Inbetweener

Curated by
Elizaveta Shneyderman

t Rosa Aiello, Cosima von

Bonin, Gaylen Gerber,
Robert Lazzarini, Giulio
Paolini, Andrew Ross,
Susan Rothenberg, Rio
Roye, Pascual Sisto,
and Paul Thek
A significant portion of the bodies we see on- and heft. The end results of this complicated
screen and in contemporary popular culture are modeling process are the images and avatars
virtual—neither physical nor photographic. Built that now constitute some of the most familiar
through extensive processes of skilled digital elements of contemporary visual culture,
labor, these virtual bodies are the result of from video games, to blockbuster films, to
“modeling.” That is, they are the final step advertising.
of a process that creates three-dimensional
models to be manipulated and animated within Computing and “naturalistic” simulation
software. have profoundly changed the consequences of
modeling—and not only on a technical level.
The material processes of modeling, which Contemporary artists working with modeling
predate computing considerably, have long been have made significant contributions to how we
central to the production of visual culture. In understand the relations between social space,
particular, representations of the modeled body corporeal experience, and visual technologies.
play a fraught but important role in shaping But what does it mean to be moved by images
expectations of visuality for new technologies of bodies that have weight and heft assigned
and the subjectivities both depicted by and to them retroactively? Modeling has generated
taking shape within them. This expectation a unique set of aesthetic qualities and
holds true for the contemporary production of representations of corporeality and embodiment
virtual forms, which introduces new protocols that we consistently, but unconsciously, watch in
that differ radically from those of hand-drawn the world.
animation and cartoons. That is, in order to
produce a three-dimensional appearance out Through a combination of artworks and non-
of two dimensions, digital animators must art objects, ​Inbetweener ​poses a gestural and
simulate the effects we associate with objects open field of inquiry through both material and
in the lived world. They must articulate the digital practices, presenting a disassembled
points where distinct elements connect—such set of bodies and prostheses. By considering
as appendages to the body—and they must this digital process through tactile forms
assign quantifiable material qualities, like of modeling, ​the exhibition​contemplates the
mass and texture, to those elements. In other stakes, limits, and unexamined qualities of
words, animators must give joints and weight modeling as a critical mode of approaching
to wholly virtual bodies or forms. As a result, embodiment and corporeality—one whose cultural
these virtual volumes appear to have uncannily consequences we already experience but are still
corporal qualities of fleshliness, wobbliness, grappling with.
 SPLAT! Redux:
Rosa Aiello First Person Leaky, 2014
HD video, stereo sound
4 minutes and 29 seconds

Imaging Bodies
Courtesy of the artist

Moving through a computer-generated

space in the first-person perspective
familiar from video games, First Person
Leaky toggles between legibility and
and the Cartoon World
illegibility, inverting a typical viewing
experience and putting the viewer in the
position of the camera.
Order
Through the smoke screen of
computer-generated imagery (CGI), ​
First Person Leaky ​overlays traditional
cinematography techniques, such as Perhaps cartoon physics speaks to a utopian condition
deep focus, and the tropes of live- of bodily invulnerability then, and all the coyotes,
action cinema, like non-diegetic sound, cats, and ducks represent more of an attempt to hold
on a digital environment. The result
is a highly uneven realism, inverting on to (for kids) or return to (for adults) the body
an embodied experience and making the that could take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.
camera an instrument of psychology.
—Scott Bukatman1

Before a character model can be posed and animated, it

must be bound to a system of interconnected joints and
bones. Otherwise, a model is a static mesh—an unwavering
digital asset, not unlike a still image. A character animator
Cosima von Bonin Quiet Lads – No Shouts, No Calls, 2006
Mixed media on cotton folds an invisible skeleton into a 3D mesh, specifying joints
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, and defining their overall motion. The animator must go as
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, far as to specify the weight of each bone, in a process
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
called “weight painting,” as well as to define the joint
The bulbous, gloved hands of Cosima von hierarchy that follows. This last step works by establishing
Bonin’s substantial tapestry ​Quiet Lads
– No Shouts, No Calls​reference early a choreography for the bones: the farther the vertices get
cartoons and the instability of the rules from the root bone, the less they are affected. For example,
of physics that govern their animated
spaces. Gloves were a clever way for
in the sequence “root → spine → shoulder → elbow,” the
animators to cut corners, as it is far elbow moves less in relation to the root bone than the spine
easier to model gloves than to hand draw does. An animator must demarcate the degree of freedom of
fingers and skin. They also more easily
anthropomorphize nonhuman creatures. Von this digital skeleton/this 3D mesh—known as the “rig”—as​
Bonin’s floating gloves become a stand- realistic human​motion is typically constrained to one axis.
in for the reliance on a simpler fiction
that is equally corporeal. The elements of a rig are modular; they are assembled into
larger-scale objects but can also maintain their separate
identities. After all the joints and bones have been indicat-
ed, a model is considered fully rigged, and an animator can
bend the model into the desired poses.

