Escher Girls and Anatomic Ecology

by John Holbo on June 25, 2012

Another follow-up to the last two posts about body images and beauty ideals.

Nick Caldwell commented that the curiously cubist ‘you can see the front and the back at the same time!’ pictures I was discussing are known as “Escher Girls”. I had actually thought of this comparison myself, because some of the tricks for making it look superficially plausible (not something Liefeld attempts) are the same. The eye can be tricked into following a line that turns into a different line so you don’t notice, overall, that it makes no sense. So I thought Caldwell was coining the term as a joke. Turns out not. Diagnosing the problem, under this name, is a party to which I am very late. See here and here. Two tumblrs devoted to the topic. So my commentary was, kinda, reinventing the wheel. (These moderately sfw links are recommended for hours – nay, minutes at least – of amazement and hilarity.)

Also, I managed somehow to miss that, at the same time I made my first post, some controversy arose concerning a particularly senses-shattering Guillem March Catwoman cover. Comics Alliance has the cover in question, and a round-up of responses. You really want to see, at least, Cameron Stewart’s expert attempt to reconstruct the anatomy of the situation.

March has responded with a somewhat defensive self-parody, in the style of R. Crumb. Very funny, actually. His point is, apparently, the same one I was experimenting with in my last post: if you don’t mind R. Crumb playing physics-defying games with female anatomy – if Crumb is a ‘great comics artist’ – then why get all head-up about a Catwoman cover? That is, since the criticisms imply that bad anatomy, per se, is the problem, the criticisms must be invalid. This defense doesn’t really fly but does make me think that DC should hire Crumb for an issue or two.

Browsing through the Escher Girl pages I’m more convinced, per my first post, that it’s an ecological problem, not an anatomic problem. If only a few artists were doing it, it would be a expressivist-fetishist eccentricity. But when it becomes standardized it becomes obnoxious since inescapable.

I was discussing this with Belle and one of the two of us – Belle? – made the point that one thing that makes Mike Mignola’s work truly stand-out is that he so rarely draws ‘hot chicks’ who stand out as such. This point extends to pretty much all the other artists who have worked on the Hellboy and B.P.R.D. franchises. Liz Sherman and Kate Corrigan do not wear bikinis. I remember one panel in which Liz (?) is complimenting Kate on her new dress and it’s a frumpy-academic, high-waisted ankle length affair. Part of a baggy sweater ensemble. I think positive predisposition to draw women who look sorta mannish, a la Guy Davis, is a prerequisite for getting a job, drawing for Mignola. Mignola does give us the occasional demon queen, true. But images like this are the exceptions that prove the rule. Betty Page doesn’t look like she belongs in the Hellboyverse. (Not that I don’t love Betty Page! Frank Cho sure can draw cute girls. But he often makes their feet kinda large. What’s with that? I guess he likes it.) Mignola-wise, the phrase ‘withered dugs’ leaps to mind more readily in association with that quadrant of female anatomy than anything more pneumatic. It would be fun to hire a bunch of pin-up artists to do Mignola’s Baba-Yaga as an Escher Girl. A Guillem March Baba-Yaga would be great!

Of course if everyone started to draw like Mike Mignola, I’d get sick of it.

It seems to me that there is no recognized term for what we might term ‘the ecological fallacy’. Namely, attributing absolute badness to styles or features or artists or individual works when, in fact, our true complaint is highly relativistic. We feel there is too much of that sort of thing around, crowding out other stuff. There is no way to make the ecological point briefly. It is always going to stammer and come out as fairly mild-mannered, since full of qualifications and caveats. So, in order to do justice to the depth of our negative feelings, we say something we don’t mean. As Kierkegaard says: a corrective mistaken for a principle is confusion. But aesthetic life goes on.

{ 14 comments }

1

david 06.25.12 at 5:14 am

Minor note: “Ecological fallacy” is already used for another concept.

2

John Holbo 06.25.12 at 5:35 am

Thanks. Yes, I should have known about that. Or preemptively googled to check whether the term was in use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

Actually the concept is not unrelated. “This fallacy assumes that individual members of a group have the average characteristics of the group at large. However, statistics that accurately describe group characteristics do not necessarily apply to individuals within that group.”

