Abstract
This paper brings together comics studies and geography to consider how space operates both on and off the comics page. We integrate discussion of comics’ formal properties with a site-specific comics installation (Dave McKean’s The Rut) to show the intertwining of these spaces. Our argument is articulated through juxtaposition of the literature on space-time in comics with our case study. This montage speaks to graphic narratives’ formal properties, especially its alchemic, emergent nature. Our argument begins by introducing The Rut as an example of how space and narrative can be intertwined. Our argument tacks back to the literature, discussing the pluralization of time-space(s) throughout recent writing within human geography and how this can help us think with The Rut. We then briefly describe the way The Rut is physically laid out. Returning once again to the literature, we argue that the topological figuration of comics is mediated by readers’ practices of relation-building and narrative construction, which are in turn impacted by the irreversible nature of time. This is demonstrated for The Rut through experience of the art as well as participant observation. Finally, we highlight how actual spaces are overlaid with virtual spaces that help shape the actualized version; we illustrate this by showing how the embodied experience of The Rut’s materiality was productive of a multiplicity of experiential spaces, both actual and virtual. We close by drawing three conclusions: the first about the implications of graphic narrative’s relational ontology for how social scientists narrate socio-spatial processes; the second, a call for more empirical work examining the emergence, evolution, and dissipation of topological spaces; and the third about the political possibility of initiating new practices of ‘reading’ spaces and times to produce and access new ways of being in the world.
Recent papers in cultural geographies have highlighted the contested and evolving nature of the visual in human geography. How does the embodied human eye engage with its surroundings to produce experience and meaning? What kind of worlds emerge from this engagement, always subjective and in process? Lesley-Anne Gallacher 1 has analysed the ways in which the ‘monstrous geographies’ of text and image in graphic narrative are bonded together through contingent performances of ‘alchemic’ reading that fuse disparate elements, text and image, into a composite whole. This performative dimension of reading comics resonates with similar work in the geographies of literature 2 that considers the act of reading as an event. In an earlier paper, Harriet Hawkins investigated installation art for ‘the critical spatial sensibilities and sensitivities that its configuration of objects, bodies and spaces brings to our attention’. 3 Her account of an exhibit in London’s Serpentine Gallery shares Gallacher’s attention to the role of the viewer/reader in actualizing the exhibition/text, but draws on (post)phenomenological approaches to emphasize the role of the body in this production: ‘in installation’s twining together of a spatial politics with an embodied visual politics it, in effect, brings the consciousness of one’s corporeality to the forefront of the art experience’. 4
This paper draws both of these arguments together to explore both the embodied visuality of graphic narrative and its alchemic power to shape our subjectivities, spaces, and temporalities. This is done through an examination of graphic narrative as installation art, thereby harnessing both the ‘impossible, and monstrous, transformation’ of graphic narrative 5 and the immersive, enfolding nature of installation art to explore spaces both on the page and off of it. We consider this case study not as a static piece of art, but instead as an architecture of becoming: an intervention in space that is itself productive of new spaces when animated by the performances of audiences. 6
We came to be interested in spatial media, such as graphic narrative and installation art, as means of describing social processes in a way that embeds an appreciation of the role of space in mediating those processes within the account itself. That is, the uses of space on the page and off the page can be brought into alignment to heighten the resonance of the account with its corresponding social experience. Other geographers have taken this up, 7 but we believe this work can be pushed further through a critical engagement between comics studies, geography, and poststructuralist theory. There is a great symmetry between the formal properties of graphic narrative and contemporary relational ontologies prominent in spatial theory, but this symmetry needs to be explored in order to inform future research agendas in the wider social sciences and humanities. 8
Just as Hawkins experimented with new forms of writing to communicate her embodied experience of installation art, we articulate our argument through the spatial juxtaposition of our critical review of the literature with snapshots from our case study, through which it becomes possible to consider the implications of the former for our understanding of space and for geographic accounts of social processes. This is meant to simulate the montage of graphic narrative, embedding its alchemy of emergent meaning within our paper. Our argument begins by briefly introducing The Rut as an example of the way space and narrative can be intertwined in ways heretofore rarely discussed in the literature. Our argument then tacks back to the literature, discussing the pluralization of framings of time-space throughout much recent writing within human geography and how this can help us think with The Rut. We then briefly describe the way The Rut is physically laid out. Returning once again to the literature, we argue that the topological figuration of the comic are mediated by readers’ practices of relation-building and narrative construction, which are in turn impacted by the irreversible nature of time. This is then demonstrated for The Rut through our personal experience of the art as well as observations of others experiencing the art. The final portion of our argument highlights the way in which actual spaces are always overlaid with virtual spaces that help shape the actualized version; we illustrate this by showing how the embodied experience of The Rut’s materiality was productive of a multiplicity of experiential spaces, both actual and virtual. We close by drawing three conclusions from our argument and case study: the first about the implications of graphic narrative’s relational ontology for the way that social scientists narrate socio-spatial processes; the second a call for more empirical work examining the emergence, evolution, and dissipation of topological spaces; and the third about the political possibility of initiating new practices of ‘reading’ spaces and times in order to produce and access new ways of being in the world.
