Session Date and Time: Friday, February 27, 2009 2:30 PM – 5:00 PM

Concourse Meeting Room 408B, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center

College Art Association, the largest association for visual arts professionals, promotes
the highest levels of creativity and scholarship in the practice, teaching, and
interpretation of the visual arts.

THINKING EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION

BEFORE WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: AN ART HISTORICAL U-
TURN

SESSION STATEMENT
Chair of Session: Dr. Janeann Dill

Experimental animation was presented as fine art by its creators

long before the art world acknowledged William Kentridge's work,
the widely-accepted marker to distinguish animation a
"legitimate" language in fine art. Looking beyond the constraining
nomenclature of cartoon inherited from Sergei Eisenstein and
forwarded by Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss, this panel visits
an earlier history of art practice and critical thinking in
experimental animation that was passed over by art history and
then relegated to film history, where it was equally ignored.
Considered neither art nor film, experimental animation dropped
out of critical consideration entirely from its 1921 origins in the
first experimental animation film, Opus I by Walter Ruttmann,
until the early 1970's with the writings of Louise O'Konor (on
Viking Eggeling), Standish Lawder (on experimental film), William
Moritz (on Oskar Fischinger), and Jeanpaul Goergen (on Walter
Ruttman). With seminal texts by P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film:
The American Avant-Garde (1974), and Cecile Starr and Robert
Russett’s Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology
(1976), a nascent canon of critical art history in experimental
animation was formed.

Progeny to Modernism’s belief that the human condition is

comforted by new technology to enable the spiritual, sensual,
and rational in art, contemporary experimental animation offers a
resolve to fulfill pictorial ideas in time. Inherently, experimental
animation is an aesthetic to pulse rhythmic separations between
space and time as invisible interstices in a frame-based
consciousness of expression and perception, projection and
reception. From the technologies of optical toy to electronic
imaging, a space-time continuum (Eisenstein’s posit of
dynamism) is understood here as a kind of drag or pressure at
the interval of singular frames in motion to create an invisible
tension that is gravity-like in its timing. In the creative practice of
animation, technical considerations are symbiotically tied to
aesthetics to render a distinction between movement in time and
timing as animation. The foundational principles of animation
adhere to laws of timing motion, e.g., bouncing ball, walk cycle,
and waveform. Beyond the concept of “art in motion,” when
these foundational principles are not operating in some degree as
rhythmic timing, movement occurs absent animation.

Rooted in the art historical trajectories of experimental animation,

experimental film, digital art and expanded cinema, this panel
links the critical histories of art, film, and philosophy as one. This
session serves not only to excavate its panelists’ individual
research, but, collectively, to engender a critical authority
previously languishing.

PANELISTS/ABSTRACTS:

Thought and Timing In the Round: Muybridge, Engel,

Deleuze
Dr. Janeann Dill, Institute Director, IIACI: Institute for Interdisciplinary Art and
Creative Intelligence (Think Tank)

Along with Sergei Eisenstein and Rosalind Krauss, Gilles Deleuze

perceives animation at the level of single-frame technology and
names all animation “cartoon.” For Deleuze, there are conditions
that determine cinema. His critique involving films previously
positioned within the terrain of experimental animation is
excavated in this paper and put forward as compelling critical
thought to place experimental animation outside cinema.
Deleuze is alert to the implications of Muybridge’s “horse’s
gallop” as an historical change of status in movement in painting,
dance, ballet and mime to release values that are not posed.
Jules Engel’s Accident (1973) is a two-fold work of lithography
and experimental animation to equally assert this awareness in
the history of art, cinema, and experimental animation. Aside
from a surface language of animal locomotion, the primacy of the
frame as a principle of timing acceleration, deceleration and
variation is fulfilled in the collective Muybridge, Engel and
Deleuze.

Pat O'Neill: The Old Dodge and the Rhizome, On the

“Experimental” and the “Real”
Professor Erika Suderburg, Departments of Art, Media and Cultural Studies, and
Dance, University of California, Riverside.

This paper examines Pat O'Neill's two feature length films Water
and Power (1989) and The Decay of Fiction (2002) and their
relation to the conceptual and geographic topography of
Southern California, the mechanics of the optical printer, and the
history of experimental cinema in relation to place, memory and
imaging.

An Art of Radical Juxtaposition: The Expanded Cinema of

Stan VanDerBeek and Robert Breer
Dr. Andrew V. Uroskie, Assistant Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art,
Photography and the Moving Image, Department of Art and Affiliate Faculty,
Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Stony Brook University.

This paper takes up the discourse of assemblage in the early

1960s as a way of reconceptualizing the terrain of animation
within which the practices of Robert Breer and Stan VanDerBeek
have long been considered. As a merely pictorial conception of
collage was giving way to a more wide-ranging model of
assemblage as environmental juxtaposition, these artists sought
to rethink the institutional norms and spectatorial preconceptions
regarding film’s material form, site, and mode of encounter.
Already known for refusing both the “deep space” of the
theatrical feature film and the two-dimensional field of modernist
“visual music,” their work underwent a further transformation
within their site-specific cinematic interventions. Examining
Breer’s cinematic performance within Stockhausen’s Originals
(1964) and VanDerBeek’s “Movie Mural” for Cage’s Variations V
(1965), I show how an interdisciplinary, intermedia practice of
expanded cinema was then emerging as a radical extension of
the assemblage tradition.

Signature as Sense and Sensation: Animating Affect as

Musical Diagram
Dr. James Tobias, Assistant Professor, Cinema and Digital Media Studies, University
of California, Riverside.

Digital appropriations of modernist animation or accounts of

modernism as prosthesis together prompt renewed questions
about the ethical dimensions of artwork on the interstices of
aesthetics and technics. Reading for sense and sensation in
Fischinger's 1947 animated film Motion Painting #1 prompts a
different account of ethics, aesthetics, and technics. Rendering
visible the modern's invisible materialities (Kesting’s clockwork of
energetic time; Bloch’s alternative “carpet motif” history of
industrial modernity) in science, art, or philosophy could leave
the untutored in the dark. Motion Painting #1 animated the
concerns of transmedial modernisms where inventing technics
was requisite to stylizing an accessible, ethical aesthetics of
modern materiality as affect. Identifying the ethical dimensions
of work marginalized yet widely sampled expands notions of
authorial signature. Where inventing machines accompanies
aesthetic advances, a signature effect (beyond a work’s “hand”
or a patent application) emerges between the sense composed
for, and the sensation generated in, reception.