Copyright approved

ADAGP has given me  its permission for the use of the Marcel Duchamp's soundpiece "La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...même" as a soundtrack only during the presentation of your MA project.

Adagp: www.adagp.fr - Banque d’images : http://bi.adagp.fr


Many thanks.

Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme: Copyright: 3

My search has connected me to some very interesting people. I am grateful for the kind responses. The New York Foundation for the Arts have provided with some very useful pointers, of which I am very thankful.

I did come across this great resource: The Dada Companion. I contacted them and that led to Ubu Web who have proved helpful in matters of copyright.

Ubu Web have suggested I next contact the ARS: Artists Rights Society. I think the New York Foundation for the Arts may have also suggested contacting them. 


ARS are quick to reply. I now await a response from DACS: Design and Artists Copyright Society.

Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme: Copyright: 2

I contacted LTM recordings, Caprice Records and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. LTM pointed to Caprice Records and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts seemed to be the wrong  organisation. The Foundation for Contemporary Arts pointed me to the New York Foundation for the Arts. The New York Foundation for the Arts also seems to be the wrong organisation.

All the above have suffered my rambling emails, for which I apologise to all concerned.

Caprice Records will I hope get back to me regarding Duchamp's  La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme and the ownership of the copyright and publishing rights.

Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme: Copyright: 1

Does anyone know who has the publishing rights to of Marcel Duchamp's sound piece La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme


The recording of Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor's Even) is a "musical erratum" to the sculpture of the same name. The sound piece was composed by Marcel Duchamp (ND 1913?) but performed and recorded by Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz 1980.The CD is called Futurism and Dada Reviewed, LTM Publishing 1988/2000. In the sleeve notes it says that the recording was reproduced by kind permission of Rikskonserter/Caprice Records and published by New York Foundation of Contemporary Arts.

The record company website includes details of FUTURISM & DADA REVIEWED 1912-1959 (LTMCD 2301) and a digitised version of the booklet (omitting the details about New York Foundation of Contemporary Arts):

http://www.ltmrecordings.com/fdrcat.html


http://www.ltmrecordings.com/fdrtxt.html

Caprice Records are yet unable to confirm copyright, while the New York Foundation of Contemporary Arts (if I am contacting the right organisation), are unaware of their possible publishing rights of the piece.

Feedback and Reflection

The external has brought up some very interesting observations about my work. It certainly reinvigorated my thinking and energised my reading of the imagery produced by myself and imagery in general.

The externals reading of the work helped to identify problems within the first project. The first part of the work which is called Deepest Autumn seems to be, as I suspected, the most convincing – although this depends on the format or the type of technology it is represented upon (a monitor  or via a projector) the first three minutes the transitions within the montage seem too slow.

The second section, Intimations seems sloppy. The painterly nature of the first section takes a back-seat. The transitions also happen too quickly. A flower dominates part of the second montage sequence.  The external questioned the use of such a motif, arguing that such a forceful graphical element creates a vortex, drawing the eye towards it.  The effect undermines the attempt to evenly distribute the eyes attention across the imagery. The dominant motif undercuts and disrupts the attempt at an all-over design that flows naturally.

The Irritated gaze section suffers from the inclusion of striking yet unsubtle and possibly clichéd imagery. The eye montage is full of mistakes and there are errors within the sequencing that causes a disruption to the narrative.

The comments and the time taken to reflect upon them have proved extremely helpful. Now it is a case of correcting these problems and finding ways of improving on the work.

Work on show

Barnett Newman, Cathedra 1951, installation view, 1958.

Gardner Rea, 'One nice thing about TV...' New Yorker cartoon, 1951.

The above photograph and the wry comment on abstract expressionism from the New Yorker is interesting, because it connects with a way of seeing that is suggested by the digital montages presented below; a slowness of inspection. It is not as slow as looking at a Ming vase or a Braque, but slower than most cinema (apart from the majority of Wenders work or Tarkovsky, perhaps) or indeed television (except late night Big Brother). I also oddly began to think of Sergei Parajanov’s Colour of Pomegranates for the first time in years.

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

As I watch the montage projected on the screen (via a very high end projector in a lecture theatre) I wonder of the effectiveness of the slowness of some of the dissolves. Are some too quick? Are the elements at the beginning of Deepest Autumn too mundane and slow in terms of there transitions? I consider the colour. The influence of Anselm Kiefer is startling, however I reminded of Robert Hughes criticism of his work. Hughes suggests that Kiefer’s “drawing lacks fluency and clarity, and his colour monotonous” (Hughes, 1991 p.409). Is that what is happening here in terms of its colour?