Take the Guillem March case. The effect of the mass of drawings like this is, on the whole, bad. It doesn’t follow that the effect of this drawing would, absent that mass, be individually bad in a similar way and to a proportionate degree.

3

johann tor 06.25.12 at 9:00 am

Mr Holbo, I think you reluctance might be caused by the fact that your argument:

If exploitative comics are exploitative, then Mignola is the bee’s knees

sounds a bit like an example of Curry’s paradox.

I dunno, maybe you could rephrase it?

4

John Holbo 06.25.12 at 9:20 am

“If exploitative comics are exploitative, then Mignola is the bee’s knees,”

Hmmm. This isn’t my argument so I’m loath to rephrase it. What is supposed to be paradoxical about what I actually said?

Perhaps this helps. I’m not really granting the premise – which many people would grant – that the Guillem March image is inherently exploitative. It’s exploitative due to the overall ecology. But I can imagine a world in which no one but Guillem March draws this way. He is this possible worlds R. Crumb, and we judge his work to be interesting, and distinctive.

Of course, some might not buy this argument for R. Crumb either:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Crumb-Comics-Vol/dp/156097107X

5

Belle Waring 06.25.12 at 11:30 am

I told you about the Escher Girls blogs too, mind. I demand equal recognition for my wasting-time-on-the-internet activities. People say, oh, she’s just a girl, she can’t waste time on the internet the way a man could. But…wait, this isn’t going in the direction I wanted.

6

The Iron-Tongued Devil 06.25.12 at 2:24 pm

Re comment 3,

If x is x, then q

isn’t any kind of paradox. It amounts to an assertion that q is necessarily true. (Not going to respond to nitpicks about quantifiers and modality.) That’s a lousy argument for q, but there’s no paradox.

Re the original post, there’s a problem. If the only thing wrong with Escher Girls and similar anatomical improbabilities were that there are too many of them, surely the rational response would be to ignore them and go find some other entertainment. At a rough first approximation, what makes Escher Girls worse than clichés is what they imply about women and their role in the world. By making the non-sexy parts of women’s bodies placeholders that can be twisted to fit as needed, they suggest that the sexy parts are all that really matter. That is, women’s bodies are for sex.

Now we can go round and round about that and point out that certifiable Great Art does the same thing (ok , so it’s subject to the same criticism) and that actually sex is pretty important and interesting (yes, and we could have a long discussion about that). Somebody could also argue that I’m reading too much into the illustrations, that getting off on that kind of image is a stage that a lot of boys go through before realizing that actual sex with actual women is better. That last argument may well be right, but the implication would be that the appropriate response to the illustrations in question would be to ignore them.

The key point is that if you want to object to the production of those illustrations, you need to make some kind of substantive moral argument. To object only to the “ecology”, which amounts to saying that they’re hackneyed clichés, won’t give you that. In that case, you should just find something else to read or look at. You seem to be moving in this direction in comment 2, where you say that the effect of these drawings is bad. I’m not sure exactly which effect you have in mind, but you need to make that move.

Finally, aren’t we rehashing feminist arguments from a quarter century ago? I’m not deeply familiar with that work, and we all know that some of it went off in very destructive directions, e.g. cooperating with the religious right to pass unconstitutional laws; but seriously, what’s new here? I’ve just spent half an hour writing a detailed comment. I don’t mean this in a judgmental way. But isn’t there literature from that era that we ought to be citing? Or are we really coming up with something new?

7

Katherine 06.25.12 at 2:38 pm

The only new bit really is that this shit is getting worse, and more common.

8

John Holbo 06.25.12 at 2:58 pm

“I told you about the Escher Girls blogs too”

Hmmm, I didn’t get that there actually was a tumblr called ‘Escher Girls’ until I googled it. I guess I thought we were just using the term as an intuitive shorthand – I sort of came up with it myself as an obvious term for an impossible drawing about the same time some folks did in comments – and you mentioned that there were things about that on the net already. I didn’t realize the actual term was in use as a name for a blog. Thousand pardons, m’dear.

“At a rough first approximation, what makes Escher Girls worse than clichés is what they imply about women and their role in the world. By making the non-sexy parts of women’s bodies placeholders that can be twisted to fit as needed, they suggest that the sexy parts are all that really matter. That is, women’s bodies are for sex.”

