Author: WillJang

What Makes a Line Beautiful?

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Looking at Ronald Searle’s drawings makes you wonder, “What makes a line beautiful?” Is it the indication of a professional hand? Perhaps the line is perfectly symmetrical, never outstepping the very boundaries it has created. Perhaps the line is colorful, existing in vibrant shade of a rich reddish-brown, causing you to remember the Fall leaves all across the rows of trees along your childhood street. Or, perhaps the line isn’t perfect, starting and stopping – visible traces of where the ink ran dry. Perhaps the line is squiggly, childish, thick, thin, blotchy, clean, jagged, strong, or even nervous. A line, much like our own handwriting, is an incredibly expressive mark on the page. Well, as is any mark on a page. Of course, writing is a combination of lines, however, a singular line representing nothing is hard to consider as something worthy of any judgment because there is no tangible meaning attached to the line.

But if the variety of handwriting habits, or perhaps, even the variety of letters or words across the slew of languages is any indication of the range of beauty a line can take, then consider the fact that a line need not be restricted by the boundaries of language alone. Although art is itself a type of language, we can nonetheless perceive it as boundless.

Perhaps what makes Searle’s drawings so interesting to look at is because of his active use of variation. He was an artist that fully utilized the full spectrum of lines in each drawing, capturing the energy of a form effortlessly We can smell the wispy strands of grass, or hear the jagged creaking of the porch as a man plays the fiddle with a pitchfork, and in the background, can be heard, the scratching of an irritated dog.

But that is it, isn’t it? Why the line is beautiful I mean. It is because it is everything in a sense. Cities, people, animals, puffs of smoke, rain, water, intricate machines, and the words of a title card at the beginning of an animated film, all of these are composed of lines and Searle’s drawings remind us of the compositional endlessness of these deceptively simple forms. You can truly draw anything with just lines.

So, it is less about technical ability that makes a line beautiful, rather, it is about capturing the world it is depicting. It is about the potential an undrawn line has. I cannot help but feel, in an optimistic fashion, that drawing a beautiful line is les about making it perfect, but more about drawing it confidently.

But Moscoso Said…

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The conversation about what is and isn’t fine art has always been somewhat tiring for me. At one point, admittedly, I was engrossed in the belief that I would one day be a part of some higher artistic collective – a part of a contemporary group that would later be remembered as an important historic tradition. It is hard to pinpoint as to why I ever had such ambitions in the first place. The dream appeared as mysteriously as it disappeared.

This subject came into my conscious once again quite recently. I am currently enrolled in a class about the self-taught artist. Given that I had never taken a class in fine art since high school, I believed that I would fall under the category of self-taught. Of course, upon wrestling with the term, I quickly understood that it was meaningless. Unless some artist was trained via data input – utilized like a robot and offered no leniency of self-expression, only commanded to reproduce what is taught in a calculated manner – it is hard to imagine anyone who is devoid of self-teaching. Even the blind interact with the visual world in their own way.

So mid-semester, I am drawing something for an assignment, and someone tells me that my drawings looked similar to the “style” of Joan Miró. I’d never heard of the artist before. So I Googled him and discovered that my drawing did have vague similarities. However, what was interesting was that I recognized a lot of Miró’s paintings (granted they are incredibly famous so my recognition is by no means a testament of anything). I must have, internalized that type of art at some point in my life, only to have it resurface at this point in my life. Given my ignorance, I can’t tell you the exact psychology behind this. But it is undoubtedly fascinating how subconscious influences seem to be directing my art far more than conscious ones. Perhaps it’s due to my focus in English rather than fine art – I never was asked to consciously critique my own style, analyzing where every bit of influence came from.

But suddenly, fine art doesn’t seem like fine art anymore. Lately, I’ve been reading an interview with Victor Moscoso, an artist involved with Zap Comix and responsible for a plethora of psychedelic concert posters. Near the beginning of the interview, Gary Groth (interviewer) was asking Moscoso about the difference between commercial art and fine art. Moscoso gave an incredibly simple answer, “Did you get the job first, or did you do the painting first?” Under this definition, as Moscoso points out, Michelangelo’s painting at the Sistine Chapel is a work of commercial art – a painting that the famed artist was commissioned to produce and one that acts as a commercial for the narratives of the Bible. Then what about the myth of fine art being “good” and commercial art being “bad.” Well, I’m sure we don’t need Moscoso to act as prophet on this debate, for it’s obvious that art, whether it is hanging at the MOMA or hidden in some half-finished notepad stuck in a drawer of some office building that recently saw half it’s employees let go, always has the potential to be shit or beautiful. Perhaps even both?

