Jonathan Monaghan: New Myths
This conversation took place at the Walters Museum in Baltimore MD, March 2018, on the occasion of Jonathan’s show After Faberge, which featured a series of digital prints depicting humorous and surreal takes on the House of Fabergé’s Imperial Easter Eggs. Jonathan’s work uses highly detailed 3D modeling and animation of animals, luxury products, baroque architecture, and the spaces of conspicuous capitalism to satirize the trappings of wealth, power, and consumer society.
The interview was originally published in edited form as New Myths: Jonathan Monaghan - Somewhere Between Cinema and Video Games in BOMB Magazine’s online edition, which can be viewed here.
still from Out Of The Abyss (2018); courtesy of the artist and Bitforms Gallery.
SEAN CAPONE: We’re here at the Walters Museum. Jonathan, we just walked through your exhibit here, for which you were invited to show prints as part of the exhibition of Fabergé Eggs, so maybe give us a quick background on that series.
JONATHAN MONAGHAN: After Fabergé was a series of prints I made in 2015, they are these absurd reimaginings of the Fabergé Egg, which for me is a symbol of wealth, desire and power, so I replaced the gold and jewels with USB ports or satellite dishes or bits of anatomy. They become these ambiguous, surreal objects, so you’re not quite sure what they are: a commercial product or a spaceship or something from the future? I think the work gets at underlying fears we have about technology and the future.
SC: Are you attracted to Fabergé Eggs because they’re a kind of ultimate expression of decorative craftsmanship? There’s a high degree of craft and detail in your work.
JM: That’s certainly a draw for me. But initially I was drawn to the Faberge more for its pop cultural symbolism, like something you see in James Bond movies, it’s something people are trying to possess, so that kind of desire for a possession was a way of thinking about modern materialism and consumerism. But also aesthetically, they are incredible, truly remarkable objects, they are almost otherworldy. All the Eggs open up, and there are these inside worlds in them.
SC: Which ties into your work, your 3D forms are always opening and creating themselves...
JM: ...and birthing things out. When I made these prints, I try and use the 3D software to accentuate details and surfaces, all smooth and slick, but when you get close to them you can see all the super-fine details. That parallel was something I was very conscious about.
SC: Are you using these high tech imaging tools in a way to resist modernism or enter into that space of extreme luxury, or a commentary on kitsch and pop art?
JM: I don’t see the works as kitsch. They deal with luxury but all the imagery is digital, they don’t have high production values, they’re not physical things. All my work is incredibly low budget, it looks really slick and commercial but really it’s just me on the computer making all this stuff. I think it’s more about getting us to reconsider ideas about wealth and luxury today -- I often look back towards traditional imagery of luxury and architecture, but we don’t see that today, all the palaces and the jewels. The wealth is more hidden or obscured, it’s not as decorous. But the bad things we associate with the era of imperialism still exist today. So, how does that play out? The work tries to get us to think about those fears about wealth and desire.
Installation view of After Fabergé, Walters Museum. Photo by Sean Capone.
SC: I’ve been following you for several years. I get referred to your work from people outside the art world, it seems to have circulated with broader appeal. I don’t see anything from before you started doing 3D animation and arrived upon these motifs, this style. What led you to the path of using animation as your art form?
JM: I’m self-taught in 3D animation. I didn’t have much of a social life as a kid. I downloaded some of the software, playing around with it as a teen. What led me there was video game design, I wanted to make environments for games. After that I started taking on the industry-standard 3D packages, but I was just doing it for fun, teaching myself. I was really drawn to the idea of creating an image that could be mistaken for a photograph. I was interested in the potential to create an illusion of reality. So, I went to college for computer graphics, and the program was pretty vocational, most of the students wanted to work in Hollywood or games, which is what I wanted to do initially. Even though the other students didn’t want to be ‘artists’, there were lots of art courses: drawing, painting, history, philosophy, aesthetics. Most of the faculty were themselves artists, so I fell into working internships for galleries, a studio assistant for a number of sculptors, etc. I began to familiarize myself with the contemporary art world. At some point I decided I could use what I know, my skills, to say something more challenging than what I could in a commercial setting. Because the stuff I was making for my portfolio was a lot weirder than what Pixar or whatever might like to see.
SC: I would LOVE to see Pixar’s discard pile of weird-ass demo reels.
