Curators: Post Brothers, Edgaras Gerasimovičius
In the 1930s, animators were faced with a problem: the rubber-hose style of rendering bodies in motion was too fluid, abstracted, and without physical structure, while rotoscoping—the practice of tracing over live-action footage—resulted in rigid mechanical movements without vitality. The Disney animator and labor rights activist Art Babbitt came up with a solution: to give force, flexibility, and believability to animated bodies, one must successively “break their joints”. Indeed, they discovered that in order to give characters flesh and bone, solidity and weight, they had to disfigure their anatomy, demonstrating a counter-intuitive principle that animated realism required a bending of the physical laws.
“Breaking The Joints” is a group exhibition and screening program that considers the status of the body within the history of animation, elaborating on essential concepts from cartoons, while also examining what this mode of world-building can tell us about our world today. Once relegated to the periphery as a popular art form, animation has become integral in all media production. At the same time, scholars across and between disciplines are increasingly turning to animation to examine not only social and physical transmutations in our society and our images, but also to reconsider material objects and relations through a renewed and speculative understanding of animist, agential, and vitalist principles. As such, animation is not simply a specific historically-bound practice of techniques and conventions for moving images, but can be regarded as an epistemology, a way of understanding and relating, that offers new possibilities for socio-political, cultural, and ecological critique and embodied transformation.
With a nod to the Sapeiha Palace’s former use as both a military hospital and an ophthalmology clinic, the project explores animation’s fusion of optics and the body, and considers legacies of bodily disfigurement and manipulation, how cartoonish violence is paired with a plasmatic resilience, a plasticity in the face of trauma and absurdity. More than simply giving the “illusion of life”, animation is in reality also an uncanny pact with death, and the increasing ubiquity of animation in all media offers some questions on the status of ourselves and our world. Through these inquiries into media and the body, the exhibition considers a tension at the heart of animation: between animation as a tool for liberation and transformation, and animation as a cyclical mechanized imposition on the body full of violence and bittersweet gags. “Breaking The Joints” introduces critical reflections on animation and its philosophical possibilities through the language of contemporary visual art and spatial practices, while also applying (mis)interpretations of animation discourses so as to animate and overturn animation practice itself, offering a cartoonish mirror on the field so as to reconsider its critical possibilities and the applications for this inevitable evolution.