The Vibe – Be Open To Your Inner Worringer: Another Vector To The Appreciation Of Abstract Animation
Len Lye, Dwinell Grant, John Whitney, Oskar Fischinger, Robert Breer, Ed Emshwiller and Norman McLaren……. the names pour forth from the introduction to Robert Russett and Cecile Starr’s seminal book ‘Experimental Animation’, first released in 1976 but updated and re-released multiple times since. And that is just page one. Turn the page and the next couple of paragraphs feature Harry Smith, Larry Jordan, John and Faith Hubley, Viking Eggeling and Hy Hirsh. The history of abstract animation is not short of a roster of founders.
These are hardly household names but some of them have left indelible marks in the mainstream videosphere. John Whitney, for example, created the breakthrough abstract computer graphics for the 1958 classic Hitchcock film Vertigo, changing the face of movie credits forever. Larry Cuba, in an intense burst of activity, created the ‘pilot briefing’ sequence which showed the only path to the destruction of the Death Star in the first Star Wars, introducing the cinema audience to its first ever taste of 3D animation. Cuba continues to push the envelope, most recently giving a talk on his work at a generative art summit in Berlin (highlights of which are readily available online).
Generally speaking, the key films and filmmakers that make up the history of abstract animation are more or less uncontested, even if their respective rankings are more up for grabs. And, happily, it is surprising how much of the work that forms this history has survived and is accessible. That being said, some pioneers did their legends little favour: Harry Smith constantly worked on and updated versions of his films with little regard for their titles leaving behind any number of films that shared a title but little else making a definitive filmography ‘challenging’. Some of the experiments of John Whitney were created on bespoke machines and in some cases were difficult to rescreen with modern standardised equipment. The early work of digital abstract pioneers such as Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton have taken complex restoration to lift them from the early systems they employed but that no longer exist and make them viewable on contemporary video platforms. It is impossible to say how many stored films of this type sit perfectly safely in archives around the world but cannot be watched without recourse to reconstructing the early and now abandoned technologies that originally bore them.
The DNA of abstract animation is more contested though. What powers it? What inspired its earliest exponents and how well did their work respond to those inspirations? How did other artforms fuel the rise of abstract animation and what role – if any – did a variety of socio-political movements and moments play? And what are the kinship strands to movements such as modernism, expressionism, (minimalism for that matter), surrealism or even Dada? The good news is that some early pioneers devoted much of their energy to explaining the wellspring of the artform – at least as they saw it. A grand example are the various writings and manifesto of Hans Richter who probably did more than any of the first generation of abstract animators to lay down a discourse about why this work was being done and what made it important and unique.
It is hard to understate what the world was experiencing as this artform took shape. Apart from the very rise of the cinematic technologies (including electricity!) that made these works even possible to create and project in the first place, the world had gone through the horrifying shocks of war and social upheaval that marked the opening decades of the 20th century. Many people – and particularly many artists – believed that the only sensible reaction was to rip up the rule book of the past and look for utterly new ways to organise every aspect of society.
Andre Breton, the leading figure in the surrealist movement talked and wrote at length about the tyrannies wrought upon humankind by what he saw as the prolonged “reign of logic” that birthed them. Given that that had gifted the world the horrific war that had torn Europe apart, he and so many others could see no use in simply returning to business as usual and, in fact, given the abundant evidence on hand, the best path was to destroy (or at least discard) as many social, political and artistic norms as possible and start again.
Writing in ‘Dada: Art And Anti Art’, Richter meanwhile talked about the rise of abstraction as being “a reaction to the general disintegration of the world around us.”
This was the veritable ‘fire sale’….. everything must go. And artists such as Richter, the surrealists led by Breton and the entire Dada movement were wielding the largest flaming torches.