Time, space, and The Rut
The Rut 1 – space and narrative
Dave McKean is an influential English illustrator whose comics career has included drawing both mainstream superhero comics (most notably Batman and Hellblazer) and more ‘indie’ comics, such as his collaboration with writer Neil Gaiman on the critically-acclaimed Sandman and his own award-winning graphic novel Cages. He has also illustrated childrens’ books for Gaiman and others. Our case study is his contribution (The Rut) to a site-specific comics exhibition held at the Pump House Gallery in London’s Battersea Park through August and September 2010 (Figure 1). Hypercomics: The Shapes of Comics to Come was curated by Paul Gravett, a London-based comics writer and broadcaster. Inspiration for the exhibit came from Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics, in which McCloud argues that escaping from the tyranny of the page (via web-publishing, primarily) will liberate comics to become a more significant art form in the US context.
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While ‘webcomics’ have largely failed to break away from the page-based model, instead importing pages into the web context, McCloud’s notion of the ‘infinite canvas’ served as an inspiration to Gravett:
The internet has really allowed comics to go in new directions as well: the whole Scott McCloud interest in the infinite canvas. But the gallery allows you to go inside and be surrounded by the comic, and there is a lot of room for that to be developed.
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A view of the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park, London. Photo credit: Dittmer.
In Hypercomics, four artists were invited to design a comic specifically for the space of the Pump House Gallery, with each given a floor in which to materialize their vision. In this way, Gravett was able to produce a multiplicity of engagements between the spaces of comics, the specific spaces of the Pump House Gallery, and the exhibition-goers whose participation actualized the exhibition’s becoming. McKean was an enthusiastic participant in Hypercomics:
I like anything that allows comics to be in another context than they are usually in. I’m slightly evangelical about that because it opens up the powerful potential of the medium that hasn’t been explored and is usually thought of in a very narrow way, and anybody who spends time looking at comics around the world knows that it’s much broader than that. It’s nice to be in a box, not just any box but a conceptual box. It’s hard to know what the limits are so that you can play with them and use them. Well, I had a literal box [his room in the Pump House].
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The Rut utilized the space of the gallery in ways that moved closer to Gravett’s ambition than any of the other exhibitors:
My [Gravett’s] goal is always to say, let’s not be limited to one wall, let’s use all four walls with branching stories going off with some sort of spine, then let’s start to, say, connect the stories across the floor – Dave McKean here has got a story that runs across the floor of the gallery as well as branching out – but then let’s cross the ceiling and then we can start to think of it as an impossible display, in which things connect diagonally and then of course you’ve got things outside the room that they can’t completely fit into the small-story world.
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Indeed, The Rut functions as a comic that has not only exploded off the page and permeated the gallery space but has also interpenetrated the surrounding parkland.
Given that The Rut is installation art, some might argue that The Rut is not properly a comic at all, in that it is not a printed text. We take the view that this is flawed for at least two reasons. First, despite significant efforts to define ‘comics’, this remains a Sisyphean task. The core of most definitions, however, is the pictorial thesis: that is, a comic is something that is read through putting multiple images into sequence. 13 The Rut meets this criterion easily, given its reliance on juxtaposed images to tell its story. Further, The Rut can be understood as a comic because it is self-consciously deployed as such both by its creator and its curator; it is being actively deployed within the discourse of comics as a meditation on the form (among other things). It is in fact The Rut’s existence at the intersection of graphic narrative and installation art that is so productive for understanding embodiment, narrative, and space. With this in mind, this article now turns to a review of the literature on space-time in geography, emphasizing the notions of space and time that are most relevant to discussions of comics and installation art.
