David Claerbout The pure necessity (J.B. vs Life), 2017
Washed ink, pencil, acrylic paint on paper
36 x 48 cm (14 1/8 x 18 7/8 in) (unframed)
61,7 x 81,7 x 3,5 cm (24 1/4 x 32 1/8 x 1 3/8 in) (framed)
61,7 x 81,7 x 3,5 cm (24 1/4 x 32 1/8 x 1 3/8 in) (framed)
The drawing is from a series related to David Claerbout’s animated cartoon Die reine Notwendigkeit/The Pure Necessity. Claerbout creates a small number of drawings with each of his projects as notes to himself regarding problems encountered during film shootings or preparatory studies. This drawing concerns the relationship of the cartoon character and a wild animal, an important theme of the animated work where the anthropomorphic traits familiar from the source are replaced by movements more typical of animals in the wild.
Die reine Notwendigkeit/The Pure Necessity is a color animated cartoon by David Claerbout, based on the classic 1967 animated adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The 60-minute-long film follows the tradition of the frame-by-frame animation, re-creating the historical characters with the most faithful precision. Claerbout's film focuses exclusively on the animals: Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear, Kaa the snake, among others.
Although the 1967 film depicted them as speaking animals, well-known for their witty dialogues, dances and jokes, they are here seen as “realistic” animals without any anthropomorphic characteristics. Claerbout represents them wandering in the jungle, drinking from a water spring, sleeping on tree branches, observing one another. Each of their movements is followed with precision and duration, giving the spectator the opportunity to observe every detail of the drawings. The title of Clearbout's work refers to the famous song, Bare Necessities, performed by Baloo in the 1967 film.
Over a period of 3 years, David Claerbout and a team of professional artists painstakingly redrew the frames of the original movie by hand, one by one, and then assembled them to create an entirely new, lifeless animation -a contradiction in terms-which stands in raw contrast to the lively and rhythmical original. Now devoid of narrative, the animals move amidst the jungle as if the story were of their own making.
David Claerbout is known for his works using photography, video, digital technology, sound. His practice revolves around the concepts of temporality and duration, images suspended in a tension between stillness and movement, as well as the experience of dilated time and memory. The artist says that he “sculpts in duration. The definition of duration is different from that of time: duration is not an independent state like time, but an in-between state.”
Die reine Notwendigkeit/The Pure Necessity is a color animated cartoon by David Claerbout, based on the classic 1967 animated adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The 60-minute-long film follows the tradition of the frame-by-frame animation, re-creating the historical characters with the most faithful precision. Claerbout's film focuses exclusively on the animals: Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear, Kaa the snake, among others.
Although the 1967 film depicted them as speaking animals, well-known for their witty dialogues, dances and jokes, they are here seen as “realistic” animals without any anthropomorphic characteristics. Claerbout represents them wandering in the jungle, drinking from a water spring, sleeping on tree branches, observing one another. Each of their movements is followed with precision and duration, giving the spectator the opportunity to observe every detail of the drawings. The title of Clearbout's work refers to the famous song, Bare Necessities, performed by Baloo in the 1967 film.
Over a period of 3 years, David Claerbout and a team of professional artists painstakingly redrew the frames of the original movie by hand, one by one, and then assembled them to create an entirely new, lifeless animation -a contradiction in terms-which stands in raw contrast to the lively and rhythmical original. Now devoid of narrative, the animals move amidst the jungle as if the story were of their own making.
David Claerbout is known for his works using photography, video, digital technology, sound. His practice revolves around the concepts of temporality and duration, images suspended in a tension between stillness and movement, as well as the experience of dilated time and memory. The artist says that he “sculpts in duration. The definition of duration is different from that of time: duration is not an independent state like time, but an in-between state.”