I’m always torn about movies, in which toys, statues and such come to life, “Night at the Museum” and “Toy Story” (and their sequels) are a few recent examples. On the one hand, these films teach children that objects are interesting by personifying them. If a child sees a statue, he may be indifferent at first, but after seeing a statue come to life, potential is born. “Yes,” they think, “this object seems like it’s just a hunk of stone but it’s really something incredible.” It’s only a few steps from this position for him to realize that a thing’s colors, form, history, and maker are its life. No, it’s not going to jump around and speak funny accents, but it is a transportation device, one that can take you to the past or to another world entirely.
On the other hand, children should be enlivening their world by themselves or with books. They should be the ones creating the object’s persona, not a filmmaker. It’s like a book with pictures. No one should be showing us what to imagine. We should take the details and craft something unique to ourselves. Seeing Robin Williams as Teddy Roosevelt determines our idea of what Teddy Roosevelt was like. Or, if not determines, it gives us a caricature that we can’t get away from. Historic people are a fiction that we build partly from facts and partly from romanticizing.
Anyway, (yes, I am going somewhere with this), where “Toy Story” and “Night at the Museum” fail in this respect, painter Jason Godeke’s work, showing at Java Juice, 125 W. Fourth St. until Sept. 29th, succeeds. Godeke imbues toys with a life all their own, but he gives them a mostly ambiguous existence (in the paintings. His drawings are a little more concrete). In his artist statement, he wrote, “I am experimenting with where and how identification happens. What level of specificity or generalization moves us the most?” This is the perfect question for what I want out of his work. He’s transforming toys into magical and wondrous things but he’s not determining our view of them. When I look at his darkly majestic teddy bear presiding over a dinosaur and two mysterious figures, I feel consumed by the atmosphere and curious about the characters but not satisfied. I feel like there’s more to the story but it lies within my mind, not Godeke’s. Whatever conception he had, if there was a particular one, was lost as soon as he put down the brush and this is a good thing. He’s giving life to toys but in a way that starts our journey rather than finishes it.
Godeke’s work reminds me of how amazing it was the first time I read Else Minarik and Maurice Sendak’s “Little Bear” stories. Little Bear climbed a tree with a makeshift helmet on and pretended he was flying to the moon. It reminds me of the hours I spent sketching characters and storylines for action figures in my bedroom, when my ego was so big it could fill these tiny, plastic toys with life. And it reminds me of special objects, like the Superman cape I wore everyday for a year, which seemed so important, they had to stay by my side at all times.
Godeke said, “A toy figure allows us to project our own psyche onto its blank expression … in making a painting of a plastic statuette, I aim to give that machine-made copy a hand made uniqueness.”
Godeke’s work fanned my interest in objects, their identity, and what worlds inhabit them. It did what a lot of good art does: it gave me tools to build with; it didn’t take me on a tour.
Jason Godeke is an assistant professor at Bloomsburg University. Godeke was raised in Northern California, earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Yale, and a master’s degree from SUNY Stony Brook.
