MFA Thesis, 2008

The Pixel Has An Edge, And It Is Double Sided
My animation installations consider contemporary power relations between physical
reality and the click-and-drag mentality. Instead of recording incidents, I re-materialize them,
challenging preconceived perceptions of surfaces and sites for myself and others. The work
addresses connections between bodies and information where selection, ideology,
movement and lack intersect.
Sites become spaces of painting when these animations unpack compressed information
into and across architectural environments. Painted marks traversing locations in exaggerated
proportions transform situational meanings: a white-box gallery becomes a site of invitation and
incarceration defined by cartoony impacts; a carousel ceiling transmits a video-game fresco; a
former weapons testing facility is haunted by marks of redaction. My animations are actually
“paintings” built from film editing techniques -- action painting moves sequenced, “spliced”
together then layered in virtual planes become elegantly absurd constructivist collages in motion
through and across real spaces.
How information builds, impacts, augments and degrades bodies, and vice versa, is where
truth and consequences are found in the 21st century. By cross-pollinating the languages of
animation, collage, montage and painting, my projects are simultaneously process-driven and
political in content, whether site-specific events or object-based experiences. These hybridized
bodies of information reflect upon conflicting digital definitions and illusions of power in the
overlap where the hand ends and ones and zeroes begin. We are caught up in a cycle of feedback, distorted beyond individual control. Demographic
information is collected and delivered back to us in a multitude of forms which we have shaped
for better or worse. This is no paranoid conspiracy theory; rather, it’s the way of the world as
we have forged it through creation and application of technology. Philosophers and artists have
engaged with this phenomenon in their work since the end of World War II.
In the 1970’s Michel Foucault presented the “unequal gaze” of the panopticon as a
metaphor for Western civilization and its controls (Foucault 72). Designed by Jeremy Bentham,
the nineteenth-century circular prison had a centralized guard tower which allowed continuous
view of the entire prison community from all angles at all times beyond their knowledge and
consent (Foucault 72). Foucault observed power (and political economies --applied, collected
resources-- of truth) was held and expanded by institutions which collected and processed the
information, not the incarcerated who produced the data (Foucault 131). However, since the
obliteration of the “fourth wall” in Bentham’s design allows open flow of information -- one
assumes the guards are also being watched, if not influenced. How does this affect truth?
The 1930’s epic theater of Bertolt Brecht appealed to reason by “breaking the fourth
wall,” the imaginary division between audience and performers on stage. Performers addressed
the audience as if they too were in the play, sometimes going into the orchestra to interact oneon-one with individuals. These tactics, originally used to affect political thought and action
outside the theater, were later co-opted into films, which eventually streamlined politics out,
favoring instead a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” brand of humor still used today. Information
disseminated for collection by complicit receivers easily becomes propaganda when the core
intention is manipulation and persuasion, whether political or pacifying in its application. What
are the implications for truth when presented theatrically in a didactic manner? Whose truth is it?
Jean-Luc Godard and Chuck Jones both broke the “fourth wall” in their films with very
different positions regarding control. Godard’s ethos can be shrill in content but rich in feeling
from his montage style. When he steps outside his Maoist-of-privilege political ideology, as in the
flashback escape sequence of Pierrot le Fou (1965), the edits provide a truth about disconnected
associations of adrenalized recall. Here Godard uses cinematic apparatus to demonstrate
sensations of memory and its breaks (Jennings) to brilliant affect. Feeling is generated from the
movie, instead of about it, and this veracity, common to modern viewers, is related to them by
combining physical action of the apparatus and illusion of shared experience.
But Godard’s montage affect gets steamrolled by his politics of control. When Anna
Karina’s character in Pierrot le Fou directly addresses the camera, “breaking the fourth wall” to
“directly connect” with audiences in theatrically didactic fashion, she delivers Godard’s contempt
for the viewer instead. If the cinema is an inverted panopticon in which the guard tower becomes
the subject of surveillance, Godard reminds us, through Karina, just who's in charge here. Her
character's coolly detached action is recorded to convey a feeling, reinforcing ideas proposed and
staged by Godard, who stridently insists we digest his truth to be our own. A more useful truth in
Pierrot le Fou is found in how the characters navigate genres within the film as locations in
themselves, forced to play parts in games predetermined by cinema, history, and culture.
Twelve years earlier Chuck Jones
attacked the same problem in animated
cartoon form. Duck Amuck (1953) uses a
theatrically Brechtian approach to lay bare
the cinematic apparatus and its properties of
control. With practically no cross-cutting to
interrupt continuity, scenic edits abound.
Daffy Duck begins ugly and ends
top and middle: two views of Pierrot le Fou (film), Godard, Jean-Luc.
direction and screenplay, 1965.
uglier: forced to endure a new mise en scène
determining his character every 20 seconds
or so, his body is replaced, erased, or
defaced over and over. Daffy’s attempts to
direct the crew/audience filming/
animating him are thwarted at every turn, so
the “fourth wall” that boundaries between
viewer/crew/director are blurred. The film
is punishing: dark, funny, ludicrous, and
violent all at once as Jones uses empathy as
a weapon.
One reason this film retains its power
sixty years on is that sequential drawings
are what get photographed here, not actors.
Directness comes from the hand instead of
political ideology. Everyone has felt as
put-through-the-ringer, led on and betrayed as
Jones, Charles M. Duck Amuck, (film), direction and story,
Warner Brothers, 1953.
Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck. This easily relates to us, whose expectations of our lives and those in
them inevitably disappoint. The movie’s ending suggests we enjoy these existential traumas. No
matter where he ends up, Daffy never belongs, but his lack of control is completely controlled. We
return to narrative manipulation as addicts return to narcotics, fully aware of our participation. We
enjoy drama to the point of complicity in it: Daffy will do just about anything for the camera, and
Bugs Bunny, the animator, goes to ridiculous extremes to maintain his powerful control over Daffy.
Today we live in and through the framing of "reality" television. The prisoners watch the
guards and talk trash about them in the yard or at the water cooler. We are Daffy, but we think we
are, or at least aspire to be, Bugs -- clean, controlled, untouched, above it all. If reason has
supplanted feeling to a cartoony extreme, has Foucault’s “unequal gaze” become equalizing,
aspirational, or rationalized into the mob mentality it was meant to control? In re-orienting the
terms set forth by Foucault, Brecht, Godard, Jones and American Idol, another path emerges loaded
with possibility for the activated participant.
Figures are unnecessary as symbolic avatars for viewers. Animation in abstract form can
unfold, reveal and expose information to audiences -- it can show participants how to see it on
equal terms rather than coming from the voice of a master. This mode of didacticism re-orients
decision-making to the viewer as direct experiential thought. Our day-to-day existence is all about
navigating tsunamis of information and data, suspended in a technologically sublime state of being
as described by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Artwork/information does not provide truth (Gilbert-Rolfe),
it creates access to it. Accustomed to editing massive amounts of information to make sense of it,
are we too exhausted by the process to find our own truths within it?
When information becomes spatial in architecture, as in Duck Amuck, we too are faced
with bodies which envelop and invade us. Times Square, Shibuya Crossing, Rio’s Carnival, the
Champs-Elysees/Arc de Triomphe rotary and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus all overpower us with
noise and spectacle in an all-encompassing fashion. We choose to go to where choices get made
for us. The minimalist sprawl of Tiananmen Square, however, produces a disconcerting feeling in
its emptiness: individual power taken has much higher personal consequence.
This twenty-first century feeling is neither polemical nor angst to be performed. This
feeling comes from the conflict between real materials and intangible information; where they
converge not as products but as openings, escape routes for imagination beyond the recording
mechanism of photography. This feeling challenges ideology as we know it. How do others'
ideas and imperatives infect our own? We generate demographic data but are not in control of it,
although we think otherwise. What kind of information are we given; how can we tell? How do
we edit ourselves to our own detriment? Franz Kline described his work as “painting experiences
Sylvester 133).” How does animation become an experience, an event, outside controlled narrative
and its biases?
Disinformation Breakdown (DB) was the first large scale (15' high by 60' long) video
installation I made at Art Center. Despite the fact that most of my art school peers were of draft or
military service age, we were all making and studying art in a former testing facility for weapons
of mass destruction, rarely if ever mentioning the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan in direct
conversation amongst each other or in class. A site of pre-emptive war all around us was
relegated to elephant-in-the-room status.
