The creative technique of projecting images into undifferentiated surfaces has been practiced amongst others by prehistoric rock artists and Renaissance artist Leonardo Da Vinci. In modern times the Dada Movement would project the image of a bull’s head on a bicycle seat, and present it as a work of art. Modern artists like Paul Klee and Juan Miro would project strange characters on patches of paint.
South African artist Marinda Du Toit takes this process to an extreme with her so-called junk sculptures, by projecting live characters and stories onto pieces of junk, which are then animated and filmed by animation artists Diek Grobler and Charles Badenhorst.
South African Artists Take Animation to a New Level
Discarded office equipment, old chairs, wooden boxes, doorbells, old kitchenware, buckets, suitcases, bird’s cages, lids, pots, brooms and broken dolls are used to construct these characters. For an exhibition called Self Image the artist projected the memories and dreams from her own life as a child, a young girl and ultimately a mature woman on a series of junk dolls.
Little Bang
An animation film called Little Bang (as opposed to Big Bang) animated by Diek Grobler and Charles Badenhorst tells the story of characters in suburban garden sheds coming to life at night, creating new worlds. According to Diek Grobler, director of Fopspeen Moving Pictures, it was very difficult to animate these junk objects, as they are in the first instance sculptures, and for that reason not as mobile as the objects and characters specially built for animation.
Another animation film, Agenda, which tells the story of very important members of a small town’s chamber of commerce having a meeting, followed in 2009. The characters, made from remnants of the tools of their different trades and objects from their implied histories and suggested lives, are characters from the memories of the artist as a child and have names like Dries Olivier, Freddie Oosthuize, Oom Geyer, etc. Despite the importance of these people, they have really nothing on their agenda but to wait for the tea girl, who is also the main character in the story. Apart from being shown as an animation film, Agenda has also been exhibited as an installation.
Agenda was shortlisted for best African short film on the Africa in Motion Film Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2008 and was screened at Zlin in the Czech Republic and Animation Fest in Croatia. Little Bang was nominated for a SAFTA in 2007. It also won a merit award for new media at the Ekurhuleni arts competition in South Africa.
Post Modern Comment on Consumerism
Ultimately the junk sculptures can be interpreted as a powerful and critical comment on a post modern culture of consumerism in which the effects of discarded junk on the environment are reduced by recycling junk in the form of new sculptures and newly animated stories.
Sources:
- Bell Roberts design and project gallery, Woodstock, Cape Town, 2009
- Fopspeen Moving Pictures, Pretoria South Africa, 2007
- M. Michalko: Cracking Creativity: The secrets of creative genius, Ten Speed Press, California, 1998
Fransi Phillips - Published author of poetry, short stories, novels, art books in Afrikaans and English Writer of art reviews in Afrikaans and English ...
