| Animation comes with the obvious advantage
of making things move which normally wouldn’t. It gives life to inanimate objects. I
see animation as a way of making performance art without performers. The performer may
isolate gestures to examine their meaning, through exaggeration or excessive repetition.
However, doing a similar thing with models removes all human identity and personality, and
allows the work to be removed from those all-prevailing means of classification and
interpretation. Animation can, by the mere fact of being entirely fake, make specific and
poignant points about human behavior. The process of identifying something which is
clearly artificial as human or living by some physical resemblance or movement is also
interesting in itself. The viewer projects desire and emotion onto the inanimate object, a
response that is personal and can be quite intimate. Animation as a medium contains some
unexplored territory. It also allows for an amount of freedom to show things which are
potentially disturbing or indecent and would be unpalatable or pornographic if they were
real. Licking shows a
plasticine head with a moist plasticine tongue licking a surface that may or may not be
another body. The process of Licking starts off as a tentative, potentially erotic
activity which gradually becomes more violent and unpleasant through its repetition. The
activity of Licking is looked at in isolation, removed from all sense of sexual
pleasure or interaction. There is also no sign of food or other context for the action. I
am interested in the shift from something fascinating or pleasurable to something
disgusting, and with the identification of pleasure and pain. This becomes even more
interesting when this response is extended to something inanimate and without feeling,
making empathy or identification pointless. There are moments where the figure and its
movements allow the real and the fake to become interchangeable yet indiscernible. |
