Critical Evaluation

My fascinations with the human form and in particular my own body have been realised as two autobiographical expressive animated films.  The entire process from starting the course and reaching this conclusion has been full of frustrations, hard work and rewards.  I have learnt so much about the techniques and applications of animation and sound design but in particular, I have learnt so much about myself and my practice.

The self negotiated briefs during the course have allowed me to acknowledge my underlying fascinations.  At the start of the course, my range of interest in science art and philosophy was something I wanted to present in my animation though it became apparent that this approach was far too wide thematically.  I really needed to pinpoint what I wanted to present in my work and I realised it was important to focus my practice.  Knowing I wanted to keep to a traditional approach practically, I thought of an idea of combining the traditional technique of drawing on film with something very measured and scientific – drawing and animating brain scans.  This then developed into an idea of applying imprints of my skin on glue to the film.  An idea expanded and progressed as part of my Masters Project.  This skin film idea was the start of discovering where my Masters was going and what my practice is really about.  My entire creative career so far seems to have always had some kind of theme centred on representation of the figure and identity.  My A level work was based on figurative paintings and photographs of myself and form.  My undergraduate degree show was focused on the concept of ‘identity’ and my dissertation was all about artificial intelligence and what makes us human.  My inspirations are also mostly figurative artists, Lucian Freud, Edward Muybridge and Jenny Saville for example.  This obsession, almost, was reflected again throughout my Masters degree as self expressive animation. 

Alongside the expansion of the Skin film idea from the first self negotiated project, I thought of another idea involving using my whole body as a paintbrush to create an animated film of my entire body.  These two films were shown as part of my exhibition and assessment for the Masters Project. 

Originally, I also intended to show a third film using scans from my own brain.  The idea was meant to be a statement about the cognitive aspect of myself and the three films were to be flesh, body and mind – a full autobiography of myself.  Fairly early on in my project it became apparent that the brain scans, although the imagery was beautiful and could potentially make for some stunning animation, just did not fit well with the other two films. 

One of the reasons for disregarding this idea was due to my original plan to have part of the process of the animations on show at the exhibition (though this was another idea I decided to not progress with as I will discuss).  One of the sheets with my body print and a skin body (which was cut up and used for the skin film) could have been used to show and display alongside the films at the exhibition, though there was not any way to of display an object that would work in the tactile way I would want for my brain scan.  Also, the imagery produced of the brain scans appeared entirely different to that of the sheet and the skin. 

The main reason, however, I decided not to develop the third brain film, was because the other two ideas were very direct and, literal applications of myself.  They were much more expressive and self driven, and fitted well together for this reason.  There also seemed to have a nice relationship of scale between the two.  The brain film did not share this direct and expressive potential.  Where the other films were very much my own imagery created using my body, the brain scans were external image creations that would then have had to have been reproduced again to make an original film, separating it contextually from the other two.  Nonetheless, I still have my brain scan imagery which could possibly be developed in future in order to possibly make a different type of statement about myself and identity.  During my Masters I have found it difficult to really pinpoint my own intentions, and so writing the proposal for my Masters Project was hard for me.  Whether this be due to a lack of confidence, stubbornness, a desire to try to force too many themed statements into one or a different reason, this has been the most difficult part of my practice to overcome and I feel as though I have partially resolved this in my Masters Project.  Having a year out between starting my Masters Project and completing it also made this a tougher task.  After much thought about the statement I wanted to make about the figure for my Masters Project, I decided and realised that I wanted to present the films as autobiographical.  The duration of the Masters Project has been a huge learning curve in particular learning about myself, my obsessions and intentions, and this is reflected in my work.  I was forced to think very hard about what I really wanted to say about the figure and I realised that I wanted it to be very much a literal projection of myself and my thoughts about myself and my form.  Further discoveries were made as I worked on the films and my thoughts and ideas about what I was really saying came to light.