Space-time and narrative
Within much of human geography it has become something of a common sense that space and time are not singular entities. Rather they are inherently pluralistic. This, of course, has not always been so. The emergence of spatial science and the so-called spatial-turn was premised on the strong assumption that space along with time could be defined, fixed, and delineated (as indeed it can under the discipline of the right apparatus). In this view space is understood as both abstract (a set of definable, measurable qualities) and relative (defined in relationship to another similarly defined element, via time, cost, distance, and so forth). Over time through the critiques of humanistic, feminist, Marxist and later post-structuralist geographers, human geography have settled into a loose – although noisy – consensus that space is not so much relative as relational. That is to say, space is not an entity in and of itself. Space is rather a kind of becoming – space, and space-time as well, is emergent through the relations between different entities.
Of course, contemporary human geography offers many ways of thinking through this notion of space (and space-time). But for now we want to stress two elements of this relational understanding of space. First, drawing on Doel’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari, relational space suggests space is not a thing but rather a performance. 14 Or put another way, we should not think about space but rather about spacing. Second, and relatedly, drawing on Ingold, 15 the notion of space as performance can be understood as encouraging us to also think of space as a kind of encounter. This can be clearly connected to the reading of a comic. The narrative function of comics, in which space is read as time, is produced through readers’ immersion in the comic. When a comic is not being read, it is obvious that all of the panels exist simultaneously in their materiality. They co-exist in a common physical artefact and are available to be viewed in any order whatsoever, or need not be viewed at all. Here space is rhizomatic in that each panel of that comic is in potential relation to every other panel: of that comic, of that series, and of every other comic ever made. This set of relations is variable in intensity, with the writers and artists signalling more or less intense connections between panels by making some paths through the comic more intelligible than others, and by embedding non-sequential relations that may or may not be picked up on by readers (Figure 2). Martin and Secor argue that geographers must go beyond just noting topological spaces, and instead consider ‘how and through what process those relations are repetitively reproduced, and yet continually changed’. 16 With that in mind, this article returns to The Rut to consider the exhibit as just such a materialized topology of varying relations, composed through the implementation of an artistic vision within a particular landscape.
In this page from Watchmen, panels from the primary narrative alternate in panels with a pirate comic that the young boy in the primary narrative is reading. Nevertheless the two narratives are interwoven, each commenting on the other in complex topology of space and time. Source: Artwork by Dave Gibbons; copyright DC Comics.
The Rut 2 – materiality and topography
McKean’s narrative is an autobiographical one: the re-narration of an event he lived through but refuses to speak about publicly, except through The Rut. He also refuses to say which role of the narrative he occupied himself. The Rut is the story (told largely in flashback) of an adolescent being stabbed in a park by another adolescent, who was part of a larger group of teenagers. The reasons for the stabbing are rather opaque, but The Rut’s artistic theme (heavily stylized antlers permeate the exhibit) implies the surge of hormones, the challenge of developing masculinity, and sexual competition.
If this is a relatively simple narrative, it is complicated and nuanced by the form and media with which it is presented. The exhibit actually begins in the stairwell, with four panels mounted on the wall. They are small and numbered one through four (Figure 3), and inside the door the panels continue along the floor in a line and then proceed up a Perspex/acrylic column, also numbered in sequence. At the top of the Perspex column, however, a Perspex crossbar attaches to each wall, creating two archways through which participants can continue. The comics panels continue in both directions from the column, but are now unnumbered. More panels adorn each of the walls and the floor of the room, and objects fill the room, either mounted on stands or sitting on the floor (Figure 4). McKean saw this as a move beyond traditional comics but nevertheless just another type of graphic narrative: ‘Objects have such a physicality about them, you can get all the way around them. They are helpful for building narrative. They seem to lend themselves to it.’ 17 A second dimension to the form of The Rut, beyond the comics panels, is the illustrations (printed on transparencies) that McKean mounted on the windows: ‘He is such a clever guy, there are these three marks and if you look from them you get a trompe l’oeil effect.’ 18 These images are of hybrid antlered humans clashing with one another, but via the trompe l’oeil effect they are inserted into the otherwise familiar Battersea Park landscape. Such blurring of spaces, in which the space of art is collapsed or folded into everyday spaces, is typical of baroque art generally and installation art in particular. 19 The artistic intervention here is an active spacing – the building of relations between sites for purposes of narrative. A final aspect of The Rut is an opened trunk in the middle of the room – ‘the unpacked suitcase of text and images which form a narrative’ 20 – that has words projected, and then traced, onto it. Consequently, the words are distorted and difficult to connect to the narrative. This will be discussed further later in the paper.
