What It Is
by Lynda Barry
retail price - $24.95
copacetic price
- $22.22
This fabulously designed, beautifully printed, full color, oversize
hardcover volume published by the intrepid Canadian supporters of fine
comics, Drawn & Quarterly, is the 2008 Copacetic Book of the Year™.
What It is,
the long awaited, all new, 208 page
hardcover
volume of heuristic metacomix by the one and only
Lynda Barry, is
both a beautiful and inspiring work of art and an insightful
exploration of the creative process. Her first new work
since her 2002 masterpiece, 100
Demons, What It Is
uses the language of comics to probe the secrets of creativity
itself. This leads her deep into the caverns of philosophy,
where, ever the
intrepid explorer, Ms. Barry undertakes an especially thorough
excavation of the cave of epistemology.
There in the murky darkness she discovers that memory and imagination
blur and merge amidst the stalactites and stalagmites of our respective genetic heritages before
condensing and collecting in placid prehistoric pools
to mix with the ancient amoebas, in the process dissolving time
itself. The past, present and future come together -- an instant
and an eternity stand as one in the revelation that it all starts
with... The Image!
While it may seem that Ms. Barry is taking a leap in the
dark here, we want to let you know that she's in good company, so
before we proceed any further, let's take a moment to hear
from another prominent thinker on the relationship between images and
creativity:
"The
words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to
play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which
seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less
clear images which can be `voluntarily' reproduced and combined....
This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive
thought--before there is any connection with logical construction in
words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others....
The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of
muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for
laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative
play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."
-- Albert Einstein quoted by Jacques Hadamard, in a survey of mathematicians
Returning to What It Is:
The
book itself is a step by step analysis of the processes of how "The
Image" -- as conceived by Lynda Barry -- comes into being which
leads ineluctably to how we can use the image to create -- works of
art, a new sense of self, even a better world. The artwork that constitutes What It Is integrates text, image
and narrative in a fundamentally novel
manner. While collage has, obviously, been a staple of modernism
for nearly a century now, and juxtapositions of found text and image
are
fairly commonplace, here Ms. Barry
successfully grafts collage onto comics and in so doing gives us
something that is charming, engaging, beautiful and new.
Barry's
collages integrate items heavily laden with emotional baggage such as
"found" drawing and writing by children, personal letters and
snapshots, and text and images cut from children's school books, along
with more neutral items such as postage stamps (with an accent on
President Lincoln), book and magazine clippings and all sorts of odds
and ends. All of these collaged objects -- often altered by over
painting and/or overdrawing -- are intertwined and held together to
varying degrees with Barry's own visuals created in a variety of media
-- primarily employing the ink brush -- and thereby deftly worked
into fully composed pages. But all this is only the
beginning. The real story takes place when these fully composed
pages are placed one after the other and then read, in conjunction with
the more normative comics work that is strategically sprinkled
throughout.
What It Is, while
firmly rooted in Western artistic practices, is very much
informed by and draws much of its strength from distinctly Eastern
sources. Intuitively incorporating creative
approaches rooted
in a variety of ways of seeing
-- most notably
those of the I Ching and the Tao -- with her
hardwired modernist comics sensibility, while simultaneously leveraging
the implicit sympathy of text and image in far east languages (see
below), Ms. Barry has created a
substantially original synthesis of disparate
traditions.
Recent
advances in
neuroscience conclusively show that the human brain has evolved to
process images and text
in specific, different ways. (As regards text, this is especially
true in the case of western languages that are written using
phonetically based alphabets, as opposed to many eastern languages
whose written forms are evolved from pictograms and so are still rooted
at a fundamental level in images and are thereby likely, when processed
by the brain, to share more of the same neurocircuitry with image
processing than their western cousins.) Information related to
visually
perceived images are also sorted and categorized differently and stored
in different places in the brain, apart and distinct from visually
perceived textual information, and this visual and textual
information is, in turn, broken down into numerous sub-categories that
are
spread hither and yon within the vastly complex
web
of the human
brain*. It is during the engagement
of recollection and imagination --
the alpha and omega of artistic creation -- that the brain
gathers together all the disparate bits to forge a
whole.
And it is, more or less, this process of drawing together -- of
conception -- that
constitutes "The Image" which is the powerful center of What It Is.
Barry has over the years of practicing her craft developed an uncanny
awareness of this process and her work reflects this awareness to an
unmatched degree.
In this context, comics can be considered -- by virtue of
the
fact that its essential nature consists of employing a multiplicity of
methods in the service of
combining image and text in an ever increasing variety of ways (and, in
fact, can be considered [see Chris Ware] as a way to employ images as
text) -- a
unique and powerful form, one that has the potential to establish a
massive new constellation of neural connections. Lynda Barry is
then, in this view, an astronomer of the mind who has turned her
telescope inwards.
Recollections from her childhood form the core of the bulk
of Lynda Barry's work, and, in this respect, What It Is
is no exception. This time around she is working harder to
universalize her own experience, initially through her
employment of found work by children
whose
childhoods, roughly speaking, correspond chronologically with her
own. Once again her work is focused on demonstrating that our
childhood experiences form the center of gravity about which our adult
life orbits, and that the ellipses of these orbits -- the courses our
adult lives take -- are fixed by these childhood experiences, once and
for all, for
better and for worse.
All this is, however, only the point of departure, for What
It Is
is a book with an agenda and that agenda is to provide the reader with
the creative insights necessary to exploit these childhood experiences
in the service of creativity. First and foremost, by revealing
the essential nature and function of these childhood experiences and
the memories that have accreted around them, Barry aims to show the
reader that s/he not only has permission to "play" with these
experiences, but that doing so is essential to her or his own
emotional, mental and, ultimately, even physical well being, for it is
precisely in playing with our inner selves that we stimulate our neural
networks into creating new connections, and it is with these new
connections that we can create art and stories of our own which in turn
create further connections, setting in motion a never ending (as
previously asserted, the number of connections it is possible to make
in one human brain is close enough to infinite as to be ungraspably
large and clearly unobtainable) and ever growing virtuous circle of
creation.
Lynda Barry, long considered among the major contemporary comics creators, has, with What It Is, taken comics to a new place and created a work that can stand shoulder to shoulder in the pantheon with those created by Frida Kahlo, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Hayao Miyazaki, to name but a few of her new peers. This book is full of surprises and delight, and while we've managed to go on at quite some length here, there's really only one thing to say about this book, and that is, "YES!!!"
____________________________
* Informed authorities insist that there are more neural connections in
one human brain than there are stars in the known universe! (this is
due to the fact that the number of connections between neurons is an
exponential function of the number of neurons). back
_____________________________
Still need convincing? Feast
your eyes on this amazing
(lucky)13-page
preview.
Want more?
Then how about this short
NYTimes-hosted web video wherein Ms. Barry discusses What It Is.
retail price - $24.95
copacetic price
- $22.22
prices and
availability
current as of 10 November 2008