I was treating the logic of why T & A are the focus as too obvious to bear mentioning but you are certainly right, Iron-Tongued Devil.

“The key point is that if you want to object to the production of those illustrations, you need to make some kind of substantive moral argument.”

This is something else. I don’t think I really objected to the production of these illustrations. I said I didn’t like them, and that others don’t like them. I think the mockery is hilarious. That said, there are lots of things I don’t like whose production I don’t, per se, object to. (Transformers movies, for example.) At the end of the day, I think Guillem March can draw what he likes, and if other people want to pay him money to do so, that’s basically up to them.

The point is to try to say why we don’t like this stuff. (Obviously you have to dislike it in order for this exercise to have something to kick off against.) My point is that I think we somewhat mis-diagnose the source of our animosity. The apparently obvious answers are partly right but not wholly right.

I don’t really have a problem with people treating women as sex objects in art. Free speech, and sex is an important part of life and people have their little ways. But when you get to a point where you can’t find women treated any other way then it gets a bit more complicated. I don’t really know what I think should be done about it, if anything.

“To object only to the “ecology”, which amounts to saying that they’re hackneyed clichés”

No, the problem isn’t just that they are cliches. The problem goes a bit beyond that. I sort of want zoning laws, requiring a reasonable mix of body types, to keep people from getting too demented. But that’s obviously absurd.

9

Theophylact 06.25.12 at 3:53 pm

I present for your delectation a JRSM article on one of Ingres’s odalisques.

10

phosphorious 06.25.12 at 6:17 pm

I’m not sure that Crumb is the right analogy here. Crumb is cartoonish, whereas the Liefeld/March/Escher Girl stuff is going for a kind of realism, no? Or at least an air of seriousness as opposed to a sense of the absurd?

The mere fact that March had to redraw his cover in the style of Crumb suggests that something very different was going on. As it was, it was not an example of the “kind of thing Crumb does.”

11

Substance McGravitas 06.25.12 at 6:37 pm

Crumb is cartoonish, whereas the Liefeld/March/Escher Girl stuff is going for a kind of realism, no? Or at least an air of seriousness as opposed to a sense of the absurd?

I expect Crumb and Liefeld masturbate to their images of women with about the same air of seriousness, but I feel bad about putting both guys in one sentence.

12

John Holbo 06.25.12 at 11:29 pm

“Liefeld/March/Escher Girl stuff is going for a kind of realism, no? Or at least an air of seriousness as opposed to a sense of the absurd?”

I think I would acquit Liefeld and March on the realism charge. But the air of seriousness is the problem. There’s this ethos of gritty seriousness that is utterly ludicrous, in conjunction with this sort of bikini anatomic contortionism. At the same time, I can’t believe March really takes himself too seriously.

13

Belle Waring 06.26.12 at 4:21 am

Oh, I wasn’t complaining that seriously. Now I feel bad.

14

michael e sullivan 06.29.12 at 12:03 am

I’m not sure if Crumb really makes for a good counterexample of the general principle. IIRC, he was/is something of a misogynist jerk in person (well misanthropic to the point where it may have been equal opportunity). I don’t think you can realistically say that Crumb isn’t objectifying female forms. I tend to feel that his art is interesting enough to be worth something in *spite* of that. I don’t think the fact that he does something more interesting makes it not objectification of women.

If you take “objectification” to be some kind of normative shibboleth, a line that you can cross and become NOT ART, then I think you will have a very hard time drawing a line where everybody on the liefeld side is juvenile objectification, and everybody on the side of the old masters and their nudes is all fine and good and not problematic, artists will be artists, etc.

And of course objectification is problematic because of social context. Not just how much pop art is out there which looks like this, but the entire history of men treating women as sexual objects and non-persons, and the fact that there are still some vestiges of that even in the most liberal western societies today, and plenty of societies in the world today make 1950s USA or 18th century england look positively feminist.

The problem with objectification in art is that it unconsciously feeds a worldview of gender norms which is problematic. And yes, this really was hashed out pretty well in debates of 20-30 years ago. Until the massive sexist backlash of the last 10-15 years, silly me thought that, barring the ill fated attempts at censorship and other massive overreach, this was pretty much accepted or at least tolerated as a rule, by nearly everybody who wasn’t a reactionary nutcase.

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