{animation} – Page 59 – { feuilleton }

Harry Smith revisited

Harry Smith in the middle of the Twentieth Century with some of his drawings.

The first European exhibition of work by artist, writer, filmmaker, collector, Kabbalist, ethnographer…okay, polymath Harry Smith, opens today at the Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland. The exhibition runs from 2nd May–8th June 2007. In addition, there’s a companion exhibition, Harry Smith Anthology Remixed, at alt.gallery from 8th May–30th June. Among his many accomplishments, Smith compiled the landmark Anthology of American Folk Music and the latter showing features 84 musical and non-musical artists responding to each of the 84 songs which comprise that collection.

Heaven and Earth Magic (1962).

Harry Smith: Hobbies and films

2nd May–8th June 2007

Reg Vardy Gallery
School of Arts, Design, Media & Culture
University of Sunderland
Ashburne House
Ryhope Road
Sunderland
SR2 7EF

Reg Vardy Gallery is proud to host the first European exhibition devoted to Harry Smith’s films and hobbies.

Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the ‘cat’s cradle’) and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled “Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side”, made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children’s jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).

He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for—the Anthology of American Folk Music—the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.
George Pendle

This exhibition includes a variety of Smith?s eccentric ethnographic collections, or what he called “Encyclopaedias of Design” such as string figures, Pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs), early sound recordings, and a range of his hand-painted, stop-motion and collaged animations such as Early Abstractions, and Late Superimpositions. The exhibition will also include documentation of Smith?s paper airplane collection. This unusual and rare collection is comprised of hundreds of paper airplanes found by Smith on the streets of New York City from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. This exhibition of the hobbies and artistry of Harry Smith has been organised in collaboration with the Harry Smith Archives and Anthology Film Archives, New York. George Pendle writes for Frieze, Cabinet, and the Financial Times . His most recent book Strange Angel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005) traces the life of the eccentric rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Both Parsons and Harry Smith were heavily involved with the occult fraternity—the Ordo Templi Orientis.

Harry Smith Anthology Remixed

8th May–30th June

alt.gallery
61/62 Thornton Street
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 4AW

The exhibition brings together the work of 84 leading artists and musicians, who have been invited to make a visual artwork in response to 1 track each from the groundbreaking music release the Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology was edited by seminal New York artist, musicologist and experimental filmmaker Harry Smith, and first published by Folkways in 1952.

The Anthology is comprised entirely of recordings issued between 1927 (the year electronic recording made accurate reproduction possible) and 1932 when the Depression stifled folk music sales. Harry Smith used the new LP technology to create an unbroken sequence of songs, divided into three colour coded sets, which represented three elements: air, fire and water. The Anthology is considered to be one of the most important collections of information in modern society, creating a folk canon and contributing to numerous folk revival movements.

This exhibition aims to create a new visual collection of the Anthology, to continue the collective history and revival of the work, as seen through the eyes of contemporary visual artists and musicians. The exhibition includes artists from the Europe, Japan and the US reflecting a diverse and exciting range of practice including: visual art, outsider art, comic book, design, craft and illustration.

Exhibition curated by Rebecca Shatwell. A specially commissioned essay by David Keenan accompanies the exhibition and can be downloaded here.

Harry Smith Anthology Remixed includes work by: Dave Allen, Jonathan Allen, Diane Barcelowsky, Marcia Bassett, Eric Beltz, Hisham Bharoocha, Jesse Bransford, Vashti Bunyan, Jelle Crama, Jaron Childs, Rob Churm, Marcus Coates, Karen Constance, Christian Cummings & Jed Lackritz, Dearraindrop, Arrington di Dionyso, Graham Dolphin, Bill Drummond, Jorn Ebner, Espers, Peter J Evans, Yamataka Eye, Jad Fair, Feathers Family, Kyle Field, Alec Finlay, Devin Flynn, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Luke Fowler, Chris Graham, Susie Green, Doug Harvey, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Rama Hoffpauir, Dan Howard-Birt, Zoe Irvine, Rich Jacobs, Juneau Projects, Seth Kelly, Jeffrey Lewis, Linder, Derek Lodge, Lone Twin, Robert AA Lowe, Ant Macari, The Matinee Orchestra, Maya Miller, Gean Moreno, Heather Leigh Murray, Michael Nyman, Dylan Nyoukis, John Olson, John Orth, Paper Rad, Mike Paré, Plastic Crimewave, Dave Portner, Devin Powers, Adam Putnam, The Rebel, Ginnie Reed, Clare E Rojas, Chris Rollen, Arik Roper, Giles Round, Royal Art Lodge, Mathew Sawyer, David Sherry, Ross Sinclair, DJ Spooky, Andre Stitt, Philip Taaffe, Vernon & Burns, Daryl Waller, Flora Whiteley, Michael Wilson, Simon Woolham, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, C. Spencer Yeh, Yokoland, zoviet*france

• The Harry Smith Archives
• American Magus: Harry Smith—A Modern Alchemist

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• Jodorowsky on DVD
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• The art of Arik Roper
• Wallace Burman and Semina
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney
• The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

Moonlight in Glory

Great abstract animation from the Trollbäck design company for Moonlight in Glory, a track from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno & David Byrne. Via Design Observer.

