Depiction And Fiction: Evaluating The Virtual

When confronted with a character or an object that only exists as a depiction, we can comprehend it on at least two levels. We can think about the thing that is being depicted – the diegetic figure or object that exists within the story-world – but we can also appreciate the depiction itself, the skill with which the person or object has been rendered by the artist. Generally speaking, we tend to appreciate the craftsmanship of the depiction rather than the thing that is being depicted. We are impressed by the skill of applying paint to canvas in order to create the sense of a three-dimensional object. The paintings of Ron English are prime examples of this. We look at a painting like Road Story and are struck by the photorealistic quality of the image. The creation of space, distance, and solidity through the capturing of light in paint is artistic craftsmanship at its height.

But it is also true that the series of figures that populate English’s composition can be aesthetically evaluated on their own terms. Each of these improvisational mash-ups of toys and objects can be considered as a work of art in and of themselves, each with their own meanings and visual appeals. The creation process of a painting for English is a complicated and unusual one. Road Story looks like a diorama because that is essentially what it is. Or was, at least. English first makes the hundreds of figures that we see here, either drawing on his ever-growing army of mutant toys or creating new ones from scratch; then he arranges them in small settings until he has the effect he desires. He then takes a photograph of the arrangement and begins the process of recreating the image on canvas – sometimes slavishly following the photograph exactly, other times making changes to light, colour or composition as he goes along.

As such, we can see a painting like Combrat House as multiple works of art simultaneously: a collection of hand-made art-objects, arranged in a specific photographic composition, and meticulously rendered in paint. The clown-featured army ‘combrats’, the multicoloured dinosaur hybrids, the gasmask wearing Mickey Mouse pilots, not to mention the layers of stratum made out of hundreds of tiny figures, could all be appreciated as artistic endeavours in themselves, juxtaposing innocent iconography with associations of violence. On top of this, the specific arrangement of these figures within the setting is a work in own right, with the particular composition creating its own effects – for instance, the vibrant orange of the gas cloud emphasises the combrat on the left hand side of the image, while the multicoloured house on the right almost blurs into the vapour trail left by the pilot Mickeys. And finally we can appreciate the application of paint to canvas in the creation of this elaborate piece of work, how the flat image creates a sense of solidity and depth. But what distinguishes this example from the paintings of Todd Schorr or Robt. Williams (discussed in previous posts) is that the idiosyncratic toy collection of Ron English actually exists in the real world. We can easily evaluate the figures separately from our evaluation of the painting itself.

But when we are faced with virtual art-objects, which only exist within the painting, can we actually evaluate the object distinct from its image? Can we see past the depiction to evaluate the artwork within the fiction? Does the virtual art-object have less validity than the real one? If we return to a Robt. Williams painting we have previously discussed, In The Land Of Retinal Delights, we can better explore this question. Looking at the Tyrannosaurus Rex toy in the background of Combrat House, we can evaluate it in almost the same way that we can with the real dinosaur toy upon which it is based (other than its tactile qualities), as well as on additional aesthetic levels specific to the depiction. So why can’t we likewise evaluate the nonexistent objects of the Williams painting in the same way? The image provides us with a collection of meticulously rendered objects that span back into the distance, each one separated from the others, each with its own distinct look. Each one has had to be invented, imagined in three-dimensions in order to be successfully rendered in the two-dimensions of the canvas. Isn’t Williams here just as much of a toy designer as English is?

If we can consider an object that only exists within a depiction, with no solid reality outside of the painting within which it appears, as an art-object in its own right then might it be possible to extend this even farther into the realms of experiences and events? Can we comprehend and evaluate a theme park attraction or a work of performance art if it only exists within a filmic or animated text? A real amusement park like Disneyland is filled with rides and mechanical marvels that depict fictional conceits (the automata of Abraham Lincoln is an impressive depiction of the real historical figure, the ghosts of the Haunted Mansion depict diegetic ghosts). But what happens when people create non-existent amusement parks, which themselves only exist as depictions?

First, let us break from ‘Depiction and Fiction’ tradition and look an example from a live-action film. In Dark Castle’s remake of The House On Haunted Hill, we are introduced to the character of Stephen Price showing reporters around his latest amusement park on the day of its grand opening. He dismisses allegations of construction problems and health and safety issues with his rides. Suddenly the elevator that the characters are riding shudders to a halt and begins to rapidly fall back to earth. Yet, rather than crashing and killing them all, the doors simply open and reveal the top floor of the ride. The elevator is part of the ride, with video screens in place of windows to create the impression of free fall. When the press get on to the actual ride, similar moments of ‘orchestrated disaster’ follow (including a rail coming loose and flinging a carriage full of dummy patrons into oblivion).

