Aesthetics of negativity in US television fiction and comics: "Here" by Richard McGuire and "Twin Peaks, the return"

• Autores: Ivan Pintor Iranzo
• Localización: REDEN (2019): Revista Española de Estudios Norteamericanos, ISSN-e 2695-4168, Nº. 0, 2019, págs. 35-54
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • In the original version of Richard McGuire’s comic Here, published in the magazine Raw in 1989, an initial panel depicting the empty corner of a living room at an unspecified point in time introduces a journey in time over a fixed space, in a to-and-fro of temporal leaps ranging from the age of the dinosaurs to the year 2030. The first panel is an almost abstract image, just a few lines converging on a point, verging on an illusion of space and perspective, depicting one corner of a living room next to a window. This article begins with this first image of an empty space, stripped bare, that underpins the whole development of Here, to venture a hypothesis of a negative aesthetic, a visual logic of emptying out and tearing in contemporary US television fiction series and comics.

    In some of the most significant practices in the context of recent innovations in comics and television, there appears to be a clear continuity with earlier explorations in the realm of visual arts, particularly in painting, based on the premise of a negative approach, whose expression can be analyzed using philosophical and even theological theoretical sources. To study the presence of the logic of emptying out, opening up and tearing in works like Here, or in Season 3 of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (Showtime Networks, 2017), or even in the works of the cartoonist Chris Ware, it is necessary to turn to methodological and theoretical tools similar to those needed for an analysis of the paintings of Mark Rothko or the work of the Anglo-Indian artist Anish Kapoor. Through a contextualization, a comparative analysis and finally a hermeneutic approach, it is the aim of this paper to attempt a broader explanation of the experimental logic emerging within contemporary popular culture in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States.