Allison Schulnik's Hobo Clown
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Allison Schulnik’s Hobo Clown: grotesque resistance, storytelling metamorphosis and Franz Kafka by william boyd fraser, sculptor A Major Research Paper presented to OCAD University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories Toronto, Ontario, Canada, April, 2015 © william boyd fraser, 2015 ii Author’s Declaration i hereby declare that i am the sole author of this thesis. this is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final versions, as accepted by my examiners. i authorize OCAD University to lend this thesis to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. i understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. i further authorize OCAD University to reproduce this thesis by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. iii Abstract Allison Schulnik’s Hobo Clown clay stop-motion film is analyzed using a rhetorical triangulation of persuasion. A hybrid method alternates Schulnik, reader and an imaginary Other for three points of view providing comparisons of story perspective. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis provides an exemplary third person narrative style. A history of stop-motion animation, hobos and clowns, along with animation theory of metamorphosis contribute to a hypothetical null questioning of Schulnik’s grotesque as a constructive identity resisting expectation. Mise-en-scène of staging and music provide sensory, visual and auditory description along with primary source materials and theoretical insight for describing a reading of the film’s grotesque transformations. The argument for an in between space finds identity unresolved, yet yields features of contemporary grotesque for thinking about self(s). A singular meaning for contemporary grotesque is not determinable, however a contemporary anti-story of resistant through an anti-theory of open-ended subversion suggests perspectives for potential future research. Keywords: Allison Schulnik, Animation, Anti-Story, Grotesque, Metamorphosis, Stop- motion, Storytelling, Franz Kafka iv Acknowledgements i acknowledge the wisdom that has supported me; found in the lived experiences of those who shared their stories of struggle and the engaging work of Allison Schulnik. v Dedication in memory of all my ancestors. vi Contents INTRODUCTION 1-15 Chapter 1 BACKGROUND CONTEXT 16-32 Chapter II STORY 33-47 Chapter III READER 48-65 Chapter IV ANTI-STORY 66-78 Chapter V CONCLUSION 79-86 Bibliography 87-92 Reference Materials 93-94 Appendix A: Mise-en-scène 95-106 Appendix B: Annotative Discography 107-110 INTRODUCTION … “anti-aesthetic”…a critique which destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them …“anti-aesthetic” also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic (e.g., feminist art) or rooted in a vernacular—that is, to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm. Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture Grotesque is the real beauty. Allison Schulnik, Wild Exaggeration: The Grotesque Body in Contemporary Art Human beings, more or less, like to order their world. Categories and classifications, indexed scales and definitions all construct a perception of understanding. Contemporary art history often describes the artistic disruptions of imposed order, including postmodern’s resistance to self, as destabilized. A theoretical shift suggests a hybridity of social pluralism and a space in between the collapse of oppositional binaries will find metamorphosis as such a process of uncertain reality. This is fertile ground for research into a marginalized field of animation within cinema studies.1 Allison Schulnik’s independently produced Hobo Clown2 is a 5 min. clay stop-motion art animation with numerous metamorphic transformations. Schulnik’s handmade digital film presents an abstracted storytelling of an imagined reality that I argue creates resistance against conformity to expectation. Kafkaesque uncertainty playfully characterizes the unlucky central figure as unfixing reason. In Franz Kafka fashion, Hobo Clown, as an 1 Michael Frierson, Clay Animation: American Highlights 1908 to Present, ed. Frank Beaver (Toronto, ON: Maxwell Macmillian, 1994), ix. 2 Allison Schulnik, Hobo Clown. Clay stop-motion, puppet and clay painting free form, Grizzly Bear Granny Diner sound track, 2008, 5:10 min. See, Allison Schulnik, accessed July 23, 2013. http://www.allisonschulnik.com. See, Grizzly Bear, “Granny Diner,” by Christopher Robert Bear, Daniel Raphael Rossen, Christopher M. Taylor, Edward Droste, recorded November 5, 2007, on Friend, Warp Records LC 02070, 2007, compact disc. See, accessed