These extreme thrill-rides would of course be impossible to make in the real world (or at least, impossible to make and not get sued). Their placement within a fiction film allows director William Malone imagination to run riot without the unfortunate repercussions of reality. But we as audience members vicariously experience these rides through the film. We are none the wiser than the press regarding the elevator or broken rail and so can extra-diegetically appreciate the ride on the level that it is meant to be appreciated within the story-world.

But this example is limited to the fact that recorded imagery is (largely) tied to real-life laws of space and time. The elevator with its video-windows was built as an actual model (though not as an actual elevator) on the film set. When we look at the paintings of Pooch Island, however, we are met with a greater variety of possibilities in the fictional rides. ‘Pooch Island’ is a loose conceptual setting for the paintings of tattooist-turned-fine-artist Pooch (real name Michael Pucciarelli), a kind of nightmarish Coney Island/Disneyland seen through the spectrum of Juxtapoz Magazine. Many of these paintings depict theme park rides and attractions, but more than a recurring motif that functions within the composition of the painting, these rides can be understood in terms of their function as solid attractions.

In all of these paintings, the depicted rides have a three-dimensional logic to them – although constructing any of them in reality would be impossible without unlimited funds. Each one is impossibly high, overlooking a vast landscape that stretches far into the distance, the angles of the rails do not always guarantee that patrons will be able to remain in their seats; gigantic figures loom threateningly over the tracks and it remains unclear if they are some animatronic part of the ride or a monstrous creature waiting for the right moment to pluck passengers out of their carriages. The rides also seem to play like conveyor belts to death – often the rails lead to unavoidable obstacles to oblivion. Luckily, most of the riders are monsters, devils or skeletons. Impossibly huge and dangerous though these rides might be, we can still appreciate and evaluate them in terms of their construction and function – even though this only exists on the canvas.

What we can’t do, however, is experience these rides in the way that we can the falling elevator of House On Haunted Hill (albeit in a second-hand capacity). We can only look at Pooch’s rides as constructs, as very big and elaborate objects. Is it possible, then, to evaluate something more fleeting if it only exists as a depiction? Can we evaluate a moment of physical activity that never actually occurred?

In Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game, we are given a complex tapestry of works-within-works (we are often treated to dream sequences or enactments of Manga stories that the central character is writing), but one of the most striking moments – for me at least – is a brief sequence when one of the characters entertains the others in what can only be described as an amazing piece of performance art.

The film has several other moments of ‘depicted-art’, that is, works that only exist as depictions of art within the story-world. A vast and elaborate collection of art-objects brings us back to Ron English – we can appreciate the artistic merit of these objects as objects (some real, some imagined), as well as the specific way in which they have been arranged and combined to create particular compositional effects, and finally on the artistic merit of the depictions themselves.

At one point, a character creates gigantic water-balloon sculptures filled with (what turn out to be) prehistoric fish.

These works are, unlike the object collection, less likely to occur in the real world. And yet, it is still possible to imagine an artist creating these same sculptures, filling them perhaps with real fish (or models of prehistoric fish). We can therefore quite successfully entertain the thought of how such artworks would be evaluated if they were to exist in the real world. But these are still just depicted objects. What about the performance?

It begins with the character appearing dressed in a mask and a costume with water balloon attachments on each breast and groin. There are hoses connected to the back allowing these balloons to be expanded with water.

The groin balloon is filled with an increasing amount of water until it is several times the size of her, and we can make out small baby dolls swimming about inside. The balloon is clearly representative of a womb – a monstrous womb for a horde of inhuman offspring. The girl takes a bow and arrow, and pierces the balloon – essential performing a self-caesarean.

Then she drenches herself in paint and throws herself up against a makeshift sail, leaving a crude imprint of her body in a running position. She repeats this in several colours until the circular piece of cloth has been covered.

Then the others take the cloth and run around with her in the centre. As they run faster, the images begin to blur and create the effect of a phenakistascope (an effect that can’t be captured with stills). As the painted imprint figures run around her, the breast-balloons expand and expand until they finally explode, raining water and glitter down upon the participants.

If this performance had occurred in reality, I for one would have been quite blown away by it. The events that comprise the performance are all achievable within the real world and the performance makes use of the body to communicate ideas about sexuality (expanding breasts), reproduction (the baby dolls), individuality (the repeated copying of the body in different colours), and physical achievement (the accumulated effect of the printed figures creates animation of a runner – combining both proto-cinema and sport). I could easily write an analysis of this performance as a performance. But, only being a depicted performance, one that exists as the end result of several animators drawing the events, can we really evaluate it in this light?

