21 January – 14 March 2010
The Drawing Room, Tannery Arts
Brunswick Wharf, 55 Laburnum Street
London E2 8BD
020 7729 5333
www.drawingroom.org.uk
Review by Natalie Bouloudis
A group of mothers recklessly hurling a baby into the air, a squirrel rotating on a scull, a human-cum-tree-trunk kebab – the latest exhibition at The Drawing Room is sinister and brilliantly unnerving. But that is the point of an exhibition called Shudder, as it stirs in the viewer unsettlement and sometimes revulsion. You are shown works from the basic to the filmic, from the hand-drawn to the computer animated, from a perceived social norm to a disconcerting reality and it is all in the name of animation.At once, the tone is set; Matt Mullican’s Dying Stick Figure takes you on a journey from life to death in only 32 seconds. A fallen stick man drawn in a box signifies enough for the viewer to recognise the knife-edge that separates life and death.
This message echoes in Markus Vater’s The Cave has been moved, a projection on the outside wall at nightfall. This is a Victorian shadow-puppet show turned abject. The silhouetted landscape illustrates humans, animals and plants morphing and growing out of each other. A mother lies on a tree-branch as a baby falls out and dangles by its umbilical cord. Later, she sprouts butterfly wings; the baby grows up and then is killed by giant boulders. Elsewhere, a man crumbles into a gorilla, an elephant and an ostrich; a plague of locus passes and a skeleton rides a speeding tank. All this is entwined within the backdrop of everyday life as cyclists continue to ride by and the chain of events continues.
At the root of the unnerving feeling of this exhibition is a memento mori, a reminder that death is inevitable and lurks just around the corner. Animation seems to be a perfect medium for this theme; the works themselves appear on a continuous loop, like the perpetual cycle of life and death.
A diverse range of techniques are shown throughout the show as each artist conveys their own handling of animation. Sound and image wrestle in Ann Course’s ironically titled The Collaborators. You hear the passive aggressive questions and answers from a couple, manifest in the violent forms of the projected images. ‘Yes, no, I don’t know, you decide’, visually translates into a rolling heap of coffins, a four spiked object and a ballerina’s feet beating across the floor until a bloodstained trail is left behind. The hand-drawn animation brilliantly delves into the emotional contradictions of a dysfunctional relationship, leaving you with sympathetic feelings of dissatisfaction.
Japanese artist Naoyuki Tsuji is clearly an old school charcoal and paper man. Yet this translated into animation brings a unique connotation of the drawerly rawness. In Zephyr, a baby plays with an anthropomorphic character; a version of the Greek wind god if we are to go by the title. With the smily-faced drawn sun and the playground on a bed of clouds, this mindscape appears like a child’s manifestation of heaven. The figures move like ghosts as their steps leave a blurred trace. The effect is achieved by the basic yet alluring method of constantly adjusting and rubbing out each hand-drawn frame.
In the booklet accompanying the exhibition, Esther Leslie’s essay refers to Adorno’s theory that celebrates the flickering 1960’s German films and their incompetence at duplicating real life. The thought process suggests that it is such digital blunders that bring out a contradictory visceral and primal response - a shudder in the viewer. The basic technology employed in Zephyr certainly adds to the naive tone of the piece. The jittering screen seems to tap into an emotional sensibility with an undeniable perturbing undertone. Adorno’s point has been made.
At the opposite end of the scale, Barry Doupe’s Whose Toes, is also one of the two strongest pieces in the show. Constructed from computer software, the painted images have been transferred into pixels, creating crude Sim-like computer game characters. The effect is blunt on the senses and a challenge for the viewer; you have become partially sighted with acute tinnitus. A sound of buzzing white-noise cutting through your ears combines with a blurred coloured screen.
The film simultaneously narrates the run-up to Princess Diana’s and JFK’s deaths. This alternative turn of events disturbingly interweaves sex, roleplay, a glory hole; objects used as weapons, weapons used as sex toys, as you yourself take on the role of a voyeur. There is nothing comfortable about this viewing yet the film increasingly demands your attention. What at first appears repellent is also extremely thought provoking and stays with you for a long time afterwards.
Doupe is making us aware of how the media induces a myopic view of public and celebrity figures, especially in the event of a conspiracy. The work is essentially an attack on the digital age and its capacity to distort and reconstruct the truth. With this, the irony of the exhibition is highlighted. Doupe may display the most advanced technology used, yet he also wars a poignant argument against it.
The other exciting piece is Raymond Pettibon’s hypnotic Sunday Night Saturday Morning. This work alone is enough to endorse the value of animation as an important dimension of visual culture. The artist usually known for his inky comic book-style drawings, here, incorporates movement, whilst referencing a web of American popular culture. It feels uncomfortable from the start as an owl’s head turns 360 degrees like something from The Exorcist. We are warned ‘Do not try to adjust your television set, it’s just a picture’ as repetitive images of swirling spirals, heart beats and black circles combine with the spoken vignettes - chillingly challenging your whole perspective of life.
There are moments when the quality falters; you are not sure if the video has gone wrong or if this is intentional. This can be found throughout the show, but of course only adds to the overall unhinging effect. What makes Shudder work is the way it craws beneath the blanket of normal life and drags to the surface the unsettling feeling we all have. Parts of your subconscious are suddenly exposed in the images before you and there is nowhere to hide. These aren’t high tech HD images with special effects and complex computer graphics. Instead, the raw and sketchy drawing translates into some moving images that will induce both a physical and conceptual shiver. This is animation at its most intriguing.