Richter, along with Walter Ruttmann and the superbly monikered Viking Eggeling were the trio that brought the first completed abstract films to the cinema screen. Each believed – to significantly varying degrees – in the higher purpose of the ‘creative destruction’ that underpinned the surrealist and Dada movements of the era. But of more interest to us today – arguably – is the notion that none of them really saw themselves primarily as filmmakers and certainly not as ‘abstract animators’ – all indications are they would have barely understood the term.
Each of them was primarily involved in a practice they saw as being some combination of the next step in painting and music – even though their work was released in a period before colour film and movie sound existed.
They were not, of course, the only artists moving into this space. Nor were they the only ones attempting to harness these motivations and offer these types of responses.
People were coming at abstract animation from a variety of vectors. Any number of artists were looking to do what so many artists do…. to create work that engenders a less representationally specific but more purely aesthetic or emotional response in its audience.
Examples abound. Enter Wilhelm Worringer. In 1908 he wrote a book whose long shadow reaches down to us even now, and will continue to do so until we surrender all of our creative faculties to A.I. (tentatively scheduled for some time next year by the look of it). His book was titled ‘Abstraction And Empathy’ and it’s a blueprint for giving form to an otherwise formless response to art. Part of his extensive thesis posited the view that there was a natural or inherent attraction to abstraction in all people due to the “psychological need to represent objects in a more spiritual manner”.
Stay with me.
“The aesthetic sense is an objectivised sense of the self.” And… “Just as the desire for empathy as the basis for aesthetic experience finds satisfaction in organic beauty, so the desire for abstraction finds its beauty in the life-renouncing inorganic, in the crystalline, in a word, in all abstract regularity and necessity.”
OK, time to hit pause for some translation methinks. Time to wheel in Peter Gay. In his astonishing book ‘Modernism: The Lure Of Heresy – From Baudelaire To Beckett And Beyond’ Gay does a pretty good job of cutting through the fog. “Worringer argued that modern aesthetics had ‘taken the decisive step from aesthetic objectivism to aesthetic subjectivism’,” he says. “What matters in art – or rather, what should matter – are the emotions it arouses.”
Sooooo…. the vibe??
“If a psychology of the need for art is ever written,” wrote Worringer, “it would be a history of the feeling about the world…”
Yep, that sounds like the vibe!!
Bring it home Wilhelm. “The value of the work of art, what we call its beauty lies, generally speaking, in its power to bestow happiness.”
Alright, now it’s a party. There’s nothing to say that a beautiful painting of a tree in front of a sunset or an exquisitely animated tale of two lost souls finally finding each other are not art and/or cannot bring about a feeling of happiness within the audience. Clearly they can be both of those things BUT it is predominantly the subject material and the way that is handled to deliver a representational image and an orthodox narrative that does the heavy lifting. In abstraction in general – and for us -abstract animation in particular that feeling has to be delivered by the art and the art alone. There is nothing else in the toolkit to get the job done. And Worringer seems to be saying the human soul has – somewhere buried in it – at least a latent yearning for that type of imagery and messaging. He must be right – why else do we love to stare at clouds, allow ourselves to become hypnotised by a flickering fire or find endless fascination in so many apparently ‘abstract’ patterns of nature, be they chucking a rock in a pond, the colours that swirl through rocks or the random shadows cast by a sun setting through trees.
I take back the quip about surrendering all our faculties to A.I. Don’t get me wrong, we’re pretty much screwed BUT not entirely. This is the last stuff A.I. will take over because, if Worringer is right, it’s among the most elementally human understanding that there is. It goes lower – perhaps deeper is a better word – into our psyches and our souls. It is next to impossible to teach and in that sense may prove to be among the hardest stuff for the machines to take off us coz they just won’t get it.
Space does not allow for a review of how every film in this programme exemplifies a contemporary notion of Worringer’s timeless idea but the opening film – SKRFF by Corrie Francis Parks and Daniel Nuderscher brings an astonishing and compelling physical literalness to the table. In SKRFF the filmmakers have ‘excavated’ marks into a wall that has been thickened by more than four decades of graffiti art paint, the layers mined and their exposed filigree re-introduced to the light of day after having been long buried beneath the work of so many others gives life less to the individual art or artist but far more to a cumulative released spirit of an entire movement of expression. Of interest – but not immediate relevance – it brings to mind the work of French artist Jacques Villeglé whose practice included wandering around and slicing down old clusters of street posters to reveal (apparently) random elements of artwork at various layers.