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.





Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

The Deepest Autumn section seems to work. It is fluid it does not have any jarring moments. On the large screen in the main lecture theatre (the Co-op) all the subtleties of the modulations of deep lamp black and Prussian blue are revealed. The bright white orbs and flashes are very strong and solid. This does not quite play out on a large monitor, where every thing is a little pale, bleached out, exposed.

Intimations: The Irritated Gaze II 2010.




Intimations: The Irritated Gaze II 2010.


Intimations: The Irritated Gaze II 2010.



Intimations: The Irritated Gaze II 2010.

The Irritated Gaze: The Irritated Gaze III 2010.

The Irritated Gaze : The Irritated Gaze III 2010.

Intimations and the Irritated Gaze lack this delicate handling. The final two parts do not have the same paint-like quality as the first section. Objects and imagery are overplayed. Is the all-overness of design maintained? Does it fall into surrealist cliché? I will have to see what the external has to say.

The Irritated Gaze: The Irritated Gaze III 2010.

Outside of an exhibition space, in the street let us say, the projections would not, I don't think, have a hope in hell of competing with the outside world and the spectacle of neon and the street.

The documentation is a little crude, but it does show some of the transitions.

Hughes, R., (1991) The Shock of the New, London and New York: Thames and Hudson.

Presentation and write up.

Digital Imaging and Photography Project 1: The Irritated Gaze.

Key aims and objectives

• To create visual metaphors that explore migraine auras and migraine experiences.


• The migraine auras are studied via personal experience and research.


• To produce work that explores the condition of seeing within the migraine experience.


• To explore the hallucinatory nature of the migraine aura.


• The imagery inspired by the migraine experiences are not attempts to produce medical illustrations of the auras.
  

To explore a range of technologies and media:

• Drawing


• Paint


• Collage


• Photographic


• Digital imaging


• Digital montage

The process was an attempt to compress technological and media history into a series of images: from drawing, painting, collage to photography, montage, the digital image and digital montage. Elements of the work look like photograms, solarization, abstract expressionist paintings and Daguerreotypes: see Current Developments 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9. See this discussion of Robert Rauschenberg's Retroactive I (1964). I do not believe that the digital montage fully achieves this kind of compression of technological history as seen within Retroactive I, but seems to represent it in more ambiguos ways.

Migraine aura visual distortions.

Migraine auras often include visual distortions, while other symptoms include “faintness, decreased levels of consciousness..., sleepiness….Twinkling and scintillating effects…” accompanying “visual auras” (Grossinger, pp.6-7). Accounts describe “small angled” spheres or disturbance suddenly appearing within the field of vision. This is described as a scotoma (plural: scotomata), while “the term scintillating scotoma is used to designate its peculiar luminous pulsation” (Grossinger, p.10). Where there is a blind spot within the field of vision this is called a negative scotoma (Grossinger, p. 11).

The psychological experience of migraine aura

"The variety of psychological experiences associated with the migraine aura include: negative (a guided tour of aura's hell) and positive emotional and cognitive reactions (a glimpse of aura's heaven)mystical, spiritual and magical interpretations as well as appreciation in terms of psychic experiences, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic interpretations, likening migraine auras to animals, humans or human-like formsthe experience of an increased creativity during varying stages of the migraine attack" (Podoll, Klaus 2007).

Digital Collage: Zoomorphic and Anthropomorphic Forms

Hudson, J Untitled 2010.

Modernist Experience and the Migraine Aura

• Not everything which looks like a migraine aura - e.g. Pablo Picasso's Cubist paintings - actually must have been inspired by a migraine aura.
  
• Likely sufferers: Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, who founded the metaphysical school and the surrealist Dali.


• Doubtful sufferer: Dutch Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh.


• Migraine auras do not fully account for or explain Modern Art
  
  
  

  Sofia Greene, Migraine aura, 2005. © 2005 Sofia Greene
  

  
  

  Anonymous, from Podoll, K and Robinson, D (2008) Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience from within, Berkley: North Atlantic Books Ch: 1 p. 1.
  

  
  
  Grossinger: “spontaneous visual distortions have been described throughout history”, but observes, interestingly, that “the association of a class of them with migraines was not recognized until the late nineteenth century” (2006 p. 5). What do we see in the 19th Century, but the birth of modernism and psychiatry?
  
  
  
  Is there are parallel between the migraine aura symptoms and modernist experience as described by Baudelaire and others?
  
