Dear Suzanne,
Many thanks for bringing up the issue of animation within the context of
the museum. A few months ago the Whitney Museum in NYC hosted the
animated project Play/Pause, an array of double screened animated
paintings set to a musical score by Sadie Benning. In December, the
Museum of Modern Art in NY featured the blockbuster multi-media work of
Tim Burton. In the catalog's introduction, Burton admits that the museum
was the very last place he expected his work to reside. Tim Murray and I
visited the exhibition twice. It was so crowded on both occasions not
only were we unable to see the work but we left the museum early because
of the hoards of tourists that gravitated to what I perceive is a show
that was launched to lure the viewer who ordinarily opted out of buying an
entrance ticket.
Those of us in close proximity of NY are looking forward to the opening of
William Kentridge's show at the MOMA but also his collaboration at the Met
for his artistic intervention into the opera The Nose.
So I agree that the work fuzzy is most appropriate for the broad
interdisciplinary/multi/mixed media that animation encompasses. The
low/high divide is dissipating in the US because of economics. Bringing
popular culture into institutions that usually feature high art is a
strategic way to broaden the demographics of the viewers. Perhaps the
Tate and the MOMA will include the Quay Brothers phenomenal work sooner
than later.
Renate
I'm very glad to be 'here' with you and all involved in this empyre
thread. (I hope this post doesn't turn into overlong lines that you need
to scroll to read - if so I'll try to rectify this in the next one)
I'd like to briefly pick up on what Paul wrote about 'fuzzy' terms - the
reason for posting this is to encourage people to consider the complexity
of techniques and forms that fall under that umbrella, and to give some
regard for the hundreds of genres that the form can express. It is most
pointedly *not* a genre.
For example, The Library of Congress Moving Image Genre-Form Guide
allocates animation as one of three Sublists (the others are Experimental
and Advertising) that is classified in Subdivisions according to
techniques and technologies. This is unusual in that other genres are
described with historical, ideological, aesthetic or content-based
terminologies:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/migsub.html#Animation
It is much like the troublesome term 'experimental film'. . In September
last year, a ListSERVE debate ensued around a call for proposal for the
FSAC Film Genre Series, two of which were anime (which is a genre) and
experimental film. A discussion ensued, and Jeffrey Skoller for UC
Berkeley offered up some valuable arguments for the case against
genrification of experimental film. Analogous to the Cinema Media
Studies Special Interest group Ex-FM (that founder Michael Zryd asked me
to be a founding member of precisely because of animation's 'fuzziness')
members concerns about experimental film the very fuzzy term of
'animation' needs unpacking and redefining into a number of related areas
of critical engagement and authorship
An example for this is Stan Vanderbeek's collage and cutout film work (the
next issue of animation: an interdiciplinary journal - ANM for short -
will be a special issue on him). Vanderbeek's animation films are
'experimental' but they can also be allocated to genres of dark comedy,
activist, diary, lyrical, reflexive, public affairs, war (using the LoC's
gernres). Many animation films express social critique, political satire,
commodity culture, gender, issues of representation, for instance Martha
Coburn, Paul Vester, George Griffin,Vera Neubauer and many more.
So 'fuzzy' terms can be a good thing, they can also be a disservice to the
multliplicity of styles, content and form, not to mention the multiple
platforms animation is increasingly using. Part of my concern with the
term is to do with the artefact - another theme you were interesting in
pursuing here - and the (improving) high/low art divide between 'serious'
and 'art' animation. William Kentridge and Robin Rhode are to my
knowledge, two of the few 'animation' artists to actually break through
this divide. Why aren't the Quay brother's works in Tate Modern? Why do
they screen Fischli Weiss, but not Jerzy Kucia's or the Quays' works in
the same contexts? An example is their currently touring DORMITORIUM
exhibition, that was recently at Cornell.
There is a long way to go to correct a common perception that animation is
not art. On the BBCs website, one reviewer of the 2007 exhibition
Momentary Momentum: Animated Drawings at Parasol Unit Foundation for
Contemporary Art, London (which includes Kentridge and Rhode), states, It
would be wrong to refer to these works as just animations. ( Francesca
Gavin, Moving Drawings at Londons Parasol Unit, Collective: The
Interactive Culture Magazine, March 8, 2007,