As elemental – both in its production and in its appeal to the senses – is Edwin Rostron’s Help Desk. Hand drawn and pulsing with a restless spirit that demands constant movement and morphing imagery Help Desk brings to the fore a quintessential tool in any animator’s kit….. can they imagine a flowing waltz of movement that pinpoints their unique ability to ‘think like an animator’. Rostron’s animation and art practice is actually fairly varied when looked at in totality but Help Desk channels a precision of draughtsmanship and a discipline of line much of his paint and drawing works dramatically eschew. It is also no surprise that Rostron has been instrumental in establishing a London-based organisation that did much to create a profile for numerous auteur animators and their work.
The roster of filmmakers in this programme’s line-up are testament to the depth and continuity of this form of animation – one that is all but invisible to the general public whose grasp of ‘animation’ so often ends at the cinema holiday blockbuster or with Saturday morning TV fare. For three decades Gabor Ulrich has been at the vanguard of the rise and rise of independent Hungarian animation. His latest film Rekonstrukt brings to the screen a unique and fascinating film originally conceived in the 1920’s by a founder of the Bauhaus Orchestra.
Nicolas Brault’s career similarly spans several decades and his new film Entropic Memory also reaches back into the past for its source inspiration, in this case the repurposing of a collection of water damaged photographs that needed the imaginative touch of a filmmaker such as Brault to give them a new life and purpose.
Australian abstract animator Dirk de Bruyn’s career reaches back even further (let’s not count the years) and there would be few artists alive who have done so much to master and carry forward the abstract animating sub-genre of cameraless or ‘direct-to-film’ animating, even as these days he harnesses some new technologies to do so. To Hear To See is little short of a masterclass in what this form of animating is capable of expressing and an indicator of its barely tapped potential as a standalone artform.
Richard Reeves can claim all the same accolades. His 1996 film Linear Dreams would stand as one of the most entrancing cameraless animations ever made and his latest film Fusion shows that Reeves, a quiet Canadian who among other achievements gave so much to the success of the Quickdraw Animation Society in Calgary, stands as one of the great cameraless animation practitioners of all time.
There is a really fascinating ‘sub-story’ buried in this line-up though. LIAF regular’s will no doubt be amply familiar with the name Max Hattler. His films routinely screen here at LIAF and in a number of cases have taken away key awards. He is renowned around the world as an innovator and an artist more than willing to explore ways of pushing abstract animating into new and fascinating directions. Some years ago, Hattler began teaching a course in abstract animating at a university in Hong Kong. Little in the film or art history of Hong Kong suggested an imminent eruption of unique, eye-popping abstract video art…. and yet, that is exactly what has happened. No less than FOUR of the films in this line-up have sprung from this one-off geyser of innovative animating. Shapes (Tsz-wing Ho), Tao (Shuxin Yan Wang, Simai Stella Huang, Haoran Yan Yang), Clash (Yuming Liao, Jingxian Zhan, Yingyue Zhuang) and Geometric Symphony (Ka Yuet Chan, Yau Hing Lam) are but a sample of the incredible catalogue of work being crafted at what – on the face of it – seems like an unlikely mothership of creation. Further investigation becomes more pressing with every passing year.
It obviously takes a range of skills to bring the imagery on display in the films in this programme out of the mind of the creator and onto a screen so they can be shared and watched. But we each have something in the core of us that allows us to appreciate and ‘feel’ what is being produced here…. we just need to let that connection be made….. to open up to our inner Worringer.
Malcolm Turner
International Competition 1: Abstract Showcase screens at The Garden Cinema Sat 23 Nov and online from the same date (available for 48 hours)
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