These four panels mark the beginning of the narrative, giving the first hint that the boundaries of the room would not be the boundaries of the narrative.
(a) View from the doorway of The Rut, with Perspex column and crossbar in foreground.
This description of the exhibition’s contents has been primarily concerned with showing how the images and objects of The Rut have been organized to be in relation with one another and with landscape elements in the building and surrounding parkland. We might say that we have so far presented a largely topographical reading. In the following section we want to attempt a more topologically oriented reading of the installation.
Bergson, Deleuze, and topology
For us – as for other cultural geographers
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– the attraction of a topologically oriented approach is how it affords a movement away from a naïve, metric orientation towards spacetime. Topology is the study of relations of structure and form. In the words of the mathematician Bert Mendelson, ‘topology . . . is concerned with the study of collections of objects with certain prescribed structures’.
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It is interested in how objects maintain a certain integrity simultaneous with them being twisted, folded, or otherwise deformed. In the hands of Michel Serres, thinking topological has offered an original (if often disorientating) way of thinking through movement and flux. As Merriman puts it:
Serres is not primarily concerned with the action or product of folding, rather he is concerned with the prepositional movement, folding and relating with that is characteristic of the turbulent unfolding of events.
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By placing metric notions of time and space into the background, Serres allows other registers of time and space to bubble forth in consciousness.
In relation to movement and media, a clear precedent has been set by Deleuze, heavily influenced by Bergson, in his works on cinema.
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While Deleuze did not (to our knowledge) ever write about comics, his argument that in cinema it is the movement of film that reconstructs the perceptible image has a parallel in comics; however, in comics it is not the film that moves but the embodied eye of the reader/viewer, leaping across gutters to constitute a constantly upending present:
Instead of seeing the present as a sequence of moments, Bergson . . . argued that it is better defined as an absence; by what it is not than what it is. The present is not a moment in time, a positive entity, but a becoming that erases itself. It is the indivisible, yet ungraspable, limit between past and future. It cannot be reflected upon or represented as a static image but comprises motion and flow.
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When considering the comic book then, if we tack a middle course between a naive, strictly linear narrative encoded in the text 26 and a rhizomatic extreme of absolute contingency, we see that readers are involved in the navigation of the topology of its space in a number of possible ways, some more likely than others. Comics semiotician Thierry Groensteen refers to this negotiation as plurivectorial narration. 27 The eye of the reader moves back and forth, up and down, adding new images to those already seen and then revisiting old images to produce a narrative from the montage. The way that this unfolds is crucial. As Bergson argues, time has force, and effects that cannot be reversed. 28 The performance of reading is a process of becoming that cannot be undone. In other words, once a panel is viewed, it cannot be unviewed, even if its place within the topology of the comic is to be reassessed. Tamsin Lorraine summarizes in a way that is useful for considering the production of graphic narrative: ‘Commonsense notions of space and time as totalised wholes in which everything can be either spatially or chronologically related with respect to everything else are no more than retrospective constructs.’ 29 Time’s arrow proceeds apace, and the event of reading is ineluctably shaped by the contingency of that process.
Deleuze’s emphasis on relations in the movement-image can be extended to the mechanism of graphic narrative itself: ‘[Deleuze] is . . . insistent that life does not exist in itself and then express itself through relations; life is just this production of connections and relations.’
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His central concepts of difference and repetition can be used to understand the processes of connection that turn montage into graphic narrative:
Modern life is such that, confronted with the most mechanical, the most stereotypical repetitions, inside and outside ourselves, we endlessly extract from them little differences, variations and modifications. Conversely, secret, disguised and hidden repetitions, animated by the perpetual displacement of a difference, restore bare, mechanical and stereotypical repetitions, within and without us.
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The production of connections made in the process of reading graphic narrative is just this sort of extraction of difference. Groensteen argues that readers link panels in meaningful ways because of iconic solidarity, the recognition of a visual similarity between two panels, which nonetheless have been (potentially) altered in some way. 32 For example, two panels might contain what appears to be the same figure, but in the first she is sitting on the couch and in the second she is jogging. The iconic solidarity of the woman’s image links the two panels and implies that they form part of a narrative, but it is the difference between the panels that is productive.