  
• Modernism led to a new emphasis on the "fragmentary and fluid nature of experience" (Ward, 2003 p. 123).


• Baudelaire: “modernist consciousness is dominated by a sense of the "transitory, the furtive, the contingent", an image of the city and identity as being fragmented (Baudillaire, C 1863 p.23 and Ward, 2003 p. 123).


• Georg Simmel too commented on the "fragmentation of modernist consciousness" (Ward, 2003 p. 123).


• "Seurat had grasped that there is something atomized, divided and analyzed about modernist experience" (Hughes, R 1991 p.118)


• Gilbert-Rolfe in his essay "Edouard Manet and the Pleasure Problematic" paraphrases T. J. Clark's description of the décor in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Clark suggests that the décor in the Folies' as garish, "but the painting's prettiness is the prettiness of black and white punctured with intensities which signify softness or impalpability" (1995 p.3). It struck me that the migraine aura has similar intensities and this description of Manet's picture seems to resonate with my own imagery. See also here.
  

Clement Greenberg: In Picasso’s Collages the various elements, the lettering, the charcoal lines and the coloured papers "begin to change places in depth with one another, and a process is set up in which every part of the picture takes its turn at occupying every plane, whether real or imagined, in it" (Greenberg, 1958, p. 106).

The process of digital montage is also an attempt to achieve this. See this early version of Deepest Autumn (2010).

Pablo Picasso Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass 1912

Modern Art: Surrealism and Film

Still from Bunuel and Dali’s Une Chien Andalou 1928

Stills from Hitchcock’s Spellbound 1945, featuring a dream sequence by Dali.

Stills from the Irritated Gaze Part III, The Irritated Gaze 2010, montage: photography and wallpaper.

The connections between the above imagery is fascinating. Bunuel's imagery is sadistic, Dali seems to reference Bunuel and both seem to problematise sight and punish the act of seeing. Bunuel's action is extremely visceral and sadistic, while Dali plays out symbolically a sadistic act: the eyes transform into patterns onto curtains which are then cut out. Visual examples are also to be found here.

The connections to migraine's auras are not concrete or fully explored here, but much of the symbolism and re-presentation of hallucinations and dreams seem to suggest the experiences of the migraine and it's aura.


Works Cited:

Baudillaire, C (1863) "The Painter of Modern Life" in Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. (1987)Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row pp.23-27.

Entwistle, E.A. (1954) The Book of Wallpaper London: Arthur Baker

Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. (1987) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row.

Futurism and Dada Reviewed, LMT Publishing 1988/2000.

Gilbert-Rolfe, J. (1995) Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Greenberg, C (1958) “On Collage” in Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. (1987) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row pp.105-108.

Grossinger, R (2006) Migraine Auras: When the Visual World Fails, Berkley: North Atlantic Books.

Hamilton, J (1983) Wallpaper London: Victoria and Albert Museum/HMSO.

Hudson, J (2009- incomplete) Digital Imaging and Photography MA Blog: http://www.digitalimagingandphotography.blogspot.com [Last Accessed 7 May, 2010].

Hughes, R (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.

Podoll, K and Robinson, D (2008) Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience from within, Berkley: North Atlantic Books.

Podoll, K Migraine Aura Foundation (2007) http://www.migraine-aura.org/content/e27891/e27265/index_en.html [Last Accessed 7 May, 2010].

Ward, G. (2003) Postmodernism, London: Teach Yourself, Hodder Education.

Digital montage: problemitised sight, illusion, art and sculpture.

Greenberg's comments about collage are relevant to the reading of my digital montages. I use similar materials like wallpaper. There is the same optical play on depth and surface, foreground and background. There are other ways of seeing that seem as relevant and connected. The digital montage in its transitions shifts the wallpapers and the flowers from being intaglio to relief and back again. This shifting view recalls Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers which seem to be moulds and then transform into the very objects that come out of moulds.

Chadwick, Helen Piss Flowers, 1991-2
Bronze, cellulose lacquer

Still from The Irritated Gaze, Part II Intimations 2010. Digital image, wallpaper and light.

Edouard Manet: Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882)

Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882)

Manet’s last painting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882) is a fascinating modern painting. Its relevance here was at first unclear to me. Ever since we discussed modernism in the Media Technologies and Public Spheres unit, it has been recurring in my thoughts.