Just as I argued that Williams’ non-existent toys were just as valid as English’s real toys on an aesthetic level, I would say that in this instance we can certainly evaluate certain aspects of this sequence as a performance. Although we cannot talk about the impressiveness of the hydro-powered outfit (as it does not exist), or the physical achievement of creating the animation by hurling a painted body against a sail (as there was no real body performing these actions), we can still understand the events as a communication about bodies being expressed through bodies. To my mind, examples such as these demonstrate that we can always look through a depiction into the fiction that it conveys and understand it on its own terms.

                                                                                                                               - P.S.

Depiction And Fiction: Virtual Wunderkammers

A ‘wunderkammer’ is a cabinet of curiosities, a collection of strange objects, or a group of mundane of objects whose grouping together creates a strange collection. The most renowned example is the extensive collection of Rudolph II who had cabinet after cabinet of more or less anything that one can think of. He was an obsessive collector and the modes of classification and distribution of items within the collection tell us a lot about how the royal collector organised his world-view. He was the patron of Acrimbaldo whose famous double-image portraits created human faces from aggregations of objects and animals. The paintings can themselves be seen as wunderkammers.

Animator Jan Svankmajer is greatly inspired by Rudolph’s collections, as well as those of naturalists and other people who try to organise the chaos of the world into human systems. His films often collect items together into seemingly arbitrary groups, in Alice (Svankmajer’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s book), the titular character’s fall down the rabbit hole is replaced by a slow descent in a lift, passing different floors as she goes; each floor a wunderkammer of various objects, from natural curios to Victorian toys.

In Historia Naturae, the different groups of the animal kingdom are explored in all of their varieties, while he even refers overtly to Acrimbaldo’s work in his heads made out of vegetables, kitchen utensils or stationary in Dimensions Of Dialogue.

A modern incarnation of Rudolph II is the eccentric Long Gone John, a sometime record producer, sometime art entrepreneur, sometime vinyl toy manufacturer and all-of-the-time collector. His unique life is explored in the documentary film The Treasures Of Long Gone John, which places its emphasis on two areas: his extensive collection of objects – ranging from mummified babies to 1960s Japanese toys – that now dominates his home to the point that he has moved out and converted it into a museum, and his relationship to a particular generation of artists associated with the underground art magazine Juxtapoz.

In fact, the film uses Long Gone John predominantly as a jumping off point to discuss the work of four artists in particular – Mark Ryden, Camille Rose Garcia, Todd Schorr and the arguable founder of the movement Robert (or Robt.) Williams. These artists are obsessed with the blurring of high and low/pop culture (the movement to which they belong is sometimes known as ‘low-brow art’, a term disliked by many of the artists themselves). They take influence from the ephemeral and popular; cartoons, comics, toys and corporate icons. Indeed, many of them have produced vinyl toys with Long Gone John’s company. They collect the pop culture objects that society forgets about, re-present them as artistically valid and then produce their own pop culture objects, to begin the cycle again.

Let us focus on two of these artists, Todd Schorr and Robt. Williams, whose paintings themselves are, like Acrimbaldo’s before, virtual wunderkammers of the camp and kitsch. Take, for instance, Schorr’s painting The Hunter Gatherer.

The elements of the ‘lowbrow’ movement can all be found in the image above; the fascination with the short-lived products of the fifties and sixties, the association between ancient idols and corporate ones, the implication that our reverence for both is somehow primal, and most importantly, the desire of human beings to collect these things. But rather than an analysis of what these paintings might ‘mean’, I want to focus on the multilayered ‘truth’ of imagery. In the previous two posts I have argued that depictions are both more conceptually complex and straightforwardly simple than photographic imagery. On one hand, depictions have a multitude of possible layers of interpretation as images, while on the other, when fiction is introduced, depictions can offer us a diegetic object or character that is more ‘true’ than a prop or actor.

Sticking with Schorr’s painting, what we have is not only a depiction of a proto-human, but depictions of a variety of art-objects (loosely; the artistic merit of such toys might be debatable for some, but I will continue with it as shorthand – I’ll define an art-object as any article that can be evaluated on some deeper level than just the descriptive). These art-objects are different from the being that collects them. While the central figure exists only as a depiction, the toys are depictions of things. The Adam West Batman toy, the Howdy Doody puppet, the robot, are all paintings of objects that actually exist (the other toys – Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse – are not so simple). As images, these toys are themselves depictions; a toy of Batman is not the actual character but a three-dimensional depiction of the character. While the robot remains fairly consistently itself, the toys of the already established cartoon characters become more complicated – they are depictions of depictions of characters.