Further, Deleuze’s notion of the affection-image, in which a ‘shot’ generates a somatic response in the viewer, also has a parallel in comics. For instance, Greice Schneider has shown that the degree of iconic solidarity can be manipulated to produce affects that communicate the experience of duration, or intensive time. For example, boredom can be communicated through
a very detailed moment-to-moment breakdown, organized as clusters of panels that can be read either in summary or in detail. The small panels are grouped together not only by colour schemes and page layout, but also by a great deal of redundancy, in the sense that we recognize the similarities because of the lack of significant changes.
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This monotony (Figure 5) can be contrasted with, for example, more traditional superhero comic book page layouts, such as the iconic work of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (the creators of Captain America): ‘Simon’s page layouts add to the impression of vigorous movement. The panels are irregularly shaped, the shapes often echoing the actions depicted within them.’ 34 Kirby is famous for the impossible bodily contortions he attributed to his heroes, which provided a sense of embodied movement (and therefore time) to his panels: ‘His characters seem to ignore the panels, their limbs extending beyond the border lines. His figures reek body English: they are contorted to emphasize movement, power, action.’ 35
(a) This highly redundant page design conveys the idea of boredom and intensive time by exhibiting significant iconic solidarity among the panels. Source: Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000).
But more generally, what is being bridged in ‘extending beyond the border lines’, this act of iconic solidarity? The space between the panels on a page is known in comics studies as the gutter; more than just an absence of visual image, the gutter serves as a site of differentiation. It is less a site in which the reader imagines events and dialogue that might occur between the panels than a topological gulf (Figure 6). Indeed, there is literally no story to represent within that space but only connections to be made. Deleuze could be specifically describing comics when he wrote the following:
Not only is the image inseparable from a before and after which belong to it, which are not to be confused with the preceding and subsequent images; but in addition it itself tips over into a past and a future of which the present is only now the extreme limit.
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In this story, a reality-warping mad man named Jaspers battles an indestructible robot. The robot wins by transporting them both to ‘un-space’ in between realities. The creative team visualizes this by literally putting the combatants in the gutter, the non-space of graphic narrative. ©2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. Used with permission.
Topological understandings of space in graphic narrative emphasize this inseparability, with the narrative ‘present’ only the product of a subject’s engagement with the comic. So what can be productively learned by considering the spaces of a comic in this way? In the following section we return to The Rut to consider this more subject-centric experience of graphic narrative, drawing on the perspectives of both Gallacher and Hawkins (mentioned in the introduction). This appreciation of the role of embodied viewers/readers in enacting (or not) the alchemy of The Rut hints at the ways that insights from comics can be carried over into our understandings of everyday spaces.
The Rut 3 – the experience of fragmentation
The Rut is an intriguing case in this regard because it is both an artistic space (laden with semiotic cues) and a social space that embodied subjects can occupy, interpret, and move through. With regard to the experience of The Rut’s spaces, it is of course dangerous to generalize and so we limit our analysis to that of our own experience and our first-hand observations of others’ experiences. When we first explored The Rut (an experience that, Bergson might point out, cannot be repeated), we missed the four panels that are outside the room (see again Figure 3). Because the first numbered panel inside the room is panel 5, we split up and searched the room for numbers 1 through 4, attempting to find iconic solidarity between the unnumbered panels and the mysterious panel 5. Calling back and forth to one another with our interpretations of what was ‘happening’ in various parts of the room, we in time discovered that McKean had intended a ‘strong’ narrative:
The nature of a gallery is really that awkward thing about interacting with narrative, which I don’t agree with. But you should be able to get as close as you can. It’s interactive in that you can go where you like, make of it what you will. But that is generally an individual telling a story in a linear way. And you can go around the line, but it’s your line.
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This privileging of authorial ‘strong’ narrative is understandable not only as a result of McKean’s experience of creativity but also his understanding of the story as a historical event that he is retelling. However, it does not change the fact that it is participants in The Rut who must assemble meaning from the fragments of narrative scattered around the room.