1 Scott Bukatman, “Some Observations Pertaining to

Cartoon Physics; or, The Cartoon Cat in the Machine,” ​​
Animating Film Theory​​(Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2014), 309.
Gaylen Gerber Support, n.d.
Oil paint on fiber and pitch water basket, N
ative American (Paiute or Washoe),
Great Basin area, 19th century
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr,
Vienna and Rome

Support, n.d.
Oil paint on memory jug (Memory Vessel, Spirit Jar)
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr,
Vienna and Rome

Gaylen Gerber’s Supports series takes

readymade objects and recontextualizes
them in new arrangements that emphasize
their status as discrete objects. The
items in this long-running series often
contain specific cultural connotations;
in this case, Gerber has used an Fig. 1 Bone properties of a rigged hyena model
Americana memory jug and a nineteenth-
century Native American (Paiute or
Washoe) water basket made of fiber and
pitch. Each Support is painted in an These days, in order to crawl closer to realism, animation
identical uniform gray, an intervention software must account for as many contingencies as possible.
challenging the conventions of production It must contain not only the correct formulas for realistic
and neutrality within industrial
parameters. motion but also their reverse: a complex set of parameters
that define an armature of ​constraint​, and that prevent the
model from crossing into the realm of unrealistic animation.
Robert Lazzarini Teacup, 2003
The increasing parameterization of software, which affects
Porcelain cup and saucer, metal spoon
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, rigging in the process, has forced animators to contend with
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, questions that were previously irrelevant. Questions such
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
as: How much does Sonic the Hedgehog weigh? How thick is
An experiment in “complex nonlinear his skin? Such considerations did not matter in an era that
distortion,” Robert Lazzarini’s
porcelain teacup deploys two-dimensional lacked the technical sophistication to apply anything like
distortion within a three-dimensional bone density to the model. In short, software in its earlier
model. The archetypal teacup was then iterations did not computationally support the notion and
reproduced in three-dimensional form,
creating wave patterns along different virtual production of a quantified body the way it does now.
axes of its surface. The result of this This encroachment of real-world physics and parameterized
perspectival distortion is an exaggerated
and playful topology. Teacup embodies design into a space once ruled by the fatalistic and surreal
the tension between the material world movements of cartoon protoplasms has had a profound effect
and the technical products of animation
software.
on the imaging of bodies. Computer-animated imagery has a
long precedent of modeling scenes too difficult to photograph
or too risky to replicate by bodies. As a result, much
of what gets prioritized in modeling software are simpler
solutions for the depiction of realistic bodies, encounters,
and catastrophes.
The realistic rendering of cloth, fog, and fire requires
massive budgets and serious technical expertise—typically
achievable only by the most successful production studios.
Giulio Paolini Ante Litteram, 1985 Thus, the leaders in developing these glossy imaging strat-
Gesso, plexiglass
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, egies are those companies that can afford to add further
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, spit-shine and richer transparencies to their models. Today’s
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
viewers are experiencing bodies that, first and foremost,
The work of Giulio Paolini, who is showcase the costs of their production. This new visual
closely associated with the Italian paradigm has the consequence of o​ bfuscating the constructed
arte povera movement, often reflects on
the nature of artistic practice itself. nature of these images in its quest to present them as
Exploring the relationship between artist “real.”
and object, Ante Litteram troubles our
sense of the original versus the copy. New questions in turn result from this state of affairs.
Paolini’s practice of self-citation With verisimilitude being the new modus operandi of anima-
manifests here in the arrangement of
plaster-cast body part fragments on a
tion, how has the depiction of bodies systematically changed
pedestal. “Ante litteram” is a Latin along with the new manipulability that has been baked into
phrase that roughly translates to software? And how does the alternative—taking the edge off
“ahead of one’s time.”
surficial representation by concerning viewers with the me-
chanics behind what gets depicted—get implemented? What is
the nature of this kind of modeling as ​ a thing witnessed in
the world ?
Evident in these techniques—and across contemporary
visual cultures that use technology to extend or enliven char-
Andrew Ross Auto-Didact, 2019
Polystyrene foam, Aqua-Resin, pigment, acters—is the correspondence between our subjective bodily
PLA plastic, wood imagination and our objective body image, and the irreduc-
Courtesy of the artist
ibility of the one to the other. Modeling is a small sample of
Auto-Didact​assembles open-source digital a larger cross section of what it means to “embody” virtual
assets—limbs, bones, machines—into a volumes—that is, to infuse life into a set of data that then
new scenario. The disaggregated forms
were heavily dissected, rearranged, and becomes manipulable. This act moves us beyond preconceived
distorted in the computer numerical notions of passive, second-order viewer experience and into
