I was at the de Young last week and saw these. First off, these are not assemblages of clothes; these are photographs (or photos of photographs…). In person, they look 3D, a photographic trompe-l’oeil. As you can probably guess, what struck me about this piece is that it is intended to be sequential. At the de Young, the photographs hang next to each other like a series of comics panels or film stills, and they’re obviously meant to be read left to right, which gives the impression of the clothes dancing.
Also, this illustrates something that I’ve thought about before. Oftentimes, comics artists are encouraged to vary the point of view from panel to panel, vary the shots (both the terms point of view and shot are problematic here, maybe “composition” would be better). How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is one such proponent of this approach. And it’s true that the same composition over and over again can get stale. Yet varying things excessively from panel to panel just for the sake of doing it can really hurt the readability of a story. Look at any of the early Image comics for examples. And if you look at early newspaper strips, like Little Nemo, there isn’t much variation of the point of view actually. Sure, McCay plays with things a lot, but generally the characters appear at the same distance from the same angle from panel to panel. This actually grounds his flights of fancy and makes them readable. The panel borders act as a frames of measurement that the reader can use to measure change. For example, the reader can tell Nemo is getting bigger because he gets closer to the panel borders in each successive panel. Likewise, the static nature of the frame can be played off against the movements of the characters. Since the shot doesn’t change, the movement of the characters gets highlighted. This is what Bowers does in You, Want, I, Want, You.
In other words, while the panel border is not supposed to be read as part of the picture plane (generally) it is still a graphical element and its lines have a relationship with the lines that are within. I think more talented comics artists have an intuitive understanding of this. Furthermore, this is something that really sets comics apart from film, and, I suspect, is why some film approaches to shots don’t translate well to comics. And c0nversely, why comics don’t always translate well to film. It’s not just the stillness of comics; it’s the two dimensionality of the panel. The depth of the image within a panel–it’s trompe l’oeil of space–is dependent on that image’s relationship to the flat panel border.