This was no easy task. While our interpretation of The Rut was initially complicated by our expectations that it would not start until we were in the room, we were subsequently confounded by the multiplicity of narrative. At the top of the Perspex column visible from the doorway, as mentioned before, there was a crossbar which led the linear narrative in two different directions. This marks the first fragmentation of the narrative (excepting the visual fragmentation already endemic to graphic narrative), with one perspective broadly being that of the teenager who committed the crime, and the other the perspective of a somewhat-complicit witness. This is difficult to navigate as a reader, however, as the first-person flashback form of narrative used throughout The Rut made no grammatical allowance for multiple protagonists. A third perspective, that of the victim, is limited to the printing on the trunk in the middle of the room. McKean sees this fragmentation as central to his endeavour:
[The top of the Perspex] is the point where the story splits and fragments. From there I’m happy for people to take from it what they want . . . There is a fact in there. But that’s not really the issue. The issue is all the possibilities. Am I really remembering it well anyway? So I’m happy for people to weave their way through it in their own way. That seems to be a narrative that works in space.
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McKean reconciles the fragmentation of The Rut and his disdain for interactive narrative by highlighting the inherent multiplicity of even ‘real’ events. But what does this subjective experience of topological space in The Rut mean for our consideration of space in general? What concepts can be productively pulled from the world of comics studies into spatial theory?
The virtual and the actual: a multiplicity of spaces
Scholars such as Mark Hansen have proposed a return to the pre-Deleuzean Bergson, imagining the body as a sensory apparatus that moves in and through the world. 39 This requires us to consider culture as always in relation to the people engaging with it. Given this, we might emphasize the Bergsonian sense of time and the contingency of reading, with space re-emergent in comics and ‘real life’ as not just the actual but its virtual doppelgangers as well.
If the flat simultaneity of comics is nonetheless predicated on the difference and repetition within the pages of a graphic narrative, this provides space through which to focus on Deleuze’s belief in multiplicity. As Jonathan Roffe describes it: ‘Virtual multiplicity . . . is real without being necessarily embodied in the world. And, rather than expressing abstract alternative possibilities, virtual multiplicity forms something like the real openness to change that inheres in every particular situation.’ 40
This multiplicity is composed of the actual and the virtual. Bergson considered the past to be virtual; rather than memory being a return to the past, as per his belief in time’s arrow he described it as the past haunting the present, a virtual displaced but still co-present alongside the actual.
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Similarly, wherever a reader might be in a comic the panels she or he have seen previously are virtually present in her or his mind, but pushing this further other possible contingent readings of the comic are also virtualities. This multiplicity is complemented by another, the doubling of ‘our’ world and that produced within the comic:
The broader philosophical implication of many comics, to one extent or another, is: there is another world, which is this world. The places that cartoonists draw are very different from the ones where readers live; every element of the comics world is created by the artist’s hands. The cartoonist’s image-world is a metaphorical representation of our own, though, and it can be mapped onto ours.
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Hence the world of text/image is itself a repetition of our own, from which difference can be extracted and meaning made. We now return to The Rut one final time, to highlight the way multiplicity is embedded within the installation. This is significant less because The Rut is important in and of itself, but because it allows us insights into the constitution of everyday spaces.
The Rut 4 – multiplicity and space
This use of gallery space to present the multiplicity of any social space reaches its apogee through the use of antlered masks in The Rut. These are arrayed on three different sides of the room, all facing towards the open trunk in the centre. When the embodied participant physically occupies the space of the mask, aligning his or her perspective with that of the mask, the trunk comes into view with just one of the protagonists’ narrations visible; the participant literally sees things from that protagonist’s perspective (Figure 7). This is the only site in the room from which it is possible to find the victim’s perspective, scrawled across the trunk. Hawkins refers to this as ‘withholding’ of visual experience, reminding us of the need to physically locate ourselves in unique lines of sight in order to reveal the artwork. 43 In arranging things thus, McKean reminds us of the absence at the heart of the narrative – the victim. This narrative has all at once too many narratives, and not enough.
The view of the trunk through one of the masks. This perspective is that of the boy who committed the stabbing. Photo credit: Dittmer.
It is important to note that this multiplicity of narrative was confounding to many who viewed it; an afternoon spent in the exhibit by one of the authors indicated that most participants gave up rather than discovered McKean’s favoured solution to the puzzle. The gutters may have been too large, the participants too un-invested in the comics medium. We only discovered the masks’ perspective on the trunk ourselves after being told about it by Pump House Gallery staff. Such evidence indicates the centrality of participants and their willingness/capability to enable the exhibit’s becoming in ways hoped for by McKean.