T. J. Clark made reference to the criticisms of the painting: it “was held to be badly drawn and insubstantial”, while “the light was ‘indecisive’, ‘bluish, (and) murky’, the glass and reflection were hopelessly botched” (Clark, T.J. 1985, p.240). There is a “general haze and dazzle” (1985, p.249) which provides us with a fascinating atmosphere. Clark quotes the critic Jules Comte’s description of the painting: “the bar and the room are lit by two globes of electric light, that white blinding light that we all know; but Monsieur Manet has probably chosen a moment when the lamps were not working properly, for never have we seen light less dazzling; the two globes of polished glass have the look of lanterns glimpsed through a winter’s fog” (1985, p.240).

The paintings softness and blackness is described by Gilbert-Rolfe in his essay “Edouard Manet and the Pleasure Problematic”. When it comes to the light, he suggests that within the Bar “the hardness and reflectiveness (invisibility) provide a space for blurring and bursts and orbs of light brighter than the light of the painting as a whole, but which is shown to be the source of that light” (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1995 pp.3-4).

Bibliography:

Clark, T.J., (1985) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and His Followers, London: Thames and Hudson

Gilbert-Rolfe, J., (1995) “Edouard Manet and the Pleasure Problematic” in Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp.3-12.

Gilbert-Rolfe, J., (1995) Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

The Cave

"Suspension of disbelief is a fundamental part of the effective use of a virtual reality Interface. Until we can ignore the interface and concentrate on the application, virtual reality will remain a novel experience instead of a serious visualization tool." (Packer and Jordan, 2001, p. 287).

This video is a video demo that explains the functionality of the CAVE®.

producer/director: Sumit Das, Alan Millman

evl contributors: Drew Browning, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Sumit Das, Thomas A. DeFanti, Alan Millman, Daniel J. Sandin.

credits: Lewis Siegel, Kathy Koller and Michelle Miller.




The Cave (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment or Computer Virtual Environment) was conceived by the media artist Dan Sandin and the engineer Thomas DeFanti with the assistance of graduate student Carolina Cruz-Neira in 1991. It was developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois in Chicago.


Dan Sandin, The Cave 'Virtual Reality Theatre' (Prototype: Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois, Chicago, 1991; publicly showcased: SIGGRAPH 92, (the annual convention for the Special Interest Group for Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery) Chicago 1992). "Virtual Realiity, accessed through dark glasses, allows users to feel as if they were in a totally different universe. For Paul Virilio, 'We are entering a world where there won't be one but two realities: the actual and the virtual' (Rush, 2005, p.237)




Michael Rush describes The Cave, a virtual environment, as “a cubic room, three meters (sic) square… consisting of stereographic computer graphics which react interactively to actions of the ‘user’, who is equipped with stereo glasses which make it possible to see other ‘playmates’ (Sandin’s word) in The Cave" (Rush, 2005, p. 234).


The CAVE's immersive experience "was intended as an allusion to Plato's cave; its multiple screens and surround-sound audio evoke the metaphor of a shadowy representation of reality, suggesting how perception is always filtered through the minds veil of illusion" (Packer and Jordan, 2001, p. 287). In his Republic, Plato "used the image of prisioners in a cave who define the basis of their reality through the shadows of fire dancing on the walls of the cave to develop concepts of reality, representation, and human perception" (Paul, 2008, p.129). The "Cave 'dwellers' do not need to wear helmets, which would limit their view of and mobility in the real world , nor don bulky gloves and heavy electronics packs, nor be pushed about by movemement retricting platforms, to experience virtual reality. Instead they put on a pair of lightweight 'glasses' and walk into the Cave, a 27-cubic-meter room with an open side and no ceiling" (Sandin, DeFanti and Cruz,-Nera, 1993 p.288).




Bibliography:

Packer, R. and Jordan, K. (2000) Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality, ArtMuseum,
Available from World Wide Web: http://www.w2vr.com/timeline/Sandin.html [last accessed 05/05/10].

Packer, R. and Jordan, K. (2001) Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality New York: Norton & Company.

Plato, (2008) Republic, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Paul, C. (2008) Digital Art London: Thames and Hudson.

Rush, M. (2005) New media in late 20th-century art, London: Thames & Hudson.

Sandin, DeFanti and Cruz,-Nera (1993) "A Room with a View" in Packer, R. and Jordan, K. (2001) Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality New York: Norton & Company, pp.287-292.

When Seeing Is Not Believing - Dana Foundation

When Seeing Is Not Believing - Dana Foundation

Posted using ShareThis

Sound

Hi all,

I have found a recording of Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor's Even) a "musical erratum" to the sculpture of the same name. It accompanies an interview of Tristran Tzara by Olivier Todd from 1959.

