CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK IN STUDYING THE VISUAL OF COMIC ART

Karna Mustaqim
Prof. Dr. Muliyadi Mahamood
Fakulti Seni Lukis Seni Reka (FSSR) UiTM

Abstract

Recently, research as the creation of knowledge draws increasing attention to the creative
arts field. There are many paradigms, which is nothing more or less than a conceptual
framework used in guiding research inquiry. The research paradigm distinguishes the inquiry
in science, social science, and the arts. The study of art is not the same as scientific study of
nature. Carole Gray and Julian Malins (2004) based on Guba’s analysis of paradigms
suggested that artistically or designerly paradigm of inquiry is illustrated as the role of
‘practitioner is the researcher’ whereupon the ‘subjectivity, involvement, reflexivity is
acknowledge; Knowledge is negotiated – inter-subjective, context bound, and is a result of
personal construction’. Regarding obscurity in comic art upon two disparate modalities, the
visible (pictorial) and the writeable (textual), Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield (2009) intriguingly
put forward that ‘visual art is not simply visual – there is always something written in the
work’. The term art-based research was coined around 1980s by Elliot W. Eisner, an
educationalist scholar. Art-based research is a form of qualitative research defined by the
presence of aesthetics qualities which quite different from traditional forms of research that
are associated with the social sciences. Steven J. Taylor and Robert Bogdan (1984)
elucidated that ‘the phenomenological perspective is central to our conception of qualitative
methodology’. It is an exploration of intangible variables resulting in description of the
phenomenon being studied such as comic art. This study is a re-search for meaning through
the re-reading the lived-experience of comics. Perspectives of methodological triangulation
here intertwine visual content analysis, visual semiotics and applied Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology of perception to explicate the aesthetic experience of the reading comics
experience. Far from using a theoretical model that imposes an external logic of a
phenomenon, the phenomenological approach seeks to find internal logic of the subject.

Introduction
The reason we studying visual images, Ball and Smith (1992) argued were simply because it
is everywhere and we used to reading them all the time (as cited in Holm, 2008, p. 325).
Visual images have exhausted much of our physical and emotional energy on the act of
seeing (Berger, 1998) and it inevitably play a central role in the culture of the twenty first
century (Sturken & Cartwright 2004). Sturken & Cartwright (2004) in ‘Practice of Looking’
noted that culture are pliant and mutual in a ‘shared practices of a group, community, or
society, through which meaning is made out of visual, aural and textual world of
representation’ (p.3). As for comics which ‘are arguably younger than literature, certainly
older than moving pictures have received less critical attention’ for quite a long time
(Berninger, Ecke, & Haberkorn, 2010, p.1). Its impact to contemporary popular culture is
huge but only lately, as a popular culture, comics gradually succeed to influence other
storytelling medium (Talon, 2004), as well as the eagerness to study comics at large make it
notable as an emerging art and literature medium (Harvey, 1996; Hatfield, 2005).

Research Paradigm and Methodology

Recently, research as the creation of knowledge draws increasing attention to the creative
arts field (McNiff, 2006, p.11; Leavy, 2009, p.2). The usual assumption bear in mind attempts
research as a form of knowing and explaining. Indeed, Shaun McNiff (2006) suggested that
a research task could be preoccupied objectives such as the need to experience, to inspire,
or to build a profession collectively. Egon Guba (1990) in The Paradigm Dialog imposed that
a researcher ‘must understand the basic ontological, epistemological and methodological
assumptions of each, and be able to engage them in dialogue’ (as cited in Denzin & Lincoln,
1998, p. 191). Indeed, Joseph A. Maxwell (2005) asserted that underpinning any research,
there are some at least implicit philosophical assumptions about the view of the nature of the
world (ontology) and the way to understand it (epistemology); and by making them explicit,
carefully considering them Gary Potter (2000) believed that will be of practical benefit (p.3).
The philosophical assumptions known as worldview or ‘paradigm’, is significant thought
disseminates by Thomas Kuhn (1922 – 1966) concerning our ideas about reality and how
we going to gain knowledge out of it (Maxwell, 2005, p. 36). There are many paradigm,
which is nothing more or less than a conceptual framework (Garratt, 2005), used in guiding
research inquiry. The research paradigm helps to distinguish the inquiry in science, social
science, and the arts. Correspondingly, Henk Borgdorff (2006) in ‘The Debate on Research
in the Arts’ indicated that what will ‘make art research distinguishes and qualifies as
academic research in its own right is by scrutinizing the question of ontological,
epistemological, and methodological’ which means not only following what already been
done and without proper knowledge about what the philosophical assumption behind the
practices.