JM: I don’t want to belittle what they do, but what’s coming out of the professional industry... it’s formulaic, the people that are studying it are just regurgitating what they see. But anyway, what I started doing in college was making animations specifically in mind to show them in a gallery or museum context, not a cinematic or commercial context, back in 2006 or 2007, it was meant to be experienced as a physical installation somehow. I would regard these things as objects. Some of the first animations I did were on black backgrounds, I would set them up as projections and mask out the rectangle edges, so you would just have an animated form hovering ghost-like in the space. I was interested in animation as a kind of art object. That was the first work that was successful for me as an artist.
Also we had a 3D printer at the campus, so I began experimenting with physical sculpture using computer fabrication processes. I ‘ve always thought about my practice in a broader sense, but using 3D modelling and animation as the origin of all the work.
SC: I’m going to break down the prevalent motifs in your videos and talk about them. There's almost always an animal, of a mythological or chimeric kind; there's architecture, mainly prefabricated corporate or luxury showrooms and futuristic environments, which are then contorted somehow; and finally, lots of rainbows. Rainbows everywhere.
JM: Yeah! Regarding the animals. I think with all my work I’m trying to create a contemporary mythology while referencing historical mythology. Escape Pod was looking at hunting mythology surrounding the deer; Disco Beast looking at the unicorn. With these new myths I’m trying to create, it’s a way to personify or manifest some of the fears we have about technology and the future.
SC: Anthropomorphism and animals are part of the DNA of animation, iself.
JM: Yes. It’s also kind of a way to poke fun at the commercial aspects of the medium. I think it’s important for any artist to understand the medium they’re working in, in a meta sense. Looking at how that medium is experienced in other ways -- we’ve experienced animation in so many commercial settings it’s important to subvert it sometimes. In 2010 I did a piece called Life Tastes Good which subverts the iconic Coca-Cola polar bear -- this cute bear having fun, but my animation shows this bear starving to death. I rotoscoped the animation from Planet Earth footage of an actual starving polar bear searching for food.
SC: What about the buildings?
JM: A lot of the buildings I reference are historical, related to wealth and power. I did a series called Gotham that took the facades of some of the first highrise luxury apartment buildings to be constructed in New York, on the Upper West Side in the 1880s. They had these beautiful grandiose ornamental facades, which I recreated in the computer and turned into a type of skin, creating a surreal image of architecture floating like fabric, or breathing. In my other films, they’re the houses of former Wall Street banking titans.
SC: And the rainbows?
JM: A lot of it is the “spinning wheel of death” from the Mac, when the system freezes. <laughter> But for me the rainbow is a symbol of the otherworldly, it has a psychedelic or transitional quality. A lot of mythologies have the rainbow as a kind of passage to another world -- the “pot o’gold”, the Rainbow Bridge -- the Rainbow Road in Mario Kart is the reason I use this motif a lot. It’s a bridge between this dreamlike fantasy space and things pulled from our reality. Portals.
SC: Did you see the movie ‘Holy Mountain’? The scene where the thief enters the tower and walks slowly down the rainbow corridor to confront the alchemist?
JM: Yeah it was a big influence on me. I read a lot about alchemy when I first began, and a lot of the symbols I use, like the unicorn, are alchemical symbols.
still from Disco Beast (2016).
SC: I want to ask you more about these luxury or royalist architectures. They seem to signify a space of consumerism and science-fiction. It makes me think of the movie Logan’s Run -- the characters live in what’s supposed to be a futuristic pleasure city, but it was obviously (in real life) just a shopping mall. And the fleeing animals in your videos make me think of the ‘runners’ -- those characters, like Logan, running away from, and I quote, “an artificial society centered on pleasure and spectacle” and into the landscape.
JM: Mm-hmm. One thing that a lot of dystopia science-fiction does is mine fears we have about society collapsing or regressing back to nature, nature taking over civilization. My fear has always been the opposite, where technology and our civilization maybe works too well, and it’s consumerism that takes over everything, and hypercapitalism becomes too much and works too well. In fact, if it succeeds -- hyper-capitalist society and technology -- that to me is a more dystopian future than it failing.
SC: Another theme in sci-fi is the upper/lower class divisions, like the Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine, or the android worker revolt in Metropolis. You have these luxury environments that are unattached from Earth, floating, but they’re always unpopulated.
