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In Action

© Joe Jeskiewicz

Last week I had assigned the topic of In Action to the crickets chirping at ArtExercise. And considering the recent events I had left it as it was for this week as well. What In Action means is simple. It is the capturing of movement on a static piece of art.

The example that I provided was "Nude Descending a Staircase". In this piece there is no nude per se, but rather the expression of forms and mass in motion on a canvas. I've often heard that cubism is an expression of movement in a static canvas. That all the distortions and odd shapes produced by and characteristic of the art is merely the object in motion.

An eyeball on the side of the face and on the forehead isn't bad art or drugs or anything unusual but rather a stroke of genius. It is just capturing several instances or angles or movements of an object all in the same place. For an example of how this might be reflected in a more real life environment, pull out your 35mm Camera.

Now take a picture of your favorite local subject matter. For this example, let's us a Barbie Doll. Set up your exposure and everything and now cut your exposure time in half. Ok, now for the tricky part. Hopefully you'll not have to advance your film, or if you do then rewind it just enough to snap a second picture over the one you just took. Move the barbie doll so that it is looking in a different direction or has a different pose and snap again on the same settings.

Now once you develop your film, you'll see that Barbie has a very oddly shaped face, a few eyes, an extra limb, etc. This is Barbie in Motion! And you thought computers were the only high-tech systems out there. Another way to do this is to simply shoot two pictures and shoot both negatives onto the same sheet of paper in the same way. I've done this with 5 different photos before and it turns out great. Just remember your exposure times though!

Well since this isn't a lecture on photography, I'll move on. So you'll see that cubism, or maybe just the aspect of distortion that cubism has, is really just several instances in time placed on top of one another. But with a high-tech world at our fingertips there are other ways to show motion.

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