control (CNC) process of cutting the
foam pieces. The sculpture transposes an operational, psychoanalytic, and corporeal exchange with
the superhuman space of virtuality onto aesthetic consequences.
the material, referencing the unique
experience of navigation in modeling
software. By drawing on the contemporary ∴
workspaces of modeling software, Andrew
Ross gives viewers the impression of
direct interaction with the shapes they It comes as no surprise that, with their history of plas-
are witnessing. matic, free-form, and potent movement, e​arly cartoons gave
Moonman, 2015 rise to some of the tropes of animation we continue to see
Cast plastic, acrylic paint, metal armature to this day.​Exaggerated proportions and oil-paint smears
Courtesy of the artist squashed and stretched their subjects, pushing the limits of
Moonman​is a plastic cast of a fictional animators’ new tools in the 1910s. Thanks to these new tools
and anthropomorphized amphibian. The facilitating the transition into topsy-turvydom, viewers
figurine, which is reconstituted from a
larger sculpture called ​W hen Philosophy came to understand the cartoon world order to be profoundly
Becomes Practice​(2015), holds a globe. exaggerated and unachievable. Cartoon physics superseded the
Originally fashioned as a builder, ​
Moonman​presides over both water and
normal laws of nature, as fear negated gravity (think of Wile
earth. E. Coyote running off a cliff and hovering in the air) and
1 Andrew Ross 7 Robert Lazzarini 13 Rio Roye
Auto-Didact, 2019 Teacup, 2003 Gandiva Ray Cast
Polystyrene foam, Porcelain cup and 2020
Aqua-Resin, pigment, saucer, metal spoon HD video
PLA plastic, wood
8 Pascual Sisto 14 Leatt, Cape Town,
2 Andrew Ross Bells & Whistles, 2015 South Africa
Moonman, 2015 Monitor, projector, C-Frame Pro
Cast plastic, acrylic moving headlight Knee Brace
paint, metal armature with sound Medically certified knee
4 minutes and 30 protection (size L/XL)
3 Susan Rothenberg seconds
Bear Skin Rug, 1995 15 Chameleon Glass,
Synthetic latex 9 Paul Thek Phoenix, AZ
Untitled (Ferocious), Lobster Claw
4 Gaylen Gerber 1971 Hand Pipe
Support, n.d. Glass, steel, plasticine, Glass, rubber band
Oil paint on fiber and dry flowers and foliage
pitch water basket, 16 The Tail Company,
Native American 10 Paul Thek London, United
(Paiute or Washoe), Untitled (Meat cable), Kingdom
Great Basin area, 19th 1969 Scary Alien Tail
century Wax, metal cord PLA Plastic,
Servomotor (XL size)
5 Gaylen Gerber 11 Rosa Aiello
Support, n.d. First Person Leaky, 17 Yamano, Tokyo, Japan
Oil paint on memory 2014 Contour Gauge
jug (Memory Vessel, HD video, stereo sound CG200MM
Spirit Jar) 4 minutes and 29 Stainless steel pins
seconds
6 Giulio Paiolini
Ante Litteram, 1985 12 Cosima von Bonin
Gesso, plexiglass Quiet Lads – No
Shouts, No Calls, 2006
Mixed media on cotton
Susan Rothenberg Bear Skin Rug, 1995 flattened bodies snapped back into normality. The impossible
Synthetic latex
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, plasticity and accompanying defamation of gravity revealed a
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, sanitized and tragicomic performance of brokenness. Cartoon
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
figures get defeated but do not die—they must keep express-
Susan Rothenberg’s Bear Skin Rug is ing themselves. Stuck in a tragic loop of resequenced death,
a caricatured and flattened sheet cartoons introduced a new level of abstraction wherein the
of synthetic latex in the shape of a
cartoon bearskin trophy. Its flatness major referent is no longer the material world but rather the
gestures to the strange contradiction technical culture behind the curtain.2
between the plasticity of cartoons and
the immutable laws of physics. Frequently ignoring the fourth wall, the first cartoons
reference their own making: a collective labor process that
condensed days and nights, cityscapes, and animators’
familial dynamics into images that move of their own accord.
An early rotoscope cartoon, ​Cartoon Factory​ (1927), illus-
trates this history of cartoons as being concerned with
the nature of animation itself. ​Cartoon Factory​ begins with
a photographic image of the animator’s hand drawing its
subject, a pernicious jokester named Koko the Clown. The
cartoon cycles through the processes of its own making.
We see an animator sketching the clown, who, throughout
Rio Roye Gandiva Ray Cast, 2020 the short, continually reflects on his relationship to his
HD video maker. Viewers even get glimpses of the animation studio
3 minutes and 43 seconds
Courtesy of the artist
and the structural hierarchy that comes with it, a blip
that showcases the uncredited labor performed there, the
Gandiva Ray Cast, a new commission tedium, and the classed, gendered, and racialized bodies
for the Inbetweener exhibition, is a
schematic retelling of a scene from the
Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata. The video
work depicts the moment Arjuna bests
Bhishma during the Kurukshetra War.
Bhishma, one of the greatest warriors
of his time, is felled because his
gaze has been diverted from the battle
through divine sleight of hand. When the
arrows from Gandiva—Arjuna’s celestial
bow—finally connect, they pierce every
inch of Bhishma’s body, leaving him
immobilized and held aloft on a bed of
arrows.
Rio Roye’s animation expresses the
divine logic of the original story using
diagrammatic drawings like those used
in ray tracing, a computer graphics Fig. 2 Koko the Clown​and Fitz the Dog
technique that renders an image by from ​Out of the Inkwell
tracing the path of light through a
scene. The cutscene and its aesthetic
of “godly light” is a small sample of
a larger cross section of what it means 2 This plasticity manifests on an intellectual-property
