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Robert Breer: Single-Frame Aesthetics and Inherited Modernisms in Relation to the Neo-Avant-Garde and Debates on Film Animation

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Robert Breer: Single-Frame Aesthetics and Inherited Modernisms in Relation to the Neo-Avant-Garde and Debates on Film Animation Robert Breer: Single-frame Aesthetics and Inherited Modernisms in Relation to the Neo-avant-garde and Debates on Film Animation Sonia Bridge A thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Art University College London June, 2016 I, Sonia Bridge confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Sharon Morris for the unfailing encouragement of my PhD research, and for her resourceful and far-reaching insight which fosters the impossible, transforming it into a poetics of the plausible. I would also like to acknowledge my advisors Prof. Timothy Mathews and Prof. Jon Thomson whose critical perspectives and reflective questions on art and responsibility have always been appreciated. A special thanks to my family, the profound dedication and generosity of Drs Gillian and John Bridge, to the constancy of my siblings Drs Michael and Amanda Bridge, and the magnanimity of David Brown whose love and companionship has enriched this journey immeasurably. ABSTRACT Breer’s cross-disciplinary process and self-reflexive exploration of the single-frame within film presents an intensive questioning of representation, movement, and the hierarchies of form that taps into the debates of mid twentieth-century art. Having an approach that is unparalleled within the discipline of animation, Breer’s work constellates the renewed interest in the avant-garde from absolute abstraction to collage, along with abstract expressionism. Involving the use of non-art materials and technology in an endeavor to refigure the status of the everyday, Breer’s work also participates in the wide-ranging transformation of art, beyond traditional mediums and more fundamentally raises questions about the technical mediation of experience. The refusal in Breer’s practice of the imaginary of conventional cinema and commercial studio animation is underscored by the recourse in his work to the ‘low arts’ of early popular animation and pre- cinematic devices which lay bare the underlying mechanics of film in a manner that nevertheless celebrates the appeal of its pleasures. Despite shared engagements with the neo-avant-garde, Breer’s cinematic assemblages presented a challenge to postwar plurality, and its recognizability was hindered by the marked novelty and art-institutional marginalization of animation-film then prevalent. The conceptual valence of Breer’s work, which questions its status as art, reflects upon its complex and contradictory historicity, and mediates between the principles of form and the so-called failure of craft, gains a renewed relevance today beyond the revival of retro-modernism, and in an era in which the technique of animation has become ubiquitous. This thesis sets out to recover the witty deflationary tactics and criticality of the aesthetic questions raised by Breer’s animated films. The practice component revolves around the materiality and analogue confluence of the digital moving-image; three short animated-sketches present inscriptions of everydayness and ephemerality as part of a recursively obsolescent gaze upon its single-frame image-objects. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ii Introduction 1 Robert Breer: A Background in the Mechanics of Motion ‘Fashioned by Function’ Modernism & Carl Breer’s Chrysler ‘Airflow’ Motorcar, The Defunctionalization of Movement in Breer’s Kinetic Frame: The 1960s Sculptural ‘Floats’ & Film 69, 1968 Chapter 1. 32 Recapturing Constructive Movements: Mondrian’s Neoplasticism & Richter’s Absolute Film in Constellation with Breer’s Filmic-image Form Phases IV, 1954 Chapter 2. 82 Attitudes to Geometric Abstraction in Op-Art and Kineticism in the Le Mouvement exhibition, 1955 Breer’s Neo-dada film Homage to Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 1960, Recovering the Implications of Film within Le Mouvement, 2010 Chapter 3. 92 Refunctioning Film in Breer’s Pre-Cinematic (& post-Conceptual) Objects & the Auratic Return in FILM, 2011 by Tacita Dean On the Cinematic Imaginary and Status of Animation after Film Chapter 4. 116 In Pursuit of Recreation, 1956 Chapter 5. 158 On Materialization, Aesthetic logic & Spatio-temoralization of the Filmic Image: Setting Breer’s process and film Eyewash, 1959 in relation to the Neo-avant-garde, Rauschenberg’s Rebus, 1955 Chapter 6. 202 Bang! Conclusion 234 Appendix A. Translation of the French audiotrack for Recreation, 1956 241 Appendix B. Practice-related Report 243 Appendix C. Practice-related Video Works included on DVD ROM in Sleeve Attached - Bibliography 247 i ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Marey, Triangular Prism Presenting One of its Bases to the Air of the Smoke-machine Equipped with 57 Channels, 1901, (print from negative plate). 22 Figure 2. Chrysler Ad., ‘Why Be So Radical?’, The Saturday Evening Post, 1934. 23 Figure 3. Carl Breer, Chrysler Airflow, 1932, presents a model of the future of the automobile. 