New Work: Photosynth Mutations

Peter Halley: 2

Peter Halley at Mary Boone, NYC (February 2010. Originally uploaded by ballenato63 on Feb 13, 2010.

Thomas Kellner

 

Eiffel Tower 1997 

The photographer Thomas Kellner produces work that represents his subjects in fragments like the cubists.  Kellner discusses his approach to panoramas in an article for Art in America (1999). He began his panoramas in 1997: “I had been thinking about doing a panorama of the country's entire border for many years, but couldn't figure out how to do it. Finally I came up with a solution: split it up into single situations. I fabricated special cameras that would photograph with eleven pinholes on one negative” (Kellner, 2003 p. 32). 

He later visited Paris and “decided to photograph the Eiffel tower”, that emblem of modernity. It was quite an appropriate choice of subject since he admired and had studied the work of Delaunay. Although at time when Kellner wrote his article in 2003, he was not using digital technologies, there is something in his process that corresponds to the nature of project 3. In fact his prints are not large prints at all, but contact prints. He makes the observation that “the bigger the image gets (that is the more film I use), the more the building itself disappears; the more you begin to see the picture itself rather than a image of something” (2003).

 Washington D.C. The White House (2004)

 

Houston Texas, Oil Refinery 2006 

He ends his article with this: I have gone on to photograph other icons of our culture that we all know well. A year after New York's World Trade Center was attacked; I am still thinking about the parallels that my pictures have with that tragedy.  These buildings, like the Twin Towers, have become metaphors for a culture in fragments (Kellner, 2003). The “culture in fragments” is the essence of the visual material that is to be produced for project 3. 

Kellner, T. “All to Pieces: Fragmented Monuments” Aperture no. 170 (Spring 2003) p. 32-7

Man Ray: The Return to Reason

Man Ray’s ironically Le Retour à la raison (‘Return to Reason’) is one of a few films made by a Dadaist. The other film-makers associated with the movement include Hans Richter and Rene Clair. Man Ray’s film was shown as part of the ‘Soiree du couer de à barbe’ which marked the demise of the movement in Paris in 1923.

Man Ray applied his rayogram to cinematography. I did not place Man Ray with the other abstract filmmakers featured in the blog because the quality is not related to painterly forms (Ruttmen, Richter, Fishinger) but a direct physical action on to the film and a process that relates to material nature of film. The abstract quality relates to the films “mechanics, materials, chemistry and techniques of cinematography” (Le Grice, 1977, p.34). The emphasis therefore is upon the physicality of the medium.

Sources:

Le Grice, M., Abstract Film and Beyond, Cambridge, Mass, London, UK: MIT Press

Berlin Symphony of a City

I have already included one entry for Ruttman that shows one of his abstract films Lightplay Opus I. Ruttman would collaborate with the animator Lotte Reininger. Ruttman’s reputation as a film maker however, is based on the above documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. It is such an innovative example of cinema that it “remains a model for subsequent urban portraits throughout the world” (Kostelanetz, 2001 p.534). The rhythmic nature of the film puts me in mind Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance from 1982 and other earlier films by Man Ray.  

Ruttman is not without his critics: “within twenty years” argues David Thomson, "Ruttman had moved from being a proponent of absolute cinema to a leading propagandist" (Thomson, D., 1975 p. 501). Ruttman's pure cinema "was always sterile and formalistic" and was "waiting to be exploited by a totalitarian message" (Thomson, D., 1975 p. 501). Indeed, Berlin does feature rhythm and motifs, "the large scale integration of single effects" that is similar to the hypnotic ornament of Celtic design, tattoos or a military parade. Is Ruttman, as John Grierson has argued "meretricious and dangerous"? (Thomas, D., 1975, p.501).

Sources:

Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes 2nd Edition, New York and London: Routledge. 

Thomas, D (1975) A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, London: Secker and Warburg

Peter Halley

Peter Halley at Mary Boone, NYC (Sept 2009). Originally uploaded by ballenato63 on Sep 22, 2009

Tomato Show Reel.

