Melting guinea pigs & flower incense trays
For the final project I have time to complete, I wanted to make something related to my love of guinea pigs. I had trouble thinking of what to do for about a week.
Eventually, I was inspired by the opening scene of Mad God for this project, specifically the text scroll of a bible verse from the old testament:
Leviticus 26: 27 “‘If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, 28 then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. 30 I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars and pile your dead bodies on the lifeless forms of your idols, and I will abhor you. 31 I will turn your cities into ruins and lay waste your sanctuaries, and I will take no delight in the pleasing aroma of your offerings. 32 I myself will lay waste the land, so that your enemies who live there will be appalled. 33 I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins.”
I like a lot of Sarah Welch-Larson’s insight of the film in her review. “The brutality is Biblical in scale and baroque in execution.” “The land of Mad God has been devastated by the doings of its own inhabitants.” “Tippett’s monsters murder because they don’t know how to do anything else.” “Progress for progress’s own sake engenders the treatment of people as grist for the mill, consumables that can be thrown away because their sacrifice enables further progress, until eventually all of humanity becomes expendable cogs in the machine. Original sin is an act of consumption, of converting others into nothing more than tools.” Her insight into Mad God makes sense to me, and some bits I disagree with, but I cherry picked those quotes because at my most pessimistic, those are the same thoughts I have about the place I come from.
Obviously, it’s a massive exaggeration to say the land of Mad God and Louisiana are 1 to 1, but the heart of it is the same. Compassion isn’t simply punishable - it just doesn’t exist, in either realm. The only glimpses of what could be passion exist only in the carnal rage of the creatures in the film - only indifference remains outside that. That is the feeling I connect to the most between my own life in Louisiana and Mad God.
My first guinea pig, Oswald, was the first pet that was 100% mine, and my responsibility, and I loved him a lot. I got him at Petco when I was 15 or 16. I did my research after I already got him, so I got him a friend and built a cage for him as time went on. Petco has a policy where you can bring the pet back if they get sick within a certain timeframe, and I had to do that. I think he was having coughing fits. He got better, and I had him back for a while. He burrowed in my hoodie while I did homework or played games. He was who I spent all my $10/hour on. A year or maybe two later, he started to get seizures. I waited a day to get my mom to bring it to the vet as I was at school - and when I came back one day, she told me his lungs had collapsed at the vet. It was obviously heartbreaking to me, and I, like a bad mother, never loved any of my pets as much I did Oswald after that.
”It’s just a rat,” is the only thing I remember hearing, even if other people did comfort me. Punish you for your sins seven times over. You will perish among the nations. I am the Lord. These are the Biblical words southern Christians live by, and none else.
I sort of miss making animations, also. I was thinking about that before I went to sleep, of ways to implement animation into my work like stop motion. I also have leftover cups from the goat project I need to finish, and I think the shape of them lends itself to hand drawn animation. For this one I’ll be making a series of incense trays of a melting guinea pig, coloring the body with orange clay and drawing on some details. The choice to make incense trays is from the Leviticus quote, as well as the idea of the decaying bodies, decaying values, and the decay/smoke of the incense stick itself.
