Have been listening to Department Of Eagles "In Ear Park" (2008) lately. One of the earlier songs on the record (I'm guessing it's the title track) rolls into an ambling waltz time that evokes (for me, anyway) long-legged insect creatures loping through a field of tall grass. Somehow, this evolved into three-legged English businessmen. From the sixties, with bowler hats and umbrellas. Something from Monty Python, no doubt, as that was the taboo fare from childhood that I would quietly sneak in my parent's bedroom an hour after everyone though I had been asleep.
This loping bowler hat, insect waltz tripping alongside prominent dotted patterning. The second frame inspired by a Russian painting by Kazimir Malevich ('Peasants', c. 1930), faceless figures, in my version, against at background of binary, and in the final frame a happy portrait of myself, as a toddler, rendered heavily (and absurdly) with half-tone patterning.
All this pretentious mess introduced by an illegibly censored review copied from an issue Cineaste, 'capitulated to aesthetic conservatism', a sentiment of anxiety - from the point of view of the reviewer - that is happily proven wrong. And so this strip starts off on that false premise. All the other words, including the evidence to the contrary (the artist having not capitulated), are blacked out. All we hear is the judgement.
But surely it's an insane (or at least inane) judgement. There's nothing here that feels aesthetically conservative to me, unless it's a wavering toward surrealist bombast. But that is the the punchline, I think. I am poking fun at my own impulse to avoid going mainstream while the reality is that I am so far from ever even getting there. I guiltily look at this and think it's about my own defensiveness.
But mostly it just feels sloppy.
I do like the coloring in the third panel, though.
Have been listening to Department Of Eagles "In Ear Park" (2008) lately. One of the earlier songs on the record (I'm guessing it's the title track) rolls into an ambling waltz time that evokes (for me, anyway) long-legged insect creatures loping through a field of tall grass. Somehow, this evolved into three-legged English businessmen. From the sixties, with bowler hats and umbrellas. Something from Monty Python, no doubt, as that was the taboo fare from childhood that I would quietly sneak in my parent's bedroom an hour after everyone though I had been asleep.
ReplyDeleteThis loping bowler hat, insect waltz tripping alongside prominent dotted patterning. The second frame inspired by a Russian painting by Kazimir Malevich ('Peasants', c. 1930), faceless figures, in my version, against at background of binary, and in the final frame a happy portrait of myself, as a toddler, rendered heavily (and absurdly) with half-tone patterning.
All this pretentious mess introduced by an illegibly censored review copied from an issue Cineaste, 'capitulated to aesthetic conservatism', a sentiment of anxiety - from the point of view of the reviewer - that is happily proven wrong. And so this strip starts off on that false premise. All the other words, including the evidence to the contrary (the artist having not capitulated), are blacked out. All we hear is the judgement.
But surely it's an insane (or at least inane) judgement. There's nothing here that feels aesthetically conservative to me, unless it's a wavering toward surrealist bombast. But that is the the punchline, I think. I am poking fun at my own impulse to avoid going mainstream while the reality is that I am so far from ever even getting there. I guiltily look at this and think it's about my own defensiveness.
But mostly it just feels sloppy.
I do like the coloring in the third panel, though.