A still from: Entartete Kunst Lebt
A couple of years ago the Henry Moore Centre in Leeds put on an excellent exhibition, 'The Body Extended: Sculpture and Prosthetics'. The exhibition was very useful in that it involved a dialogue as to where the human body stops, and for someone interested in drawing, it opened doors to ideas about performative drawing and concepts touching on drawing as traces of extended bodies. For instance you could think of a pencil as an extension of a finger. In what I tend to think of as the back room, there was a looped animation by Yael Bartana and when I was writing my last post I was reminded of this. I have been making animations myself for several years, one of which has been selected for this years Trinity Buoy Wharf drawing prize, so I always tend to look closely at what other artists are doing in this area. Bartana's animation illustrates a type of practice that I think has been very underused; the animated collage.
If you go to Yael Bartana’s web site this is what she has to say about Entartete Kunst Lebt, a 5 minute long, 16mm film animation and sound installation from 2010.
‘When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they regarded Otto Dix as a degenerate artist and had him sacked from his post as an art teacher at the Dresden Academy. He later moved to Lake Constance in the south west of Germany. Dix's paintings The Trench and War cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored Munich 1937 exhibition of degenerate art, 'Entartete Kunst'. They were later burned. Degenerate art is the English translation of the German Entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art entirely’.
She has used Dix’s work to compile a powerful collaged animation that is supported by a soundtrack designed to heighten the feeling of automated doom and the mechanisation of war. She would have had to copy and print off hundreds of images, often duplicating Dix’s figures over and over again until what were in the original images individual’s suffering from the plight of being caught up in a horrific war, now becoming depersonalised cogs in a war machine. I’m not sure if these images were scanned in or simply photocopied, but the reproduction process also lends itself to a sort of ironing out or flattening of expressive qualities. The ‘artist’s touch’ is much less apparent and mechanical reproduction comes to the fore. You can watch the full animation by going to Bartana’s web site and I would encourage you to pay careful attention to the sound and how it supports the ideas developed by the visuals. It is only 5 minutes long, and in exhibition it is shown looped.
The fact that some artists were forbidden to produce art, reminds us of how powerful the idea of art is. Sometimes it is very easy to dismiss what artists do as of being no consequence and it is only when it is forbidden or removed that in its absence we become aware of how important it can be to us.
See also:
On articulated collage
See also:
On articulated collage
Links to other animators or posts about animation.
Yael Bartana: Entartete Kunst Lebt
Degenerate art exhibition
Collage: Part one
Collage part twoCollage part three
College: part four
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