The body film, presents my obsession with body image and I also realised that it shows my frustrations with myself and lack of confidence in my appearance and the pressure presented to women in society to look a certain way.  I also considered how if I were male, would I have as much obsession about my own figure and form?  I do not believe I would.  The images on the sheet are very obviously female and my own, audiences’ reactions and thoughts if the imagery on the sheets were male could be different.  I’m aware of the fact that there is a female form on the sheet could suggest a sexual angle to the film, just because of it being a female form.  Gender representation in society is seemingly a strong theme in this film.  With my films, I really want to communicate my form to allow audiences to be intrigued by its shapes and the way it looks without considering gender, though it would be unavoidable.  I would consider the film to be almost a feminist act of rebellion against these attitudes.  My body appears and disappears on a sheet repeatedly, like breathe, which brings the film to life.  A living breathing form and figure as an animation, a direct, autobiographical representation of myself.  Watching it is almost voyeuristic, bringing me back to the possibility of gender importance in the film and my obsession with self representation.

The skin film is a different kind of autobiographical approach.  It is genderless and abstract, completely non narrative, a measurement of my own flesh through film.  My entire skin, cut up into strips for 35mm film is around two and a half minutes long.  The film is visceral, more internal and ironically, more close up and personal, even invasive, than the body film.  Although the other film has a feeling of an exposed self, displaying my gender, size and shape, the skin film is actually a much more literal presentation of these aspects.  Parts of my hair and skin were pulled off and then attached onto the film as part of the process.  Together, the films present what I feel to be a successful autobiographical statement as film.

Towards the end of the project, I still wanted to display one of my sheets with my body print on, and a full body glue skin of myself as part of an installation alongside my films.  I originally planned to have the films shown on loop, one after another on one screen, with another section of my space displaying the sheet and glue.  With help from tutorials I finally realised that showing these objects would actually detract from the films themselves and draw away from the films on show that are the result of the work.  Displaying these objects would be showing the process but after consideration, I would just be repeating my statements or even suggesting other things, i.e. the skin hung up was very eerie and almost horrific.  I did not want my show to be about shock value, although I did like the idea of there being something tactile there for the audience to look at and connect with the films.  This was a very difficult decision to make as a lot of work went into producing full body glue skin forms of myself and I really wanted to essentially ‘show off’ some of the process to the viewers of the exhibition.  I decided to show the two films on separate screens thus producing a much stronger exhibition with a stronger statement about my own self and image and the potential to progress and be presented in different way, i.e. the objects and the brain scans, in possible future exhibitions.   From this experience, I feel much more aware of what is expected from an art installation rather than a display of work, and has prepared me for any eventualities in the future for further exhibitions – possibly where I could display the skin and/or sheet as a separate statement, drawing from this work.

My sound design was quite a basic process in my Masters.  The sounds produced are literal representations of the objects used during the process.  This helps to draw attention to the material and tactile element to the films and works well to connect the films together as well as connecting them to the audience.

To conclude, I feel I have developed and grown as an artist throughout the whole of the Masters course.  I would never had expected I would be producing work of such an self expressive nature, but this is clearly where my work belongs, along with exploring themes of the human body, in particular my own.  I embarked on the course with an open mind to learn about animation techniques and learn new skills and to revisit old ones.  I have come out with so much more, a direction of my practice and the enthusiasm to produce more work of a similar nature in the future along with the confidence in my films and strong ideas behind them and to understand their reasons and justify my decisions.

BODY FILM:

SKIN FILM:

Reshooting Animation

I decided to reshoot my animation for the exhibition.  After watching back the last shoot I was uncomfortable about the sheet jumping about too much and wanted to take much more care about the animation.  The form appearing in this reshoot is a much more accurate representation of my form.

Thinking about Critical Evaluation

Today I have been thinking about my critical evaluation.

Notes:

Condensing what I have learnt
Do not need to explain technical Processes - unless it forms a major part of the work
How well I have answered my questions and resolved issues
Self Critical
Changes made
Journey of the idea - how I tested what went well etc
Growth and progress
Tests! - Tests form part of the research
Achieving and not achieving what was mentioned in the proposal
What's changed about me since starting the MA.