In a similar vein there’s Bruce Connor‘s 1981 film for another track, Mea Culpa. Connor also produced a film for America is Waiting from the same album. Continuing the interpretative theme, Eno & Byrne made the album tracks publicly available in 2006 to potential remixers. Some results of that, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, can be found here and here.

Update: the original Moonlight link was deleted but you can still see the video on their site if you hunt through the sample of works shown on the Trollbäck home page.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• Generative culture
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

La Rue du Tramway (1938) by Paul Delvaux.

Taxandria (1994) is a feature-length fantasy film by Belgian animator Raoul Servais that’s received little attention outside his native country, possibly because it failed in the marketplace and has been deemed too weird or uncommercial to export. You only have to compare the export version of Harry Kümel’s Malpertuis with his original cut to see how inventive Belgian films are treated by US distributors.

Servais had previously made an acclaimed animated short, Harpya, using a combination of live actors and painted backgrounds. Taxandria elaborates on this process (called Servaisgraphy by its inventor) using settings designed by one of my favourite comic artists François Schuiten, creator (with Benoît Peeters) of Les Cités Obscures. Taxandria intrigues for a third reason, the inspiration of Surrealist master Paul Delvaux whose paintings served as the origin of the project. And it also contains a remarkable detail in the screenplay credit for Alain Robbe-Grillet, a man better known for making Last Year at Marienbad with Alain Resnais, and the kind of fierce intellectual one imagines would usually run a mile from this kind of extravagant whimsy.

Continue reading “Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux”

Ten films by Oskar Fischinger

After complaining a couple of days ago about the difficulty of seeing works of abstract cinema, it turns out that a collection of Oskar Fischinger’s great animations appeared earlier this year.

Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before Fantasia (the 1940 version), there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967), master of “absolute” or nonobjective filmmaking. He was cinema’s Kandinsky, an animator who, beginning in the 1920’s in Germany, created exquisite “visual music” using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz. (John Canemaker, New York Times)

Oskar Fischinger is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, embracing the abstraction that became the major art movement of that century, and exploring the new technology of the cinema to open abstract painting into a new Visual Music that performs in liquid time. (Biographer William Moritz)

We now understand Oskar Fischinger not only as a link between the geometric painting of pre-war Europe and post-war California but as a grandfather of the digital arts.
(Art Critic Peter Frank)

That’s good, so now how about the Whitneys, Jordan Belson, Harry Smith…?

Via Boing Boing.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Lapis by James Whitney

Lapis (1966).

Proof of the conservative nature of cinema as an artistic medium can be found in the way its abstract practitioners don’t merit anything like the attention received by Piet Mondrian or Jackson Pollock. In cinema narrative is all, and it’s ironic that when artists such as Julian Schnabel or Robert Longo turn to film they end up telling stories.

James Whitney’s Lapis (1966) is a classic work in this field, a 10-minute animation that took three years to create using primitive computer equipment:

In this piece smaller circles oscillate in and out in an array of colors resembling a kaleidoscope while being accompanied with Indian sitar music. The patterns become hypnotic and trance inducing. This work clearly correlates the auditory and the visual and is a wonderful example of the concept of synaesthesia.

James and his brother John were pioneers of the use of computers in animation. Looking around for stills from Lapis turned up this fascinating page of early computer graphics:

In the early 1960s digital computers became available to artists for the first time (although they cost from $100,000 to several millions, required air conditioning, and therefore located in separate computer rooms, uninhabitable ‘studios’; programs and data had to be prepared with the keypunch, punch cards then fed into the computer; systems were not interactive and could produce only still images). The output medium was usually a pen plotter, microfilm plotter (hybrid bwn vector CRT and a raster image device), line printer or an alphanumeric printout, which was then manually transferred into a visual medium.

It’s difficult to see these films outside a special screening at a gallery or arts cinema. The Keith Griffiths documentary Abstract Cinema is an excellent introduction, including both Lapis and James Whitney’s Yantra among many other short works. However, this isn’t available to buy so viewing it means scouring TV schedules or waiting for some of these neglected works to turn up on YouTube. Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema discusses abstraction and the Whitneys and is available as a free PDF download here.

Update: Lapis on YouTube again, in full this time!

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive