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| Nathalie Djurberg Experimentet 2009 |
The term ‘claymation’ refers to animations involving the medium of clay. Clay is used to craft figures and environments in, often short, animated films. (“Claymation”, 2011)
Nathalie Djurberg is a prominent young Swedish artist who is well renowned for her disturbing yet poignant Claymation films.
Djurberg rose to superstar status in Venice with the work Experimentet that won her the silver lion award for the best young artist at the Venice Biennale in 2009. (Regine, 2009)
An installation of mammoth scale, Exprimentet recreates the Garden of Eden in a dystopian manner. An array of giant flowers adorns the garden dwarfing viewers and purveying a sense of unease with a nauseating display of colour and shape. The garden is in a perpetual state of darkness, with no sun entering the basement gallery setting. Music composed by Hans Berg accompanies and adds a sense of trepidation to the dark setting. While three merciless and erotic claymations complete this macabre take on a historically Arcadian scene. (Regine, 2009) “One tells the story of a puppet who battles her own aggressive limbs. The second one features puppets who resort to all sort of brutishness in order to escape a hostile forest environment and the third one follows the sexual foreplay of various puppets, some of them Catholic ecclesiastics. Their sexual and sacrilegious encounters are just pretexts to highlight perverse games of power and submission.” (Regine, 2009)
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| Nathalie Djurberg Experimentet 2009 |
Experimentet has been described as “A surrealistic garden of Eden in which everything that is natural goes awry” (Design Boom, 2009) Such a statement encapsulates the essence of Djurberg's work most adequately and references the modernist concern with personal reality and the push to deconstruct history in order to create their own history. (Kreis, 2000) The multitude of media and dwarfing formal elements presented by djurberg indeed give the garden a surrealistic tone invoking a sense that the artist is displaying a picturesque snapshot of introspective deconstruction regarding this prominent, typically Arcadian, cultural myth.
By portraying a well-known subject matter in a socially perverse way, Djurberg confronts viewers with a complexity of emotions. (Design Boom, 2009) To quote the Biennale catalogue: “Through these minutely composed sequences of stop-motion animations, Djurberg toys with society's perceptions of right and wrong, exposing our own innate fears of what we do not understand and illustrating the complexity that arises when we are confronted with these emotions.” Emotions such as fear, curiosity, disenchantment and isolation provoke a response in the viewer challenging the constructs of our intellect in an unnerving way.
In keeping to the modernist tradition Djurberg demands that reason, creative intuition, intellect and emotion be given equal audience when experiencing her works.
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| Nathalie Djurberg Experimentet 2009 |
Aesthetics often limited to the domain of children’s stories and ideas of innocence are key features in many of Djurberg’s works.
These elements help to convey the emotional complexity discussed above and are manipulated to create a sense of perverse fervor about the work. Doll like, candy coloured plasticine puppets lead us on folk like narrative journeys. The plots may be macabre but the sense of humanity, and mystical naivety of childhood tales runs rife in the overall aesthetic of the work.
This perversion of innocence is a popular aesthetic conceit among many young artists and designers. The Happy Tree Friends web show is another example of this, which I feel relates to Djurberg's work pleasantly. In this web animation series cute cuddly looking animals engage on adventures, which undoubtedly end in violence and obscene deaths. I personally find this aesthetic trend to be amusing and enjoy the blinding cynicism of such works. I feel that such a trend has eventuated as a result of artists and designers responding to the ideals of modernism from a postmodern vantage point. Modernist psychological conceits still dominate discussion on and determine current thinking yet the revolutionary context of the modernist era has been replaced with the complex cynicism of post modernity. Nothing is taboo in the postmodern matrix so it quite logically follows that the perversion of innocence provides both abundant amusement and poignant disenchantment in this cynical age.
I have really enjoyed researching Djurberg’s work and the ideological concerns surrounding it. The conflict presented by the intense visual interest and accompanying disturbing, repulsive elements of Djurberg’s work provides a scintillating viewing experience. A conceptual achievement, which I believe, more than validates this artist’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale.
References:
“Claymation”, 2011. In Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Regine. (2009) Venice Biennale -Nathalie Djurberg .
Design Boom.(2009) Nathalie Djurberg: 'experiment' at Venice art biennale 09
Kreis,S.(2000) Nietsche, Freud, and the thrust towards modernism.
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture3.html