The evening of January 24, 2008, the interior of Art Center's South Campus Wind Tunnel
served as a support for a video animation projection roughly four times as long as it was high,
divided by the corner, with one side twice as long as the short side. The three channel synchronous
video was projected into the northeast corner of the Wind Tunnel, cycling in 6.5 minute durations.
DB was a site-driven artwork -- all the ideas and action are derived from the fact that
nuclear weapons delivery systems and air-to-air Sidewinder missiles (still in use today) were
designed and tested in the Guggenheim family-financed Wind Tunnel (Bristow). The South
Campus Wind Tunnel backstory is alluded to only twice on-site: once on a vague placard showing
its construction and decommission, and the militaristic roof design of the building. A spot-lit flag
and gridded patio adjacent to a gray Quonset-style corrugated arch is surrounded by a garden
overlooking the San Gabriel mountains.
Originally intended for projection on-site of the Wind Tunnel roof, inclement weather drove
the installation into the belly of the beast, where the “magic” actually happened. Regardless, one
goal of DB was to extract the hidden original agenda of the site by projecting across it, in effect
turning it inside out. A secondary aim was to simplify my means of animation production using a
more minimal approach to organizing elements in and across space. The projection field within
the Wind Tunnel initially filled with a
video static pattern in a systemic rhythm;
more psychedelically tiled than random,
and in a strange purple and green hue
rather than the monochrome, "old
television" variety. Entering from the
courtyard, one saw, distorted by a forced
perspectival point of view, huge shapes
-- paint-like splotches-- filled with
Initial mock-up of Disinformation Breakdown, roof of Art Center’s
South Campus Wind Tunnel, 2008.
flickering color video snow. When
entering from the parking lot entrance,
the near right-hand foreground of the
space was filled with ten rows of empty
lime green chairs facing a bright vista of
oppositional shapes atop a video green
field.
A less-is-more, site-driven
approach to animating space was
suggested to me by a work I had
experienced at the Tate Modern's
Turbine Hall in London five years prior,
Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project (2003).
Using only the simplest of forms -yellow monofilament light, a half circle
reflecting up into a mirrored ceiling to
create the illusion of a sun-like disk, and
a purple haze pumped into the space,
Eliasson turned the massive Turbine Hall
into a cathedral of power (sun) worship.
Eliasson, Olafur. Weather Project, site-specific installation,
monofilament light and vapor, 2003.
What was the Turbine Hall for if not to generate energy through power and light, replacing or
replicating that of the sun?
The Tate Modern, like the Wind Tunnel, is a rehabilitated space where power, no
longer manufactured as energy or weapons, gets presented instead as ideas for mass consumption.
Participants' engagement with Eliasson's installation was fascinating… some people laid down,
shirts off, on the cold concrete floor as if sunbathing! I experienced an all-at-once view of a solar
field which immediately fragmented down into the material elements previously listed. None of
those parts lost their power as individual elements in the transition from recognition to illusion.
DB attempted to integrate the simplicity of the Weather Project by using minimal
animated design elements while deviating from that logic in presentation. I chose four specific
forms to derive objects from as a starting point: splotch, blur, video mosaic, and static. These
marks of redaction are signs used to cover information in video and painting, so I cross-pollinated
--collaged-- them as much as possible. Static was made from scanned scumbled paint; painted
splotches were filtered into censored geometric forms; splotch and static together was always
subject to blur. Splotches in motion became hard-edge objects removed from the macho cliches
of action painting, freed from the recorded gesture of the master to roam about the room.
Only from the parking lot entrance and second floor could the projection of DB be seen in
its entirety. The closer one approached, the more DB's overwhelming size filled and distorted in
one's field of vision. From either entry point, the video functioned more like painting in
installation than black box cinema. The viewer's body position was important-- it changed the
scaling and perception of the experience. This was reminiscent of the multivalent affect James
Rosenquist's painting F-111 had on me several years before.
F-111, a modular oil painting from 1964-5 about how the military industrial complex
pervades every aspect of American life, was designed to wrap around and cover all the walls of
Leo Castelli's 22.5 foot wide x 24 foot long New York gallery (Rosenquist 154, 152). The
painting depicts an F-111 Aardvark warplane in metaphorical camouflage, covered by numerous
objects of middle class life loaded with multiple meanings. Spaghetti references dinner from a
can, disemboweled carnage, and Abstract Expressionist skeins of paint in soft focus. A tire is a
meeting point for capitalism and royalty (Rosenquist 160-2). A cracked lightbulb references the
fragility of itself and an egg, "which both burst when dropped like bombs (Rosenquist 160-2),"
opening a mental reference to the double sided Pandora's Box opened by technology in corporate
hands. The last thing seen is the plane itself, made even more difficult by close proximity.
“I wanted to….give the idea to people of collecting fragments of vision (Stiles 348)." - James Rosenquist on his collage-based process for F-111.
Ten feet high by eighty six feet long, I first experienced F-111 as intended: a tight four wall
room installation with hot overhead lights and two entry/exit points. Impossible to take in all at once
at the Guggenheim Museum 2003 retrospective installation, "fragments of vision" come as fast and
furious as their connections. Rosenquist chose the spaghetti, tire, and lightbulbs to function as
shifting signifiers. Positioned locally in the painting but interpreted in compressed space and
extended time (in and out of exhibition in memory), the objects' meanings change as the person
moves though the room and the eye moves across and into the painting surface. Powers of
association and differences in repetition magnified by four-wall installation are reduced when F-111
is seen its entirety across one single wall, as on the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art in 2004.
With wall space all around, F-111 became a small hijacked plane; a trophy head of institutionalized
power; a passive billboard rather than activated installation.
top and bottom: Rosenquist, James. F-111, multipanel room installation: oil on canvas and aluminum panels, 10 x 86 feet, 1964-5.
The corner in DB, an uncrossable
boundary and center of gravity in the
original and default locations, was
crucial in avoiding that trap. Helpful too
was the door to nowhere in the Wind
Tunnel corner, an escape hatch providing
no comfort. From either entrance,
parking lot or courtyard, one saw the edges
of the two splotches facing each other in
oppositional motion. The shapes floated
Detail from documentation of Disinformation Breakdown,
3 channel sync video installation, 6.5 minutes animated video with 9 minute
looped cellphone soundtrack, 15’ x 60’, Art Center South Campus
Wind Tunnel, 2008.
vertically toward and away from the floor,
then up against the corner into which they
were projected. Each had pulsating drippy
edges reaching out and retracting in
cyclical movements, sometimes reaching
out for contact with, then later seeming to
fire, gun-like toward, its opposite.
My design brought two associations
from Diana Thater. First, a 1914 Franz
Marc, Franz. Fighting Forms, oil on canvas, 36 x 55 inches, 1914.
Marc painting, Fighting Forms; then El
Lissitzky's 1919 lithograph poster Beat the
Whites with the Red Wedge. Both works
were relevant as warnings. Neither work
intends much open-system thought in their
attempts to illustrate ideological absolutes.
Without their titles, parsing their specific
meanings is difficult. My challenge as
maker was three-fold: how could I avoid
the Roadrunner-Coyote kind of conflict
El Lissitzsky. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, lithograph,
23 x 19 inches,1919.
found in each work, and how could I keep the politics open-ended enough to deny a
propagandistic reading? Finally, what were the limits of my understanding of those works as I
had never experienced them "live,"and how could I use that distance to re-examine my position
to DB?
The initial premise of DB asked: what kept discussion about the current situation from
occurring? The current conflict is an ongoing historical continuum between East and West, with
West positioned as technological aggressor, and East a mysteriously unpredictable variable,
as necessary for our progress as it is in the way of it. So I began by making the splotch on the
left red and cobalt blue. The splotch on the right, which eventually split into three co-mingling
shapes overlapping and bleeding into each other, was orange and cyan.
These solutions brought the shapes up-to-date by directly referencing video color,
Western and Eastern international flag colors, in my attempt to use, as pointed out by Patti
Podesta (in a previous video work), contemporary media to expand upon conversations and ideas
left hanging or otherwise unaddressed by prior technological means. My updating strategy -animate action painting using sequential movement in unforeseen ways -- originated in the Wind
Tunnel operational era, 1948- 1960. Cinematic endpoints were found in Stan Brakhage’s works
utilizing optically printed camera trucks into materially loaded film frames; Paul Sharits’
structural flicker films; and Norman McLaren’s attempts to animate the styles of his times; all
influenced by a Cold War paranoiac feedback loop still present today. My splotches, however,
were still codes of being rather than demonstrations of becoming.... how could I get there?