to embody virtual volumes—that is, to basis, too. Seeing the same, familiar face of
infuse life into a set of data that then Goofy means reentering that intimacy and all the
becomes manipulable. archetypes that come with it.
Pascual Sisto Bells & Whistles, 2015 doing the animating. The short animation gestures toward
Monitor, projector, moving headlight with sound
4 minutes and 30 seconds the disjunction between available tools and the exaggerated
Courtesy of the artist movements birthed from them. Animation, with its continual
Bells & Whistles ​isolates the elements reactivation of past activity, highlights the fundamental gap
that constitute a performance—its between the work that goes into making it and what is made.
choreography, lighting, and so on—and Few other practices of visual culture acknowledge this stark
arranges them into a synchronized,
autonomous performance. Pascual Sisto break between the final product and the time spent making it.
recasts the space of background as Yet another cartoon short, ​Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner​
foreground, emphasizing the animated
tricks typically used to enhance (1949), narrativizes the self-reflexive quality of animation.
a main subject or protagonist. The Chuck Jones, the creator of the ​Looney Tunes franchise from
resulting in-between space changes the
viewer’s awareness of their own bodily
which these cartoons emerged, implemented a strict set of
comportment. rules to govern the animated space of his universe. Much of
the success of these cartoons was based on the capacity to
make the cartoon characters feel free-wheeling and sovereign
in spite of the cartoon physics and the carefully constructed
universe they were subject to. When Wile E. Coyote launches
off a cliff as a result of the conniving designs of his
nemesis, his body melts into a gestural stroke before snapping
Paul Thek Untitled (Ferocious), 1971 back into place. The Roadrunner disappears into a ​trompe
Glass, steel, plasticine, dry flowers and foliage
Estate of Paul Thek and the Watermill Center l’oeil​image of a tunnel, which the viewer comes to realize
is two-dimensional through Wile E.’s subsequent encounter
Untitled (Meat Cables), 1969
Wax, metal cord
with it. Thus, the central gag for the Roadrunner cartoons
Estate of Paul Thek and the Watermill Center is precisely this instability of the rules that govern the
characters’ animated space. Storytelling has long been a
Paul Thek’s sculptural practice
prominently features bodily motifs: wax push and pullbetween fact and fiction, but, as these early
sculptures made to resemble raw meat cartoons demonstrate, realism was historically seen as either
and human limbs encased in plexiglass
vitrines. In an interview in 1966, Thek too costly to model—or no fun.
said of this work: “We accept our thing- The origins of animation are thus rooted in illustrations
ness intellectually but the emotional of profoundly unachievable relations to the world. To be
acceptance of it can be a joy.” Here,
Thek’s work is framed in a prehistory destroyed and remain intact is the fundamental credo of
of technical transformations, placing it the phantasmatic cartoon universe. The assumptions of an
within a larger history of modeling in
the twentieth century. eminently rational mind—that Wile E. Coyote will enter the​
Ferocious shows an exploded cross trompe l’oeil​tunnel, that the anvil won’t bounce back after
section of a reptilian head rendered
in plasticine. Like a mold without an
being thrown off a cliff—begin with trust in the natural
original, the work carries references laws governing our world. But the cartoon is neither wholly
to cinematic practical effects and the artificial nor entirely accurate: it’s both. From these
fictive, popular image of dinosaurs in
visual culture. In this way, it models beginnings, generations of viewers ingested cartoons as a
what is impossible to see otherwise. vector for the idea that no wound is mortal—and so began a
Thek’s Meat Cables consist of wads of
wax on slender steel chains. Grotesque culture-wide reimagining of the body and its relation to the
and absurd, the meat cables play on the world.
clinicality of traditional sculpture.
The bright-red lumps of flesh emphasize
At stake here is a fundamental belief in the tactile,
their own perverse artificiality. haptic effects of images and their psychic transfer. The
Chameleon Glass, Lobster Claw Hand Pipe bodies in cartoons demonstrate a plasticity, persistence of
Phoenix, AZ Glass, rubber band
character, ability to proliferate, and capacity to self-deter-
Made by Arizona-based glassware company mine that all run counter to how the act of animation itself
Chameleon Glass, this glass piece is a
hand pipe that simulates a fresh-caught
is conceived as a slowly unfolding process. Furthermore,
lobster’s claw. A rubber band is wrapped the limitless potential of the undying body that cartoons
around the surface of the claw, which is depict—and their nonorganic-ness—make apparent the strange
rounded out by a bowl and a side carb
for airflow. The mouthpiece is at the tip contradiction between cartoons’ ability to change forms and
of the lobster claw. The company claims a viewer’s own incapacity to experience this infinite pli-
the pipe was inspired by the recent
practice of providing lobsters with ability. One wonders if the increasing frequency of plastic,
cannabis prior to boiling them. aesthetic strategies in movies has stretched the seemingly
immutable laws of dominant cultural modes, such as live-ac-
tion cinema, toward the impossible—fueled by a desire to
see a version of an ageless space. Are we tantalized by what
cartoon bodies undergo, knowing full well that ourscould
never? Does the infinitude of Wile E. Coyote’s body come as
a relief? By cartoon logic, what doesn’t die is, after all,
forced to keep expressing itself.

