Scherenschnitte

Kara Walker

I was first introduced to Kara Walker in a Post-Modern Art History class I took with Joe Lucchesi. Kara got her MFA from RISD, which is where she started working with paper silhouettes. The medium is perfectly suited for her work, which is normally very large and environmental. The Scherenschnitte allows for large scale work to be completed quickly with clean vector-like lines. This can best be seen in “Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE PanoramicJourney into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol' Virginny'sHole' (sketches from Plantation Life)" See the Peculiar Institution asnever before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara ElizabethWalker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause.” Here Kara is using the Scherenschnitte to immerse the viewer in the polar cyclorama. Kara’s work addresses racial and sexual problems that are often presented and processed in extremes, in that the poles of the issues are what receive attention and not the realistic grey area that exists in the middle. This work resounds with me because it is environmental and I have a great interest in creating environments. The work also addresses the cultural groups and ethnic heritages that Kara ascribes to. In the projection piece im working on now, I would like to include a comment on human sexuality, the sex trade and societal perceptions of the polarity of socially relevant issues.

Kara also works in projection and video. In her projection piece she applies the Scherenschnitte images to the wall and projects colors on them via a projector on the floor. The projectors are on the floor. This involves the viewer in the piece because the viewer’s shadow joins the silhouettes on the wall. I would like to involve the viewer in my work in some way. I was thinking about having the video file I will be projecting move or rock slightly so that the viewer will become disoriented or sea-sick after prolonged exposure.

In her video Kara explores the mythology black culture as it is seen through the mass cultural eye. It also comments on how historical atrocities can be distanced culturally from the people that committed them.

This concept in reference to the Holocaust in relation to the videos Scherenschnitte animated style ties Kara to Lotte Reiniger, a shadow-puppet animator.

Shadow puppets have been used to tell mythological and cultural stories by many different civilizations and connects Kara’s work to an innate system of universal semiotics.

Lotte Reiniger

A good friend of mine is working on an SMP that focuses on Scherenschnitte and I came across Lotte when I was looking into the technique myself. Lotte started her film career as a special effects animator. She then created the oldest animated film to survive till the present “The Adventures of PrinceAchmed.” After this she made several short films set to classical operas. She then moved on to animate Grimm’s fairy tales. This adaptation of the old stories into an animated medium exposed a new generation that was obsessed with picture shows and talkies to the tales that inspired their grandparents. This type of cultural re-introduction is pretty fascinating and it came at a crucial time. When Lotte was making the Grimm’s shorts at a time where Germany was struggling to regain its cultural pride and identity post WWII. Lotte’s animation style and process are also proving to be influential. A video was produced showing how Lotte made her masterworks. I wish to update this animation technique using new media in the same way that Lotte updated the Grimm tales using the new media available in her time.

Lotte also invented new machines to complete her work. This type of innovation resounds with me. Through her creation of a multiplane camera, Lotte was able to create lush environments for her Scherenschnitte characters to inhabit. In the projection project I will be creating my own environment in an existing environment. This is similar but different from Lotte’s work in that Lotte’s work would have been originally screened in a cinema and would have visually enveloped the viewer. My work will be publicly displayed in a semi-outdoor setting and only be visually enveloping if the viewer wants to be enveloped.

Lotte’s work took a traditional German medium of Scherenschnitte and adapted it to her generations New Media of film and animation. This helped reaffirm a young generation of their rich cultural heritage while establishing a bond with the past. 

Project 1 Evaluation

The central theme of the final work for Project 1 was formed by the usage of appropriated and found visual information. The central theme wound up being a comment on global commerce and the perception of national identity.

 The inspiration for this project came from my personal lack of a tie to a specific identity. In my life I have never felt a distinct connection with anything in the same way that I perceive others do. Instead I recognize a type of fluid. Fleeting identity that has changed throughout my life. In most cases this sense of temporary identity focuses around objects, stories and characters that have piqued my interest.

In this assignment I explored the 8-bit identity of the Nintendo Pokémon trainer and how my generation borrowed many of the Japanese cultural nuances present in the game universe. There exists a culture of people that strongly relate with this commercialized Japanese identity and through this assignment I was exploring the factors that contribute to this culture borrowing and the amount of control that the consumers of foreign markets have in respect to identity formation.

All of these ideas were expressed in a fictional international marketing campaign for bunnies. I chose to use bunnies because of their innate reproductive prowess.

My productive process started very early. During the first week of the semester my housemate showed me this Japanese music video that her brother had been obsessed with over the winter break. The video was of Japanese performer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

Kyary is from the Harajuku area of Tokyo and her environment has had a great impact on her music and fashion.

The video struck me as very odd but what I found to be even more peculiar was the number of views that the video had on YouTube. The upload I saw was from a western fan of Japanese music and not the record label that is marketing the music in Japan.

Upon noticing that a westerner uploaded the video, I immediately thought of the kind of person that had sought out this video and saw enough value in it to share it with the western world. This caused a chain of thoughts that jumped from giant anime conventions to people dressing up like characters from video games and then to Pokémon costumes and subsequently my experience with Pokémon.

I then began to think of how many people in my generation were affected by the Pokémon craze. When you ask people of my generation to list things that they liked when they were children, Pokémon inevitably comes up. It was a cultural phenomenon that many people claim as part of their childhood, and in some cases part of their current life.