Missing from the work of Brakhage, Sharits, and McLaren: individualized movement of
component parts, the ability to move into and through imagery using blur edged by percussively
sharp edges, and large scale outside the boundaries of predetermined cinematic frame ratios,
respectively. So I triply animated each cyclical shape, first as containers with looped edges.
Held within, colored static moved between definition and blur, as if a camera was continuously
racking focus upon and within the shapes themselves. The splotches’ moves -- fighting,
caressing, pulling, and grinding -- grew more varied as they underwent biological and
mechanical transformations.
Upon closer viewing, the undulating splotches were scaled twice as tall as the people in
the room. What appeared to be pillars panned behind the oppositional shapes. The idea was to
reference architecture in multiple ways, first as scale reference to the viewer -- large yet
manageable, clear yet distorted, always addressing a lack. Installation allows for viewers to
get outside a passive cinematic viewing of work, translating it instead into experiential, active
participation:
"... Installation directly addresses consciousness, [which] raises questions
about subjectivity. When one moves through the space of an installation
and is aware of this movement, one achieves what Robert Morris calls
"present-ness." One engages with what Morris describes as the "I", living
imageless here and now in time and space, as opposed to the "me," the
self-remembered… as if in a photograph, frozen in time (Thater 51)."
As the viewer becomes more aware of the self in present space, the participant's choices, (and
what drives them) come to the forefront, especially in a minimized atmosphere. What is missing
then becomes at least as important as what is obviously there (Virilio 2, Focillon 79).
Secondly, by integrating a design element of panning silhouetted pillars, viewers might
make connections between Middle Eastern and Western European pillar styles, and in turn, their
shared histories. By exposing that relationship, I could point to, through omission, the fact the
Wind Tunnel's architectural intent was buried behind sheetrock -- missing in action, just like
discussion about the current conflicts. How could this strategy be amplified with sound?
How would I integrate my frustrated disconnected-ness into the audio while updating that
discussion using a point-of-view driven, organized and delivered by contemporary technology?
Recent visitors saw other participants on their cell phones in the installation. Looping audio 9
minutes long was delivered via cell phone by dialing, toll-free, 888-205-6789. After approaching
those using their phones, new participants dialed a number to access a soundtrack. "Look
somewhere else," the track admonished.
The Wind Tunnel roof reminded me of the 1984 John Milius film Red Dawn, in which the
town's drive-in movie theater was converted into a large screen, loudspeaker-driven re-education
camp. The drive-ins of my youth broadcast movie soundtracks utilizing bandwidth on visitors'
AM/FM car radios, enabling an isolated yet communal experience. In the Iraqi conflict,
cellphones used by “insurgents” detonate improvised explosive devices to kill occupying
combatants. American Idol also eliminates contestants through phone calls: the prisoners in the
panopticon can eliminate contestants (other prisoners) by voting, and entire guardtowers (judges,
producers, shows) via ratings.
The combination of all those possibilities led me to the cell phone as a delivery system to
enframe and funnel down the monumental visual spectacle of the animation into a more
individualized, personal scale. One couldn’t take the whole video in all at once due to the scaling of
the architecture, so I wanted to equivalently bombard the viewer aurally; Public Enemy-style:
"Sound has a look... I don't look for [samples] because they sound
cool, but because they create a mood… no live musicians, all samples.
[But] I'm looking for a complete performance in the vocal tracks… the
audience can hear the edits when you punch them in (Ahearn)."
-- Hip-hop producer Hank Shocklee on his collage-based recording process.
Shocklee, like Rosenquist, collects a “standard reserve” (Heidegger 17) of collage
material. Both artists take different materials from a multitude of sources in the interest of combining
them to create transformative, rather than strictly literal, forms bound by abstract thought. Hearing
Shocklee’s best work is not an exercise in recognizing the sample-- instead is it a demonstration of
ideas as noise, as language, as rhythm, as intentions crashing together into something new.
Another important aspect of Shocklee’s process is the edge of the sample. Whether
derived from heavy metal or funk records, samples are degraded by mechanical remove,
hardening entry and exit editing points. Live music performances in their most direct state sound
soft despite their authenticity, their locational acoustic truth. The decay and attack of the wave is too
organic, too present, even in the case of a shredding metal guitar performance.
The more compressed the sound becomes from generation to generation, the harder and more
blocky --the more pixelated-- transitions between sounds become. Their aural veracity
becomes subject to scrutiny: where does the truth lie? My issue in using redactions in the soundtrack
was how to reduce the aural edges between the edits to maintain percussive impact while minimizing
distraction in the connections between samples. The DB soundtrack became a sampled, remixed and
re-contextually edited audio collage of voices from the Cold War era shrunken down, equalizing the
spectacle of large scale projection.
An art documentary seen two semesters earlier, Emile de Antonio's Painters Painting
(1972) was my primary source material. Redacting educated references to PAINTING and ART
from the track left behind many macho examples of verbal heroics conflated with descriptions of
violence comparable to press conference quotes from neo-conervatives of 2008. I added snippets
from other art documentaries, classic rock selections and quarter-century old porn: all archaic
content edited together to leave out the subject of the chatter to be filled in by the
subjects/participants in the room. Tim Martin pointed out I was asking for trouble by attempting
to make viewers think, but my question was why weren't we feeling this war?
The action of the audio was concurrent with, while not in direct sync to, the sprawling
video animation, the left side of which began metamorphosing itself from a red and blue
painterly mark to a hard edge, red, rotating wheel; reminiscent of a turbine or revolver from a
gun. The sound, tinny, noisy and piercing, was small. The turbine and splotch seemed to push
and pull each other in conjunction with the video, creating an unsteady balance in the room as
viewers moved toward and away from the projection field. Sometimes participants' shadows
would cross the path of a projector, then disappear as if behind a curtain when viewers moved
parallel to the surfaces. Those using their phones who came with dates or in groups began to
isolate themselves from each other as the video continued.
As the voice of Clement Greenberg described the "violence of the American situation
(de Antonio)," the hard edge red turbine ground away against the corner, never fully crossing the
threshold while catching black splashes from the right side and lashing back drippy red from its
center. The phone relayed what seemed to be a National Public Radio documentary from hell.
On the video wall, teeth projected out from around the turbine circumference. A second, much
larger turbine took shape at the far left side: this one also with teeth but in addition with what
appeared to be pulsating bullets in the revolver chambers. Rosenquist's F-111 shifters influenced
transformative object/signifiers of my own, festering away and unfolding over time in DB.
What were those voices in the phone going on about, anyway -- the subject of the
discussion was never mentioned directly. As the bullets throbbed, the motion of the smaller
turbine became more distorted and violent in its rotation, looking to be more of a cross between
the crown of the Statue of Liberty and a lawn mower, or fan blade. The soundtrack’s verbal
expressions of violence were crudely collaged together, irritating in both content and facture over
the small cell phone speaker. On the phone, Willem de Kooning's description of draining oil from
paint was reorganized to describe draining oil from a small country.
The video got more unhinged as actions sped up and the turbine/blades/crowns ground
away more agitatedly against the corner they couldn't seem to cross. Crazed bits of Freddie
Mercury singing "Ride 'em, cowboy!" crashed up against a post-ecstatic female voice telling a
guy named "George, I'm so glad I met you" over the phone line. After a flash frame, the right side
splotches fired away at the turbine,
chipping away its hard edges
and reverting it back to a splotch,
finally spiraling away as if flushed
by a toilet in the corner. The video
reset itself back to the initial
purple and green static. The
soundtrack rattled on as viewers
stayed with the experience,
sometimes for four full cycles of
video, approximately 28 minutes.
Disinformation Breakdown,
3 channel sync video
installation, 6.5 minutes
animated video with 9 minute
looped cellphone soundtrack,
15’ x 60’, Art Center
South Campus Wind Tunnel,
2008.
Detail from documentation of Disinformation Breakdown, 3 channel sync video installation,
6.5 minutes animated video with 9 minute looped cellphone soundtrack, 15’ x 60’,
Art Center South Campus Wind Tunnel, 2008.
