Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 43

Monsters of Grace

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As the musicians and vocalists of Philip Glass’s ensemble repeat these
evocative phrases with controlled intensity, the screen above the live performers
fills with a forest of digitally generated trees, which gradually, as we move through
the foliage, reveals a group of inviting, doll-like houses, with illuminated win
dows. It is the fantasy landscape of childhood brought to life, a place of peaceful
sanctu ary. Because the images we watch are rendered in faultlessly effective 3-D,
it seems as if the distance between this bucolic scene and the audience has been
dissolved: we are in the forest, gliding through the trees, slowly and with a certain
inexorably deliberate grace. As we watch, a young computer-generated boy on a
bicycle appears on a road that runs between the houses, far in the distance, slowly
pedaling towards us. It takes perhaps five minutes for the young boy to reach the
center of the performance space in front of us; just as he dominates the center of
the 3-D frame, the view cuts to an out-of-focus side angle of the houses in the
distance. As we watch, disoriented by this change in perspective and spatial dif
ferentiation, an enormous child’s shoe (seen in close-up) drops from the top to the
bottom of the frame, resting in front of our collective gaze, an ominous talisman of
disaster. What has happened to the image of domestic serenity and safety? Disas
ter has befallen the young boy, but the accident, observed only through the agency
of his falling sneaker, remains obscured from our view, and thus becomes more
sinister, less defined.
The non-specificity of Robert Wilson’s images is inextricably intertwined
with Rumi’s text, creating a sense of mystery and evocative sadness which is no
less tangible for being, in a certain sense, undefined. Then, too, it should be noted
that all of the 3-D digital images in Monsters o f Grace are determinedly “con
structed,” that is, no attempt at verisimilitude (with perhaps one exception, the
“stereoscopic couple” sequence [actually titled “stereo gram”]) in the creation of
Wilson’s glyphic universe. Rather, under Wilson’s guidance, visual artists Jeff
Kleiser and Diana Walczak have created a series of storybook images that seem
remote yet accessible, recalling the brightly colored world of children’s storybooks,
coupled with the surrealist beut of Magritte. Kleiser and Walczak have used digi
tal special effects (computer generated imagery, or CGI) to create such recent
projects as the Columbia Pictures logo, as well as special effects for the feature
films Stargate (Dir. Roland Emmerich, 1994), Clear and Present Danger (Dir.
Philip Noyce, 1994) and numerous other assignments. Given the current capabil
ity of CGI’s to produce near-perfect copies of human, animal, or objectificational
models, it would easily have been possible for Wilson, working with Kleiser and
Walczak, to create more “realistic” performers for Monsters o f Grace.
But it is the absolute transparency of Wilson’s creations in Monsters o f
Grace that transfixes us; like the nascent pod-people in Invasion o f the Body Snatch
ers (Dir. Don Siegel, 1956), the figures and locations of Wilson’s landscapes are