Consider

Thouroughness
Attention to detail
Taking risks
Justification
Point out problems
On going reflection.

Body Tests: Final Animation

I have decided to use Duration 10 and Dissolve 6 for my final animation, I feel this gives the best effect for the animation.

I also increased the contrast and put the film into black and white:

Installation or Display

After taking my glue skin and sheet objects into the space I have decided to not include them in the exhibition show and just submit them for assessment.

After chatting to Shaun and Tom I have started to agree with them about how they would either detract from the films or just be a repeat of the statement that I am trying to make.

Annette Messager

Two interesting articles about Annette Messager:

Source

Annette Messager: A bold messenger for feminist art

By Alan Riding

Published: Tuesday, June 26, 2007

PARIS — Annette Messager remembers feeling lonely when she set out to become an artist in her 20s. The role models before her were all men: not only the greats of the past but also her father, an amateur painter, and her boyfriend, Christian Boltanski, already a heralded new talent when they met in 1970.
"In my family, my father was the artist," Messager recalled in a conversation at her home on the outskirts of Paris. "With Christian, I was the girlfriend. And since I was cute, well, it was thought impossible to be an artist and cute. At first, I felt proud when someone said, 'Your work looks like a man did it.' Then I realized that was stupid."
The path Messager chose instead was to embrace her gender, to become an artist who interpreted life - sex, love, beauty, pain, yearning, power - through the eyes of a woman. In this narrative, the petite, bright-eyed artist could be the fictional storyteller, and she would play all the roles.
It was a strategy - one might call it feminism à la française - that evidently worked.
Now 63, Messager has long been one of France's leading artists, a status she shares with Boltanski, who is still her partner. Two years ago, she represented France at the Venice Biennale, taking the prize for the best national pavilion. This month, a retrospective of Messager's 35-year career opened at the Pompidou Center in Paris. (The exhibition runs through Sept. 17.)
The show's title, "Les Messagers" (The Messengers), is of course a play on her surname. But it is also an invitation into the many worlds she has created. And in these various worlds in the show's jigsaw of rooms, she hopes visitors will write their own stories, blending their experience with the elements she has provided.
The works on display are enormously varied, although none is a traditional painting or sculpture. They all fall loosely into the category of installations: in some cases, elaborately arranged collections of photographs; in others, compositions of stuffed animals and their limbs. In recent years, she has also added movement to some of her installations, like "Pinocchio's Ballad in Beaubourg," created for this show.
Still, if her installations are becoming more complex and sophisticated, the message of her work has always been simple and to the point: She wants to free women from the roles assigned to them by men, by the marketplace, and by society. And she tries to do so through satire and caricature, using the images and materials of everyday life.
Some early ventures raised eyebrows, as when she presented newspaper photographs of babies with their eyes scratched out by pen lines to protest the way the media seemed to demand that women procreate. (Messager herself has no children.) In other works, like "Voluntary Tortures," she dwelled on women's need - a need, she implies, imposed by men - to appear beautiful through makeup, facials and plastic surgery.
She also treated her art as a game that she called "false biography," variously portraying herself as Annette Messager the Collector, the Artist, the Cheater, the Peddler, the Practical Woman.
"I wanted to look for an identity through others," she said over tea. "I asked myself, 'Who am I?' I am nothing. So I asked what people said about women. I appropriated the identity of others."
One work from the 1970s comprised photographs of "The Men I Love," although Messager had never in fact met any of them. In another, she imagined through small sketches how her friends would portray her. And in yet another, underlining a television stereotype, she photographed herself as a pretty nurse in an operating room.
More controversially, in "The Approaches," she followed men through streets in order to photograph the crotches of their trousers.
"It was a way of treating men as objects when it's usually women who are treated as objects," Messager explained. "Men never stop checking out women's bottoms, breasts, everything."
In 1974, she began collecting French proverbs, all of them denigrating women, and embroidered them onto cloth. Among those on view in the show are "Women's tears are worth a lot and cost them little"; "Women are educated by nature, men by books"; "When a girl is born, even the walls cry"; and "Beware of a bad woman and distrust one who is good."
The series that has proved most popular came later: "Mes Voeux" (My Vows), inspired by the ritual offerings left beside altars in Roman Catholic churches, often in gratitude for answered prayers.
Here, evoking these so-called ex-votos, dozens of small photographs of body parts, including breasts and genitals but also arms, legs, tongues and ears, hang on cords and are arranged into patterns.
"They led some people to say I was a pornographic artist," she said dismissively, "or that I was obsessed with sex."
It was also a charge that followed Messager when she began working with stuffed animals, mostly children's castoffs that she bought at flea markets or that were donated to her as they became a familiar feature of her art. Some critics suggested that she was perverted for dismembering these stuffed bears and giraffes.
She chose to work with stuffed animals rather than dolls, she explained, precisely because dolls have a sexual identity. "All those Barbies with their Ken," she said with a laugh. "Barbie must be sick of him. If only she could run off with someone else. In any event, children always mistreat their stuffed animals."
Today, her menagerie often comes alive, as with one installation from 2001-2 called "articulés/désarticulés," in which animals and limbs rise and fall while a dead cow - stuffed of course - is dragged around the room. "The idea is to confront movement and immobility," she said, "but people only see the movement."
With "The Ballad of the Hanged Ones," which opens the show, stuffed animals, limbs, a toy plane and other playroom objects circle overhead. And in "Pinocchio's Ballad in Beaubourg," large stuffed body parts rise and fall over a minuscule and mobile Pinocchio, to represent the puppet's dream of becoming human.
More recently, Messager has harnessed fabric for her moving artworks, notably in "Casino" for the 2005 Venice Biennale, in which a wind machine stirs a large red silk sheet so that it resembles a rocking sea. In "Gonflés/Degonflés" hand-painted silk cushions, in many cases in the form of body parts, inflate and deflate.
"When I start to repeat myself, I get bored," she said. "So I am always trying something new."
So in the end, she was asked, what message does "Les Messagers" convey?
"Two kinds of people look at my work," she replied. "Those who find it funny, droll, and those who find it very morbid, very sad."