The Rut can be understood as a series of repetitions and differences. Of course, it is composed via the juxtaposition of panels and objects, with the panels utilizing iconic solidarity to produce narrative. It is then a repetition of images, each slightly different, in a way that is generative of meaning (as all comics are). The second repetition is of stabbings in the past; the event documented by The Rut is unfortunately all too familiar, especially in London. Nevertheless, it is resolutely singular and different, and it is the sense of distinction from other stabbings (if only because we know more as a result of The Rut) that provides meaning to this one. The third repetition is of the narrative of The Rut. The perspectives of all three protagonists, co-present in the same narrative, are multiplied by the perspectives of those inhabiting the space. These together produce a near infinitude of difference. A final repetition is of the space of the Pump House Gallery and the surrounding Battersea Park. The Rut occupied a floor not terribly different than that occupied by the other Hypercomics exhibits. Although we have not addressed the other three, each spoke to the architecture and surroundings of the gallery, and to the park outside. Here space folds over on itself, and as the viewer passes out of the gallery into the park she or he confronts their own experience of parks like Battersea – past, present, and future – with a heightened awareness of the potentialities within. This virtual multiplicity is encountered through the micro-space of The Rut, haunting the park with all its possibilities.
Closure
Scott McCloud describes the process by which readers create connections between individual panels as ‘closure’, drawing parallels 44 between comics and film theory, in which the viewer transforms the rapidly flickering frames into continuous motion. Such attempts to stitch together the ultimately irreducible are always partial and incomplete, and so it is with our own attempt at ‘closure’ in this conclusion. Nevertheless, we would like to venture three claims based on the argument detailed in the literature review and the case study.
First, as has been demonstrated, the capacity of both installation art and comics (via their viewers/readers) to produce narrative via the simultaneous co-presence of elements in relation with one another also enables the production of unique affects and intensities, as well as multiple relations among the art’s elements. We would like to argue that academic narratives of social processes can benefit from this form of narration, which speaks to topological relations among social actors. 45 Emphasizing these qualities of social processes enables a different account to be developed, in which social outcomes are seen as emergent and constantly becoming, like the Bergsonian ‘now’ produced in the act of reading comics or occupying an installation. Narratives of social processes are rarely linear, whether in a retrospective consideration of causation or in the predictions of outcome associated with futurology. Indeed, in ‘real’ life this is largely because of the complex politics of relational space. Why should our narratives of social processes not utilize media founded on relational space to provide nuanced, multivalent accounts of the world in which we live?
Second, we have attempted to speak to the concern of Martin and Secor, that topology calls on us ‘to understand the spatial operation of continuity and change, repetition and difference. In other words, topology directs us to consider relationality itself and to question how relations are formed and then endure despite conditions of continual change’. 46 We have engaged with the empirics of visual semiotics, key to the mineralization of artists’ intent in the installation or graphic narrative itself, as well as with the empirics of viewers’ production of relations among the elements of that installation or graphic narrative. This process of becoming, through which new spaces are constantly ‘evented’, needs to be documented in its specificity if we are to move beyond basic claims about topology and relational spaces to a more specific explication of how they emerge, evolve, and dissipate.
Third, as we have seen, the repetition and juxtaposition of spaces through which graphic narrative is produced in comics is mirrored in both artistic installations and interventions in ‘real’ spaces such as The Rut. However, this phenomenon is equally true of everyday spaces. The everyday spaces we inhabit are meaningful because of the differences to be extracted, not only from proximate spaces or times, but also from other people’s experiences of the same spaces and times we occupy. Consider, for instance, the way in which the perception of urban park spaces can be transformed through the experience of The Rut. Further, the production of new spacings (and therefore meanings) is dependent on our ability to shake free from entrenched patterns of thought and to engage in new routines of thinking about these spaces. 47 It is in this that the political potential of installation art and graphic narrative can be most obviously found. Their ability to inculcate new embodied sensibilities in their viewers, which are carried forth into more everyday spaces, indicates both the multiplicity of spaces that co-exist in any seemingly singular place and the political potentials that exist in the ‘gutters’ between those spaces.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Special thanks are due to Paul Gravett and Dave McKean for offering their time and consideration, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their insights. This paper was initially presented before seminar audiences at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Amsterdam, Aberystwyth University, National University of Ireland – Maynooth, the University of Exeter, and the University of Western Sydney, as well as at the 2011 AAG Annual Meeting in Seattle and the ‘Perception of Change: Space, time, and mobility after Henri Bergson’ symposium at the University of Oxford. Each audience contributed to this paper’s final form, but special thanks are due to Rik Spanjers for his insight and sustained interest. Any flaws remain our own.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.