SPECIAL POST: Socially Conscious Crafting and Making with Joe Sacco

About two weeks ago, I attended the Stamps Lecture at the Michigan Theater, where I managed to find a seat within a crowded auditorium. The speaker was comic writer and illustrator Joe Sacco, who is famous for creating incisive graphic novels representing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Bosnian war. I came in knowing nothing about the author, as I have read very few graphic novels and have never had any particular obsession with comics (digital or otherwise). However, I left with a greater sense of the process of crafting and making, and how the overall products of these processes carry social responsibility.

A few of the takeaways from the talk that I found captivating include the idea that emotions like anger are useful to draw from while crafting. Mr. Sacco spoke of anger as a productive emotion, arguing that “there are plenty of things to be angry about. You should be angry. But that anger needs to go somewhere. All of my work comes from anger.” These comments made me reflect on the nature of the creative process and how powerful emotion can often profoundly influence a work one is making. But are powerful emotions like these allowed in a makerspace? I would hazard a guess that anger would be considered disruptive in a collective maker setting rather than conducive to creativity. Does this mean that some creative acts must be produced alone, in order to maximize inspiration? At what point do our efforts to enhance creativity in a space conflict with collective values and expectations?

Another idea that I felt contradicted the maker ethos/movement that we have been reading about is the idea that Mr. Sacco presented that one craft is inherently more intimate than another. Sacco was explaining that he saw his writings and illustrations as representations, and that it felt more personally invasive to draw someone than write about them. The act of recording a person’s appearance felt more intimate to him than recording a person’s words. This direct appraisal of these two maker activities and judging whether one is more intimate than the other also contrasted with the maker movement, which tries to proclaim that all maker activities are somehow equal and thus, produce the same feelings of satisfaction or pride. Yet, I think Sacco’s insights reveal the inherent differences between different activities under the maker umbrella and call into question the characterizations that have been made about what is considered a maker activity and what effect it produces.

Overall, I felt Sacco’s talk gave me a lot of thought as to what making looks like to an artist that is continuously engaging with his subjects in a real-life basis and has real implications. My analysis of the maker movement so far is that it has mostly focused on those who make for personal satisfaction or profit rather than engaging their making in a socially-conscious way. I personally wonder how individual emotions can fit into a collective space, where making and learning is at its greatest potential, and I wish Sacco could have touched upon the power of collective emotion in an artistic space rather than just individual emotion. Yet, I felt that his talk illuminated some key questions that I had not thought to ask before.

Joe Sacco (left) discussing the political implications of his work at the Stamps Lecture on January 19, 2017 at the Michigan Theater.