Evening course: The Animated Body

9 May, 2018
– 23 May, 2018
6pm – 9pm
LUX
Waterlow Park Centre
Ian Cheng, Metis Suns, 2014

This evening course examines the ways that artists have interacted with the subject of the body through experimental animation and moving image art, looking across work made internationally from the 1960s to the present. Led by independent curator Herb Shellenberger, the course is structured around a mixture of screenings, readings and discussions.
Throughout history, artists have used animation as a means to conjure fantasy, craft new realities and explore possibilities that live action film cannot facilitate. This is especially true when it comes to how one pictures the body: experimental animation can allow artists to represent their internal feelings, desire, sexuality and bodily experience in highly complicated, abstract or metaphorical ways. During this course, we will discuss and show examples of how artists have used animation to articulate these highly personal, sometimes intangible and complicated experiences through physical morphology of the bodies shown in their films, either representations of their own body mediated through animation or quasi-human and non-human forms. We will explore both works made on celluloid film and digital moving image work, focusing on thematic connections between work from different eras, rather than purely through analysis of materials or techniques.
Artists to be discussed include: Mary Beams, Ian Cheng, Lisa Crafts, Paul Glabicki, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Anthony McCall, Sondra Perry, Kathy Rose, Jacolby Satterwhite, Naomi Uman, Jordan Wolfson and many more.


About

Herb Shellenberger is a curator and writer originally from Philadelphia and based in London. He has curated screenings at institutions such as Arnolfini, Irish Film Institute, Light Industry, Lightbox Film Center, LUX, New York University, Taipei Center for Contemporary Arts and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Since 2016, he has been Associate Programmer for Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. He is a graduate of the Central Saint Martins/LUX MRes Moving Image programme, has lectured on film and contemporary art at museums, universities and art spaces internationally, and has written for publications including Art-Agenda, Art Monthly and The Brooklyn Rail. He curated the series ‘Independent Frames: American Experimental Animation in the 1970s + 1980s’, which premiered at Tate Modern in 2017 and is currently touring internationally.

FAKE SEX//REAL VIOLENCE
Starting with works of erotic animation made in the 1970s, we will discover how artists articulated personal and sexual autonomy through cartoonish or abstract figuration. We will continue by looking at the ways bodily trauma and therapy have impacted artist animation, considering both works made on film and the ways new, virtual works facilitate an embodied experience of these opposite extremes.

THE UNCANNY AVATAR
Virtual identities extend our reach into imaginary space but at the same time they can increasingly complicate our sense of self. We will look at complicated forms of embodied representation, the friction between the corporeal and virtual body, and the idea of the “thinking machine” as represented by artificial intelligence.

BODIES IN SPACE
Through installation and expanded forms, or animating bodies by means of a camera, the final session will discuss how animators have created works that foreground the viewer’s bodily experience of interacting with moving images.

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