The prevalence of absurdist and Dadaistic tendencies in the arts is usually proportionate to the level of cultural and political conservatism and religious fervor in the society at large. No doubt one needs the other for social relevance. Some animation practices take a punk-rock attitude, exhibiting disturbing, shocking, or anarchic images to subvert or mock conformism. Yet paradoxically, since animation is traditionally a non-arty medium, it has also been at the helm of a drive to return the artistic value and richness of handmade media such as collage, assemblage, clay sculpture, and charcoal drawing to art's discussion table. Alongside the quick advancement of slick digital animation techniques used by companies such as Pixar comes an insistence on the rough, quirky, and purposefully flawed image—a determination to leave the hand's trace in view. Perhaps it's a mode of pushing subjectivity and eccentricity through the homogenizing digital screen, or a desire to break the illusion—as when Bugs Bunny spoke back to his "maker" as he was being erased, revealing the hand of the animator (albeit in animation). Tactics such as artist William Kentridge's use of charcoal drawing and erasures to reflect on heroism and failure through both the medium and the narrative allow animation to comment on the limits and currency of sincerity and authenticity in art making.

Many new animation narratives—like the three works by Nathalie Djurberg, Brent Green, and David Shrigley & Chris Shepherd in the present exhibition—make use of these techniques to expose subconscious desire, anarchistic tendencies, entropic thoughts, and the grotesque to ultimately get closer to the rawness of being human.

Nathalie Djurberg

Nathalie Djurberg works with the craft of claymation and brings her characters into new and provocative territories. Like their better-known mainstream counterparts Gumby and Pokey or Wallace and Gromit, Djurberg's figures are made from plasticine(1) and are shot with a stop-action technique, referencing the look of early "after-school special" programming. Like other popular animated or puppet shows of late—such as Wonder Showzen, for instance—Djurberg's work ridicules the shortcomings and deception implicit in the early children’s educational television programming that her generation consumed. Yet her work also relates to traditional adult theatrical acts like Punch and Judy, marionette plays, or even sock puppet acts, which often played out subversive dramas and confronted private fantasies in the safe territory of "play-acting."

Djurberg's films are set to the upbeat tone of Hans Berg's synth-pop musical accompaniments. She punctuates each scene with childishly drawn narration cards, yet the figurines and interiors are crafted with extreme care and attentiveness to costume and style, with elaborate period sets that appear to invoke midcentury European bourgeois life. Her figures flagrantly dramatize and overplay their emotions and actions so as to captivate us with the sheer physicality of the medium and the magic that it can do. Claymation, it turns out, is quite effective for flesh, blood, and sexual appeal.

With a playful style and innocent traditional technique, Djurberg is able to dig deep into the dark side of humanity and taboo subjects such as cruel familial power struggles, perverted impulses, and children's evil fantasies. Children appear especially precocious and unruly, while adults are often deviant and deceiving. Many of her narratives foreground animals: either they are savvy sexual beings or subjects of romantic and sexual fantasies, or they take on more nuanced human emotional states such as humility or possessiveness. In Selfloathing and humiliation, a man displays such disturbing submissiveness that he literally transforms himself into a dog. In There ain’t no pill, a romantic fox beckons a young wild-child girl to join him in the garden, but in the meantime a manipulative domestic cat usurps the scene. In Djurberg's hands, claymation becomes an expressionistic medium that is sinfully pleasurable to watch.

Brent Green

Hadacol Christmas begins with the words: "There's some people who think that Santa Claus cranks together Christmas with a gigantic golden wrench...that’s not altogether true." And so begins the loopy story of Brent Green's Santa Claus.

A short, dystopic tale, narrated by Green himself alongside live instrumentals by the band Califone, Hadacol Christmas depicts Mr. Claus as a poor, sickly Giacometti-like figure addicted to an over-the-counter cough syrup called Hadacol.(2) Hadacol, we are told, "sponsored a lot of Hank Williams radio shows" and renders Santa Claus in a perpetual state of malaise. In a desperate, tremulous but urgent voice, Green recounts Santa's everyday existence, telling of his ailments, his trials, and the suite of come-to-life hallucinations that inhabit his ramshackle world. Despite his melancholy, Claus is still an industrious and productive man, tinkering away with "outlandish machinery, little trinkets, and baubles." In Green's rendition, Claus is not a hero or a Grinch, but more of an existential outsider artist gearing up for his raucous sleigh ride. Created with rough sketches, torn kraft paper, bits of transparencies, masking tape, and fluffy cotton balls, the scenes move nervously, from cel to cel, with brilliant material ebb and flow. One may conclude that Green probably cut this epic tale on his kitchen table, allowing lint, dust, sticks, and even a dental X-ray to sift into the piece. To break the illusion, cel numbers appear scribbled at the edges of the sheets of glass, which are sometimes layered to create blurriness or the fog of snow and murky weather. We are aware of how this entire world could just blow away. Califone's Appalachian-infused music sets the tone for Hadacol Christmas as if it hails from a bygone era—a deeply remote America with roots in beguiling oral histories and tall tales. This world—though more poetic and tentative than, say, Tim Burton's (it's closest aesthetic kin)—twinkles with frail hope and the strange sweetness of human pathos.

David Shrigley & Chris Shepherd

David Shrigley & Chris Shepherd's Who I Am and What I Want brings us the daily life of the character Pete, who has chosen to leave "polite society" and live in the woods. Pete is determinedly antisocial—in the sense that his goal seems to be to decivilize himself completely and live a life of total freedom (to do whatever he wants). He is a walking untamed ego but still somewhat self-aware. He relishes introducing himself as part of the wilderness, as a purely natural being—"My name is mushroom, my name is toadstool, my name is muck"—and it helps that he, like the mushrooms around him, is just a line drawing. He admits to doing terrible things to small children, eating live animals, and abandoning all responsibility, though without guilt or shame.

Narrated in the first person with droll humor by Kevin Eldon, Pete comes across as naughty and amoral but never terribly demonic. He is, for us, an impish proxy exploring the dangerous edges of being human. Somehow we want him to continue on, to see what else he can do. In a lyrical spoken-word rant that ends the piece, Pete hurriedly lists and acts out all the things he desires to experience before he dies, including glorious transmutations and entropic flow: "I want to be fried in a pan with some butter and some garlic!" and "I want to come back as a ghost and dig up my own corpse!" Shrigley's signature doodles and line drawings animate Pete's most gruesome and blasphemous fantasies with the lightest, unchanged touch.(3) Pete's wanting it all in every shape or form brings our own unbridled wants and desires into sharper focus. Make no mistake though: this is no morality tale. Pete's character is as much about self-mockery as anything else. When describing his own work, Shrigley has said, "I would define it as amateurish and oddball, like the doodles of an autistic pre-pubescent."(4)