A few other cultural imports like Teletubbies and Ironchef came to mind and I began to become interested in how those products were exposed to other cultures and how they were modified so that the target culture would respond positively to the products. Infomercials became something that I wound up drawing allot of my colors from. Internet and print ads became something that I sought to emulate in order to understand how they grab and sustain people’s attention.

In Ironchef, the entire show was reshot using western participants and western ingredients that western audiences could relate to, while Teletubbies was virtually untouched in its airing. In Pokémon, the episodes were re-dubbed in English and the characters were given different names that matched the mouth movements of the Japanese animation. Ultimately it was the idea of cultural adaptations that became the focus of my product. I wanted to make people want to own and have the product displayed.

Something else that influenced my project was my seeing the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie. I liked the American adaptation much better than the Swedish version. I was then surprised to see that the movie did better internationally than it did domestically and that despite bad domestic revenue the studio that produced the movie is moving on with the sequels. I then came to the conclusion that there is a central human element that is something like “universal taste” or “universal appeal” and that the idea, whatever it is, has been influenced by western culture and cultural imperialism.

I then applied the principle of cultural imperialism to my product and created a path that showed the spread of the product by arbitrarily drawing a line on a map with Japan being the vertex. The randomness of the line drawing illustrates the coincidence that plays a part in marketing and trade.

The path of the cultural empire’s expansion was documented in an artists book, something that served as both an illustration of the ads in print form but also as a type of cultural scrap book where some fictional character collected the posters and assembled them into a book.

Conceptually I think I grew allot with this assignment. Conceptualizing my work and giving myself a purpose for working is something that I have struggled with. Recently a professor asked me how I am connected to the world and how my art shows my connection. Unfortunately she asked me this after I had completed Project 1 but the question clicked everything into place nonetheless.

Technically I learned a lot of stuff by accident in Photoshop.   I accidently learned how to quickly select what I want using the quick-select tool and then refining the edges. Before, I would meticulously drop down the magnetic lasso tool. I also learned that there is this thing called a “color library” in Photoshop. It contributed to greater experimentation with color in my later ads.

I normally have pretty good work habits. I tend to work steadily on projects over a long period of time instead of working on something erratically in a short amount of time. This was particularly helpful in this project because of the amount of images I was creating. It allowed me to do extensive research into finding just the right open-source images of the bunnies, double check my translations on languages that I am familiar with and get things translated into languages that I am not, and it allowed me to step back and look at my project and realize that it felt unfinished. If I hadn’t worked steadily on the project I would never have had the time to put the GIF animations together and thus tie up the whole endeavor.

Overall I think my project was successful. When I show the images to people, a common reaction is “Aww how cute! I want one!” The first time I heard that I knew that I had met my goal of using visual language to create a sense of desire for an object, even if the object doesn’t exist.

The messages about global commercial culture and cultural imperialism are only noticeable when the images are viewed together. If I were to show the project in a gallery I would show multiple images and not just one.

The colors of my ads really affect how they are digested. I spent a lot of time on the typographical and chromatic elements of each poster and how they interacted with each other and with the whole image. The later ads are more successful because they use a more distilled visual language and utilize color and form much better than the earlier ads, which were busy and relatively bland.

I would give myself a B+ for the project. Although the project was successful I stayed in my two-dimensional comfort zone. I did add a time based element at the end, which tied the project together, but unlike my other classmates who used programs and technology that were completely new to them, I used software that I was familiar with.

final posters

Bunny ad 2 (click me!)

bunny ad

russian add for duet ice cream

cute advertisement...it says see the banana-think strawberry. the ad is for a russian frozen novelty that has banana flavored ice cream on the outside and strawberry ice cream on the inside. the russian word for strawberry is a sexual innuendo. clever?

ikea SPÖKA

Takashi Murikami

Takashi Murikami was one of the first artists to promote the idea of creating a unique cultural identity in Japan after the US occupation. This and many other ideas present in my current project are a direct reaction to Murikami-san's ideas presented in The Inevitable Japanese Experience , which I picked up at the SMCM library. Murikami presents the idea of a uniquely Japanese appreciation of things that western viewers might consider childish and pedantic. Murikami explains that "growing up" in Japan has a completely different meaning than what it does in the united states. This translates well into Takashi's work in which he both applauds Japanese ideologies and critiques western cultural influences. Like Warhol, Takashi is also interested in commercial and material consumption but unlike Warhol, Takashi is also concerned with ideas of cultural imperialism and how the export of material and cultural goods out of japan both increases the awareness of a unique japanese identity abroad while at the same time putting the culture at risk of outside influence. an example of the cultural disemination that murikami references would be Poke'mon cards/toys and the new western obsession of anime and manga. To make the connection between cultural imperialism and commerce even more obvious Murikami designed two helium balloons for the macy's thanksgiving day parade.

Headlines

I had the fortunate experience to see HEADLINES at the national gallery over winter break. The exhibition features work by Andy Warhol that captures a unique american identity in a visual form and comments on the view of the world through mass media. This correlates with my current project in which i am exploring the western view of commercial and cultural identity in post-occupation japan. In the piece featured above, Andy is collaborating with another artist to broaden the spectrum of view of the subject depicted. By collaborating with another artist the piece is able to exemplify two unique perspectives of the same image; in the same way that binoculars would provide a more detailed experience than a pirate's spyglass. In my project i am only using my lens of experience but am applying it to an international idea of cross-cultural material consumption; similar to Warhol's piece featuring Mao in the Headlines series.