Another Schorr painting, Variations On Kitsch, gives us a similar premise – a collector and his collection. But now the objects in the collection seem to possess more of a life of their own. While in The Hunter Gatherer, only Mickey and the Idol moved, here all of the kitsch objects seem to be bouncing around the space, perhaps dancing to the beat of the beatnik’s bongos. On top of this, though they possess intentional nods to existing objects, the art-objects here exist entirely as depictions. Though the astronaut caveman in the corner is clearly designed to remind us of Fred Flintstone, he isn’t that character, nor even a toy of that character, he remains a completely unique object that exists only within the painting. The relationship between the depicted art-objects to the real world distinguishes the two paintings; the emphasis on the former being the depiction of real toys (themselves depictions of characters), while the latter is depictions of entirely ‘diegetic’ art-objects. While we can evaluate the hunter gatherer’s collection on two levels, as objects with their own pop cultural baggage or as depictions of those objects by Schorr, how do we evaluate the art-objects of Variations On Kitsch? As components of an overall composition, or as virtual art-objects?

Such considerations will be the focus of future posts, but for now let us stick with the idea of these paintings as collections of virtual art-objects. Moving on to Robt. Williams, two paintings offer up similar collections for our multi-layered perusal. The first gives us an image with similar levels of visual interpretation as The Hunter Gatherer, a vast collection of art-objects that are depictions of real ones. Wooden Spirits Persist Where Termites Fear To Tread  presents us with another collection that exists as a single depiction.

On the other hand, In The Land Of Retinal Delights might, as a painting, appear to be less interesting at first glance; the vast collection of objects presented to us do not have the same multiplicity of possible diegetic truth layers as Schorr’s do.

But what Williams’ painting lacks in diegetic complexity it makes up for in sheer scale. The entire landscape in which the figure stands is made up of these strange apparently plastic kitsch objects. At first glance they might appear to be toys, the kind of cheap plastic ones that you get in Christmas crackers; one appears to be a red spinning top, another a green facsimile of a lunar landing pod. But these are only superficial similarities of shape. In fact, these objects are entirely surreal and virtual, depictions of themselves, not of anything we might find in the real world. But each of these objects is rendered in minute detail, each given a solid distinctness which continues as far back as we can make out. Only the furthest peaks of the distant hills reduce the objects down to coloured dots. This is a collection of the imagination, a multitude of virtual art-objects that we can only see through the medium of this painting. Williams invites us to delve into his collection just as Long Gone John does at his home-cum-museum, but while Long Gone John’s objects are real and we can view them by walking through the space that holds them, Williams’ collection is one we can only appreciate via the depiction.

And this is where these paintings have a particular resonance and relevance to a collector like Long Gone John – as his own collection of real art-objects contains many of these Juxtapoz paintings, themselves containing a variety of virtual art-objects, his collection becomes augmented, a collection of real objects, depictions of real objects and depictions of entirely virtual objects.

One more Schorr painting, The Pirate’s Treasure Dream, was created specifically for Long Gone John (he’s the pirate king on the altar on the left); the image depicts some of the various objects of his collection as prisoners taken by the monstrous pirate band. Marching along in chains, the prisoners are taken a step further from those in Variations On Kitsch; they have become sentient characters like their collector. They add yet another layer to the complex imagery – they are depictions of characters that are toy depictions of characters. That gives us four possible ways of looking at some of these figures. One figure in particular is fascinating; the bunnyduck, held aloft in the tentacle of the pirate octopus.

The complexity of this figure lays in its history: the character appears in two earlier Schorr paintings Romantic Notions Of The Mysterious East and The Spectre Of Cartoon Appeal. In these paintings, he is a character, an amalgam of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, existing as a diegetic entity within the world of the paintings.

But the character was also produced as a vinyl figure in the real world. And in The Pirate’s Treasure Dream, we are given not the character itself but a depiction of a toy of a depiction of a character that is an allusion to other characters (Bugs and Daffy, themselves only existent as depictions).

These paintings, and others like them, are so complex in their multilayered depictions that they instantly set up a multitude of possible visual interpretations and modes of evaluation. Depicting virtual collections of art-objects both real and imagined, the painting becomes a double itself; it is both an art-object in its own right which can be appreciated as a single composition, but we can also look through the depiction at the art-objects being depicted and evaluate not one art-object but many – the paintings become virtual wunderkammers.

                                                                                                             - P.S.