 source

These childish things

 
For a long time, Annette Messager did things with dead sparrows. She scratched out the eyes on photographs of small children, and she took other photographs of men's crotches, and much worse besides. But she's over all that now. Growing up, she had dreams of becoming a ballerina or a nun, but became an artist instead.
The black carpet of her installation Inflated-Deflated, now at the Hayward Gallery in London, is a wheezing, heaving mass of inflatable body parts and fanciful creatures. A jellyfish-cum-pouffe keeps rising from the floor like a deranged soufflé, then collapsing, dejectedly. A penis erects itself, then goes all droopy and sad. Next to it, a blow-up louse gets puffed up, then squashed like a bug. Pfffft. Inflated-Deflated is pathetic, in the best sense. It runs on hot air, and all its elements are made from sewn and painted parachute fabric. It also comes as a bit of light relief after those disturbing photographs. It was tough being a woman artist in France in the 1970s, and Messager adopted extreme measures to save herself from invisibility. She parodied the woman artist, women's work and women's preoccupations. She had her dead sparrows, some wearing crocheted little bonnets and knitted capes, lain out in rows in vitrines, as though in retirement homes. Other sparrows - the disobedient ones, presumably - were banged-up in a separate vitrine. Messager attempted to reanimate yet more of these sorry little bundles of feathers and bone with wind-up clockwork motors. "I was winding them up to make them jump," she has said. "There was a kind of pathos about it." Here, there are some drawings of Messager, glimpsed in a sort of Sadean romp. Originally drawn in blue biro on a tiny, furtive scale, these "Horrifying Adventures of Annette Messager Trickster" have been photographed and blown up for all to see. Annette Messager Trickster is just one of the artist's personalities. There is also the Tinkerer Handywoman and the Practical Woman. Once, Messager wrote out her signature in dozens and dozens of styles, looking for her best one. She has arranged this graphol-ogist's nightmare beside innocent-looking, coloured pencil drawings of castles. My Collection of Castles, the title reads, proudly. There is nothing innocent anywhere in Messager's work, nor has there ever been. More stuff can be spied through the holes in the walls of a "secret room". Things you cannot look at properly become all the more intriguing. Here comes a big red wave. In 2005, Messager won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Casino, a rumbustious, inventive and gloriously theatrical interpretation of the Pinocchio story, all done with computer-assisted pneumatic servos, seas of billowing red silk, and a cast of undersea creatures and weird dangly bat-like forms. One element, a grinning skeleton with a scythe-like nose, now lurks behind the Hayward's back staircase. Part of Casino was restaged at the Liverpool Biennial last year, and yet another has come to the Hayward. I miss seeing the whole thing again, though the section here, which takes place in the crimson gloom of the belly of a whale, is genuinely magical and mysterious. The darker side of childhood is accommodated in "articulated-disarticulated", a 2001-2 tableau based on mad cow disease, which ravaged France as well as the UK. A cuddly big brown cow is endlessly dragged around the floor on its belly, while a rag-bag cast of witless giant soft toys hump, twitch, jolt and spasm in a circus of jarring movements. These abject marionettes bounce up and down on cords, with Messager their puppet-master. Something like a human being twirls disjointedly on a trapeze above our heads. Messager's work can be obvious as well as secretive and strange. Like a child, she can go on a bit, and at times this show gets fractious and overwrought. She shares her theatricality, and her preoccupation with the play and fantasies of childhood, with artists as different as Mike Kelley and Susan Hiller. The wonderfully dirty and sadistic animations of Nathalie Djurberg tap the same source. But at best Messager's work is as accessible as it is sinister; as monstrous as it is funny. Children will love all the soft toy abuse, the inflatable creatures and magic seas. Now, behave.

