Scène d’été (Summer Scene, 1869) by Jean-Frédéric Bazille.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916
The Bowes Swan
“I watched a silver swan which had a living grace about his movements and a living intelligence in his eyes.” Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad.
The Silver Swan is perhaps the best known and best loved object in The Bowes Museum. It is musical automaton in the form of a life-size model of a swan, comprising a clockwork mechanism covered in silver plumage above a music box. It rests on a stream made of twisted glass rods interspersed with silver fish. When the mechanism is wound up, the glass rods rotate, the music begins, and the swan twists its head to the left and right and appears to preen its back. It then appears to see a fish in the water below and bends down to catch it, it then swallows the fish as the music stops and resumes its upright position. The whole performance lasts about forty seconds. In reality the fish has been concealed lengthways on a pivot in the swan’s beak and returns to this position. In real life swans do not eat fish.
The Bowes Museum site has more details about John Joseph Merlin’s splendid swan and this page has a QT movie of the automaton in action.
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
El Topo
Subterranean Cinema has the El Topo screenplay online, taken from the Douglas Book edition from 1971 (above is the cover of my John Calder UK reprint of the same). As well as a screenplay with annotations by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the second half of the book featured a lengthy, fascinating and at times bizarre and hilarious interview with the director. The site also includes a 1973 Penthouse interview with Jodorowsky, the soundtrack album, and elsewhere on the site there are further gems such as the Mad magazine parody of A Clockwork Orange, something I’d not seen for years.
(Thanks Jay!)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store