I am trying not to end this blog post with some cheesy statement on how it’s important to just do what you love and not be concerned with the workings of the fine art tradition and the art world. Which is both true and utterly bullshit, for even the most hardcore self-indulgent bohemian needs to eat. Apartments filled with aspiring artists have open doors during critic visiting hours.

Sometimes, the answer doesn’t quite feel like an answer at all. I must imagine that has something to do with me asking the wrong question. But it truly is insane how juvenile this topic feels while still remaining so annoyingly relevant.

Perhaps it’s best that I just stop thinking about it.

The Threat From Afar

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So I want to talk about a game I recently played called Inside, and specifically how Playdead has shown, for their last two games, how visual depth can be utilized narratively and as a means of evoking emotion from the player.

So for Inside, and Playdead’s previous game, Limbo, the gameplay has been fairly straightforward. The player controls a boy who traverses along a set horizontal axis although the game is rendered to suggest a three dimensional space. Hence, there is a clear distinction of foreground, middleground, and background in nearly every scene of the game.

With this aesthetic setup, the developer is able to tell stories in their own distinctive fields of depth, allowing for storytelling that is incredibly subtle. For instance, while the player is traversing across the rooftops in the foreground, in the background, there is a steady stream of zombie-like people marching to and from some unknown location. What is going on with those people? Who knows?

There is a distinct separation of stories, however, they are by no means unrelated, and instead they run parallel to one another and inevitably converge. For instance, in the beginning of the game, virtually every enemy is introduced in the background: a pair of headlights, a patrol car, or dogs chasing after you. However, it is when these enemies enter, or rather, run into, the player’s depth of field, that they actually become threats. These threats may emerge from the background, but they invade the main character’s space so quickly that it creates a primal sense of fear. However, as you play the game, the player recognizes that these “events” are timed perfectly, so that if you know what to do, you will escape just in time every time. But that doesn’t mean the player isn’t jamming the analog stick or saying, “Come on come on, open the door!” as they frantically try to escape danger.

Another moment of narrative convergence happens when, after seeing the people marching in the background, the boy falls through a patch of old floorboards. Where does he fall to? Of course he falls directly in the middle of a line of marching people. Suddenly, a robot comes over and flashes a light at you, but it isn’t taking you away or anything yet. Then the line moves, and the player realizes, that in order to survive, they have to copy the line. One false move out of rhythm and the robot shoots a Taser at the boy and drags him way. It is amazing how the game is able to compress depth not through horizontal movement, but laterally instead, and in an instant.

There isn’t a steady stream of angry mushrooms or turtles walking towards you from screen right. Instead, threats emerge from the fog, from the dark, from the depths. Inside (and Limbo) builds a steady stream of dread. Perhaps it has something to do with the lateral camera movement, making the player feel eerily distant yet inevitably involved due to the nature of the video game medium. But what is evident is that the world is out to get you in Inside and it most certainly doesn’t care about your space in the foreground.

My words won’t ever really be able to describe the feeling of the game completely, so check out the trailer below.

What Animal Do You Want to Be? (The Lobster)

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So a woman is driving down the road. She stops, gets out, and we see her through the front window as she shoots one of three donkeys grazing in the rainy field. As she leaves the other donkeys crowd around the dead one.

This is the opening scene from the 2015 film, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, called The Lobster. The film follows David (Colin Farrell) as he checks in at a hotel where the primary purpose is to find a mate. Should you fail to do so in 45 days, you will be turned into an animal of your own choosing. Interestingly, David brings a Border Collie with him, he tells the staff that it is his brother who had failed to find a mate at this hotel in the past. There are other instances of quirky dark humor spattered throughout the film. But instead of specific moments, the comedy of the film is developed through the details/world building (and boy is it bleak). The patients take part in hunts where they go into a nearby forest to search for guests that ran away, should they find someone, they shoot the “loner” with a tranquilizer. Should you find runaways, you are rewarded with an extra day for each person captured.

I know the whole single versus couples thing is overplayed on Valentines day, so I decided to talk about this movie months in advance. The film is quite obviously critiquing modern notions on what love and more precisely, contemporary emphasis on the importance of sticking to a couple based society. It is incredibly rigid. To fit into society A, you must follow rules 1-100 and to fit in society B, you must follow a new set of rules 1-100. So inevitably, should you choose to run away from the hotel and live your life amongst the “loners” then you have to exchange an old set of rules for entirely new ones. In other words, escape does not equal freedom in this world.

