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.

Depiction And Fiction: Animated 'Truth'

A TALE OF TWO VASES

In the previous post on the subject of ‘Depiction & Fiction’, I argued that animated imagery was more complex than live-action imagery because it contained multiple layers of fiction (that the image from Labyrinth Labyrinthos was a depiction of a fictional toy that was itself a depiction of a fictional entity of the Toonerville Trolley, itself a depiction of the diegetic trolley). In this post, however, I’m going to argue the opposite, claiming that the imagery of hand-drawn animation is conceptually simpler, that it offers us a more direct depiction of diegetic information than live-action does, that it is in some ways 'truer'. To this end, let us leap straight into our titular hypothetical example, the comparison between a vase in a live-action film, and a vase in an animated one.

In live-action, we see a recording of a solid object that exists in front of the camera, the imagery that we see is a photographic ‘trace’ of the object and – as was mentioned in the previous post – would therefore appear to be a more straightforward image than a depiction. We look through the mediation of the recording process and see a true reproduction of the object that was recorded. When the director places the vase in front of the camera and shouts ‘action!’ in our hypothetical example, it allows us to see the vase more or less as we understand it to be in the real world. This is one of the central appeals of live-action cinema, from the earliest Lumiere brothers’ actualities, to critic Andre Bazin’s insistence that realism defined the cinematic medium from other art-forms, to the enduring fascination with documentaries and reality TV.

But when we consider the way in which fiction films operate, this becomes a more complex phenomenon. When we see the object in front of the camera, it is tied to the understanding that what we are seeing – most of the time – is an object purporting to be something else. In this case, what we are seeing is a prop purporting to be a vase. Within the fiction, the vase is an expensive and irreplaceable object, while outside of the diegesis, the prop of the vase is simply a plastic facsimile. As such, the live-action image takes on a dual status thanks to fiction – both real prop and fictional vase - and complicates the idea of the truth of the object. The prop, essentially, lies about being a vase.

With animation, as one might expect, this phenomenon is quite different. When we look at the vase in our hypothetical animated example, we do not have this same kind of doubling-up. The drawn vase is simply a direct depiction of the diegetic vase, there is no additional pro-filmic layer as there is in the live-action example. The fictional vase is all that there is, devoid of the additional layer of extra-diegetic prop. This might seem to be completely at odds with the claim of the previous post, where I argued that the animated image has multiple levels of understanding (the depiction and what is being depicted). Why is this phenomenon any different to our example of the pro-filmic prop? Simply, one is about complexity on the level of image, the other is about complexity on the level of fiction, our understanding of what we are supposed to be looking at.

While the Toonerville Trolley toy had, I believe, four different layers of potential understanding attached to it (the depiction of the toy, the diegetic toy, the cartoon object that the toy depicts, and the diegetic trolley that the cartoon depicts), all of these options were based upon decisions that the viewer made regarding their comprehension of the image. As an image, it could be all of these things simultaneously. As far as the level of fiction goes, the situation is far simpler – it is a direct depiction of a diegetic toy, not a prop purporting to be a toy as we have with our live-action vase.

Our hypothetical animated vase therefore is only the vase of the story, without the additional layer of pro-filmic understanding. This becomes more interesting when we move away from inanimate objects and look at characters. When we see a character in a live-action film, we are likewise able to look at the figure on screen in one of two ways – as pro-filmic performer or diegetic character. When we see Charlie Chaplin, we can either choose to perceive him as Charles Chaplin, the Hollywood writer, director and performer, who cavorts about the screen engaging in a variety of impressive slapstick set-pieces, or we can choose to see him as the Little Tramp, the hopeless, homeless man who finds himself in a variety of scrapes and scenarios that he has no control over.

But with an animated character like Felix the Cat, we do not have a pro-filmic performer to consider. We can only see the diegetic character of Felix, without the additional consideration of a performer. As such, I would argue that animated characters are more 'true' than their live-action counterparts because they lack this extra level of non-diegetic complexity. Michael Corleone in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) can never sever himself from Al Pacino; the pro-filmic actor will always be hovering around our perception of the character, always potentially distracting us from Corleone as a complete and truly diegetic entity. But Bugs Bunny is capable of being just Bugs devoid of any non-diegetic complexity. The things that Bugs says and does are therefore, in a sense, more true than the words and actions of Corleone.

                                                                                                                  - P. S.