The study of art is not the same as scientific study of nature. Natural processes investigated
to find a causal link that was considered necessary according to the formulation of
deductive-nomological, which phenomena that repeatedly experienced then it results in a
covering law theory. If art studies using this approach as such, James F. Walker (2004)
assured that the artist would perform an instrumental rationality that is controlling and
manipulating (experimental) the art object. It treated art as ‘an impersonal representation of
the world as described by an objectivist science’ (Matthews, 2006, p. 137), which end up in a
deductive premise proposition as the literal meaning. Walker (2004) in ‘The Reckless and
The Artless: Practical Research And Digital Painting’ argued that:
“...the absurdity of the 'objective' criteria of art school research speak, the absurdity
of using the models of the physical or social sciences when framing research in
visual art; the models should come from the humanities, where 'objective truth' is
somewhat hedged around with questions of viewpoint and interpretation. It was as if
visual art suffered from an inferiority complex, and had to wear a different set of
clothes to look respectable...”

Conceptual Framework
Following Grossberg (1995) ‘studying popular performance can not be successful without
the researcher being serious about her own connection to pleasure’ (as cited in Hanulla,
Suoranta, & Vadén, 2005, p.73). This study of comics as popular culture as such is a search
for meaning through reading comics’ activities, or a re-reading the lived-experience into-the-
world of comics. The study accordingly analyse the visual content based on observing the
appearance of amount characteristics in purposively sampling of four comics magazines.
The analysis of appearance things in the visual form from the selected sampling are not
merely a statistical compilation but concerning the themes, iconicity, models or patterns and
conceptual development which accepts as given existence that hopefully will serve as an aid
to sensitization and interpretation in deciphering their meanings.

Renée Green (2010) offering a definition for artistic research that can be contemplated and
further probed developed taking from Sha Xin Wei (2008) who described how art research
differs from other form of research:
“…Like research in other domains, art research has its own archive, but whereas
historians use textual archives, and anthropologists use materials gathered in
fieldwork, art research’s “body of literature” is the body of prior works and the critical
commentaries surrounding them. Like other research, art research is open-ended,
we cannot declare in advance what is the “deliverable”: if we already know the
 answer, then we would not need to do the research… (as cited in Green, 2010,
p.18).”

Table 3.1 Artistic Research Paradigms inquiry by Carol Gray & Julian Malins (2004, p. 20) developed from Guba’s.

Studying art is not to explain the nature of art, because art is not a kind of knowledge
whereupon to find the law of causation as natural scientific per se. Carole Gray and Julian
Malins (2004) based on Guba’s analysis of paradigms suggested that artistically or
designerly paradigm of inquiry is illustrated as the role of ‘practitioner is the researcher’
whereupon the ‘subjectivity, involvement, reflexivity is acknowledge; Knowledge is
negotiated – inter-subjective, context bound, and is a result of personal construction’ (p.21).
Regarding obscurity in art research upon two apparently disparate modalities, the visible
(image) and the writeable (text), Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield (2009) in ‘Theory as Art
Practice: Notes for Discipline’, intriguingly put forward that ‘visual art is not simply visual –
there is always something written in the work’, which he further expressed:
“It is a space, an interval, in the work of visual art which is given by how the work
itself writes and writes of itself…., it is something writerly, what Jean-Luc Nancy calls
“a certain writability or scriptuality”, which makes possible what we see, within what is
seen, something which makes the art itself possible as something seeable. Art
writing what it wants to say itself – this is what the researcher can draw out from the
visible.”

Patricia Leavy (2009) in ‘Method Meets Art’ introduced the emergent of a new
methodological genre called ‘art-based research practices’ which she defined as ‘a set of
methodological tools used by qualitative researchers across disciplines during all phases of
social research, including, data collection, analysis, interpretation, and representation’ (p. 2-
3). She asserted that ‘art-based methods….comprises new theoretical and epistemological
groundings that are expanding the qualitative paradigm’ (p. 3). The term art-based research
was coined by Elliot W. Eisner (1980). Art-based research is a form of qualitative research
defined by the presence of aesthetics qualities which quite different from traditional forms of
research that are associated with the social sciences (Barone, 2008, p. 29). But it need to
differ that art research is not the same as art practice as argued by Sha Xin Wei (as cited in
Green, 2010, p.18).

’Influenced by Eisner, Leavy (2009) then purported ‘the emergence of art-based practices
has necessitated a renegotiation of the qualitative paradigm with respect to fundamental
assumptions about scientific standards of evaluation’ (p. 15). She further situated that:
“Traditional conceptions of validity and reliability, which developed out of positivism,
are inappropriate for evaluating artistic inquiry. Unlike positivist approaches to social
inquiry, art-based practices produce partial, situated, and contextual truths” (p. 15-
16).

Qualitative Analysis of Visual Content

Klauss Krippendorff (2009) as a leading exponent in content analysis argued that ‘the
feature that distinguishes content analysis from other techniques of inquiry is that it provides
inference by abduction’ (p.205). Abduction, as an interpretivist research strategy was also
called as ‘logic of discovery’ by Russell Hanson and characterized as ‘reasoning to the best
explanation’ by Gilbert Harman, as suggested by Jennifer Mason (2002) is a strategy that
theory, data generation and analyses are developed simultaneously in a dialectical process
such as moving back and forth between data, experience and broader concepts.

