THE ANXIOUS PENCIL

On the left you see a 1937 photograph of a hand. It holds a sharpened architectural pencil with a relaxed self-assurance, balanced over a limitless white expanse. This hand may have belonged to the photographer, Herbert Bayer. There is a serene sense of balance in the photograph: a technical apparatus composed of metal, glass, and gears has made an image of a handheld pencil, itself a maker of images, poised, ready to sketch a figure, diagram, perhaps just a solitary horizontal line suggesting a boundary between earth and sky, or floor and wall, or perhaps nothing more than a squiggle. Bayer titled it “Self Portrait.”

MAKING AND MOVING PICTURES

Photography gathers light through a lens and instantaneously captures an image, a document of real space; drawing is a manual practice of marking; it invents virtual space. One is “mechanical” the other “artistic,” with all the burdens and preconceptions those words imply. Animated film binds both of these contradictory processes together in symbiotic conspiracy. When we enter the room of animation we understand that our preconceptions about space and time will be challenged.

To “pencil in” is to suggest a provisional state. A pencil drawing is a “draft,” an incomplete sketch, a work-in-progress stabbing at a idea. A pencil stroke may be erased, smudged, scratched, overdrawn, reworked with limpid pentimenti: a discursive, ruminative practice, or a bold spontaneous gesture. Like speech, a sketch is a restless combination of declarations and demurrals, components of a herky-jerky rhythm of communication.

A drawing is understood to be a graphic image, inhabiting two dimensions, yet having the potential to represent three dimensions. A photograph is understood be an optical equivalent of real space, that which spreads out before our eyes.

REAL AND VIRTUAL

Architectural sketches embody a process of experimentation, trying out variations in design and point of view — a procession toward a final spatial realization, livable sculpture. Animators’ rough sketches are efforts to place shapes within a dynamic temporal continuum. The two goals, indeed both practices, are not that far apart, particularly in their conclusion as performance. Real space assumes meaning when we observe, enter, and interact with it, just as animated film’s virtual space and synthetic time come to life only during projection.

When Frank Lloyd Wright advised Walt Disney to use rough sketch storyboards as the design for his animation (instead of the slick inked and painted cel look perfected in the 1930’s), he may have been a bit disingenuous. Even a genius knows that working plans need to be drawn and engineered with precision. Nonetheless, today we have Frank Gehry buildings designed to resemble a random, playful sketch, just as many contemporary animators have trashed illustrative conventions in search of more vertiginous spaces where figure, ground, and point of view constantly shift, where drawing itself is being redefined.

COLLAGE

Bayer considered his photograph a fine art object but also used it (see above) as an element in a collage, that 20th C. art form that grew out of the fractured and recombined picture planes of Cubism — the juxtaposition of unlikely elements. Here the hand is assembled with a landscape painting and a crosshatched etching of an eye: three floating disparate elements tied together by a vein-like red line suggesting both the biomechanics of perception and creation — the conceptual integration of diverse image fragments to form a meaningful whole.

It was no accident that the advent of collage coincided with that of animated film, which was based on the collation of dissimilar photographs. But while Picasso’s collages would soon be festooned with real objects thrusting out from their surface plane animated film would have to rely on illusion.

CEL ANIMATION

Animated film production has historically employed a kind of technical collage, or glue, but with few exceptions (like Disney’s grandiose multiplane camera and the Fleischers’ primitive composites of photography and cartoon drawing) the intentions have been less artistically innovative than industrially expedient: to save labor costs within a hierarchy of skills while maintaining a consistent pictorial illusion. Perfected in the cartoon studios of the 1930s, cel animation continues to be used as a production model By slicing the design into layers cartoon animators divide dynamic and static areas into fore, middle, and background zones. When the individual frames are collated to form a cinematographic sequence the layers are compressed under a sheet of glass to obliterate their materiality (which might normally reveal shadows and wrinkles) and create the illusion of pictorial depth.

The diversity of strategies employed by individual contemporary animators to modify, defy, or subvert the cel cartoon model and its relentless pursuit of realism result in graphic processes that transcend mere technique to become an aspect of design.

SURFACE AS SURFACE

Regression to a single plane can be liberating. Instead of alluding to pictorial depth animators like Caroline Leaf practice a kind of dynamic primitivism by directly marking, smearing, erasing on surfaces like glass or, in the case of ENTRE DEUX SOEURS, scratching and scraping into 70mm film. In FLUX Chris Hinton’s field of view is flattened to suggest graffiti and his discontinuous, spontaneous splatters accentuate and celebrate the collision of ink and paper. These animators intentionally forego the illusion of naturalism to create a kind of emotional or conceptual mapping of space. They work as action painters, marking directly on a single plane, freely inventing idiosyncratic gestures to represent form while animating “straight ahead."    

