Hot off the drawing board

OUR modern lives are saturated with cartoon-like characters, whether it’s corporate advertising campaigns, street art or cute pop-ups on our computer screens. Some, like Hello Kitty or Ronald McDonald, are familiar to any 5-year-old. Others we know as just “that green furry monster” or “that googly-eyed kid in the striped shirt.”

At Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum, more than 100 character designs, as varied as a distorted goose-stepping mouse and a Hello Kitty sporting makeup a la the heavy-metal band KISS, face off as two armies in the aptly named exhibition “Characters at War.” The show runs until April 15.

Arranged in rows some five deep on opposing platforms, the stand-up 2D cutouts, which come in a kaleidoscope of shapes, colors, sizes and styles, are imposing and alluring in their naked forms.

Displayed in a museum separate from their usual utilitarian contexts, the characters we are used to thinking of as playthings take on the veneer of art objects.

“Character designs in terms of products have been going on for decades -- the Pillsbury Doughboy is a fine example,” says UAM Director Christopher Scoates. “But by not showing the designs in the context of selling a product or promoting some other commercial form, the exhibition puts the designs in a fine art place.”

Although none of the exhibit’s characters is as iconic as the Pillsbury Doughboy, a few, such as Shag’s hula girl or Rob Reger’s Emily the Strange, are recognizable. Others, like a troll-like figure by London-based Klaus Hapaniemi, will not be familiar to U.S. audiences.

Most of the images on display originated from abroad, all pulled from the Pictoplasma Project, an international character design archive started eight years ago by “Characters at War” curator Peter Thaler and fellow Berlin-based designer Lars Denicke. Pictoplasma currently boasts more than 10,000 individual characters created by artists from around the globe.

Pictoplasma “started as a reaction to an overwhelming flood of extremely weak iconographic figures featured on Web sites, billboards and in animation,” Thaler, 38, says via e-mail from Berlin. “We wanted to set a well-thought-out, stylistically surefooted, high-quality collection of figures against the daily overdose of random mascots and annoying sympathy seekers.”

The archive has since spawned two books, two conferences and three animation festivals. Among its biggest fans is La Canada Flintridge painter and designer Tim Biskup, whose work is included in the Pictoplasma books and the “Characters at War” exhibition.

“I think the guys who do Pictoplasma have an amazing understanding of character design,” says Biskup, who attended the 2006 Pictoplasma conference in Berlin. “The thing that really defines Pictoplasma is that it forces you to look beyond the specific thing, whether it be toys or art or some other form of media, to what is character design and what is unique about the group of artists that is creating them.”

Thaler curated the first “Characters at War” show three years ago in Berlin. The show premiered in the U.S. last year at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., which also organized the current exhibit.

“We hope the installation works as a curated exhibition of what we consider outstanding character visuals by the international character design elite,” Thaler says. “And if you step closer and look at each character individually, you’ll see the incredible artistic appeal these works have.”

Along with the stand-up characters, the exhibition features an animated component titled “Characters in Motion”: more than 90 short films, music videos and motion graphics that offer a taste of Pictoplasma’s full-blown animation festivals and a contrast to what Thaler says are the predictable movements and the limited gestural vocabulary of traditional animation.

“The recent explosion of pictorial logos on the Web, advertising and other media have opened the way for a new breed of character design, and these new characters are reclaiming the world of animation,” he says.

For Scoates, who took over as UAM director 18 months ago, “Characters at War” is another step in his mandate to expand the scope of the museum.

Also on view at the UAM is “Burned Out by the Rising Sun: Works by Anna Von Mertens,” which examines star rotation patterns above violent moments in American history.

“What we have here at the museum is a new initiative that looks at art and technology, music and pop culture,” Scoates says. “What we want to do is incorporate all these kinds of ideas and issues, and ‘Characters at War’ was a wonderful way for me to insert something new and fresh into the program.”

weekend@latimes.com

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‘Characters at War’

Where: University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday; noon to 8 p.m. Thursday. Ends: April 15

Price: Free

Info: (562) 985-5761; www.csulb.edu/uam