This seminar/discussion, led by Stuart Hilton, was to consider the ‘inanimate’ or ‘still life’ in the context of exploring animation. The foundational principle of animation remains that it is the illusion of movement created by a series of still images played in rapid succession. Through considering the inanimate, we question what mundane objects mean – to artists? yes. But also, to us as viewers and just as human beings generally. Looking at the image above (a Pompeian still life wall painting (fresco)), we asked what does it mean? Does it mean anything? What does it mean to mean something?
This painting is a detached fresco fragment from the house of Julia Felix in Pompeii – which miraculously survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD – now housed in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli in Naples, Italy — myddoa.com. Frescos were painted directly onto wet plaster, allowing the pigment to fuse into the wall as it dried, with still life (xenia), meaning “hospitality gifts”, being a massive subject of these frescos. They were part of a decorative phase in Pompeii, that showcased social status as well as the cultural sophistication of the owner, and also marked a time when artists were exploring illusionistic realism (in particular, a technique known as trompe-l’œil which is creating the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface). Zooming in closer at this painting in particular, the composition and symbolism of the subjects add more context. Glass was a marvel in roman times – a basic yet expensive technology limited to the upper class, thus the glass bowl in the painting is a signifier of wealth. Each fruit carries its own symbolic weight: apples signified the abundance of autumn harvest and were associated with Venus the goddess of love ; Grapes were associated with Bacchus the god of wine, ferocity and revelry, a sign of pleasure and ecstasy ; the white ledge shows the artist’s sensitivity to perspective and shadow.
Now, even with all that in mind, it is still possible to go back to that painting and be incapable of finding “meaning” within it. What we can say is that it is representational. After we consider what it is representing, in the context of the time it was made, we can say that it depicts the pleasures of domestic life of the Roman upper class. It also showcases the artist’s eye for detail. The sensitivity to light and shadow, colour, depth, etc. It exposes the lens through which the artist interprets the subject in front of them. The technical mastery of those paintings as well as the genre of still life ricocheted through history. These excavated ruins validated the movements of the renaissance and baroque era. It showed how beauty can be shown through the depiction of everyday life, not just idealised myths. Suddenly this image of an ordinary bowl of fruits becomes elevated due to inherent meaning. Whether or not it was the intention of those artists, no piece of art lives in a vacuum outside of context. As Stuart Hall puts it “We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’, positioned.” Art too is positioned; a window into how someone saw and lived their world, or where and why something existed in that world.
Metaphysical art (Pittura Metafisica), was a brief yet influential movement of the early 2oth century, created by artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra. This movement used a realist style with odd juxtapositions and compositions too recreate a dreamlike sense of reality. It emerged during the context of the Great War, during which ideas surrounding Freudian psychoanalysis, the subconscious mind, and movements such as Surrealism were also developing. It was a kind of protest against the rationalism of society that contributed to the atrocities of war, by embracing and expressing these irrational and illogical scenes.
In these artworks (like the ones above) recognisable imagery is distorted and misplaced. The familiar becomes convoluted and we scramble to find connections, to understand what it is that we can see. It subsequently makes us question what happens when an artist intentionally fragments the “meaning” of a piece of work in a dreamlike way. Maybe it’s not about a definitive meaning, but a feeling – an experience; the dialogue you enter with your brain as you attempt to make sense of what you are perceiving.
Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) was an Italian painter and printmaker who was inspired by the Metaphysical iconography of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra and made a series of subtly muted still lifes. He said “I believe nothing is more abstract than reality” — though his painting are of ordinary objects, they begin to take on strange qualities. They seem flat, muddy, and residual forms of what they depict. They have a ghostly and spectral presence in the frame, one that taps into our disillusionment. He also says: “there is a little or nothing new in the world. What matters is the new and different position in which an artist finds himself seeing and considering things of so-called nature and the works that proceeded and interested him“. This is at the core of these kinds of works. It exposes the lens through an artist perceives the world, and in a way the more mundane and insignificant the subject, the clearer we can see their lens. For instance, Morandi’s paintings shows how he saw painting as a meditative and contemplative practice. His meticulously balanced compositions and limited colour palette all speak to the sense of clam and serenity that he viewed these objects in.
Furniture Poetry (2000) by Paul Bush
This movie demonstrates the core principle of animation. Here ordinary objects are transformed when they appear at higher frame rates. It makes still, solid things feel like they are moving, growing, and changing. The most elicitive scene was when the apple and pear interchanged rapidly, which echoed the principle of squash and stretch. Watching the whole movie in class, everyone more or less had an indifferent reaction, however that scene got the most chuckles. I think it speaks to something psychological, when we suddenly begin to see not just movement but elasticity and what that remind us of. There was a sense of character conveyed in that moment. What makes a character? Something emotional responsive it seems. If you can get me to laugh, or cry, or curse at an inanimate object, in that moment, that object was elevated to a level of humanity where I felt I could respond to it.
Still Life (2016) by Mehdi Shiri
Here, objects are curated to take on meaning. This film is shown in vivid colours, fragmented compositions, and ephemeral shots. I interpreted this as a depiction of how memory is constructive, and re-constructive. We remember objects through shapes and colours. This film visualises the process of recollection, when objects become vessels for emotions and meaning rather than mere representation.
What becomes apparent in this film and all the works considered so far is that objects are not inert. their stillness is merely deceptive. Every object holds layers of meaning (whether it be contextual, cultural, personal, historical, etc) that allow it to act as a stand-in for something else. A child’s toy can stand-in as a friend or father-figure; a mug can stand-in for somewhere that you used to live; a glass bowl in Pompeii can stand-in as a sign of wealth. Whether through paint, or motion, the inanimate becomes animated by the meanings we project onto it.
Stems by Ainslie Henderson
The genre of this film is not clear. It mixes documentary, with fantasy; there is an element of reflection shown with how Henderson’s narration is extracted from an interview of some kind where he explains his process:
what I love about stop-motion puppets is that they have this inherent sadness about them […] they’re like little actors that only ever get to play one role […] they have a tiny little life, and then they just go back to being inanimate objects again.
This film shows how he takes found, used, even broken objects and anthropomorphises them, giving them a renewed life. The film shows the process from the selection of objects to the musical sequence of characters and when they, sadly, “go back to being objects again”. Henderson’s hands are not hidden in the animation, rather they are shown articulating the puppets as they move in their sequence. This shows how though the trick of stop-motion and characterisation is revealed it doesn’t make it any less effective. Like with the film ‘Furniture Poetry’ above, these anthropomorphised objects elicit an emotional response from us as human (obviously) viewers. Even for a short span of time, we can feel that sense of sadness once the play finally comes to an end.
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time — Brian Eno
The film in a way speaks to the nature of life itself. How artists demonstrate that every time we create, it is an act of giving life. Objects don’t have a life, but we as artists can project our sense of life onto them (similar to what I wrote about eliciting an emotional response — humans can relate to things that we deem also human). The puppets don’t “die” but Henderson stops playing with them, in-turn allowing them to become objects again, in-turn we feel their absence as the audience. Life stops when you stop playing, and every game has an end.