Animation, Fabrication, Photography: Reflections upon the Intersecting Practices of Sub-Saharan Artists within the Moving Image
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: all photos © and courtesy of the artistsAnimation draws upon a range of artistic practice: illustration, painting, sculpture, choreography, and photography. This assemblage of forms is bound by the photographic as it effectively captures the sequence of images. There are a number of different ways in which a range of African animation artists engage with or utilize photography within their practice, illustrating the range and scope of methods that are employed. By focusing upon Kenyan Ng'endo Mukii's explorations of animated documentary such as Yellow Fever (2012), Ethiopian Ezra Wube's portfolio of animated paintings, and South African artists Mocke Jansen van Veuren and Theresa Collins's time-lapse experiments, this article explores photographic practice within African animation. These artists have been selected to demonstrate the range of such ideas and practices explored within animation rather than to offer specific representations of African animation. Embedded within these animations one can identify the themes of migration, displacement, identity, interpersonal relationships, local narrative, and social and political commentary. They challenge the fixed conventions of still and moving image and create works that prompt the viewer to reconsider photography in light of fabrication and manipulation. This interplay between photographic “realism” and fabricated renditions of the image within animation generate an aesthetic diversity that cannot be easily placed within rigid categories of the moving image.Animation as a medium incorporates a range of aesthetic devices including, in these cases, intervals of photographic pixelated1 performances, montage sequences of archival images embedded as a projection, animated paintings as cathartic performance, collage, time-lapse, and moving puppets. Unlike typical discourses on the photographic image to capture a moment fixed in time, in this instance the camera makes visible the passage of time and process integral to all animation by the juxtaposition of photographic images in succession. There is a paradoxical condition that animation reveals through the persistence of vision: the reliance upon renditions of still images in order to make visible movement (Hernandez 2007). It is somewhere within the interstices of these images that the artist's fabrication of animation becomes complexly intertwined with photography. Unlike live-action film, where it is possible to conceal this “dormant” contradiction through the automated recording of these images, in animation process artists are continuously faced with the interplay between stillness and the appearance of moving image as they capture and compose the sequential assembly of images.Historically the relationship between animation and photography has involved many levels of intersection, whether at the moment of fabrication, manipulation, or rendition. These have had varying degrees of visibility, which may account for their conceptual separation and why they are often placed within different discourses. Furthermore, the hegemonic effect of Disney in a transnational context has had the unfortunate result of animation typically being associated with children's popular entertainment and the consequential association with European fairy tales and the fantastical. Discourse on animation from the African continent is scarce, with only a few key scholars directing their attention to sub-Saharan animation artists at large (Bazzoli 2003; Bendazzi 2004; Callus 2010a, 2010b, 2012; Convents 2003, 2014; Edera 1993, 1996).2 Within Western animation discourse, it is possible to identify both a narrative that positioned a range of animation genres as particularly suited to the depiction of the unreal and a distinct interest in the fabricated qualities that made up the animated moving image (Wells 1997, 1998; Moritz 1988; Furniss 1998). Its aesthetic form tends to overtly declare the image as a construct in contrast to the indexical qualities of the photograph.3 In contrast, past discourses on photography and documentary film have positioned the technology and its aesthetic as evidence of the trace and of its fidelity to the real, whereby the artist's hand was rendered invisible (Barthes 1982, Bazin 1960). The indexical “nature” of the image was discussed as evidence of the pre-photographic referent, binding it to a fixed time, space, and subject in an a priori “reality” (Barthes 1982). However, animation does not preclude a relationship to the notional referent that may be present in a variety of guises and is typically explored within “animation documentary.” For example, in 2D animation a purposeful aesthetic resemblance and conceptual connection between the referent in a photograph and the drawn image is possible though rotoscoping,4 as in the case of South African Jacquie Trowell's Beyond Freedom (2005). Furthermore, even within photographic images the bond to a preexisting referent is also much more complex.5 As Tagg identifies,In 2014, for example, the Lagos Photo Photography Festival in Nigeria alluded to the strategies of contemporary artists who sought to expand beyond with the dichotomy of fiction and documentary by theming the event under the title, “Staging Reality, Documenting Fiction.”Perhaps the most overt use of the camera and photographic process within a genre of animation would be in 3D stop-motion, visible in the animations of Congolese Jean Michel Kibushi's Prince Loseno (2004), Malian Kadiatou Konate's L'enfant Terrible (1993), and