24 Figure 4. Breer, Floats, 1966, (photo). 25 Figure 5. Breer, 69, 1968, (4.24min,16mm, 8 stills). 26 Figure 6. Breer, 69, 1968, (4x6in index-card). 27 Figure 7. Breer, Floats, 1966-7, (2 photodocuments). 28 Figure 8. Rauschenberg, Linoleum, 1966, (13min, document clip of performance, 3 stills). 29 Figure 9. Oldenburg, Profile Airflow, 1969, (multiple wall-relief sculpture, 85.1x166.4cm). 30 Figure 10. Breer, (Almost) Everything Goes! 2011, (index-card sketch enlarged to 20m high banner for his retrospective at the BALTIC). 31 Figure 11. Breer, Form Phases IV, 1954, (4min, 16mm, 2 stills). 43 Figure 12. Breer, Form Phases IV, 1954. 44 Figure 13. Breer, Untitled, 1949-50, (oil on canvas, 65x81cm). 48 Figure 14. Mondrian, Tableau I: Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, 1921, (oil on canvas, 103x100cm). 49 Figure 15. Richter, Rhythmus 21, 1921, (3min, 16mm). 60 Figure 16. Richter, Rhythmus 21. 61 Figure 17. Richter, Rhythmus 21. 63 Figure 18. Richter, Rhythmus 21. 63 Figure 19. Richter, Rhythmus 21. (inclusion of the once controversial diagonal; Footnote 47). 64 Figure 20. Richter, Rhythmus 21. 65 Figure 21. Breer, Form Phases IV. 66 Figure 22. Breer, Form Phases IV. 66 Figure 23. Breer, Form Phases IV. 67 Figure 24. Breer, Form Phases IV. 67 Figure 25. Breer, Form Phases IV. 68 Figure 26. Breer, Form Phases IV. 71 Figure 27. Breer, Form Phases IV. 72 Figure 28. Breer, Form Phases IV. 72 Figure 29. Breer, Form Phases IV, (2 stills). 73 Figure 30. Breer, Form Phases IV. 74 Figure 31. Breer, Form Phases IV. 76 Figure 32. Breer, Form Phases IV, (2 stills). 77 Figure 33. Breer & Hultén, Le Mouvement, 1955, film & exhibition photodocumentation includes: Breer, Image by Images, 1955, flip-book, third row down on the right. 83 Figure 34. Tinguely, Broadsheet for Homage to New York, 1960, and opening shot in: Breer, Homage to Tinguely’s Homage, 1960. 85 Figure 35. Breer, Homage to Jean Tinguely's Homage to NY, 1960, (9.5min, 16mm, black & white, 2stills). 86 iii Figure 36. Lye, Rhythm, 1957. (1min, 16mm, black & white). 87 Figure 37. Tinguely, Œuf d'Onocrotale No.2, 1958. (60x60x25cm, relief: metal elements on black wooden panel, motorized.) 88 Figure 38. Breer, Homage to Jean Tinguely’s Homage to NY, 1960, (4 stills). 89 Figure 39. Breer, 3D-Mutoscope, 1978-1980, (rotary hand-cranked index-cards, & mounted viewer. 20.5x56x23cm). 92 Figure 40. Dean, FILM, 2011, (Unilever Series, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, Oct. - March, 2012). 99 Figure 41. Marey with George Demeny, Somersault, 1890-1904, Scientific American, 1914. 110 Figure 42. Bragaglia, The Typist, 1911. (Gelatine silver print, 4.6x6.5in). 110 Figure 43. Breer, Form Phases IV. 117 Figure 44. Breer, Form Phases IV. 118 Figure 45. Breer, Recreation, 1956, (1.30min, 16mm, 2 stills). 119 Figure 46. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 120 Figure 47. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 124 Figure 48. Breer, Recreation. 125 Figure 49. Léger & Murphy, Ballet Mécanique, 1924, (19min, 16mm). 126 Figure 50. Léger, Ballet Mécanique. 127 Figure 51. Breer, Recreation. 129 Figure 52. Breer, Recreation. 130 Figure 53. Breer, Recreation. 131 Figure 54. Breer, Recreation, (3 stills). 139 Figure 55. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 143 Figure 56. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 148 Figure 57. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 150 Figure 58. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 151 Figure 59. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 152 Figure 60. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 153 Figure 61. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 154 Figure 62. Raushenberg, Automobile Tire Print, 1953, (4.1mx67.1m, paint on 20 sheets of paper with ends rolled into scrolls, ca. 1960). 156 Figure 63. Breer, Recreation, (2 stills). 157 Figure 64. Breer, Eyewash, 1959, (6min, 16mm, blurred live-action and paint-on-film). 158 Figure 65. Breer, Eyewash, (screentone acetate and cutout). 159 Figure 66. Breer, Eyewash, (2 stills). 160 Figure 67. Breer, Eyewash, (feltpen, overpainted photograph, suggests the popular cinema-history legend of Lumières’ Arrival of the Train, 1896, 2 stills). 161 Figure 68. Breer, Eyewash, (paint-on-film, felt-pen rainbow, card, movement of colored light, 2 stills). 162 Figure 69. Breer, Eyewash, (2 stills). 164 Figure 70. Breer, Eyewash, (reminiscent of French New Realism décollage, 2 stills). 165 Figure 71. Rauschenberg, Rebus, 1955, (2.44mx3.33m, oil, collage on canvas). 167 Figure 72. Breer, Blazes, 1961, (3min, 16mm, 8 stills). 172 iv Figure 73. Breer, Eyewash, (2 stills). 173 Figure 74. Breer, Eyewash. 174 Figure 75. Breer, Eyewash, (2 stills). 177 Figure 76. Gilbreth, Micro-motion films for industrial management and training purposes, 1910-24, (2 stills). 188 Figure 77. Brakhage, Commingled Containers, 1997, (3min, 16mm). 192 Figure 78. Cohl, Fantasmagorie, 1908, (1.20min, 16mm). 194 Figure 79. Cohl, Les Métamorphosis Comiques, 1912, (4:20min, 16mm, 8 stills). 197 Figure 80. Breer, Eyewash. 198 Figure 81. Breer, Eyewash. 200 Figure 82. Breer, Eyewash. 200 Figure 83. Breer, Bang!, 1986, (10.17min, 16mm, 2 stills). 202 Figure 84.
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