Cosplay and the Art of Play

Exploring Sub-Culture Through Art

Garry Crawford, David Hancock

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030159665
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an introduction to cosplay asa subculture and community, built around playful spaces and the everyday practices of crafting costumes, identities, and performances.

Drawing on new and original ethnographic data, as well as the innovative use of arts-led research, this book adds to our understanding of a popular, global cultural practice. In turn, this pushes forward our understanding of play, fan practices, subcultures, practice-led research, and uses of urban spaces.

Cosplay and the Art of Play offers a significant addition to key contemporary debates on the meaning and uses of popular culture in the 21st century, and will be of importance to students and scholars interested incommunities, fandom, identity, leisure, participatory cultures, performance, and play.

© The Author(s) 2019

Garry Crawford and David HancockCosplay and the Art of PlayLeisure Studies in a Global Erahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15966-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: What Is Cosplay?

Garry Crawford¹ and David Hancock¹

(1)

University of Salford, Salford, UK

Garry Crawford (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

David Hancock

End Abstract

Introduction

This is a book about cosplay, but also much more than this.

It is our central argument that cosplay can be best understood as a craft, a subculture, and a performance, all of which are created and recreated in the everyday online and offline lives of cosplayers, but take on greater significance in certain locations, such as at science fiction and fantasy convention and meet-ups. However, in doing so, we hope that this will contribute to our understanding of many other related areas such as craft, creativity, fan culture, identity, leisure, performance, play, practice-led research , subculture, urban spaces, and much more.

In seeking to understand and explore cosplay, this book draws on traditional ethnographic methods while also more innovatively employing art as both a method of research and as a form of data. A substantial part of this book is theoretical and seeks to explore, develop, and set out a number of theoretical tools that we suggest are useful in exploring cosplay and cosplay culture. However, these are theoretical ideas that are empirically informed, and in particular, this book draws on data gathered over a period, in excess, of five years. Much of this research has followed a traditional ethnographic path, where David Hancock has attended events and meet-ups, spoke to cosplayers, followed this community online, and conducted a series of formal interviews with thirty-six cosplayers. However, as we shall explore in more detail in Chapter 3, at the core of this project has been the use of art as a means of both gathering and representing data. This project and book are, therefore, a meeting and blurring of sociological and art-led research, which has involved the production of well over one hundred watercolour paintings, sketches and drawings, and also several sculptures and videos, representing a significant body of work that explores and represents this subculture.

The book begins in the following chapter with a discussion that seeks to locate this artwork within the context of other artists who have similarly been involved with, or drawn on, subcultures in the creation of their work. We then more specifically consider the use of art in research, before dedicating a chapter to each of the topics of subculture, performance and identity, crafting, and place, before concluding with a final and much broader chapter that seeks to consider the wider role of creativity in contemporary society. In each of these chapters, apart from the conclusion, David Hancock’s artwork is presented in a number of focused discussions. Each of these inserts uses Hancock’s artwork to focus our attention and discussion on specific issues central to our analysis. Hence, each of these inserts uses artwork to represent the research, but also as a tool to further explore key aspects of this. We begin this with a discussion below of Hancock’s 2014 pencil crayon drawing of Link (The Wanderer) (Fig. 1.1). This we use to discuss the origins of the overall project, and also the relationship between the digital and the physical, and how cosplayers ‘make real’ the often ephemeral. What then follows for the remainder of this chapter is a discussion of ‘what is cosplay?’; a question, one may assume, that would lead to a fairly short and simple answer, but as we shall see in this chapter and the rest of the book, pinning this down, is far from straightforward.

Fig. 1.1

Link (The Wanderer), pencil crayon on paper, 2014

Link (The Wanderer)

The starting point for this research was an exploration of how media texts, such as video games, are (re)interpreted and (re)located within everyday life. What could be referred to as the place of the ‘virtual’ in the ‘real’—if that were not such a problematic statement.

In particular, a key early artistic influence for David Hancock came from his reading of Casper David Friedrich’s painting Der Wander über dem Nebelmeer, or The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818). In particular, Friedrich’s use of the Rückenfigur (the view of the figure seen only from behind) is an example of a third-person perspective; a viewpoint now commonly seen in, and typically associated with, video games, such as Tomb Raider , Gears of War , and Max Payne , to name but a few.

In particular, what is quite striking is how a contemporary viewer might, therefore, see The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog from the perspective of a third-person video game. This idea of viewing an earlier work through a more contemporary lens is explored by Svetlana Alpers in her book The Vexations of Art (2005). In this, Alpers considers the remark made by the nineteenth-century French critic, Baudelaire, that ‘Velázquez can be described as resembling Manet’ (Alpers 2005, p. 219). The notion that a seventeenth-century painter, Velázquez, could be influenced by the artist Manet, working some two hundred years later, at first seems absurd. However, after Manet, the work of Velázquez is seen in a new light. Manet thus becomes a filter to how a contemporary viewer might read a Velázquez, and so perceptions of his work are shaped accordingly. Similarly, we can see this reverse influence in Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog. When viewing The Wanderer, we cannot help but view this from our contemporary perspective and understand this as resembling a third-person perspective video game.

The Wanderer has been used in many contemporary contexts, such as a cover image for numerous books, including Dover Publications’ edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Ted Honderich’s The Oxford Guide to Philosophy (1995), and amongst many others. It has also been the inspiration for many other paintings and images, which include numerous film posters, such as those for V for Vendetta (2005), Watchmen (2009), and Inception (2010), and several video game boxes too, including The Legend of Zelda : Breath of the Wild (2017). ¹

It was, therefore, the appropriation of The Wanderer within contemporary popular culture and, in turn, how a modern audience, raised on a diet of video games and movie posters, might see this painting, which was, in many ways, a starting point for this project. In particular, Hancock used The Wanderer as inspiration for a number of paintings and drawings between 2011 and 2014, including Link (The Wanderer) (2014) (Fig. 1.1), featuring a cosplayer dressed as the character Link from Nintendo’s hugely popular video game series The Legend of Zelda .

In the drawing pictured here (Fig. 1.1), we see a cosplayer, Mikey, restaged in the seminal pose of Friedrich’s The Wanderer. It is through this image that Hancock asks the viewer to see the world of Zelda and Link through Friedrich’s work. In this use of the Rückenfigur, we see Link as similarly ‘turning his back on the world of the spectator to be fully engrossed by the world of sublime nature or to look inward to the sublime depths of his imagination’ (Beech 2004, online).

As we shall explore further in Chapter 7, for cosplayers, their environment can take on significant meaning; as it is not only where they are physically located, but this can also become a resource they draw on in their play and the creation of new narratives. The cosplayer Mikey is therefore here, both a wanderer in a park in Cheshire, but also through his play, a wanderer in Hyrule, the fictional world of The Legend of Zelda . As with Friedrich’s painting, ‘we oversee the experience of someone else, someone who was already there in a past long before our arrival’, as Koerner (2009, p. 192) writes in his book on Friedrich. Hence, the viewer has the same feeling looking at Friedrich’s painting as we do when playing a video game or watching someone else’s cosplay: that of being granted access to only part of a wider narrative, to being an observer, or temporary presence, in someone else’s story. As Koerner (2009, p. 192) continues, ‘I had a sense of undisturbed presence, here I am not the first in this landscape, for the traveller remains spatially and temporally before me’. As such, both the avatar and the artist never fully allow the audience to experience the scene alone; this is always filtered through the perspective of another, from a third-person perspective. However, as we shall see, cosplay enables, at least partially, the stepping into a first-person role, which allows the cosplayer to see the world through the character’s eyes.

What Is Cosplay?

In this section, we specifically focus in more detail on cosplay, and in particular we address the fundamental, but far from straightforward, question, of ‘what is cosplay?’.

The term ‘cosplay’ is a contraction (or portmanteau) of the words ‘costume’ and ‘play’ (Lamerichs 2015, 1.1), or as Lome (2016, 1.2) suggests, possibly more accurately, it might be seen as a combination of the terms ‘costume’ with ‘role-play’. Put simply, cosplay would appear to be typically about individuals taking on (certain aspects of) the appearance (and to some extent manne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: What Is Cosplay?
• 2. Contextualising the Artwork
• 3. Cosplay and Art as Research Method
• 4. Cosplay as Subculture
• 5. Identity and Performance
• 6. Crafting Cosplay
• 7. Playful Cultures and the Appropriation of Urban Space
• 8. Conclusion: Decentring Cosplay
• Back Matter