CURA.

Of these, ATU 1-69 are sub-categorized under the heading “The Clever Fox (or Other Animal),” and feature stories of cunning, trickery, and intellect, identified with a vulpine spirit. To take just one example, ATU 1, found in Scottish, Sámi, African American, Palestinian and Indian cultures among others, is a tale-type describing wily fox’s technique for stealing fish. Broadly, a hunter or merchant with a cart of freshly caught seafood is fooled by a fox who lies in the road pretending to be dead (and thereby suggesting the luxuriant fur on its dead body as a bonus prize). Once he has been thrown in with the goods in the back, the fox eats all the fish, then quietly slinks away with a full belly. I mention the ‘sly fox’ category, because the fox is the only animal that merits enough folk tales across the globe, to merit a whole typology, suggesting a particular fascination in oral and folk tradition with this creature and its way of being in the world. (1) Though usually characterized as sly, the fox is also shifty and strange, quick-witted and intelligent. Part of his appeal is that he is a slippery, difficult to catch by the tail.

It is animation itself, and the creation of a lively presence within a gallery space that drew Copson to using laser animation technology, which he has employed in recent work to depict the archetypal animalia such as Reynard. “I was interested in using the gallery as a theatrical space, and the attempt to create a living character that creates a response,” Copson noted as we spoke over the phone recently. “It allows me to think about characters and creating a story worth telling. I believe that narratives are all we have artistically as forms of escape and resistance, and it is simply about how we reconfigure them.” Down Boy (2019), at Reena Spaulings Fine Arts, is a laser animation featuring a fox, that was projected into the corner of the room, appearing to interact with its mirror image. In the darkened gallery space, a thin vertical line of glowing multicolored light appeared like a zip in the velvety blackness, before a red fox head and its reflection peered out at opposite sides, and padded into the space. Faced with the prospect of his double in the mirror, the fox licked his own tongue, attacked himself, and then settled down to masturbate to his own image. All the while, Copson’s voice emanated (“Down boy. Good boy. Bad boy. Fuck boy. Who’s a pretty boy? I’m a pretty boy.”) before contemptuously spitting out the wisdom of the immortals:

Another series of animations featuring a bird, entitled Blorange (2018), and recently shown on the roof of Swiss Institute in New York, similarly sets another archetypal character into freestyling motion. A bird is cooked on a spit, it flies away, it keeps travelling and never arriving. Rather than a slippery intelligence like the fox, the bird is mythologically cast as an archetypal messenger. Duplicated across time and space, and without a particular message, the bird begins to appear as an empty vessel, plotted on narrative or ideological vectors across time and space. Death Again (2019), a recent laser animation of a skull with flies flying out of its mouth, recalls the animation techniques used in Renaissance painting, in particular Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533), which famously includes an anamorphic skull that appears when the body of the viewer is placed at the correct angle to it.

The sheer power of laser light itself is part of what gives Copson’s laser animations such disturbing vitality. A surprisingly mechanical, analogue technology, the lasers used in Copson’s vector-based animations are created using powerful beams of light reflected by mirrors moving tens of thousands of times a second. It was when watching footage of one of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon concerts, that Copson noted how the stadium rock-scale laser animations that the band were using rendered the entire space around them into a void. The impossibly sharp light of lasers, which literally cut through the darkness like so many knives, are powerful enough to command our attention from miles away, and when the figure made of such sheer brightness addresses us, it is as though they communicate a message from a different plane. In modeling that contrast of light and dark to create archetypal animated animalia, Copson has identified the contemporary moment’s perceived darkness, and within it a groping search for ghosts, universal truths, faith and spirits. His animations allow us the brief sensation of meeting a form of liveliness that has a longer duration than brief human lives: the supernatural, the ancient spirits, the gods, cut through time and space to shatter the dark.

1. See Hans-Jörg Uther, The Fox in World Literature, Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 65, 2006, pp. 133-160.