Krippendorff (2009) further explained that ‘content analysis utilizes text – writings, images
and all kind of symbolic matter – as data to answer various social research question’ (p.205).
Within popular culture studies, qualitative content analyses have been common for exploring
films, magazines, and television (Holm, 2008, p. 329). Krippendorf (2009) inferred that
‘reading is fundamentally qualitative process’ (p.20) and ‘recognizing meanings is the reason
that the researchers engage in content analysis’ (pp. 21-22). He also described that:
“Content analysis is a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences
from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use….The reference to
text in the above definition is not intended to restrict content analysis to written
material. The phrase “or other meaningful matter” is included in parentheses to
indicate that in content analysis works of art, images, maps, sounds, signs, symbols,
and even numerical records may be included as data – that is, they may be
considered as texts – provided they speak to someone about phenomena outside of
what can be sensed or observed” (Krippendorff,1980, 2004, pp.18-19).

We use content analysis as a systematic attempt to exami ne visual form that ‘goes beyond
merely counting or extracting objective content from ‘texts’ to examine meaning, themes and
patterns that maybe manifest or latent in a particular text’ (Yan Zhang & Wildemuth).
Frequencies and cross-tabulation will be sufficient to describe the findings (Mosdell, 2006,
p.107). Indeed, Bell as cited in Holm (2008) explained that it is not a theory-based process
and does not tell much about meanings, it is better to establish variables with distinguishable
values rather than just categories for classification (p. 328-329). Therefore, Holm (2008)
suggested for exploring the messages intended to be perceived from the pictures, a content
analysis needs to be combined with a qualitative semiotic analysis (p. 329).

Visual Semiotics of Comics

Marcel Danesi (2004) argued that culture is everywhere “meaningful,” everywhere the result
of an innate need to seek meaning to existence (p. 4). Niall Lucy (2001) further emphasized
in Beyond Semiotics: Culture, Text and Technology by saying that:
“It would not be entirely wrong, though it may be provocative, to say that what used
to be called semiotics is now called cultural studies. This would not be to infer that
semiotics as such no longer exists - yet notice the ease by which an 'as such' can
attach itself to 'semiotics' nowadays, seeming to diminish it. To say 'semiotics as
 such' is at the same time to say that Something has been lost to semiotics, that
semiotics exists today as something less than it might have been” (p.25).

Semiotics, mostly renowned as the science of signs, is an enormous field of study which
suggested by a few semiotician who believed that ‘everything can be analyzed semiotically’
(Berger, 2005), ‘encompassing anything that is used, invented, or adopted by human beings
to produce meaning’ (Danesi, 2004); from a simple pictorial figure to a complex narrative or
even scientific theory.

Phenomenology and the Aesthetics of Comics

Steven J. Taylor and Robert Bogdan (1984) in their Introduction to Qualitative Research
Methodology elucidated that ‘the phenomenological perspective is central to our conception
of qualitative methodology’ (p. 8). It is an exploration of intangible variables resulting in
description of the phenomenon being studied. A researcher role in qualitative approaches
suggested by Gideon Sjoberg and Roger Nett (1968) is part of the variable in the research
design (as cited in A.A. Berger, 1998, p. 27), and as the research method (Gay & Airasian,
2003);or is the instrument itself (Janesick, 2001). As a method applied to art criticism,
Edmund Burke Feldman (1994) gives a provisional understanding about phenomenology as
art criticism:
“…a powerful method of focusing the critic’s perceptual powers on the actual features
of an artwork. Through the epoché – or “bracketing” or suspension – of preconceived
notions, the phenomenological critic endeavours to experience the distinctively
aesthetic properties of the art object…” (pp. 16-17).

‘I’, the researcher, found that adapting the Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is
particularly advantageous to be use as an investigation of the phenomenon in the creative
arts. The discussion derived mainly in the phenomenological account of art of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment and temporality, and through the voices of others including
Mikel Dreyfuss’s, Roman Ingardern’s, also refrain to the phenomenological conceptions
provide by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

Merleau-Ponty implied ‘phenomenology is the study of essences’ and accordingly it includes

finding the essence of comics through phenomenological inquiry as part of uncovering the
meaning of comics.

The act of reading comic means a lived-experience to read in–between the panels (gutter) to
disclose the treasure life-world behind an elliptical and paradoxical formulation using a
sophisticated style of intricate and symbolic language found in comics. From this point of
view, the understanding of comics as an invisible art is not only achievable through writing
an explanation of the visible, but essentially need to do the practice of reading comics and
explicate how is the comics show itself to the researcher as it is.

Conclusion
In this study of comic arts, the quantitative numbers simply denote the presence of a specific
sign which is defined objectively and limited to the surface characteristics of the comics. The
next step is to pursue an analysis of comics art via semiotics theory and intertwines
correspondingly with psychology of art, art theory, aesthetics and related comics art theory.
It focuses on the visual(art)-based research by carefully examine the drawings
characteristics. This research into drawing method and models derived from Charles
Sanders Pierce which is develop by William Morris that constructed within the triadic models
of semiotics theories and deliberately come from the visual communication design studies.
Last but not least, the understanding of comic arts is an intersubjective reading horizon. To
read is to share the perception amongst the reader. To be immersing into comics is to be
lived-in-the-being-of-the-gutter.

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