Week 11

Jennifer Backman
Zev Farber
FA/VISA 2053 3.0
March 29, 2010

Assignment 5: Complete Work


My blog, A Look at Women in Comics, has been more fun than work to do. I really enjoyed exploring this theme, looking further into one of the things that I am most passionate about. While doing research for my blog I realized that there are a lot more women in the industry than I had thought. I may have proved myself wrong in a sense, but in another, this allows me to feel more confident about aspiring to work in this industry one day. I feel that my Photoshop skills grew with the photography assignment, and that I was able to use creativity in ways I wasn’t use to (i.e. film). I have also been very pleased with the amount of feedback I have gotten back about my blog. I have been posting links to my blog on Facebook every week. I have not only had many friends talk to me about my blog, but also comic book artists and writers who I am friends with. For example, Agnes Garbowska who was featured in my first post has been following my blog. It was really cool to know that someone I featured was looking at the work I posted every week. I felt that I could dive into a lot with the research and what I posted on my blog, and that with the projects I was able to be more artistic, tell a narrative, and be informative through a different means. With my last project I wanted to tell a narrative and leave a message with the viewer that they could think about. I feel that using the ‘doll’ as the superhero was one of the most effective messages about my last project. She is an inanimate object, she is not real like you or I, but she reflects the characters in comics who readers can relate to on such a personal level. It was harder to tell a narrative with stop animation, but I had fun with working on it and trying different methods to make the project work.

‘REVOLT! The Performative Aesthetics of Protest’ by Kathleen Ritter

In this article by Kathleen Ritter we as the reader learns of the legacy of 1968 and how the idea of portraying it to this day is still continuously seen through art, writing, exhibitions and many other forms. Ritter starts the article by talking about banners she saw outside of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. The banners were meant to recapture the lost political urgency from the 1960’s and 1970’s. She gives examples of different artists who have carried out ideas of revolution into their art, some of these artists included: Kelly, Hadley + Maxwell, Hayes, and Tauberger. Ritter also focuses of French philosopher Julia Kristeva. Kristeva looks at the distinction between the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘revolt’. Ritter seemed to base a lot of this article around Kristeva’s beliefs on ‘revolution’ vs. ‘revolt’ and how it connects to the art world. Flashing Nipple Remix by Mary Kelly is an example of restaging an event. Based off a picture Kelly took during the Women’s Liberation movement in London, Kelly did two ‘performances’ both concerning the use of light. She had many women who were born around the time of 1968 who wanted to participate in these different restagings. Kelly believes that so many people who were born around this time have such interest in restaging revolts because of what she calls the ‘political primal scene’, which is the idea that our identities are shaped by the imagined failures and aspirations of our parents. This article by Ritter touches down on a couple different examples of reenactments and why the idea of restaging protests from around the time of 1968 have been popular within the art world for so many years. The article is finished off with the notion that, “‘revolution’ fails to happen, but ‘revolt’ is still necessary.”


Work Cited
Ritter, Kathleen. "Revolt! The Performative Aesthetics of Protest." Switch 2009: 22-25. Print.