“...I ascribe a kind of ironic self-awareness to an age accustomed to break
into such loud and innocent rejoicing at its historical culture, and say that
it is infused with a presentiment that there is really nothing to rejoice about
and a fear that all the merriment of historical knowledge will soon be over
and done with (Nietzsche 100).”
This describes 2008, a time driven by nostalgia for a glorious past incessantly replayed
to us by a corporate media culture profiting from mass consumption of reruns and reuse, lacking
incentives for invention or discovery. We live in a historically antiquarian time (Nietzsche 85)
loaded with cultural self-delusion and blind complicity to fascism fueled by a cynical twin
fixation on apocalyptic fantasy and ostentatious personal wealth leading to pragmatic isolation.
This enframing in terms of “technological behavior (Heidegger 48)” is promoted by a
techno-sublime (Gilbert-Rolfe 135) suprasensory (the “real” beyond the real of experience)
worldview in conflict with the last gasps of the old suprasensory worldview based on belief in an
omniscient god (Heidegger 61). Religion continues to dominate thought (at least as a framing
device) from Missouri to Pakistan while complicity is the actual problem for all contemporary
people/subjects -- we still enslave ourselves to be "free."
One example of subjective complicity is the ongoing popularity of the animations made
by the Walt Disney Company targeted toward children. The name is the sign of the American
paradox: hypocritical American ideology which ignores the realities of American action. Walter
Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1937) was originally
inspired by Benjamin's fascination with the utopian potential of the technology behind Mickey
Mouse (Leslie 102). But Mickey never made the cut due to Benjamin's "recognition of 'the
usability of Disney's methods [in industrial process and themes] for fascism (Leslie 120)."
The Disney aesthetic revises traditional fairy tale violence, by manipulating children's
fear of losing their families, isolating them in nature, traditional turf of the sublime and all its
terror and rupture. In 1941's Bambi, a worldwide box office bomb (Solomon 129), a talking deer
protagonist endures winter after losing his mother to a hunter's gun. Right then nothing was
more sublime than the technologically superior German army with its Blitzkrieg, Siege of
Leningrad, and Holocaust (Heidegger's Nazi support notwithstanding). Ideology trumps nature
when backed up by, or merged with, technologies which enable reason to destroy the real.
Disney's answer: make propaganda films (Victory Through Air Power, 1943) promoting the
dubious superiority of long-range air bombers (Solomon 126), an illusion still persistent today.
The 2003 aerial "shock and awe" in Iraq created years, instead of only months of war.
Contradictorily, Walt Disney was the only Hollywood executive to officially provide Nazi
propagandist Leni Riefenstahl a guided studio tour on her 1938 pre-WWII visit to Los Angeles
(Leslie 127). Also problematic is the idea, perpetuated to young women over fifty years of
filmmaking from Snow White (1937) to Sleeping Beauty (1959) to the Little Mermaid (1989), that
“someday my prince will come” to “save” them. These antiquated thoughts on both
feminist and democratic fronts provide mixed messages, making it harder for contemporary
viewers -- liberated individual subjects, in theory -- to think for themselves when divided and
conquered as children (many of whom have already had their religions chosen for them). This
confusion is further propagated by parental nostalgia.
“Ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e.,
as nothingness. All its reality is external to it (Althusser 121).”
Louis Althusser might as well have been describing animation. The most minimalist of
material arts (light from a tube, screen, or projection), animation in cartoon form is escapist
illusion supporting ideologies from consumerism to sexism, slapstick comedy to satire,
racism and war propaganda. Without material consequence, one can make anything, so one
really makes nothing (Martin). Animation can be tactile in its production phase, but once
recorded, textures in movement revert back to stillness, as in a stop motion model, or get
compressed by film or video. Without tactile material reality, animation is a delivery system for
ideology, a recording of someone else’s experience, real or imagined, mostly delivered in
narrative format.
When delivered as an event in the here-and-now, animation challenges perception of the
self in the world -- is the subjective experience of the self real or imagined? Events are
outside narrative, and as such are less controlled by conventions, tropes, and arcs. Events are
often referred to as being “staged,” which takes them out of a definition provided by Thater
regarding events in nature, which has no narrative arc, no beginning or ending, only continuum.
This makes event creation a difficult proposition for moving images reliant on linear time and
framing of space by standardized
aspect ratios. Event is beyond
viewer control: event brings
involuntariness into action by
rearranging the terms of
narrative. Ad Reinhardt’s 1946
cartoon What Does This
Represent? (Woodward)
illustrates the idea that the
protagonist in an event is the
subject/viewer/participant, rather
than the object itself.
Reinhardt, Ad. What Do You Represent?, ink on board, 1946.
How can subjects in the world use history rather than be used by it? How is it that
something (action) can be bolstered by nothing (ideology)? The subject is the third thing, the
active participant in this equation. Animation, in installation form, can spark individual
transformations outside complicity to the group dynamic and its ideologies at large, especially
within group contexts in the here-and-now. If conditioning has indeed occurred, what other
thoughts are subject to repression by the individual as s/he subjugates him or herself to the
"powers that be"?
When a person approaches a carousel which was antique when that person was a child, is
the person’s nostalgia for the ride his/her own? Or has that set of thoughts been conditioned by the
collective society (Smith)? The evening of July 23, 2008, the historic Looff Hippodrome (built
1916) on the Santa Monica Pier was the site of interior ceiling video projections roughly 100’ feet
in diameter. Vicious Circle (VC) was my work made specifically for a group show called Tonalism
at the 2008 Glow Festival. The program was curated by Cindy Bernard and Alejandro Cohen for
SASSAS and Dublab, respectively. While the building’s maximum capacity is 450 people at any
one time, over 100,000 people visited the Pier that evening. The following pages will be spent
discussing what VC was, how it was made, how it related to the world and other artworks, and the
questions the project produced.
Improvised sound remixed live by disk jockeys surrounded viewers upon entry.
Participants looked up past the six-decade-old carousel housed within the national landmarked
building to see colors and objects in movement across a white-gridded, circular cupola ceiling.
Viewers experienced the darkened “arena” a variety of ways while barred from the center of the
room by the carousel itself. The impossibility of a passive, stationary “all-at once” reception
encouraged fragment-chasing,
self-choreographed points-of-view in motion.
The idea behind VC was to create the
feeling of an internal storm within a place of
shelter. This hypothesis was exacerbated by
navigating the obstacle course that became the
floorspace in combination with a high-relief
surface hostile to video projection. I worked
with new parallels to my previous observations
of complicit distance: nostalgia regarding the
top: wide installation view of Vicious Circle,
3 channel video installation with improvised sound, 100’ diameter, 2008.
bottom: a closer view of the projection against the webbed ceiling.
carousel and critical observations derived from
two canonical paintings. The Hippodrome
experience made me consider movement
through and across space more carefully.
I also found direct confrontation with possible
and perceived failure became a valid entry
point into making work.
“If [the] three drives - laughing, lamenting, hating - manage to produce
knowledge, this is not, according to Nietzsche, because they have subsided,
as in Spinoza, or made peace, or because they have attained a unity. On the
contrary, it is because they have tried, as Nietzsche says, to harm one another,
it is because they are in a state of war, they reach a kind of state, a kind of
hiatus, in which knowledge will finally appear as the spark between two
swords (Foucault 12).”
Laughing: miscommunication led to a
three-week window in which I could generate
work for the show. A trip to New York slashed
my schedule down to two weeks. The body of
work I was just installing at Art Center was not
“family friendly,” so that content was not
considered for Tonalism. I would have to
reformat old work and remix it into new form,
in effect “sampling myself.” None of these
factors were optimal to me, but after editing
voices from the grave for DB, the experience
ended up being refreshing.
Lamenting: a test one week prior to the
event went poorly. The whitewashed cupola
ceiling of the Looff Hippodrome Carousel
building is vertically conical with an apex
cascading down via wooden slats and beams into
carousel installation view of Vicious Circle,
3 channel video installation with improvised sound,
100’ diameter, 2008.
a circular yet hexadecagonal (sixteen-sided) base. Pale wood slats fill all the gaps of the grid,
strands of which protrude in outward relief as diagonal beams rising to the sky, conforming to a
single point beneath the building’s external rooftop spire. The parquet spider web ceiling had a
dark, empty central circular space directly above the carousel which video could not reach.
Hating: the structure of the ceiling confounded everything but high-contrast black-and-
white video imagery. Everything I tested dissolved atop the multi-faceted grid except
Glitchkillers and Weedwhackers (GKWW), a white-on-black figurative animation from 2007.
