When I was living and working in a small, studio apartment in Manhattan, I would regularly move models from my own model graveyard to the trash for lack of space. I’d box them up and usher them down to the basement in a sort-of-funeral for foam core and illustration board only to discover, several days later, that they’d been rescued from the trash by my building’s superintendent, Bill–a humorless, dingy, man-of-few-words whom I prejudged as not having much imagination. I’d find my models set up on his workbench, under the light of a table lamp, resurrected for a command performance of Bill’s imagination, for an audience of Bill. This makes a case for the model’s autonomy as a work of art. For Bill, the model was an object separated from the context of the production for which it was made and divorced from the use for which it was intended, yet, it created wonder in Bill; it sparked his imagination. For Bill, the model was a toy, and he was playing.
For most adults, it is easy to dismiss the value of play—as in, ‘play is for children’—but for Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, play holds a deeper significance. In his essay The Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon, Huizinga argues:
Play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex. It goes beyond the confines of purely physical or purely biological activity. It is a significant function—that is to say, there is some sense to it. In play there is something ‘at play’ which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action (155).
For Huizinga, all play means something, and although I cannot know how play meant for Bill, I know how play meant for the models: it meant revitalization for the discarded works of art.
To play with something is to act upon it, and Bill acted upon the models; he retrieved them from the trash, he unpacked them, and he set them up in a new arrangement of his own choosing. In the process, Bill physically changed the models and remade them anew. This phenomenon of renewal through change can be better understood by examining Russian-American linguist and literary scholar Roman Jakobson’s writing about the revitalization of art–a process he describes as “deformation”.
In his paper On Realism in Art, Jakobson argues that everything is based on convention—a system of rules and codes that work like a language. Using painting as his example, Jakobson says one has to learn the conventions of painting in order to “see” the picture (the idea the painting is representing). But over time, those conventions tend to ossify and “the painted image becomes an ideogram, a formula, to which the object is linked by contiguity. Recognition becomes instantaneous. We no longer see the picture” (21). For example, Realist Painters prized verisimilitude—an accurate representation in art of the visual appearances of scenes and objects. However, there is nothing “real” about pigment arranged on a canvas. This verisimilitude was achieved through a series of illusionistic conventions, such as perspective to give a two-dimensional canvas the appearance of depth, and the use of light and shadow to imply that flat forms have three-dimensions. And over time, the conventions of perspective and light that conspired to signify “real” in Realist Painting were lost on the spectator. Thus, convention comes to obscure meaning; we “see” only the convention and not the art. Jakobson argues that in order to see beyond the ideogram, the art must be deformed:
The artist-innovator must impose a new form upon our perception if we are to detect in a given thing those traits which went unnoticed the day before. He may present the objects in an unusual perspective; he may violate the rules of composition canonized by his predecessors (21).
Enter a group of artists known as the Impressionists who prized movement and immediacy over verisimilitude. They replaced the illusion of three-dimensional perspective with a two-dimensional surface treatment made up of short, blurred brush strokes. The freely brushed color simulated the changing play of light and captured the transitory nature of time. These new techniques in painting deformed the conventions of Realism, revitalized painting according to a new aesthetic, and provided the spectator with a new way of seeing.
What is true of painting is true of scenic models. When the convention of ‘scenic model equals tool for production’ is left unchallenged, we come to recognize the model only as a signifier for the full-scale set. In order to see the model anew, an intervention by an artist-innovator is required. Bill was such an artist-innovator—he intervened in the model’s fate when he pulled it from the trash. He deformed the model when he altered its perspective and changed its composition; he revitalized the model by physically transforming it into something new. The same process of revitalization can occur in a more spiritual way when performing imagination in the model.
For Bill, the scenic models he discovered were toys, and without play, toys become defunct. In the 2010 Pixar animated film Toy Story 3, Andy, the movie franchise’s young protagonist, is growing up. Now, a young man going off to college, Andy has forgotten how to play, which leaves the fate of his toys in question. They wonder, will they be abandoned, or thrown away; are they just junk? In the film, the toys exclaim things like ‘we don’t need owners, we own ourselves, we are masters of our own destiny’! Perhaps, but only in the movies. In real life, toys need to be activated by play in order to be vital. As Susan Stewart describes it:
The inanimate toy repeats the still life’s theme of arrested life, the life of the tableau. But once the toy becomes animated, it initiates another world, the world of daydream . . . it is the beginning of an entirely new temporal world, a fantasy world parallel to (and hence never intersecting) the world of everyday reality” (57).
When left on their own, toys are nothing more than inanimate still lifes. Toys require someone to activate them with their imagination. When someone does stir them to life, toys reveal daydream worlds that write entirely new narratives—toys give performances.
This is true even for the toys in Toy Story. In his book Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar literary and cultural theorist Alan Ackerman explains that:
Early in each movie, Andy plays with his toys in a self-contained action of his own imagining and making; in short, he stages a drama and, in doing so, as in any play-within-a-play, comments meaningfully, if unintentionally, on the poetics of the larger work (123).
Scenic models, like toys, are inanimate objects, frozen in tableaux—that is, until someone like Andy, or Bill, stirs them to life with their imagination. This “stirring” of the model’s spirit is a kind of deformation whereby imagination ‘imposes a new form upon our perception’ of the model. Through this deformation, new dramaturgies begin to emerge, and the model is again revitalized. In his essay, A Philosophy of Toys, 19th-century French “poet of modern life” Charles Baudelaire discusses the way children create new dramaturgies when they play with toys. He describes a solitary child playing at war; in the child’s imagination corks and dominoes become soldiers while books become fortifications, and marbles become dead bodies. He says, “almost any object, with imagination, can become a toy, an actor in a performance” (199). If dominoes can become soldiers, and marbles dead bodies, then too, any object in the scenic model, with imagination, can become a character around which a narrative can be spun, and the model the environment for their story.
Like the actor, the model has a life both in and out of the theatre. These are two separate but related lives, and we must embrace them both if we are to know the model’s total ontology. In the theatre, models serve a function as a tool for production, but Bill was blind to that fact. Outside of the context of the theatre, Bill saw only toys which he engaged in play, and through his play, he deformed the models both physically and spiritually. Thus, in their afterlife, Bill revitalized the models and they created new narratives. The scenic model’s true purpose is as a starting point for new dramas to be made, and we must not throw away anything that still has the power to create. So, the question becomes, what do we do with the scenic model now?
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