Leatt, C-Frame Pro Knee Brace

Cape Town, Medically certified knee protection (size L/XL)
South Africa

The Leatt C-Frame Pro Carbon Knee Brace

is a pro-level knee brace that provides
additional structural support to the
knee. Medically certified, this brace is
worn by a variety of users for various
applications, including rehabilitative
and prophylactic (preventative) ones in
relation to contact sports. The brace
is included here as an object that both
models the body and is modeled by the
body. That is, it offers a carefully
attended to, subjective account of
anatomy.
The Tail Company, Scary Alien Tail
London, United PLA Plastic, Servomotor (XL size)
Kingdom
This Scary Alien Tail is made by a
small company called the Tail Company.
Popular among cosplay subcultures, the
tail is a gesture to the impossible
correspondence between one’s subjective
bodily imagination and its objective
image, and the irreducibility of the
one to the other. A visible add-on to
the body, the tail reportedly transmits
tactile sensations to users despite being
a prosthetic attachment.

Yamano, Contour Gauge CG200MM

Tokyo, Japan Stainless steel pins

A contour gauge is used to record

the profile of a shape. With broad
application in woodworking and tile
installation, the contour gauge
duplicates cross sections of the desired
object and helps create exact replicas
of the copied shapes. This contour gauge
is composed of stainless steel pins that
mark the graduations of a curve with
precision up to a 3.5-inch depth.
Inbetweener
April/May 2020

Rosa Aiello
Cosima von Bonin
Gaylen Gerber
Robert Lazzarini
Giulio Paolini
Andrew Ross
Susan Rothenberg
Rio Roye
Pascual Sisto
Paul Thek

Published in an edition of 200

Design: Alec-Mapes Frances

With special thanks to Rio Roye and

Evan Calder Williams for their continued insight

Inbetweener is curated by
Elizaveta Shneyderman as part of the
requirements for the master of arts degree at
the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.