Above is a show reel of work by the design group Tomato uploaded by Ricardo Padua. The first piece of work is from 1993 and is a Radio Scotland television advert. To help attract listeners to the station Tomato combined “spoken words-snatches of the programmes- with moving type as subtitles” (McDermott, 1999 p.278).


McDermott, Catherine, 20th Century Design, Design Museum London: Carlton Books 1999

Rosalind Krauss on Postmodernism

The Cave: 2

Abstract Cinema 5: Len Lye

A number of the film makers and animators featured throughout this blog are represented because of their work of abstract nature. I do not think that I am a colourist or influenced directly by animators like Len Lye. The colour seems extracted from that of Gaugain alongside the brightness and ecstasy of Matisse and the Fauves.


Lye’s first film was Tusalava, but his first camera-less film was Colour Box (1935) “considered to be the first animation film painted directly on film and shown to general audiences” (Russet and Starr, 1976 p. 65). Colour Box was produced for the G.P.O.


The non-objective and non-linear nature of Colour Box “is created with lines and shapes stencilled directly on to celluloid, changing colour and form throughout its five duration” (Wells, 1998 p. 46). The film is made up of lines which dominate throughout alongside “circles, triangles and grids interrupting and temporarily joining the image, until it reveals its sponsors, the G.P.O Unit, by including various rates of parcel post” (Wells, 1998 p. 46).

The films modernity was not just expressed in its imagery, but also in its use of “a contemporary jazz-calypso score” (Wells 1998, p.46). Lye’s modernity lay also in the way in which his films pointed to the future, not the future it seems of animation or film, but that of painting. It is interesting to note that “Lye adapted the free brush work and wax-resist techniques he had developed in his batik paintings” that allowed him “to paint directly onto clear 35 mm film” (Watson, 1997 p.48). The result is gestural and “calligraphic” (LeGrice, 1977 p. 771) an effect closer to the aesthetics of the action painters like Kline or the more abstract de Kooning.




Sources:


Beck, J., (2004) Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, The History of Cartoon, Anime and CGI London: Flame Tree Publishing.


LeGrice, M. (1977) Abstract Film and Beyond, Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press.


Russett, R.and Starr, C. (1976) Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Van Nostrand.

Watson, P., (1997) "True Lye's: (Rem)Animating Film Studies" in Art and Animation: Art and Design Vol 12 No. 3/4 March-April 1997 pp. 46-49. 
Wells, P., (1998) Understanding Animation London and New York: Routledge


Further reading:


Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes 2nd Edition, New York and London: Routledge.

Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde, London and New York: Verso.

Abstract Cinema 4: Oskar Fishinger

Above: Abstractions 1946-57.

Oskar Fishinger is often seen as the pioneer of abstract animation. Jerry Beck suggests that “Fishinger had always had a dream of blending classical music with the kind of conceptual designs that might be formulated in one’s mind when listening to a symphony. This mixture he termed as ‘visual music’” (Beck, 2004, p.22).

Fishinger’s ability in blending music with animation inspired the animators on Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1941). He did work on the “Toccata and Fugue” (Bach) section, but “because his original designs were dismissed as too abstract and modified against his wishes, Fishinger acquired a deserved reputation as an animator with more integrity than Disney” (Kostelanetz, 2001 p.213). Fantasia can be seen as “Disney’s attempt to legitimise the animated film by working in a more abstract, highly aesthetic supposedly ‘cultured’ way" (Wells, 1998 p. 29)


Further reading:

Beck, J., (2004) Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, The History of Cartoon, Anime and CGI London: Flame Tree Publishing.
Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes 2nd Edition, New York and London: Routledge.
Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde, London and New York: Verso.
Russett, R.and Starr, C. (1976) Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Van Nostrand.
Wells, P., (1998) Understanding Animation London and New York: Routledge

Abstract Cinema 3: Hans Richter

Hans Richter is still an important chronicler of the Dada movement. His first-hand account of Dada, Dada: Art and Anti Art still stands today as an important document despite it’s the silly and appalling treatment of Hannah Höch. It’s a book that still appears on many a reading list in art schools today.