October 16, 2013, http://grizzly-bear.net/, accessed September 21, 2014, http://grizzly-bear.net/music/eps/friend/. Duration is listed on Grizzly Bear Internet site as 4:49 min. 2 experimentally oriented music video, plays with satirical contrary to subvert perceptions and widen boundaries for marginalized and disenfranchised Other within contemporary animation. Between the real and unreal the world inside the animated story is a space for conceptual artistic oration. A contemporary art history null theory frameworks an anti- conventional, grotesque metamorphic as a disruptive double negative resisting societal norms. Grotesque, as a contrary aesthetic, is an anti-anti resistance premise or constructive anti-theory suggesting a direction beyond positivist or empirical limitations. I propose an experimental triangulation of speculative points of view including author as self, reader as co-creator and a third person Other as a figural subjective of new ontological designation. Ontology describes ideas about being. Each perspective provides insight. As a null hypothesis seeking to define features of contemporary grotesque, this paper will ask, whether Schulnik’s grotesque is one of alienation, or paradoxically, a resist to identity through three conceptualized rhetorical forms comparing the contrary descriptions of sensual, visual and auditory elements of Schulnik’s storytelling animation.3 A working definition of positive resistance speculates that Schulnik is using the extreme of grotesque in a way suggested through Kafka to create a fuzzy and playful unhinging of storytelling expectation.4 The conceptual triangulation of perspective will be explained through classic Greek rhetoric strategy and the comparison reference to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis supporting the three points of view arguments will be 3 Null hypothesis claims are chance and nullified unless significant evidence can falsify false statements as truth. 4 Fuzzy logic or the fuzzy set theory of professors of mathematics, Lotfi A. Zadeh and Dieter Klaua opens a space for the subjective and vagueness of social construct over the formalist structure of binaries. Also see, Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12-13. Connelly suggests Spielraum as a deconstructive description of a space of play that is found within the grotesque agency to destabilize perceptions and definitions. Note: Storytelling is used to describe a co-creative process involving author and audience forming meaning rather than narrative semiotic or structuralism categorizes of text. 3 returned to after a brief outline description of Schulnik’s Hobo Clown. As a sculptor, I am attracted to impressions made in clay and the fluidity of metamorphosis in clay stop- motion; its intensely intimate and crafted labour I bias as producing personal, inner expression. Allison Schulnik’s Eager was awarded Best Abstract Animation at the 2014 Ottawa International Film Festival. Schulnik’s film education at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts, BFA 2000, Experimental Animation) and critically recognized career as an internationally ranked artist suggests the importance of grotesque as a contemporary art style.5 A close critique adaptation of literary New Criticism found in narrative studies describes a text as using plot, setting, events, gaps, episodes, tone, duration, discourse and story/narrative to name a few elements.6 Here, contemporary art history and critical analysis are adapted for discussion. In a neutral positioning, away from narratology’s discourse and semiotics intersubjectivity, Schulnik’s Hobo Clown is considered an storyteller’s oratory of voice and vision presenting a series of connected sensual, visual and auditory details that initially can be thought of as describing an interior consciousness or narrative state of mind as qualia observed through sequences of changing realities. In following chapters greater description of Schulnik’s media techniques will be expand with observations of the sequences within the film related to sensual, visual, and auditory detail. A general description situates a central Hobo Clown figure undergoing several episodes of questionable traditional beginning, middle and ending logic. 5 Allison Schulnik is listed as 500 on a top 1000 artists in the world. Verfhond’s list of NEW MASTERS- 2013, 500, posted December 31, 2012, http://www.pinterest.com/pin/477522366710533173/. Found at Rembrandt’s Dog List, posted January 18, 2011, accessed July 26, 2013, http://a1000livingpainters.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/allison-schulnik/2-%C2%A0allison%C2%A0schulnik/. 6 David Herman, ed., The Cambridge