Chantal Rousseau's 'Historiettes'

Cut-out animation (and that which has a similar physiognomy) can be extremely sensitive to a movement inherent in its medium (ex: Yuri Norstein), but can also include the stiffness of Flash, even Atari-inspired animation, in which segments (a leaf on a tree, an arm, eyes) move while much of the remaining object seems paralyzed. Hair is helmet-stiff or behaves like frozen tentacles. Chantal Rousseau has treated her animated subjects like cut-outs; only two of the animations have any fluidity (the maddened mid-flight of a bird attacking a lizard seems also 'shot' in the middle of a hurricane), although in the self-contained machine of the animation 'cycle' or loop.

What does the stiffness and cycle-movement do to the sense of the drawings and to the subject matter in these animations? While containing a bit of collage slapstick, Rousseau's animation does not exist only to undermine the dignity of ready-made signs, but to also include the mundane stiffness of the everyday body. The animal-subjects in the animations seem more comfortable and natural in their animated roles, while the human subjects associate the futility of the same ceremony; we need or want a reason for each act and motion. The fact that there is no explanation or continuation for each piece speaks more of the everyday than any Flash formula or collage animation; in one piece, a young woman is elegantly displayed in a pose restrained by a drawing style reminiscent of childrens' book illustration, adding a modesty and (human-scale) immediacy to each sexually-suggestive act. The vulnerability of these animations links to Slavoj Zizek's reading of Lacan's "sublime quality of an object": "the paradox of an object...able to subsist only in shadow, in an intermediary half-born state...to reveal the substance, the object itself dissolves; all that remains is the dross of the common object."(Looking Awry, 83); the image which fails to live up to its identity outside of the 'fantasy space' of the ideal. In Rousseau's animations, the element of time (the subtle change of posture, the appearance of a bird, the shivering of leaves) evokes the anti-climactic nature of every-day public space, which fails to acknowledge these glimpsed ceremonies and instead has the audacity to interrupt the seduction of these acts.

Unlike the deadpan performance of a lot of raw animation, Rousseau's work has an austere sense of movement which is able to retain the elegance of the iconic, the pose, and the confrontation of drawings.

'Historiettes' is showing at The New Gallery from November 18 - December 16, 2006.