Hans Richter’s Rythmus 21 is an important early abstract film. It sometimes, quite wrongly apparently, referred to as the first abstract film.

According to Esther Leslie, Richter’s “abstract films were conceived as a light-play of positive and negative” (Leslie, 2002p.37). Leslie compares Richter to Malevich in his aim to “reduce form to its simplest element”, which Richter claimed “to be the rectangle or square” (p.37). However, she points out that unlike Malevich and others, there was no “assumed metaphysical importance” to these elements (p.37).

Sources:

Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde, London and New York: Verso.

Abstract Cinema 2: Viking Eggeling (1880-1925)

Eggeling was an early contributor to the Dada movement. In collaboration with Hans Richter he worked on abstract picture scrolls. The works are notable shift in (Zurich) Dada’s aesthetics away from Expressionism towards Constructivism. Although it can be argued that historically “the impetus for the production of the first abstract film seems to come from music and paintings rather than cinematography” stimulated by the “Blaue Reiter almanac’s call for a theory of painting” (Lynton, 2003, p. 119).

Eggeling was concerned with “‘rhythm in painting’ through all the possible permutations of certain linear and spatial relationships” (Kostelanetz, R., 2001, p. 189): “a general concern for line and surface” (Michaud, 1996, p.23). Above is the classic Diagonal Symphony from 1924, in which Eggeling produced more than a thousand drawings on his own.

Bibliography:

Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes 2nd Edition, New York and London: Routledge.

Lynton, N., (2003) The Story of Modern Art, London and New York: Phaidon.

Michaud, Philippe-Alain, (1961) “The Haunting of the Subject on Dada Cinema”, in (2005) Dada Cinema, Paris: Re: Voir Video.

Web 3.0: Nigel Coates, Architect, Author and Designer

First minutes of Nigel Coates, Head of Architecture at the RCA, participation on the STIR lecture; Web 3.0: Materializing the conceptual worlds of the mind.

Web 3.0: Materializing the conceptual worlds of the mind

Highlights of STIR lecture - Web 3.0:
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus IBM Academy of Science with John Maybury, Film Director and Nigel Coates, Architect, Author and Designer. In this evening's lecture we explored the cross over between real and virtual worlds in the worlds of cinema, architecture and information technology. For more information including full lenght videos visit www.designlondon.net/news&events

Abstract Cinema 1: Walter Ruttman

Walter Ruttman is perhaps best known for his film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City from 1927, a film that demonstrated the influence of Soviet film montage as exemplified by Vertov. Before he produced this classic film Ruttman was making short abstract films in the early 1920s. Ruttmen like Eggeling and Richter started out as a painter. For these painters-come-film makers “it seems that at first, they hoped that animation could be, above all, paintings salvation rather than films” (Leslie, 2002 p.46).

Lightplay Opus I has been referred to as “not only the first abstract film to be shown in public, but also a film hand-tinted in striking and subtle colours, with a live synchronised musical score composed especially for it (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

In 1976 Opus I is said to be missing however above is a film which is claimed to be Opus I. It is claimed that “Ruttman did not wish it (Opus I) to be seen, after he had made improvements to his later films” (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

As well as producing his Opus films Ruttman produced abstract films for commercial purposes in Munich and Berlin: “in 1923 he created the “Dream of Hawks Sequence” for Fritz Lang’s Siegfried” (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 41). Later he joined Lotte Reininger in her feature length silhouette animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed Ruttman produced fantasy effects using the wax slixcing machine he had commissioned from Oskar Fischinger. Prince Achmed was completed in 1926 after which Ruttmen gave up animation (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

Bibliography:

Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde, London and New York: Verso.
Russett, R.and Starr, C. (1976) Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Van Nostrand.