Tristan Tzara with Olivier Todd. Sound: Marcel Duchamp(ND)/performed and recorded by Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz 1980: Dada into Surrealism from, if I am not mistaken, the recording Futurism and Dada Reviewed, LMT Publishing 1988/2000. I have no translation I am afraid.




La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme according to the above recording notes by James Neiss and Paul Hammond can be described as "a possible system of musical composition." Duchamp's sound works require elements of chance: " the requisites are a funnel, a toy train with open trucks and balls to be placed in the funnel. The balls are numbered and represent separate notes- a piano, for example. Chance decides the tonal sequence of the composition, which is thus made variable" (Neiss, J and Hammond, P, 1988/2000).


The above version uses "ordinary pianos" which "replaced the ordinary action with a small electric motor with a rotary disc which moves against the strings to produce various overtones" (Neiss, J and Hammond, P, 1988/2000).

The sound that Duchamp achieves is similar to the sounds I wish to create for my moving images, some of which are featured somewhere in this blog (see the entry New Developments: Deepest Autumn and a Big Thank You).

MIchel Chion

Rob Coley introduced me to the writings of the French composer Michel Chion. He specialises in "electro-acoustic music" and produces works that often that "often incorporate elements from traditional forms- sonatas, requiems, masses, waltzes, mambos- but these are transform in the context of his sound based art which is ultimately associational in structure. His primary concerns has been the association between sound, image and memory (Kostelanetz, 2001, p. 116).





Michel Chion, Requiem - Excerpts, Part One

On the new pics: previous post.

Thanks Mike for your comments on the previous post. You saucy thing! How Withnail and I! I will never see these innocent, yes they were innocent, flowers in the same way again!

I should have added more comments with the pictures. To be honest I was too tired, it was getting late and I clicked "PUBLISH POST" instead of "SAVE NOW".

I had forgotten about Mapplethorpe, thank you for reminding me.. As for the method: these are scanned flowers. I love their smudginess. The smears on the scanner are shocking, but they make a wonderful texture. I must photograph the flowers too.

Ernst, Snow Flowers 1929

Georgia O'Keffe: title and date unknown

Mapplethorpe Orchids, 1989

Flower Pictures

These are new pictures. They seem to recall Max Ernst's Shell Flower work and the paintings of Georgia O'Keefe.

Tutorial

After the tutorial there are a number of things to consider. I think that one of the main concerns is with the installations space. How is it to be controlled and organised? How are people going to navigate or be navigated around the space? How can be move around and in and out of the space at will? I must reread my notes from Alex’s lecture on “Space and New Media”.

Sound is another aspect of the work. Is in listened to via headphones and therefore maintaining an audience or does it surround the audience. Rob advised that I read Michel Chion on sound.

Ros asked an interesting question regarding the nature of the imagery in the previous post: why the three leaves/shapes in the centre of the work? I did say it had something to do with the nature of the migraine auras, but culturally, and this is something I did not say (duh?); three represents the trinity or the triptych in art.

New Developments: Deepest Autumn and a Big Thank You

Well many thanks to Graham for the help here. He has helped me get this far and really figure out what it is I need from technology and software. Check out Graham's fantastic blog! Nancy too has given me some great advice and showed me with great patience around After Effects. Both have been extremely kind.

I call this section Deepest Autumn. I am fusing my numerous interests and concerns. The light effects are my attempts to capture aspects of migraine auras and there are plenty of abstract and painterly elements that point to many to the many artists I have blogged about.

It has a lot of the subtlety that I wish to bring to my work. I am considering drawing out the transitions between the various imagery.

Picasso's Collages

Pablo Picasso Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass 1912

As I work on my digital collages I am reminded of Clement Greenberg's essay on collage: "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" (or as it is known "On Collage"). Greenberg's article is still amazing. In it he discusses a number of cubist works by Braque and Picasso.

In the Autumn of 1912 Pablo Picasso began a series of works using a range of materials such as wallpaper, imitation wood grain, newspaper, a charcoal drawing and sheet music. This is one (above) of the earliest collages and perhaps even the first.

Clement Greenberg in his "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" of 1958 argued that pictorial allusion gave way to what he called an optical illusion. In his sophisticated formalist reading of the work he argued that the various elements, the lettering, the charcoal lines and the coloured papers "begin to change places in depth with one another, and a process is set up in which every part of the picture takes its turn at occupying every plane, whether real or imagined, in it."


Art News 1958

Source:

Frascina, Francis and Harrison, Charles (1987) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row pp.105-108.

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