JM: In my work, there’s no humans in any of the animations. One of them had Iron Man dancing, but he’s totally reliant on technology to survive. The worlds I create are very dehumanized, they’re empty. They’re antiseptic, clinical, they don’t have warmth. It’s meant to challenge our perceptions about architecture. There’s a book by Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, in which he talks about modern capitalist spaces like airports, Starbucks, whatever -- things that are uniform anywhere you go in the world, places that lack a sense of place. Nonspaces, everywhere-spaces. He talks about how that affects your perception of reality. You go to all these different places all over the world and still be in the same place, and that lowers your ability to critically receive the world around you. By creating this kind of fantasy in my work with these corporate or luxury spaces, I’m drawing attention to that or challenge that ... but also thinking how our contemporary desires are manifested in these aesthetics of luxury and wealth.
“One thing that a lot of dystopia science-fiction does is mine fears we have about society collapsing or regressing back to nature, nature taking over civilization. My fear has always been the opposite, where technology and our civilization maybe works too well, and it’s consumerism that takes over everything.”
SC: I want to get back to talking about animation and your strategies as a moving-image maker. Another consistent thing I’ve noticed is that there’s no edits in your movies. You compose these vast single takes that zoom in and out across multiple scales and distances. What is it about the seamlessness of digital cinematography that appeals to you? Are these long slow takes referencing other filmmakers like Kubrick or Tarkovsky?
JM: My most recent work has no edits or cuts, and has no beginning or end either. They’re seamless loops. Even the earlier work we talked about, projecting those ghostly half-synthetic life-forms, those were also seamless loops. Those first works, I was thinking about them as objects, not films.
SC: As permanent things, not durational or narrative.
JM: Yeah. Even in some of the earlier work, though there were some edits, the piece was conceived as a moment of another world that’s going to keep going, in an endless cycle. For example, I did this film French Penguin where a gothic penguin eats its young in a repeating process, and births out another young and keeps propagating itself. I like working in this way, it creates a kind of processional camera motion, where the virtual camera is almost not there. We’re watching something unfold, the narrative develops through the imagery and environments as opposed to your typical cinematic camera shot/edit action.
SC: Is that because you’re thinking of these as installations and not as single-screening works?
JM: Well, going back to making video games, I think of the films as somewhere between cinema and video games. In the game, there’s no cuts, you’re exploring the environment. I think of the films as something like that too, as the viewer we’re exploring in ‘God mode’ like in a video game, perceiving this virtual space and constructing this different narrative structure.
SC: You came into this cinematic language through video games, and maybe through things like GIF culture, as opposed to studying, say, structuralist film or expanded cinema?
JM: Yeah, but I am a fan of films like Kubrick’s as you mentioned. He makes long shots with symmetrical tracking, he lets the environments speak for themselves.
SC: I’ve been watching the film Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov. It’s one single 100-minute continuous tracking shot, no cheats, that follows a character slowly walking through the Hermitage Museum, this luxury palace, commenting on all the art and passing through period-costume scenes that are staged in various galleries. Now that you’ve also exhibited at the Hermitage, what were your impressions of how your work looked in a luxurious building like that?
JM: The Hermitage is quite over the top to say the least. You know we could look at a monumental undertaking like the Hermitage, think of the labor and resources, the decadence, the ostentation, and be a little repulsed by it. But I think the same things can be said today, when looking at social media or our consumerist culture, those qualities are still there. I try to draw these parallels out in my work.
SC: In Russian Ark, the central guiding character seems like a romantic figure displaced in time, as he addresses his unseen companion ‘behind’ the camera -- the camera POV is the viewpoint of the other character in the film who we never see or hear, or maybe it’s the POV of ‘us’, the viewer, doing a virtual reality walk-through. It seems to speak to what you’re doing, inadvertently.
JM: Studying film history, I was less drawn to dialogue and actors, and more to films that showed an environment through the camera -- where the camera was almost disappeared, really, and then you’d become part of the space in the film. Another one I can think of is Hitchcock’s Rope. The more you can make the viewer less aware of the artificiality of the shot.
SC: But, in Rope, you’re really just watching a play that’s filmed from the stage. I think there’s more going on here in your work, creating these impossible shifts in scale and zoomed details that couldn’t be done with practical filmmaking. There’s also a high level of verisimilitude, whereas you could have chosen a rougher or more expressionistic way of rendering your animations.
