Time and History

Watching the video with McLuhan and Mailer, there were several things that really shocked me. They both have such interesting ways of looking at things I had formerly considered simple. Mcluhan’s take on artists is what interested me the most.

When he said that only artists face the present and only they really understand now and what is happening right at this moment, at first I was a little offended. I feel that I face the present each and every day. Just a few days ago I went to a yoga class and took part in a meditation at the end of the session. We were told to lie flat on our backs and forget the past, forget future plans, stop analyzing situations (something I seem to do constantly) and just lie there, aware of our bodies at that instant. We concentrated on our breaths, in and out, and not much else. While I admit that from time to time something would pop in my head and I would think about the homework I still had to do or the person I bumped into last night, most of the time I was just there, in the moment. But I admit that I rarely find myself in this position; forced to just be here and now and nowhere else.

I feel that American society has forced people to constantly be on the move, looking for newer and better things. I especially think that new media has a big role in this. New technology forces us to analyze and discover new things at a rapid pace. If we don’t, we are left behind, lost and left out from society. When I think of this, I can better understand McLuhan ideas about artists. Artists explore themselves and create art in the process. As McLuhan said, artists experience history in the present, now. They create history in the present. When a painted is painting a picture, he is concentrating on his strokes, the colors he carefully chooses, and the small details of the painting. When he is finished, his work has already become history.

In the reading we had to do for this week, Time Frames, McCloud talks about drawing the past, present, and future. Comics are a great way to display theses different times. The funny thing about comics is that the present can become the past so quickly and the future quickly becomes the present. Depending on how you read the comics, some frames can be different times.