Identity and Visual Culture in David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs and Art & Max

• Autores: Lesley D. Clement
• Localización: Exploring Visual Literacy Inside, Outside and Through the Frame / Aundreta Conner Farris (ed. lit.), Frieda Pattenden (ed. lit.), 2012, ISBN 9781848881129, págs. 213-223
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright investigate visual culture ‘as a set of processes or practices through which individuals and groups come to make sense of things, including their own identities within and even against or outside the group.’ 1 David Wiesner’s visual storytelling in The Three Pigs (2001) and Art & Max (2010) invites readers to participate in a twenty-first-century visual culture that is beginning to conceptualise identity as described by Peggy Phelan, ‘a form of both resisting and claiming the other, declaring the boundary where the self diverges from and merges with the other.’ 2 Such participation is integral to the attainment of a visually literate community. In both Wiesner’s texts, the central characters - the three pigs and Art - become active agents in their own deconstruction of self and story to undergo a reconstruction and renewal from their experiences and the relationships they have formed. By first entering the blank white expanse behind the traditional story and conventional canvas and then assenting to the transformation of visual and linguistic features that have fixed them in this story and canvas, they discover words and images, colours and lines, which can be reconfigured to create a work of art that expresses their new identity. The three pigs and Art are representative of the twenty-first-century artist with an identity beyond self, having escaped what Kenneth Gergen refers to as a ‘bounded self’ - discrete, unified, coherent - and emerging as a ‘multi-’ or ‘relational being.’ 3 The collapsing of frames, unravelling of lines, vanishing of colours, truncating of words, and dismantling of syntax invite viewers into Wiesner’s picturebooks to read visual cues and so join a community of creators and participate in an evolving visual culture.