EXHIBITIONISM: The Art of Display: Josef Sparrow
The seventeenth artist from EXHIBITIONISM at The Courtauld Institute of Art is Josef Sparrow…
Josef Sparrow is an illustrator/ animator student living and working in London. He is currently enrolled on a full-time illustration BA course at Kingston University.
Sparrow has created three new pieces specifically for our exhibition. The works are unlike his usual style. As an illustrator he is used to creating images that will aid a plot, where as these pieces focus on the reverse of this process; destroying a storyline.
The form of comic-book art is an interesting one, as it sits rather awkwardly between representative pictorial art and narrative prose. It is the unification of the two modes that creates the unique comic-book method of representation, and this is what Sparrow is interested in. His work focuses on what happens when you isolate the image from the text, and in these instances, remove the text entirely, leaving comic-book images without the narration that is almost imperative to the normal interpretation of the work. ‘I like the idea that relieving the books of their text has the effect of “purifying” them of their abrasive, comic-book tackiness and yet at the same time damages them fundamentally so that they become unreadable.’
The work is placed in the Reproduction Room, to accentuate its role as a work of art. The comic-book is displayed in a frame, instantly preventing us from reading it, as we would usually presume to do. It also parodies the apparent ‘elevation’ of the work in to a position within the spectrum of ‘fine-art’, through its framing, raising questions of what constitutes such a notion.
By removing the text with a scalpel, and presenting the comic books closed and otherwise intact, Sparrow accentuates the dramatics of the images, and confuses the linear narrative that is usually present. You can see through holes he has created into adjacent pages, and thus future moments of the original narrative. This brings about the paradox that the narration is simultaneously unified (the progressive future is brought into the present, through these ‘peep holes’) and destroyed (we are left to interpret images that were never meant to be analysed on their own).
