Religious fanaticism, decapitations, dating game shows, Dungeons & Dragons, Scientology, corporate malfeasance, eating disorders, madness and erotic fan fiction. This isn’t a description of the newest adult swim show, but of UCLA alumna and Guggenheim fellow Erin Cosgrove’s new animated video art installation “What Manner of Person Art Thou?” at the Hammer Museum.
The 10-part short film, running through March 15, tells the story of Elijah Yoder and Enoch Troyer, the sole survivors of a plague of madness on their Amish-esque fundamentalist religious colony. The two travel to the modern world beyond their borders to collect the surviving descendents of the Yoders and Troyers that “backslid” into modernity. The two crusaders see decay and evil in their encounters with the modern world, with each of them representing some aspect of the seven deadly sins. And in a style reminiscent of “Boondock Saints” and “Dogma,” Yoder and Troyer mete out bloody judgment on those they deem blasphemous or unfit.
To create this fable, Cosgrove, a 2001 graduate in the new genres department of the art school, labored over the course of four years (from 2004 to 2008) to write, draw and animate the entire story by herself. She began by hand-drawing the characters and scanning them into Photoshop, and then progressed to drawing them in Photoshop and adding aftereffects.
Although the drawings themselves are detailed, Cosgrove maintains that the limited animation style was somewhat out of necessity. “You see a movie like “˜Ratatouille,’ and you think, “˜If I only had a budget and a million people, I could make something like that,'” she said.
Despite the amount of effort involved, Cosgrove’s reasons for creating the piece were both personal and political. “I wanted to create a story that was in a way my secularist response to 9/11,” Cosgrove said. “The idea that people are flying airplanes into buildings in the name of God. Maybe it’s time do some work about dogma.”
In order to examine this issue, Cosgrove resurrected Yoder and Troyer, two minor characters that had previously appeared in a novel by Cosgrove. In finally visualizing previously written characters, Cosgrove took inspiration from one of art’s priceless pieces: the Bayeux Tapestry. The tapestry, which chronicles the Norman conquest of England in 1066, highly informed the idiosyncratic, very two-dimensional style of animation featured in “What Manner.”
“The reason I chose medieval art was to articulate the idea that the beliefs of some people seem to be coming from the middle ages,” Cosgrove said. “I mean, Sarah Palin’s pastor was a witch hunter. What kind of time period are we living in?”
Aside from the film’s influences and inspirations, the work itself manages to skewer the inflexible piety of the protagonists as well as the absurdity of the modern world. The situations in the film include a heated game of “Dungeons & Dragons,” a bulimia and anorexia conference, and a segment where the unwitting Yoder and Troyer become contestants on a show, dating recently separated conjoined twins. Cosgrove feels compelled to these areas and to satirizing them. “I think I’m incapable of working any other way. I don’t know what it is, but I guess I’m attracted to places of heat and controversy. I like stirring up a little bit of trouble. Probably like a skipped gene,” Cosgrove said. “There’s a good long history of work such as this. I think a lot of artwork today sort of eschews issues. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel a lot of work is fairly conservative compared to what it was in the ’80s and ’90s.”
“What Manner” tells its story with the aid of a narrative structure and surreal humor, two qualities seldom found simultaneously in video art. Because of that humorous accessibility, Cosgrove hopes for change.
“Sam Harris, he gave a talk one time about … the power of laughter,” Cosgrove said. “Until Superman as a radio program started fighting against people in the KKK, … it was sort of all right to be in the KKK. It was the ability to laugh that made them somewhat unacceptable in the US.”