JM: When I decided to use 3D animation, I wanted to do something that could only be done in 3D. I want the films to be seamless. I want them to draw you in, they’re very seductive. That’s important to me, because it’s what technology does, it’s what commercials do. I’m trying to operate complicitly with the commercial aspects of this medium. I very much want you to be drawn into these worlds, I think one never-ending shot does it, and high attention to detail and perfect surfaces, things like that. The question is: what’s behind the commercialism, what’s behind our desires? What part of human nature is manifesting itself in these (non)spaces?
installation view of Sentries (2019), temporary wallpaper print.
SC: While there often aren’t any human characters in your work, the buildings have these anthropomorphic qualities: the facades are like clothing, fluttering in the breeze, they’re furry and wrinkled, they have orifices laying eggs and taking shits; the walls pulse and breathe, produce limbs, and become fused with animals. Is this juxtaposition and dreamlike admixture of forms related to Surrealism?
JM: I do think the work has a history to the lineage of Surrealism. It’s overused a lot now, but they were trying to get at something fundamentally psychological and disturbing with their visuals. What would they have made of our hypermodern world? With all the anthropomorphism I use in my work, I’m trying to show how technology is its own life-form in a way. Yeah, there’s a lot of birthing and dying, being rebirthed. What is the future holding for us? What is human nature in the digital age? That’s the challenge I’m trying to make.
SC: So where does that lead? As an artist it’s not your responsibility to provide easy answers, but to challenge the viewer only to lead them back to the starting point, in a cyclical loop... is there a way your animals will ever be liberated from these designer showrooms and Starbucks space-stations?
JM: The loop is indicating there might be no escape for us. We’re left with these facades and we can’t get out. That’s the contradiction, but there’s where the artist comes in, finding a voice within these technologies. Other people could work with a pencil and paper to make animations and tell great stories; I couldn’t do it. For me it’s important to use the tools and aesthetics of mass media to critique it.
SC: The problem using these technologies for art is we become too dependent on corporate industries and developer whims which determine the aesthetic possibilities, how it’s distributed, what’s even possible. I’m a skeptic of virtual reality: I think it’s isolating, it’s too corporate and entertainment oriented, it’s trendy but can’t ever seem to prove itself. However, I must say, your work would potentially make a lot of sense translated into VR or video game space.
JM: I’m open to it. We’ll see. I like to control the visuals, the camera and how people are perceiving the film. The narratives in my work are dependent on the timing and pacing of the elements in the environment.
SC: In conclusion: one of the goals of these conversations is to demystify the realities and economics of maintaining a moving-image practice. In what ways do you engage the commercial sphere and the art market? You work in prints and sculptures, but what about the video work?
JM: One of the things I used to do for work was create architectural visualizations. That influences my work, you could take a still from one of my films and it looks like an advertisement. I think we have more potential applications in the commercial world with our skillset -- but I don’t have time for it! I’m trying to make my work, that’s my priority. I teach, and that helps, I also work with two galleries, one in NY and one in Paris; I produce ‘art commodities’ that is an extension of my practice. I approach the prints and sculptures with the same level of criticality and experimentation as my films.
SC: Your sculptures have a very high level of precision and you work with materials like marble and gold-plated metal. You’re not making notional objects of luxury out of duct tape and plaster, you’re making actual luxury objects. I like to say there’s two ways to engage technology in art: you can either go right through it, and make the most sophisticated imagery possible, or you sneak in the side door, the kitchen-sink approach that seems to reject the limitations of access or knowledge of how to properly use it. It’s always a question of content vs. material -- is the technology leading what we’re trying to say as artists, or are we being led by technology?
JM: What drew me to animation was its creative world-building power. Theoretically you could create any image or animated film you want to produce. I didn’t have that power in any other way, in painting or drawing. The technology gave me this incredible capability. The challenge then is “why?”, figuring out what we can say as artists.
SC: Do you ever have the temptation to suck people in to that seamless visual world, and when they’re as deep in as possible, you just want to fuck it up, pull the rug out from under them?
JM: I think I am messing with them in a way. A lot of these works draw you in and confuse you or freak you out a little bit. There’s no glitches, even though the animals sometimes move a little funky. But with the discordances I create, it draws you in but makes you a little uncomfortable.
SC: There’s no ‘articulate glitches’, no hand-drawn animation, no sign of your hand in the work.
JM: It’s very much meant to be a ... polished mirror.
Installation view of Out Of The Abyss (2018), Palais de Tokyo.