Nigerois Moustapha Alassane's Samba le Grande (1977) and Kokoa (1985). Typically within this genre the animator uses puppets and miniature sets to stage the performance that is controlled through incremental movement and captured photographically frame by frame (Fig. 1). Alassane's Kokoa (1985), for example, uses a colorful cast of puppets as anthropomorphic frogs, chameleons, and leopard characters in a Kokowa “traditional” wrestling match. There are cases where artists can adopt a similar process but may choose to incorporate found objects, real actors, and sets in combination with puppets, as in the South African piece And There in the Dust (2001) by Lara Foot Newton and Gerhard Marx. The controlled and incremental change of three-dimensional objects in front of the lens is mirrored in “under-the-camera” animation that uses an assortment of materials usually layered on two-dimensional planes. Whether the artist uses sand on glass, paint on a canvas, or prepared cut-out pictorial elements such as photographs or drawings, the manipulation is recorded and renders visible both movement and, on occasion, artistic process. By utilizing this technique, the artist is also able to encompass painterly, drawn, and photographic elements within contemporaneous compositional spaces, as in the case of Ethiopian Ezra Wube's Indamora (2009) and Kibushi's Le Crapuad chez ses Beaux Parents (1992). At times the photograph is embedded within the animation image (as a visible insert or as a projection upon other elements in frame) to serve a specific function. In Wube's Hold the Door (2008) and When We All Met (2009) the artist combines pictorial elements as “objects of memory” to call upon the discourses of representation in documentary photography as a record of personal and/or collective memory (Barthes 1982, Nora 1989).It is also possible to talk of animation that appears entirely photographic in rendition, albeit spatially and temporally affected. In Somehow (2009), by the Kenyan multimedia art collective known as Just a Band and the journalist photographer Boniface Mwangi, the artists call for reflection upon the Kenyan post-election violence in 2008 by overtly drawing upon photographic tropes.6 This limited animation presents movement on screen as a state of change between two still photographic images: the photojournalistic capture of people during the post-election violence and the same picture with a rupture consisting of cut-out “Hollywood smiles” that are seamlessly positioned to replace the mouths of the subjects depicted in these images. The use of combined photographic references is also visible in South African artists Theresa Collins and Mocke J. van Veuren's collaborative time-lapse piece minutes 2010: time/bodies/rhythm/Johannesburg (2010). This short sequence of affected digital moving images is discussed here alongside animation, as the film engages with discourses of animation to illustrate the control and interjection of the artists as they manipulate the sequence of still images through a juxtaposition of spaces achieved through digital compositing.7 Although this type of semi-observational mode of still and moving image can readily be positioned as “essentially an act of non-intervention” (Sontag 1973:8), van Veuren's interest in empirical measurement is also tempered by an interest in the poetic (van Veuren 2012). Collins and van Veuren's film straddles the automated process of time-lapse with the fabrication of “dream like juxtapositions … used to create merged imaginary landscapes” (van Veuren 2012:57).Nigerian Kenneth Coker's computer animations Iwa (2009; Fig. 2)) and Oni Ise Owo (2008) illustrate the interstices between photography and animation in the digital context. These animations present adaptations of Yoruba mythology that combine influences from “Dahomey art, North African architecture, Lotte Reiniger's films … [and] Yoruba textile patterns.”8 Both animations are inspired by a Yoruba creation myth “recounted by Wole Soyinka about a creator god Olorun and his rebellious servant,” albeit rendered differently as 2D and 3D computer animation.9 Coker's animations embedded a range of elements stemming from his experiences in Nigeria; these included Yoruba mythologies and narrative, with their deities and spirits such as Sango; culturally situated practices such as masquerade; Hausa pipe players; imagery like the patterns on Yoruba adire eleko textiles; and the forms of masks and specific motifs, such as the ram horns on the head of the exiled artisan. Computer animation offers the potential to create images that also move between extreme aesthetic poles. These may appear photographic in their entirety while being fabricated, or overtly synthetic yet relying upon the virtual camera to render visible the image. Similarly, Coker's own animations have an aesthetic that appear on the one hand as a two-tone illustrative design, and on the other hand as 3D, sculptural, virtual polygon-forms. Digital technologies therefore cause a reframing of discourses in animation and photography. A mutable aesthetic is possible whereby the digital image can appear to be textual, photographic, painterly, drawn, or illustrative, while in being only a of all or of these These technologies a of the artist's range of within the computer not at the of at the of manipulation and However, the artist's reliance upon the use of both a digital camera and a virtual camera is in the renditions of 3D computer animation. 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Source: African Arts
DOI: 10.1162/afar_a_00239
Author: Paula Callus
Institution: Bournemouth University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2124513764