Despite its existential narrative premise, GKWW was the only work to take graphic traction on
that very “slippery” surface. The only thing left to edit into GKWW was Disinformation
Breakdown. The Hippodrome site and I were not getting along… it was pointed out in the
documentation that I chose to fight power with power (Martin).
While DB’s content would change radically in the Hippodrome --DB and GKWW were
both about war -- at least they were thematically unified. The biggest challenge was to
structurally edit in tune with the architecture of the cupola, which begged a question I had been
confronted with before: what kind of movement works for a given situation, organic or
mechanical, and why (Gilbert-Rolfe)? The remix/mashup that would become Vicious Circle
demanded a spatial logic of motion to arrange the final edit up above, and therefore, the
experience down below.
Pressed for time, I considered
obvious and available paintings for
reference. Michelangelo Buonarroti’s
massive fresco Sistine Chapel Ceiling
(1508-1512) is event: a depiction of
immaterial power condensed into
multiple narratives covering and
penetrating an overwhelming physical
space at once, impossible to approach
directly. One cannot recall the first thing
seen in it, which is a watermark for
depth (Gilbert-Rolfe). Onsite,
accumulation of multiple points of view
creates overwhelming breadth which
becomes depth. The broad x and y axes
of Sistine Chapel Ceiling, and its z-axis,
its depth, is primarily generated by
proximal remove, compounded by the
Buonarroti, Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel Ceiling, fresco, 134 x 44 feet, 1508-1512.
illuminating reflection of light from gypsum in the lime. Sistine Chapel Ceiling seems closer
than it actually is, which it what makes it such a tease.
The luminous crust, legible in content and breadth in fragmented chunks, becomes
intangible from the vantage point of the floor: it can be read (in pieces) but never touched. The
space between the viewer and the fresco skin is what the work is really about: human frustration
about the impossible distance between heaven, earth and history; with the promise of a shared
past and future accessible only through distorted, indirect language. The all-encompassing
physical indirectness and fragmented “pixelation” of Sistine Chapel Ceiling activates the work into
experience in a way that the tableau of the Last Judgment cannot achieve, presented as
conventional narrative.
Sistine Chapel Ceiling is problematic. Michelangelo stands accused of trying to control
everything through drawing (Gilbert-Rolfe), and its religious site and message make it an easy
target as propaganda. But Sistine Chapel Ceiling might just fail as an illustration of heavenly
desire because it succeeds so much more brilliantly as an installation. The opposite experience
of F-111, Sistine Chapel Ceiling demonstrates the mercurial quality of aspirational desire through
distanciation. Everyone wants grace as well as other things which are visible or tangible yet out of
reach. The metaphor is universal -- no religious conversion is required to relate.
The design structure of the Looff Hippodrome ceiling is as beautiful a readymade surface as
it is difficult for projection. Like Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the Hippodrome ceiling could be treated
as a surface for painting, but emphasizing palimpsest (Podesta) over skim coat. In this case, the
skim coat would be the animation projection crawling and rolling over the surface. Closer to the
floor than Sistine, the downward slope of the Hippodrome’s interior cupola emphasized a sense
of gravity. It could bring the narrative of GKWW and the pixelated abstract expressionism of DB
down to earth, raining down and rising up while spinning round, unraveling itself.
This calculation determined the spatial orientation of the edit. The central circular apex of
the cupola = the top of the editing screen. The widest, lowest section of the cupola = the
bottom of the editing screen. The walking figures and other actions of GKWW would be subject to
conventional gravity just as in the original narrative. DB, however, would change: the
turbines and splotches of DB would work best if they rolled around and ground against the
cupola’s empty central circular apex.
The video projection could not be a continuous circle. Projectors were oriented to throw
through available openings in the round from the second floor above the carousel. Imagery was
projected across the conically-peaked ceiling in three “screens” with edges overlapping or
breaking away into shards of black in spots. Video signal was in lock-step synchronous time
between screens, so temporal and spatial continuity was kept. The illusion of circular motion was
enhanced and received as dictated by the curved space, but to the trained eye it was apparent that
the video was edited as a rectangular field three screens long and one screen high.
Three edits were visible over a fifteen minute duration to create an illusion of
re-invention over one hour fifteen minutes total run time. As the video repeated three times, the
music/sound/noise continuously evolved into new forms. I didn’t know what music DJ’s
Michael Stock and Sam Cooper were going to play in advance, so in editing I looked to the
content I had to reinforce the swirling movement I wanted, which became an interior storm. I
had static, a perspectival pile of bodies which filled the screen, horizontal walking, horizontal +
vertical rolling forms, and rack focusing camera moves. The long rectangular screens visually
denied the swirl in the edit room, so I was unsure of how my gamble would work until it was
projected in front of a live audience.
The swirl I wanted was inspired
by from the second painting I used for
reference, J.M.W. Turner’s 1842
Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a
Harbour’s Mouth, which I had just seen
in New York. Snow Storm is also a
problematic work: it is a depiction,
rather than a demonstration, of the
sublimity of nature from first-hand
experience. The stupefying rupture of
Turner, J.M.W. Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth,
oil on canvas, 3 x 4 feet, 1842.
the sublime cannot be reduced to replication in an artwork as the sublime and the infinite are both
absolutely great, “surpassing every standard of sense” (Kant 66, 69). Turner’s “documentary”
painting de-emphasizes the sublime further due to its scale: at 3 x 4 feet, it was one of the smaller
canvases in the retrospective. Its aspect ratio is close to television, and the backstory of Turner
being lashed to the mast of a boat in storm actually does the work a
disservice by raising expectation.
But what movement is present in Snow Storm! A diagonally tipped horizon is kicked
around by triangles and arcs leading into and out from the picture’s core but never resolving at
one central point. Warm and cool dark values in various states of rack-focused spatial flux toss
the eye around, denying focus on the white light in the center, which could be a sail, a shaft of
light, or a torrential squall dropping down on its target. The materiality and and direction of the
gestural brushstrokes confound and disrupt the composition as they enhance the feeling of
randomly startled surprise from being tempest-tossed.
If Snow Storm fails as a depiction of the sublime, it exceeds its author’s ambition with
its oppositional movements between gesture and composition. The marks with make the work
are almost proto-abstract expressionist in their range of tactility from smooth to coarse, thin and
thick, scratchy and scumbled. The conically sloping round hexadecagonal Hippodrome ceiling
composed and broke my animated composition. Could I break the ceiling with the right kind of
movement across it? How exaggerated would motions have to be across the crazy-quilt relief of
the cupola?
The Looff Hippodrome building reminded me of a similar building in my hometown
which housed a theatre in a park. It seemed like every time we went to picnic in that park near
the lake we were rained out and had to take shelter from the storms in that building, which in
retrospect, most likely housed a carousel at one point.
A large number of twenty and thirty-somethings were excited about riding the Looff
Hippodrome carousel the night of the test so they could relive childhood memories; so many that
in fact there was a line of people waiting as we tested video above their heads. What if one’s
memory of a carousel isn’t all puppies, Hallmark cards and light?
The first fight I ever got in was on a merry-go-round at the age of seven. A group of kids
I hung out with decided I was the weakest of the bunch and started harassing me for a week or so
before I’d had enough. I kicked the smartest kid, not the toughest one, in the stomach, and never
got picked on again. Perhaps I could tie the storm itself to the interior body of the ship, where
we are supposed to be safely sequestered, to open a space where we all experience it together, for
better or worse; a metaphorical corollary to an outsourced war. The sky could fall on the
carousel through, and in spite of, the grid meant to protect us.
The first section of VC -- alternately blue, green and red or magenta, cyan, and white
-- was made up of turbines and splotches rolling and grinding against the disk-like apex of the
interior cupola. Red and blue checkered bars, akin to those found on audio equalizing systems
or home stereos, pumped up and down, toward and away from the empty centered circle directly
above the carousel. This part ended in a form of video static (snow) which illuminated the entire
room in a haze of white, magenta, and green light before fading to black, taking the site into
darkness with it.
Walking around the barrier of the carousel on foot, participants could go in the direction
of the edit and/or enframed movement, or against the grain of the audience and/or the cinematic
projected motion. Some spectators chose a more passive, stationary experience: standing still,
seated or laid down to take in the work with sound encroaching from all around. Video
documentation from the fixed camera stationary position, I would later see, did not do justice to
the experience of navigating and following the Vicious Circle.