What is particularly interesting to me about this world however is that despite the lack of choices, there is an odd moment of freedom amidst the film and the title lets us know right away. David chooses to be a lobster, just like his brother chose to be a dog. Imagine if you believed in reincarnation and your preference actually mattered in what you came back as. Obviously, this choice is given in the contextual parameters of doom and gloom. But is it all that bad? For some reason, I felt it such an odd form of punishment. The hotel manager suggests in the film that becoming an animal is a second chance at love. However, other than the donkeys living together at the beginning, there is no evidence of animals living together in any social manner. In fact, when we see the forest, we see lone animals wandering about – like a camel that just casually walks in the background of one of the more important narrative scenes.

In that sense, I suppose being turned into an animal is terrible, given that all evidence seems to point towards the fact that once you are alone, you will always be alone. Also, although it is not quite clear, I believe you retain your human consciousness as an animal (in which case becoming an animal is a horrible notion). But if you do not retain any semblance of human cognition, then perhaps I’d want to be some form of predatory bird, because who does not want to fly?

But invariably, the animal we choose is highly reflective of who we are. The hotel manager even notes how everyone picks a dog, and that is why there are so many dogs in the world. The primary way that people select mates at the hotel is through “defining characteristics.” For instance, if a man has a limp, he must find a woman who has a limp. So if picking a dog is being a predictable and rather boring individual, is that particularly defining if so many people do the exact same thing? I’d imagine that the hotel manager would say, “Well that is why they are alone.” I guess the choice does not really matter in the end.

But who does not like dogs? Fuck this movie. Just kidding I love this movie.

Tomi Ungerer and his Sketchbook

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img_1232“The mind, body, and society of men seem fragile containers for violent, centrifugal forces.” This is from the preface, written by Jonathan Miller, to The Underground Sketchbook of Tomi Ungerer. As Miller notes, it is in depicting this force that Ungerer seems to find such artistic potency. The book features drawings of people falling apart or being manipulated by loved ones as if they are but objects. Heads can be screwed off, bodies can be used as vacuums, lamps, yarn for a scarf in the shape of a face, or stitched together with a sewing machine. In these bits of mechanized violence, the inflictor, the aggressor, the woman, the man, all of them have faces empty of any real emotion – they hold the faces of blank indifference much like the manipulated object of a person that lies, sits, stands, beside them.


As Miller states, these drawings may be the result of Tomi Ungerer being a, “derivative of sixty years of modern mechanized warfare. He is the artistic offspring of Passchendaele, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, and Algeria.” But Ungerer is doing more than just pr oducing satire on violence. Instead, the way he depicts these forms of violence suggests something else. This is a parody of the body image. We love our bodies, but to inflict pain to what we hold so dear, is to have absolute power over it. This may take the form of a sadist or a masochist, but either way, the horror is that people are capable of such violence, and have already, for centuries, committed such actions of selfish power.


This was the first drawing I saw from the book. I loved it. I loved the line work, how it was able to capture the form of the man, his crooked shoulders, his hunched back, and his contemplative gaze, all with minimal line work. But before I even full realized the form of the drawing, I recognized the one bold black figure in the entirety of the drawing – the bomb and its lit fuse. There appears to be no rush to get rid of the explosive, instead, the man seems to be ready to die. He appears to be stroking the bomb, like a dear object. He holds it with care, as one might hold a wine glass in an incredibly pretentious way. There is no regret – only willingness.

I must admit, I can find no way to spin all of this in a positive light. Perhaps reading Ungerer’s work on children’s books might be the best course to retrieve some optimism. Or perhaps walk away from Ungerer all together. But I’d suggest that that is not the way. I cannot tell you that I relate to where Ungerer is coming from. I’ve never experience war, never been in close proximity, I’ve only gained faint images from the stories my grandpa told me. Even those are not graphic by any means. Perhaps the most haunting bit of war cinema I’ve seen was the John Huston documentary Let There Be Light. However, even that film, with images of soldiers back from the war, physically intact yet mentally broken, will never allow me to get into their headspace fully. So in this particular situation, looking at these drawings by Ungerer, why do I find myself returning to these drawings?

When a child purposely steps on an ant, they may be indifferent to the ant’s pain; however, there is something besides indifference that is present – playfulness. Ungerer is filled to the brim with a playful vigor in the face of horror. It makes me think, whether or not playfulness is that far removed from indifference, or even, being unaware.
However, perhaps there is a victory that can be discovered, in treading the lines of indifferent violence, and finding humor in it. After all, comedy is formed out of tragedy. We just need, to dive into the grave, and emerge with a bone to chew on.