PHOTOGRAPH AS OBJECT

While animation has depended on photography to reproduce and collate images into a sequence it can also use its documentative ability to represent the real world. The quick sketch pioneers often bookended their trick film performances with live action and used still photos as backgrounds. The Fleischer Brothers used a realistic photo of an inkbottle as a background for KOKO to imply that the animated clown, composed of lines and tones, was just another player in the real world of the animator. In Paul Vester’s disturbing dystopian PICNIC black and white photographs of torture victims intercut with urban environments overrun by mutating mechanical lines glowing like phosphorescent neon suggesting a template for a voracious architectural virus. Here photography is not used for illusion but for authentication: this is no escapist fantasy.

CINEMA AS OBJECT

The tendency toward reflexivity, alive throughout the history of cartoon animation, is also present in films which expand our definition of “animation” by analyzing, dissecting, re-composing, even collaging live action film. By employing a variety of technologies this work treats film as a material object to be manipulated. BLOCK PRINT is an austere 3-part documentation of a walk around a city block which is filmed in real time, copied on an industrial microfilm printer, chopped up and bound together as a mutoscope book, and re-recorded frame by frame, page by page, against the original background — a melding of actual and virtual space. TANGO presents a plain, empty apartment room, which becomes the stage for a parade of multiple human users who have been shot in real time and matted into the background through successive stages of optical printing. WAKING LIFE takes video footage of actors engaged in quirky, philosophical conversations and processes it through proprietary software to separate, colorize, flatten, and recompose its pictorial elements. FAST FILM appropriates sequences from Hollywood classics (by copying onto paper, then cutting, folding, ripping) to practice a kind of archeology of cinematic clichés.

TRICKRAUM/SPACETRICKS

To my Anglophone ear this witty merger shoots both high and low by combining the two essentials of our art: the design of the frame, and the changes which occur over time, between frames, which induce the viewer to assemble a continuous, dynamic image. But a “trick” also connotes an abusive joke, a transaction with a prostitute, or the category of “special effects” into which animation is often marginalized. It shares with “cartoon” a certain disreputable heritage. This neologism suggests the dimensional paradoxes at the heart of animation: a two-dimensional medium that represents both the third and fourth dimensions by an array of illusionistic techniques.

Drawing a picture, a two-dimensional image, to represent three-dimensional space is in itself a paradox, well tweaked in the “impossible” graphics of Escher. Conventional strategies of linear perspective, scale, shading can construct convincing illusions of depth. Even without obvious clues like shading and lighting effects, a figure drawn on white paper can be read as existing in existential limbo, on a desert, in a room, on a stage.

Animating a picture places it within a temporal envelope where successive still images are fused paradoxically into a single moving image. By choosing the number of phases in a time signature, their length, order and direction, animators shape a rhythmic performance of marks to make dancing lines, drunken skyscrapers, or a cat’s tail that transforms into a question mark. The stationary horizon line hovering above the wily Felix indicates that he is grounded to the white area below, just as the white area above is the sky, and the line itself is the base for houses and trees. All is properly anchored until the cat eats too much, causing all assumptions about landscape and architecture to be distorted into impossible geometries.

As animators consider how and where to make a change to bridge disparate images into a sequence, they sit on the cusp between past and future and commonly treat such profound concepts as time space symmetry as a lark. Metronomic technology, which holds and replays each piece of time equally, is controlled by the animation spreadsheet score which assigns temporal values to re-write the laws of physics. For example, Georges Schwizgebel’s FUGUE constructs a clockwork world in which point of view, path of movement, temporal progression slide in counterpoint to one another. The film’s length, composed of repeats, mirrors and inversions, seems arbitrary, yet somehow perfect, as if the end is simply another beginning and we have just witnessed time standing still.

BAYER’S PENCIL

The poised, hand-held pencil has presided over numerous introductions to animations from the innocent vaudevillians Blackton, Cohl, and McCay, to the goofball surrealism of the Fleischers. Now, as technologies supplant each other with alarming velocity, seeming to blur the distinctions between virtual and real space, our most radical and versatile tool remains this intuitive, scribbling extension of the hand. Bayer’s insignia of self-reference still carries with it complex assumptions about plasticity and communication that impact much of the animation produced today.

GG

NYC 2005

“Self Portrait” photo by Herbert Bayer as reproduced on cover of herbert bayer, the complete work, arthur a. cohen. the mit press, cambridge, massachusetts, 1984.

front cover of “Gebrauchsgrapik” (Practical Graphics), 1938, designed by Herbert Bayer. Reproduced in BAUHAUS, Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, eds. Könnemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Cologne, 1999. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (BHA/Atelier Schneider)