Following was a section of a high contrast black and white narrative video of what
appeared to be a war-like conflict between spinning tumbleweeds and little, white, bug-like
walking figures. The figures trudged around in a circle, blown by an animated wind as they
traversed across a webbed field of slats and planks, constantly pummeled by tumbleweeds. This
section ended in a swirling pile of dead bug-like bodies, which moved as if an aperture were
opening and closing the cupola ceiling, bathing the entire space in a spinning vortex of white
light.
At times it appeared that lines (depicting blown off limbs from war) fell, snow-like, from
the cupola center down upon the carousel and ultimately, the crowd. This illusion was enhanced
by the perspective provided by the slanted planes which met at a central zenith high above the
carousel. When the video entered it’s section B aperture mode, a visual feeling of spin was
created, temporarily dizzying the viewer into an upwardly optical vertigo.
Ambulatory participants had to keep their eyes on other viewers surrounding them as well
as the ceiling. Unable to take in the entire continuity of action, viewers often had no choice but
to follow movements and/or objects by physically moving around and about the site.
Others who let their stationary places within the mise-en-scene dictate the action for them must
have followed the action across the cupola with their eyes. I chased the action with my video
camera, documenting the work clockwise around the carousel as the crowd curiously moved
counter-clockwise.
The third section of VC was a remix or mash-up of both sections. Every seven seconds
the checkerboard would rotate clockwise regardless of the movement happening within each of
the three fields. For instance, the visual started and ended with the static of section A and the
cycled swirl of section B in the following organization: A-B-A. Seven seconds into the cycle,
the visual rotated into B-A-B, then back again by 00:00:21:00, and so forth. Section A, the
turbine and splotch section, ran in reverse continuity; section B ran in a beginning-to-end
narrative continuity, but bookended so B’s ending also served as the beginning of the work.
Another variable outside my control was the sound that dj’s Michael Stock and Sam
Cooper would choose to add over the top of the video. I hoped the dj’s would engage in a
conversation with my work in the decentered way I intended to engage the building and its space.
They did not see anything in advance; in fact we met only once, five minutes before the picture
went up. All their sound was completely improvised with no idea what material I would be
presenting. Likewise, I had no idea where they would go sonically; I just hoped it wouldn’t turn
into a rave or a rock video. I was concerned that the narrative that I had worked so hard to break
down and abrade would rear up by way of musical accompaniment.
I’m constantly surprised how quickly music is categorized by literal sign systems in spite
of its phenomenologically direct attributes. Melody immediately goes to narrative association as
its sound swells through the room; world music becomes a sign of its ethnic origin; musical style
becomes dated the moment of recording, which makes available repeated aural dissection. A
recognizable chord progression immediately sites the style as orchestration and production value
place the music in a particular period. Even instrumentation without words imprints
recognizable form onto music and robs it of its involuntariness, at least in terms of its ability to
decenter a listener under a certain volume threshhold. Stylistic encoding can turn music into
illustration and pollute an experience (in no way am I suggesting, however, that experience is
pure to begin with) with distracting sense memory.
The improvised score of samples and loops that Stock and Cooper created was, at its best,
sweeping and operatic without repeatable melodic recognition. Often filled more with sound
effects favored over instrumentation, the track which was created filled te Hippodrome with
drops and lilts, techno-organic jitters and long tones acting as cushion for the actions above. At
its weakest, an instrument recognizable as a soprano saxophone played a wistful melody over the
proceedings, favoring a more illustratively cinematic read over an experiential one.
Music can be used as a form of psychological control in cinema, war, and on the dance
floor. A bass teacher of mine, who had played on the Aretha Franklin records for Atlantic, taught
me the bass player controls every move a dancer makes, to the point of making that dancer dip,
drop, or spin: involuntariness becomes a dictated kind of passive aggression, of puppet mastery.
I stopped playing the bass soon after; animation was controlling enough.
Paradoxically, this kind of control kills the animation it creates, just as video eradicates
the materiality of history it records. I have no answer to this conundrum other than I want to,
and try to, circumvent that outcome by animating sequences structured through editing and
overloaded with materiality, much of which will be destroyed by the scan lines and persistence
of vision. A jump cut or hard edit is a kind of materiality because it creates a gap in perception.
Gaps in perception, when loaded into spectacle, entice questioning of that spectacle. Spectacle is
dangerous: in New York your pocket will get
picked if spectacle demands your full
attention; in Africa the tiger you’re recording
with your Bolex distracts you from the other
tiger about to eat you alive from behind.
A carousel is dangerous too; the
aforementioned discussion with Jason Smith
unearthed the idea that a hundred-year-old
carousel is an embodiment of someone else’s
childhood, someone else’s nostalgia, a time
Vicious Circle,
3 channel video installation with improvised sound, 100’ diameter, 2008.
far away conflated (confused?) with one’s own experience. Looking at this idea in Althusserian
terms, an antiquarian carousel can subjugate individual subjects into an ideological Subjecthood
where collective nostalgia trumps individual experience. One is supposed to love the carousel
as an image of idyllic childhood, but I wonder if that becomes a cliche which reduces childhood
into a leveling, normalized experience. Where is the discovery of the carousel when the
expectation of the carousel is all around, and isn’t a carousel just a lo-fi way of getting high
through inducement of dizziness? How can innocence be so cherished, and isn’t that position
ideologically based in retrograde thought? If one’s memory of a carousel is in opposition to
cultural expectation, one recourse is to see it critically or metaphorically and unpack it as such.
Video and participants were linked together not just through kinds of motion but also by
reactive audio which was alternately narrative (melodic) or spastic with the schizophrenic
potential of atonal noise. I could not tell how long participants stayed to take in the collaboration
as I was intent on documenting the work. Like DB, I edited the documentation of VC to take on
the experience of the work. The documentation styles were, however, quite different.
The documentation of DB was based on a logic of three vantage points: first, a stationary
wide angle view on a tripod; next, handheld “interventions” into the corner and cones of
projection which invaded content with my silhouette, and finally integration of the actual
animation content (in and of itself, not projected) into the final edit.
“The veracity of the work therefore depends, in part, on this solicitation of the
eye (and possibly body) movement in the witness who, in order to sense an
object with maximum clarity, must accomplish an enormous amount of tiny,
rapid movements from one object to another....the veracity of the whole is only
made possible through the lack of precision of details conceived merely as so
many material props enabling either a falling short of or a going beyond
immediate vision... (Virilio 2).”
Paul Virilio, in paraphrasing Auguste Rodin’s disdain for photography, describes how
other art forms utilize eye movements across and through three- and two-dimensional structures
to create individual images for viewers implanting them into memory. For Rodin, “truth” was
found in the optical communication between the eye and the sculptural, painted, or drawn object
loaded with marks which, too many to take in at once, continuously refresh themselves in vision.
Whatever blanks occurred were filled in from viewers’ own image banks or imagination. Where
are the blanks in the information overloaded- techno sublime and whose subjective truth fills
those blanks?
Henri Focillon takes Rodin’s observation further in terms of the research the artist makes
to create forms, the pentimenti: “the rough draft always gives vitality to the masterpiece
(Focillon 27).” He next mentions, then shies away from an important analysis of Michelangelo’s
contradictory theories in his drawing and sculpting practices (Focillon 107): the body explodes
out from its center in a drawing, yet within the block of marble awaits a body to be carved free.
But later Focillon, in his examination of touch, first of the artist’s hand, then of the viewers’ eye
across the object, stakes out architectural space as a zone of touch (Focillon 111). The Looff
Hippodrome was the most extreme example of this I experienced to date; a rough-hewn spider
web lurking over a smoothly sculpted nostalgic trap; a highly tactile surface extraordinarily
slippery, nearly without traction for projected imagery.
In contrast, the smooth skin and micro-material depth of photography make this kind
of rapid eye movement redundant, and photographic cinema only magnifies the passive affect.
Cinema, with its “mobilization of the snapshot [and] retinal take-off” into persistence of vision,
becomes a kind of “artificial memory,” supplanting direct sensory observation (Virilio 3-4). In
effect, photographic cinema not only mediates but attacks memory by squashing actual, direct
experience in its chemical compression of materiality. A distance is created and amplified
between the viewer and the materiality described in Focillon. Perhaps this is why Sharits’
flicker films are so powerful -- the gaps in the flicker break the droning projector’s light as
memory fights back.
