Review

Independent Frames

First published by Art Monthly, April 2017

Independent Frames: American Experimental Animation In The 1970s + 1980s, Tate, London, 17th - 19th February, 2017

‘A drawing brought to life, the most direct realisation of … animism!’, declared the Soviet pioneer of modern cinema Sergei Eisenstein while discussing the cartoons of Walt Disney in his vast treatise Method (1932-48). Eisenstein’s ambitious analysis of modernist aesthetics sought in part to draw links between the industrial processes of commercial animation – in particular, its comic propensity to distort the physical limitations of the real world – to human thought’s common recourse to anthropomorphism, from ancient times to the present. Whether or not you give the genealogy much credence, it is difficult to ignore the inherently metamorphic promise of animation, with its ability to free matter from the confines of inertness, animals from their silence, and even time and space from durational or gravitational principles. Indeed, the works collected by ‘Independent Frames: American Experimental Animation In The 1970s + 1980s’, all seemingly betrayed their makers’ captivation with the form’s lack of any real laws, cherishing its aptitude for riotous freedom, outlandish humour and poignant self-reflection.

Curated by Herb Shellenberger as part of Tate Modern’s Counter-Histories series, this five-part exploration of animated works from a particularly vivid period of American independent activity was less a solemn art-historical survey than it was a joyful and jocular unleashing of ‘toons’ across three days of thematically segmented programmes. Foregrounding some of the earliest films in the series, ‘Exploded View’ kick-started the proceedings on Friday night with a run of frantic pop collages. Fred Mogubgub’s The Pop Show, 1966, satirised the breakneck pace at which pop-cultural trends are both established and demolished with a rapid-fire depiction of fads and social hot spots. Taking the form of a bricolage of found images, onomatopoeic comic book captions and cursorily sketched characters, this darkly humoured film was intercut with footage of a live-action glamour model tasting increasingly hostile concoctions – from cool pale ales to industrial disinfectants – in an absurdly sultry manner. Disney animator Ward Kimball’s independent short Escalation, 1968, depicted US president Lyndon B Johnson with a testicular chin and phallic nose that grows erect to the patriotic tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ (Glory, Glory, Hallelujah), before exploding orgasmically with a burst of pin-up girls, junk food and motor cars – the lifeblood of a hubristic presidency determined to wreak havoc in Vietnam. Along with other pieces by Bruce Conner, Stan Vanderbeek, Paul Glabicki and Adam Beckett, the focus of this first screening was characterised by an evidently countercultural desire to besmirch late-capitalist excess and imperial ambition, a tendency that was, at times, undermined by the film-makers’ easy and somewhat uncritical use of the image of an exoticised female body, contradictorily employed as both an indication of the era’s superficiality and a potentially holistic remedy.

‘Shape and Structure’ on Saturday sought to draw a parallel narrative to the histories of structural filmmaking present throughout the early 1970s with an arresting body of animated films focusing on elementary forms, geometric abstractions and rhythmic colour sequences. Peter Rose’s Incantation, 1970, shot entirely in-camera, layered botanical imagery to a soundtrack of the Islamic Liturgy, a breath-based chant that re-characterised viewing the film as an act of sympathetic respiration. Contrastingly, Robert Russett’s Primary Stimulus, 1980, left very little room for viewers to catch their breath, with its pulsing bands of monochromatic colour vibrating off the screen to an intense modular soundtrack, an exhilarating stroboscopic experience.

Shellenberger’s curatorial nous and sensitivity came to the fore with the third screening of the series, ‘Bodymania’, which marked a tipping point for the weekend’s focus on animation’s peculiar fitness for exploring ambling thought, erotic fantasy and heightened interiority. Mary Beams’s Tub Film, 1972, Seed Reel and Rain Seeds, both 1975, all shown here in their original 16mm format, were beautifully understated instances of lines being taken for walks, each film allowing Beams’s hand-drawn images to unfurl personal worlds of introspection, cat companionship and seed gestation. These simple instances of self-representation in the form of an animated cartoon body weren’t just stylistic choices, they were crucial to the representational and thematic freedom women animators of the period would find in sidestepping photorealism in the wake of the Women’s Movement. It would present an opportunity to explore complex desires and unruly sexual choreographies, as Lisa Crafts’s Desire Pie, 1976, and Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus, 1979, attested with their compellingly transformative characters. Pitts’s Crocus, 1971, celebrates a wonderful form of voyeuristic, imaginative female sexuality in which intercourse with the protagonist’s partner is depicted as a kind of ‘best in show’, with vegetal ‘thought forms’ passing surreally above their gyrating bodies, suggesting some kind of turgid biochemical index to their sensual ecounter.

Frank and Caroline Mouris’s Frank Film, 1973, screened as part of a focus on ‘Introspection’ on Sunday afternoon was a heartfelt testimonial on the animator’s journey, made all the more impactful by a discussion between the filmmakers and Shellenberger via Skype in which they broke down the time-consuming and frequently menial labour of animating films together. That such monotonous toil could drive the mind to peculiar work-oriented hallucinations was the focus of Kathy Rose’s Pencil Booklings, 1978, in which the artist’s squeaky-voiced characters argue for the right to determine their own fate in her film.

Despite the stylistic diversity and formal brilliance of ‘Underground Cartoons’ – Sunday afternoon’s final series of films by George Griffin, Mary Newland and Victor Faccinto, amongst others – the programme belonged to legendary underground artist Sally Cruickshank whose hypnotic tales Quasi At The Quackadero, 1975, and Make Me Psychic, 1978, were shown here on strikingly luminous celluloid. Crucikshank’s oddball worlds are the direct precursor to the current vanguard of critical cartooning, be it the popular kids TV shows of Nickelodeon or the frantic, accelerated nihilism of Paper Rad’s zany art films. These are stories in which matter misbehaves and machines have the ability to make the deepest desires known to their users. Nothing is static – everything unravels fluidly according to Cruickshanks’s comic wit.

If, as the theorist Rosie Braidotti has postulated, the monstrous, metamorphic dimension of animation allows us to recognise the multiplicity of selves we each contain, then Shellenberger’s brilliant selection of films not only filled in the blanks of an unacknowledged history, but also stressed the continuing importance of the medium’s ability to articulate uninhibitedly the strange movements of identities in flux.