Body Tests

I used After Effects to try different methods of dissolving the frames into one another, creating a much more fluid effect of animation.

Here are some different tests.

 Without any Dissolve:

Duration 10, Dissolve 5 from first sheet test:

Take One Tests

Duration 5 Dissolve 3

Duration 6 Dissolve 3:

Duration 10 Dissolve 5:

Recording 35mm film in Kent

 
Today I am taking my film to Kent to film the projection onto the screen.

Things to remember:

DV tape
Video Camera
Film!
Money to pay Tom
Tripod

Fast shutter speed
Manual exposure
Manual focus


I was quite nervous about how successful my film would be, it has taken many many hours of work to get the glue prints done and onto the film and the 16mm film tests were only partially successful.  I did have 16mm clear film as a backup plan but they just didn't appear very clear (They were fairly out of focus) and it would've taken much much longer to produce the film and I would've had to not do a full body film (defeating the point of the film!)  When initially testing the 35mm film on the camera it was completely out of focus and blurry.  I did panic at this point and I was trying to think around time scales in my head as to how I would get the 16mm film done in time.  Then Tom put through a different film where he could focus it, and then when putting my film back through, it looked great!

HUZZAH!

35mm skin film is now finished and filmed and just needs testing through the projector and looking at on computer.  Possibly slowing down slightly.

My body is about 2 mins and 30 seconds long!

Model of Projector used

Make of Projector used

Setting up!

Screen that the film was projected onto.  Only a small section of the screen.

Body Tests

Today I tried a couple of different ideas for shooting for animation.

I attempted to make it look as though I was walking through the sheet so I could include my back in the animation.  The only way to do this would be to use one of the front animations then apply the paint by hand and 'guess' where my cross section of my body would go.  This, as you can see, just did not work:

I then tried an animation using my back, this worked quite well but I would not include it in the exhibition as I still feel the front animation is much stronger.

 

Also tried a roll from side to side:

Exhibition Space

Deciding on a room!

Today I met with Suzie Hanna and Tom Simmons to discuss which room I would have for the exhibition.  The black room or the white room.  The white room would be great as I can then use on of the areas to show my films on loop and another section to show my sheet and glue, after discussion with other students it was decided that the white room would be best for my work.

Plan of area: