viz.

Image Credit: BookDrum.com

I suspect I was one of very few people thinking of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, as I watched The Hunger Games with my family last weekend. In particular, I was recalling how Shaftesbury lamented in 1711 that the English theater had come to resemble the “popular circus or bear-garden.”

It is no wonder we hear such applause resounded on the victories of Almanzor, when the same parties had possibly no later than the day before bestowed their applause as freely on the victorious butcher, the hero of another stage, where amid various frays, bestial and human blood, promiscuous wounds and slaughter, [both sexes] are… pleased spectators, and sometimes not spectators only, but actors in the gladiatorian parts.[1]

Still from Nina Paley's The Stork

THE STORK is a 3-minute film, a delightful and powerful piece of visual rhetoric by an independent art animator, Nina Paley.  (Another of Nina’s animated films has been discussed by John Jones here.)

Paley has created several animated shorts about serious subjects such as overpopulation and cancer.  I consider THE STORK her most successful balancing of left and right brain content.  She achieves the feat of conveying a perfectly clear piece of rhetoric entirely through visual art. 

Nina Paley's The Stork, with permission of the author

A bit of background:  Independent animated shorts,  created by individual artists, are possibly the very best fine art medium for clear transmission of ideas.  One element that often makes them effective is a clever song (frequently written by the animator) used as the sound track of the entire short film.   Song lyrics can be a fun, rhythmic, pulsing way of introducing words into a piece of visual art.

But an unusual aspect of Paley’s THE STORK is that she makes her argument entirely visually.   She doesn’t need lyrics to make her point utterly evident (the sound track is instumental music).  THE STORK uses no text or words at all.  So how does she achieve her impact?

The success of THE STORK comes from a visual similarity Nina observed: storks fly to deliver babies from the air, and planes fly to deliver bombs from the air.   She uses this disturbing visual equation to create the metaphor that forms THE STORK.  

At the beginning of the film, an appealing, smiling stork flies above verdant green earth carrying its precious cargo to strains of Edvard Grieg.  How bucolic!

But soon, the first stork is joined by another stork … and another, and eventually tens of storks, each with a baby to deliver to earth.   The storks move into military formation and start bombing.

At first this seems outrageous: how can we equate the joy of new life with the death and destruction of war?   Paley answers with another visual metaphor: each of her storks’ “bombs” explode to create the mountain of Stuff needed to support every new human being on earth: house, car, stroller, Huggies, toys, TVs, clothes, toilets. 

So Paley equates mountains of human Stuff with bombs.  But does that metaphor make sense?  Bombs are destructive.  Isn’t the manufacture of Stuff creative, not destructive?

Well, in THE STORK, the massive amounts of Stuff needed by each human are destroying larger swathes of our planet than bombs could.  Wild animals flee as newly-built homes carpet-bomb their habitat.  Fish become skeletons as the children swim and are toilet trained, polluting waterways.  Finally the green earth is replaced by brown aerial views of cities, still overflown by endless formations of storks.

Whatever you feel about Paley’s view – and I personally relate to it more amidst today’s realization that our current lifestyle is unsustainable than I did years ago when I first saw the film – she argues her point clearly.  She uses imaginative visualizations that are exactly pertinent to her line of reasoning.   

Here are techniques we can learn from Nina:  The first, a general one, is that humor – even dark humor – makes it much easier to entertain a horrific realization, think it through, and integrate it into our world view.

More specifically, when arguing visually, we might look for appropriate, telling visual metaphors.  Perhaps best are equations of elements whose appearance is alike but whose function at first seems opposite.  If the work of art can reveal an underlying similarity not at first seen by the viewer, this alone gives the art power.  

Note:  Since I’ll be looking at a number of animated short films in this art blog, one might ask whether these films are truly fine art.  I feel they are indeed.  We don’t hear about them often or have many chances to see them, because they fall through the gap between museums (which show mostly still art) and arthouse movie theaters (which show mainly full-length films). 

To me, animated shorts – by which I’m not referring to kids’ cartoons, which are something else – are important because they give the artist additional tools.  One of these tools is, of course, the dimension of time.  Another is the potential for narrative.  Yet another is movement.

But what about the often less than perfect drawing style?  What about the borrowings from popular culture?  Well, Andy Warhol long ago showed that style and imagery taken from popular culture can make fine art.

Because I seem to be the first non-UT/DWRL blogger on viz., I’ll introduce myself.   I’m Anne Bobroff-Hajal. I'm an artist interested in something rather hard to find: fine art that incorporates clearly-graspable rhetoric.   Art that attempts to integrate the left brain with the right.

Detail of Home Security at Any Crazy Price

So my entries on this blog will be a treasure hunt, searching for artists who have a double goal: to communicate something rational or scientific about the real world in a way that also powerfully moves and/or delights us.   There aren’t many such artists.  John Jones accurately observed  that visual argument tends, “contrary to Aristotle’s advice, [to] foreground the use of pathos and ethos rather than logos.”  I’m searching for those very rare artists from whom I – and maybe others – can learn techniques to balance logos, pathos, and ethos.