Carels, Edwin. "Short Circuits: On the Impact of the Flipbook in the Work of Robert Breer." Global Animation Theory: International Perspectives at Animafest Zagreb. Ed. Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gili#, Holger Lang, Daniel Šulji# and Hrvoje Turkovi#. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 117–142. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501337161.ch-008>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 15:19 UTC. Copyright © Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gili#, Holger Lang, Daniel Šulji#, Hrvoje Turkovi#, and Contributors and Cover image Zlatka Salopek 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 8 Short Circuits On the Impact of the Flipbook in the Work of Robert Breer Edwin Carels Introduction Pursuing a highly personal and surprisingly consistent course, painter, fi lmmaker and sculptor Robert Carlton Breer (1926–2011) was driven by a persistent interest in visual perception. No matter how diverse, Breer’s works always make us aware to what extent human perception is both culturally conditioned and physiologically determined. The formats he developed to achieve this lead us back to optical toys and the technological origins of media- art. The interaction he provoked between such parameters as time, space and movement were aimed to short-circuit viewing habits. This chapter retraces how for Breer the fundamental decision to destabilize the visual regime within the context of modern art came about. Through the (re)discovery of the fl ipbook, Breer found his initial means to problematize the relationship between viewer and artwork. With this methodological breakthrough, the decomposition and reconstruction of movement became the centre of attention in all strands of his work. With forty- three fi lms in fi fty years, Breer remains a household name in the world of animation and avant- garde fi lm. And yet his career began as a painter, with still images. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1949, Breer adopted the radical modernist stance of abstract, neo-plastic painting. Inspired by Mondrian, he imposed the same types of restrictions on himself to come to 117 118 GLOBAL ANIMATION THEORY the purest interplay of lines and solid colour surfaces on canvas. But in the same year that he could have started to exhibit in the reputed gallery Denise Ren é in Paris, Breer had already begun to ‘decompose’ his major infl uences with his fi rst fi lm, Form Phases (1952). Translating his own rigourous, two- dimensional paintings into a time-based medium also led him to conceive three- dimensional objects, starting with fl ipbooks. In April 1955 Denise Ren é placed him alongside such prominent, or then still promising, names as Duchamp, Calder, Tinguely, Bury and Vasarely in the groundbreaking group show Le Mouvement . And yet it would be Breer’s fi nal act de pr é sence at the gallery. 1 His ultimate contribution consisted of a one- off fi lm programme and the production of a multiple, in the form of a fl ipbook. Once he had experienced the sensation of the moving image, the absoluteness of painting was no longer an option. The fl ickering, fl uttering fi lms Breer started to make are like moths heading towards a fl ame: his images appear only for the briefest of moments, always already at the brink of their disappearence. The rapid-fi re animation technique Breer favoured in his fi lmworks, he contrasted with a second strand of works that evolved from the rupture with painting. Via the fl ipbook Breer not only found his way into fi lm, but as objects they also steered him towards kinetic sculputures. Gradually these evolved into enigmatic shapes that move about at a nearly imperceptible pace. Over the last decade this spatial aspect of his work has been foregrounded and the radicality of his critical practice better understood. 2 The aesthetic questions raised by blurring the distinction between sculpture and pedestal, between object and background, between stasis and movement continue to reverberate. Pivotal moments After spending the fi rst ten years of his career in Paris (with frequent return trips to visit his family in the United States), Breer felt the real debates about the developments in contemporary art were happening in New York. Upon his return in 1959, he quickly became acquainted with instigators of the Fluxus- movement, John Cage and Nam June Paik, as well as befriending prominent Pop artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg. 1 The gallery opened right after the liberation of Paris in November 1944 with a solo show by Vasarely. Le Mouvement ran from 8 April to 30 April 1955. Although the initiator passed away in 2012, the gallery still continues. 2 A few examples of this reviving interest in his work: in March 2010 an article appeared in the magazine Kaleidoscope ; in November 2010 an interview appeared in Artforum ; in 2011 a retrospective in the Baltic (Gateshead, UK ) and in the museum Tinguely (Basel, Switzerland) was organized, accompanied by a catalogue. SHORT CIRCUITS 119 His fi lmworks were regularly featured in the programmes of Anthology Film Archives and Cinema 16, two hotspots of avant-garde fi lm. Breer has been a fellow traveller and occasional participant to many of the modernist movements of the second half of the twentieth century, but he never really became Op, Pop or Rock. An eyewitness as much as an actor on all these scenes, Breer quietly, yet systematically, developed a separate category, a parallel movement of his own. There were many pivotal moments in his early career that led him to start questioning and expanding his fi eld of vision. During his training as a painter, he discovered geometric abstraction through an exposition of Mondrian, which incited him to abandon fi gurative painting. 3 This implied a complete distantiation from his teachers and fellow students at Stanford University, but Breer persevered in isolation. When he fi rst arrived in Paris, from early on he befriended such visionaries as the Swiss orchestrator of sculptural machines, Jean Tinguely, and the Swedish art collector, Karl Gunnar Pontus Hult é n, which led to several collaborations in the longer term. The former was then still developing his disruptive style that would make him world famous a decade later; the latter would in 1973 become the founding director of the new museum at the Centre Georges Pompidou, opening in 1977. Another decisive moment came when Breer stepped back from the ambition of absolute painting to focus on the transformational steps and thought processes that lead towards the composition of a painting. In 1952 Breer picked up the camera in order to register each step of the creative process in a sequence and soon started to explore the parameters of this new medium. During a visit to his parental home in Michigan he borrowed his father’s Bolex movie camera and fi lmed the images from his fl ipbook one at a time with the camera clamped to a closet door. Breer came back to Paris with three short fi lms, and in 1954 he made the fourth one in this series, Form Phazes IV . Another step towards liberation from the abstract, geometric, post-Cubist orthodoxy came along with his friendship with Pontus Hult é n, co- curator of the exhibition Le Mouvement . Together they set up a programme of historical avant- garde fi lms, including their own works. Breer showed Form Phazes IV (1954) and, under a pseudonym, his fi rst animated photocollage, the anti- clerical joke Un Miracle (1954). 4 Together with Pontus Hult é n, Breer also documented the exhibition. 5 The fi rst applause after a fi lm screening 3 This was in 1947 at the occasion of a fi eld trip to San Francisco as a student. Breer’s college years had been interrupted by a two-year service in the US army. Right after his graduation, he arrived in Paris in April 1949 at the age of twenty- two. 4 At its fi rst screening, Un Miracle was still called Le Pape , and Breer presented it under the pseudonyme of B. Dieu. Pontus Hult é n’s fi lm was named ‘X’ (1955). 5 The fi lm is 14 min and simply called Le Mouvement (1955). 120 GLOBAL ANIMATION THEORY at the Brussels’ Cin é mathè que in 1956 was also a moment of epiphany. 6 Although he was primarily there with a solo show in a gallery, the discovery of an entirely different audience was another motivation to abandon painting. When Breer was back in Brussels for the 1958 EXPRMNTL festival, this was the fi rst occasion for several avant- garde fi lmmakers to meet each other. In the company of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, Breer discovered there actually was a whole different context for his fi lmwork. In particular, his meeting with Peter Kubelka, who also conceputalized fi lm as a metric sequence of autonomous frames, would lead to a long-lasting and productive friendship. Frame by frame To the actual gallery show, Breer contributed the fl ipbook that he created as an alternative strategy for showing fi lm in the bright- lit conditions of a white cube. Although being part of a breakthrough show, for Breer it also brought a sense of departure. His name did not appear together with Agam, Bury, Calder, Duchamp, Jacobsen, Soto, Tinguely and Vasarely on the front of the ‘Manifeste Jaune’, which accompanied the exhibition and considerably FIGURE 8.1 Image par Images , fl ipbook (cardboard, paper, 1955). Courtesy: gallery gb agency, Paris.