In our technological sublime, subjective perception and memory need more than just gaps
and pixels to get a leg up. Reality external to animation -- architecture -- provides animation a
material body outside itself. As animation is grafted onto the surface of architecture, it engages
in conversation with its support, which is already related to the viewer in the room. Embodiment, especially shapes outside standardized rectangles, gets animation closer to subjects, and
vice-versa. The scale and tactility of space mingles with the immateriality of the projection.
Participants confronted with this operation enter a virtual space of painting.
I initially filled a place with projected virtual spaces of movement (DB), then later
subdivided an entire real space into virtual places within, and framed by, specific movements
within and across the site (VC). Until Vicious Circle, I took the actual physical movement of the
viewer for granted. I didn’t fully consider, at least until late in the game, the impact of the
motion of the subject inside the object. If the viewer is the protagonist, is information the
antagonist? The revelation of gesture that Virilio, Rodin and Focillon describe is optical and
local. The twenty-first century globalized version is a whole body experience in which the
movement of the viewer being is just one expression in concert with an unpacked,
rematerialized, decompressed set of motions becoming.
“That which is susceptible of introducing a significant difference
in the field of knowledge, at the cost of a certain difficulty for the
author and the reader, with, however, the eventual recompense
of a certain pleasure, that is to say of access to another figure of
truth (Rabinow, vii).” -- Michel Foucault’s definition of work.
Participants in animation installation move through the tension between actual place into
space, face into body, materiality into immateriality, exteriority into interiority, imagination and
reality, and back again. If the viewer/subject can question the work and the space surrounding her/
him, then how do I get the participant to question the self in relation to what is facing him/her? If
spectatorial criticality is activated when work reconfigures conventional narrative performance into
event, I wanted to test it by maximizing that affect in my thesis show.
Institutionalized was a two-work video installation which took place at Art Center’s South
Campus Raymond Gallery the week of November 8, 2008, the week Barack Obama was elected
44th President of the United States. By this point I had accumulated my own “standing reserve
(Heidegger 17)” -- a collection of digitized actions, operations and movements-- that I wanted to
augment with some new, but more minimal moves. The gallery was even more difficult for video
than the Looff Hippodrome in that it had a western window with blazing sunlight all day long, and
was even more slippery than the Hippodrome: the white box erases site specificity.
The final words attributed to JMW Turner on his deathbed were “...the sun is God
(Lindsay 213).” With Institutionalized I insisted on the coexistence of video projection with
sunlight in a gallery setting. In my thesis show defense I
said “I wanted to beat up the sun” with light from my
projectors. Was Turner wrong? Did I want to attack
God with my work?
A viewer walked down a hallway toward a
beacon: a black and white painting in motion framed
by the walls and ceilings of a corridor. As with still
paintings, this motion painting changed as it was
approached: detail increased and was clarified through
proximity even as layers blurred and dodged. A visual
push and pull existed between what appeared to be
layered depth of material atop a ground.
This was not a painting, but a video: projected
light upon a blank wall was the only, very limited
materiality present.
Untitled Black and White.
animation video, 15 second loop 8’ x 6’, 2008.
On the approach toward the room it occupied, the projection was revealed standing abreast to a
window view of an industrial street with which the “painting” shared a horizon line.
Semblance to a lightbox emerged, as did reference to a photographic origin, yet there was
no rear projection of light through anything but the window, and no camera was used to make
the work which was, conversely, projected onto a support with a lens. And while loose, gestural,
painterly marks were certainly captured and sequenced to make the video projection, the
animation did not not move like any which could previously have been categorized as “Abstract
Expressionist.” The marks defined their own edges, as in painting, but flicker defined the
movement of both the edges and that which they contained, as in video.
The marks were huge, too large to be made physically with paint (with the possible
exception of Guy Goodwin’s large-scale scrape paintings from the 1970’s), yet it was clear to
painters that the marks were originally quite small in origin. Finally, the grain, quite unlike what
is experienced in either painting or video, appeared more closely related to film. This first work
described was called Untitled Black and White. It ran in a continuous loop of fifteen seconds’
duration and was 8 feet high by 6 feet wide.
As the viewer turned the corner to the right, another video, this one brightly colored and
more minimal in its aesthetic, drew attention to itself. From the exterior vantage point, a viewer
walking or driving down an industrial Pasadena street in the evening saw a distorted pattern of
red, magenta and blue vertical lines through the gallery window of a commercial space. These
vertical bars moved
mechanically left to right as
they plowed through a series
of redacted bodies flying into,
then sliding down the bars,
which rolled horizontally
across an interior corner.
The red bars’ edges had
color vibration against the
blue background although the
edges were not so hard.
I Want to Break Free.
2 channel sync animation video, 2 minute loop, 6’ x 8’ x 21’, 2008.
The bars were paint strokes; the background was a grainy cycled paint wash. White stars -cartoony impacts -- were released as the drab green and flesh colored redacted objects slammed
across the rolling dual channel projection. Sometimes the stars were atop the bars, sometimes
behind them. Were the mosaic-redacted objects representations of human bodies... soldiers?
When the viewer walked inside the gallery space, s/he felt a disruption in inner ear
balance as the bars rolled against the vertical corner in a seven degree skew to the right. The
projection appeared flat but had shallow layered depth, which became apparent on closer
viewing. It had the colors (red, white, and blue) and units (stars and bars) of an American flag
and yet it was not that; the orientation of the forms was different and the colors were too
saturated, leading to forms found in video (vertical roll was a transitional element in the work). While it looked like a programmed early 1980’s video game, large fleshy-colored paint
marks revealed themselves, thrashing away as the projection reset, looping back into itself. The
form of the projection read as an inverted chevron, quietly pointing toward a militaristic
reading. The only relief comes from the exits. One exit is the corridor over the right shoulder,
where as one turns to go that person is confronted by an interrogational spotlight of a projector at
chest level, not burning the eyes, but threatening nonetheless. The other exit was the door to the
street, where the sliding bars trailed viewers until clear of the window.
The room in daytime: the window is a way out which tatters the flag. In daylight the
video is quite apparent and fully colored until midday, when the western sunlight blasts through
the window and shade at forty-five degrees to burn the edges and lighten the color. Projection
persists, affected, framing somewhat interrupted, but largely unerased by natural sunlight.
From the outside, ensconced in bunker-like unpolished concrete, the gallery looked like
a US Armed Forces recruiting station (Martin). From inside, by night, the viewer appeared to
be in a cage, revolving around him or her in an open-ended reflective loop, mirrored around the
body by the limo shade darkening the window. At night there is no relief from the corner or the
presence of the black and white monochrome abstraction flickering over one’s left shoulder. If
this was freedom, I wanted to break it, and from that premise the color bar/flag work was titled
I Want To Break Free. This work was two minutes in duration, continuously looping in a
6-8 x 21 foot orientation across the gallery’s corner.
I called the show Institutionalized because war and action paintings are institutions in
themselves, the gallery the work was in is an aggressively commercial space, and I had been
working in and toward higher education for nearly a decade. Any allusion to insanity or punk
rock was secondary to the intention of taking conservative, authoritative, or otherwise official
forms of power and messing with their intentions. Messing with these particular, self-described
forms of integrity was necessary as nostalgia gets conflated with an assumed righteousness of
history. If the technological sublime makes reality cartoony, it made sense to test it with
animation.
Action paintings are still except for the movement produced by the eye moving through
the depth of the paint on the support. Untitled Black and White was mercurial in its points-ofview: it manipulated how the viewer looked at it as it induced ways to see it by re-generating
its composition. Putting the work into architecture – beside a window or in a corner – was my
attempt to bring the ideas into real space which one can physically walk through as one looks
through, around and into the work. Walking through a projection or around a corner to distort
the view are ways the viewer can frame one’s own point of view, using a hallway to frame a
projection luminous like the window it is beside are others. I wanted the viewer to confront the
work as s/he is confronted by it to elicit questions of the experience. Did they believe the
premise before them? What was their part in it? Was everything as it appeared or was
something amiss? Was the painting in the video avoiding one’s gaze?