 

We Begin in Onett

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We begin in, “Onett, a small town in Eagleland.” At the outskirts of town, there is a home, inside there is a boy sleeping and then the world shakes, and our hero, Ness, wakes up in the middle of the night. Outside, there are cops standing around doing nothing except prevent you from getting to the meteorite that landed on a cliff to the north of town. Since the adults prevent you from checking it out, you, naturally, go back home and go to sleep. Then, later that night, furious knocking wakes you up. It is your neighbor, Pokey – his younger brother has gone missing. The two of you, and your dog tags along as well, you and Pokey go exploring. The cops are gone; instead, wild brown dogs, green snakes, and cool crows with sunglasses replace them. They attack you, and all you can do is defend yourself with a cracked bat. Eventually, you get to the unguarded meteorite and it is here you finally meet an alien – its name is Buzz Buzz and it is a bee.

He tells you a prophecy…that you are the chosen one…blah blah…but wait, he’s a bee? So is he an alien or what? Well Buzz Buzz joins your group, and as you head back, a Starman beams down from the sky and engages you in battle. This isn’t a crow, a snake, a dog, this is a metallic looking alien with his tentacle-like arms resting on his hips, exuding confidence as if he is just going to tear your child body apart by just standing there, or even worse, send you through some galactic head-trip by shooting astral objects as you, forcing you through some Kubrikian stargate, leaving you as some star child floating through space saying, “WTF?”. But you have Buzz Buzz remember? Buzz Buzz protects your entire party with a shield and you win, easily. You’re untouchable; this game is going to be a breeze. So you go home, again, for the third time in one night, and what does your mom do? She freaks out about the bee and smacks it and kills Buzz Buzz.

I realize I haven’t even told you what I’m talking about yet. What I’ve essentially just summarized is the beginning of the game called Earthbound. It was a game that was released, coincidentally, the year I was born, 1994. However, I never played it when I was a child, I only played it just recently, in college, when I should have been doing other more productive things. Being a cult classic, this game already has numerous articles and videos dedicated to analyzing its perplexing oddities and absorbing story all over the Internet. People talk about the boss at the very end, they talk about the colors, the story, the odd enemies like a crazy looking duck or a floating Dali clock, they talk about how vagina symbolism, fetus symbolism, and on and on and on. So what can I say about a game that I never grew up with?

I can tell you that this experience was by no means unproductive. I firmly believe, that I am the most productive when I don’t feel like I’m working. Essentially, when others believe I’m wasting time, doing nothing, I’m actually doing far more than I’d be if I were working on some essay that I had zero interest in. This game was a piece of art and I’d love to analyze if it weren’t for the fact that it hadn’t been analyzed to oblivion by now. So harking back on the comment about others judging me about playing games during college, in a similar light, I’m not exactly in a position to be analyzing Earthbound with any real integrity. In reality, those who grew up with it, who played it when they were young, and revisited the timeless game when they were older, those are the people that can truly understand what the game is about. To some, or to many, it’s a game about growing up, about seeing a world that is the meeting point between childhood and adulthood, to see a world that isn’t all nice and filled with friendly caricatures, instead, it is occupied by cultists, brutish police officers, apocalyptic alien threats, and abstract embodiments of everything evil in the world. All you have is a bat and some friends – three to be exact.

Am I a gamer? Given that I’ve played games more than once in my life, yes, I’d say I’m a gamer. But am I an expert on the gaming world? Definitely not. But I can recognize that Earthbound is a game that certainly goes against the grain. It is at the peak of its deconstructive powers when it brushes up against storytelling clichés or video game tropes for it revels in dialing up the absurdity meter regularly, taking each step into the unknown, the strange, with a sure idea of where it is going. But that is the thing, isn’t it, the player is the one that is confused, not the game. The world is just the world – it doesn’t know it is weird, only you do. But as you play the game, the strange becomes the normal and you understand the logic that was at first foreign. In other words, the game felt accessible to me because it never thought that it was strange. It never wavered in its identity; it was more stable than me.

This game hasn’t changed my life drastically, unlike some dedicated fans claim (which I must say, had I played it as a child, would be very understandable). But it made me care about it, unlike some Jane Austen novel I had to read or something. I was upset, but at the same time, laughing, when Buzz Buzz met an untimely death. I was horrified when I finally saw what the Giygas looked like. I gave a shit about a world that doesn’t seem weird at all anymore. This is more than just growing up as a child. Even today, I don’t care about everything. How can I? The world is expansive and I don’t understand 99% of it. But when you get naturally immersed in something new and you start to understand, it is one of the greatest feelings in the world.