Michael Corris on Stan VanDerBeek

Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) realized, through Marshall McLuhan, that behind the cinematic and televisual floor had been solely different surfaces, seemingly numerous of their quantity. That, in impact, is how actuality was depicted by this visionary artist of the Nineteen Sixties. His movies emerged from the panorama of New York’s filmmaking avant-garde, populated by figures akin to Tony Conrad, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, and Jack Smith. Within the case of See Noticed Appears, 1965—the namesake work of this presentation at Magenta Plains—the artist’s TV-production expertise performed a big position. Inside his milieu, few had been as versatile and as technologically gifted as VanDerBeek. Solely a handful might tease movie aside as he did, lay naked its world-making illusions, or match his religion in the concept that artwork will all the time quantity to a lot greater than the latest expertise.

Along with See Noticed Appears, two different movies had been featured within the artist’s exhibition right here: A La Mode, 1960, and BreathDeath, 1963. The thread that certain these predominantly stop-motion animations collectively was the visible pun, which served because the hinge that enabled VanDerBeek to shepherd the viewer from one scene to the subsequent at excessive velocity. (And if a sequence of pictures appears to current a case for believing that the veil has been parted to disclose fact’s floor zero, it’s instantly remodeled into one thing else to destabilize the viewer.) Whereas these works definitely owe a proper debt to early-twentieth-century avant-garde filmmakers akin to Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and Dziga Vertov, they put on these influences frivolously. Their sense of absurdity will be traced again to the start of cinema, to the favored cinématographe of the Lumière brothers, and particularly the early movies of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

A La Mode is all Victorian soft-core porno stuffed with buttocks and breasts, with Mannequin Ts and musclemen cavorting on a nude torso “panorama.” Faces of vogue fashions are bombarded with all types of objects or are depicted as facades—their options fall away to disclose nonetheless different moving-image scenes. Generally their heads are supported by a scaffolding, as in the event that they had been human Potemkin villages. Hollywood fakery is supplanted by the authenticity of vanguard experimentation. Actuality isn’t unsure—the artist is all the time broadcasting the message that the reality is multidimensional, elusive, difficult.

BreathDeath is a black-and-white movie that begins with a montage of hypnotic all-seeing eyes, set to the bass line of “I Put a Spell on You” (1956) by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Its fast-moving precredit sequence presents snippets of solarized footage displaying individuals dancing the twist in a jungle setting, parading troops, faces morphing into mushroom clouds, computer systems, skeletons, and dying heads. Intertitles announce BREATH and DEATH towards a carnivalesque soundtrack. The movie is devoted to Chaplin and Keaton, and we see the latter lighting his cigarette with the burning fuse of a bomb. (Breath and Loss of life, certainly.) Additional sequences on this unusually surreal work embody vignettes that includes the artist, his spouse, and their daughter. A few of these segments are framed by a print of a proscenium arch, a TV display, or a convention room. However regardless of these banal tableaux, the subtext is all the time warfare and the specter of nuclear annihilation. Chaplin’s head bifurcates, revealing a mushroom cloud. Loss of life rides on horseback. A speech bubble incredulously asks, DON’T YOU EVER KNOCK?

In 1966, VanDerBeek wrote, “Sights and sounds, the altering phantasm of the world during which we dwell, and the world that lives solely within the thoughts, are the essential supplies of movie creation.” The artist nonetheless had religion in humanity’s means to discern fact from fiction. He longed to create an area for real self-realization by expertise, not regardless of it. On this regard, he was extra pragmatic and optimistic than McLuhan. The worldwide-village guru proclaimed our instantaneous unconscious connection to one another through digital expertise, whereas VanDerBeek insisted on the person’s proper to assemble their very own community of truth-affirming experiences. One wonders what the artist would have product of AI and different types of digitality, their distortionary powers, and the influence they’ve had on our social and political panorama. I think about he, too, would have been startled to see all these televisual surfaces shatter into billions upon billions of seductive, complicated, and life-altering pixels.

— Michael Corris