The dual channel piece, I Want to Break Free, was made specifically to question whether
the wars we were fighting were actually coming to an end because of the election. Jasper Johns
owns the American flag as a modern icon
in his art, so I had to reinvent my concept
of the flag. The impending selection of
Obama suggested an end point to the war,
so the checkered flag, which signals the
end of a race, came to mind. My
consideration of the colors of in the
American flag led me to a painting I had
seen the previous year, Bridget Riley’s
Riley, Bridget. Red with Red 2, oil on linen, 67 x 89 3/4 inches, 2007.
Red on Red 1 (2007). Riley’s “stripes” appeared to be on fire, optically and in terms of their shape.
The American flag and all it represented might as well have been set on fire since 9/11, and the sun
set the gallery ablaze with light all day long. Primarily, Riley’s painting reminded me to use minimal
elements with maximum color vibration, which helped the work all around, even if my approach to
her color palette failed.
I realized after completing the installation that I had created a kind of panopticon with a
traffic flow like that of the American symbol for a cyclone or hurricane system. Nether Turner nor
action painting had left my system: Snow-Storm became a organizational floor plan while gestures
became both sequenced and redacted. The swirling movement of Snow-Storm was still present, if
mechanically in the projection, then organically in a cyclone-symbol like choreography of the room
and its entry points. Untitled Black-and-White was updated action painting, akin to an animated
David Reed in its luminosity, if not its marks; a magnet drawing the viewer into the eye of the jail.
This jail was open -- a panopticon with exits, like a double-headed nautilus. For all our
hope in the election of our new president, things were still the same. Not because of the election,
but because of our ongoing complicity to the status quo. Change does not happen without shocking
the system. In my installation, like in life, little shock is brought by information in the system, from
which we are at a safe, dulled remove. Feeling is what’s lacking, and that feeling came from the
spacial affect of the installation.
It is that informational remove which is disturbing, and how that lack of feeling has worked
on us. By not seeing bodies returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, we are separated from the
experience. Not knowing anyone who has served is an even more powerful anesthetic. We are only
tired of hearing about it, we have “media fatigue,” even though this information surrounds, swirling,
stirred and exacerbated by our silent collaboration. The window and the doors show the ways out,
but we are too distracted, too weary to use our power to exit.
Likewise, action painting as we think we know it is exhausted, to be sure, but when
animated (activated, energized), there are new possibilities, new behaviors. There is still a “there”
there beyond all the macho cliches and tired posturing. Those things are around the paintings, not
what the best paintings do. The connection between paint as material and animation as organizing
logic brings a fresh range of possibilities beyond the “recording” of an “action” on canvas. If this
can create a new way of seeing, it is worthwhile, valid, necessary.
Materiality is missing in the click-and-drag world. Untitled Black and White is an
example of a kind of process animation that merges those two ideas to create a third thing.
Animation is generally not seen in Kantian terms as a thing-in-itself like painting. Untitled Black
and White defies that assertion in its form, as Focillon would put it: “Artistic activity... a
chemical reaction, elaborates matter as it continues the work of metamorphosis (Focillon 99).”
My responsibility as an artist is to explore these kinds of animation, process and political,
until they are emptied, otherwise I am a willing accessory to the propaganda and media
segregationism of art history and the market. I refuse to be complicit to the reactionary
nostalgia and attempts at revisionist mythmaking I have been subjected to in my training in
painting. Charismatic authority has no place in my practice --as an artist, student, teacher, or
person-- except when derived from aesthetic judgments regarding experiences with artworks,
ideas and the possibilities they reveal…. never the maker, myself included.
Maybe ideology exists as layers of nothingness in an animation installation. Perhaps
the living subject is that which is most real, becoming and being all at once, a body impacted by
information within another body impacted by information. Next comes the architecture, made
with heavy materials according to laws of gravity and decaying slowly, designed according to
ideological imperatives which drive its obsolescence. Then comes the barely-material skin in
accelerated motion, the animation itself, information with the most minimal body impacted by
the ideologies of place and subject; a catalytic agent between the belief systems driving the site
and those collected and unpacked in the living subject’s head.
The goal has evolved over the past year from extraction of history from architecture
toward seduction into viewer-centric associations between room, surfaces, and movement of both
viewer and content. A viewer can navigate a virtual space of painting transposed into real space
from attention paid to the layering of the space inhabited by viewer, the work, and its
surrounding/supporting terrain. This attention is subject to ruptures in vantage points caused by
walking through the installations.
Other points of dislocation regard scaling of information, whether that be found in
subdivision of place or mental space. The challenge, as I move forward, comes from how
delivery of content benefits from a variety of tempos of movement, proportions, fragmentations,
and modular treatments. How will the work function differently, and what form of the work will
be most effective using multiple monitors rather than large scale projections?
How can light be integrated into the work as a tertiary to projections battling sunlight?
When does the necessity to fabricate sculptural or relief-based supports for the projections come
into play, and will those structures function as works-in-themselves? How does visual music
function without musical accompaniment? How can the structural concerns of music -- tempo,
time, rhythm, tone, harmony, melody, beats, involuntariness -- be used to build and differentiate
modes of animation in space?
What are the consequences of multiple site specificity, where the same content can
radically change from place to place, and how can that be used to benefit the work outside of
exposing failure? What subjects for content are structurally intrinsic to this kind of work, rather
than derived from historical topics or architectural revision?
I haven’t even scratched the surface yet.
Matt Sheridan
Los Angeles, CA
1 December 2010
Works Cited:
Althusser, Louis. On Ideology. London: Verso, 2008.
Bristow, Frank. “Wind Tunnel That Spawned Planes, Rockets to Close.” Los Angeles Times.
April 29, 1960, page B1.
Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, ed. Sylvester, David. “Franz Kline 1910-1962: An Interview,”
Franz Kline 1910-1962. Milan: Skira, 2004.
Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Allworth Press, 1999.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. New York: Harper Perennial, 1982.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Mineola: Dover, 2005.
Leslie, Esther: Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde.
London: Verso, 2004
Lindsay, Jack. JMW Turner, A Critical Biography. Greenwich CT: New York Graphic Society, 1966.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations.
Cambridge: University Press, 1997.
Rabinow, Paul, and James D. Faubion, ed. Foucault, Michel. “Series Preface” and “Truth and
Juridical Forms,” Essential Works, Volume Three: Power. New York: New Press, 1994.
Rosenquist, James, with David Dalton. Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art.
New York: Knopf, 2009.
Shocklee, Hank. “Yes Yes Y’all.” Interview by Charlie Ahearn. ArtonAir.org. Art International Radio,
2004. Web. 23 May 2008.
<http://www.artonair.org/archives/j/component/option,com_alphacontent/Itemid,187/section,101/cat,136/
sort,15/limit,30/limitstart,30/>.
Solomon, Charles. Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. New York: Random House, 1994.
Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, ed. “The F-111: An Interview With James Rosenquist by
G.R. Swenson, 1965.” Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Thater, Diana, with Barbara Engelbach and Wulf Herzogenrath, ed. Keep the Faith. A Survey Exhibition.
Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2004.
Virilio, Paul. “A Topographical Amnesia,” The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994.
Art Works Cited:
Buonarroti, Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel Ceiling, fresco, 134 x 44 feet, 1508-1512.
D’Antonio, Emile. Painters Painting, documentary film, direction, 1972.
Eliasson, Olafur. Weather Project, site-specific installation, monofilament light and vapor, 2003.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Pierrot le Fou, narrative fiction film, direction and screenplay, 1965.
Jones, Charles M. Duck Amuck, animated film, direction and story, Warner Brothers, 1953.
El Lissitzsky. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, lithograph, 23 x 19 inches, 1919.
Marc, Franz. Fighting Forms, oil on canvas, 36 x 55 inches, 1914.
Riley, Bridget. Red with Red 2, oil on linen, 67 x 89 3/4 inches, 2007.
Rosenquist, James. F-111, multipanel paiting in room installation: oil on canvas and aluminum panels,
10 x 86 feet, 1964-5.
Turner, J.M.W. Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, oil on canvas, 3 x 4 feet, 1842.
Woodward, Richard B. “Ad Reinhardt, Newspaper Cartoonist: The Abstract Double Agent.”
New York Times. Published: December 21, 2003.
Studio/Class discussions cited:
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. Studio and class discussions with candidate.
Jennings, Gabrielle. Studio discussions with candidate.
Martin, Tim. Studio and class discussions with candidate.
Podesta, Patti. Studio and class discussions with candidate.
Smith, Jason. Studio discussion with candidate.
Thater, Diana. Studio and class discussions with candidate.