Travel, Yuichi Yokoyama
Nov. 10th, 2012 03:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksSome time ago I reviewed Yuichi Yokoyama's astonishing conceptual art project Garden, so I was fascinated to see another volume of him lurking in the manga section-- what else would an artist who has both successfully visually depicted infinity and bent representational art beyond what I had thought were its conceivable mental limits do?
Well, the internet won't tell me whether Travel was made before or after Garden, which is a shame, because I would really like to know. Garden follows the approach of taking a visual image and endlessly complicating it until it falls into abstraction: the face reflected in the water which is being rippled by the fountain, all of that in the photo being played over the holography projector, so you get a set of lines on the page which are representational if and only if you have done the narrative and conceptual work which allows them to become so, and which play to about ninety percent of your brain as abstract art, in a way poised midway between 'transcendental experience' and 'splitting migraine'.
Travel is doing exactly the same thing, with one major, and I do mean major, conceptual difference: every single panel of it is physically possible.
So in Travel, your nearly-to-the-point-of-headache abstraction/narrative image will be something along the lines of the interplay of light and shadow from the lightning which struck the tree behind the spouting fountain outside the train window in the middle of the extremely stiff downpour, reflected off the glasses of the man in the seat across as he puffs out another cloud of extremely dense cigarette smoke. Which does not make it any less a pattern of perfectly classical curves and symmetrical lines, in fact a set of curves and lines playing across every panel on the page, and also makes it no easier, but also no harder, to parse as a representational image. Except that once you've figured out what the image is of in the real world (tree, bird, elk antler, man reading) your brain also ties it to whatever your brain has as a more realistic signifier of that image, whatever it was you just pictured when I said tree, bird, elk antler, man reading, and this representation actively fights with the damn-close-to-abstract image on the page, and just, did I mention migraine, you will never stare so hard at a single black-and-white drawing as you will at a Yokoyama page.
Oh, and this one has more narrative than Garden, in that it follows three people who get onto a train, find seats, stay on it for some time, and eventually get off again, which means of course that it has no dialogue at all, because dialogue would just be unnecessary since we have had so much spelled out.
You know what I don't get? The damn thing has emotional impact. The final page is as brilliant an image of triumphant joy as I have ever seen. I don't know how. Something about the line shape and the line weight and the way the curves are in contrast to the way the curves are in the rest of the book. I will swear up down and sideways that it is totally intentional and I have less than no idea how it was done.
I gather from interviews I have read online that Yokoyama hates comics, does not read comics, and does not consider himself to be drawing comics. Fair enough. I don't think he is either. There isn't a word for whatever it is he is doing, but I am impressed that he manages to do it.
Well, the internet won't tell me whether Travel was made before or after Garden, which is a shame, because I would really like to know. Garden follows the approach of taking a visual image and endlessly complicating it until it falls into abstraction: the face reflected in the water which is being rippled by the fountain, all of that in the photo being played over the holography projector, so you get a set of lines on the page which are representational if and only if you have done the narrative and conceptual work which allows them to become so, and which play to about ninety percent of your brain as abstract art, in a way poised midway between 'transcendental experience' and 'splitting migraine'.
Travel is doing exactly the same thing, with one major, and I do mean major, conceptual difference: every single panel of it is physically possible.
So in Travel, your nearly-to-the-point-of-headache abstraction/narrative image will be something along the lines of the interplay of light and shadow from the lightning which struck the tree behind the spouting fountain outside the train window in the middle of the extremely stiff downpour, reflected off the glasses of the man in the seat across as he puffs out another cloud of extremely dense cigarette smoke. Which does not make it any less a pattern of perfectly classical curves and symmetrical lines, in fact a set of curves and lines playing across every panel on the page, and also makes it no easier, but also no harder, to parse as a representational image. Except that once you've figured out what the image is of in the real world (tree, bird, elk antler, man reading) your brain also ties it to whatever your brain has as a more realistic signifier of that image, whatever it was you just pictured when I said tree, bird, elk antler, man reading, and this representation actively fights with the damn-close-to-abstract image on the page, and just, did I mention migraine, you will never stare so hard at a single black-and-white drawing as you will at a Yokoyama page.
Oh, and this one has more narrative than Garden, in that it follows three people who get onto a train, find seats, stay on it for some time, and eventually get off again, which means of course that it has no dialogue at all, because dialogue would just be unnecessary since we have had so much spelled out.
You know what I don't get? The damn thing has emotional impact. The final page is as brilliant an image of triumphant joy as I have ever seen. I don't know how. Something about the line shape and the line weight and the way the curves are in contrast to the way the curves are in the rest of the book. I will swear up down and sideways that it is totally intentional and I have less than no idea how it was done.
I gather from interviews I have read online that Yokoyama hates comics, does not read comics, and does not consider himself to be drawing comics. Fair enough. I don't think he is either. There isn't a word for whatever it is he is doing, but I am impressed that he manages to do it.
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Date: 2012-11-10 03:35 pm (UTC)I don't think my comics-loving sweetie