Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) realized, via Marshall McLuhan, that behind the cinematic and televisual surface were only other surfaces, seemingly countless in their number. That, in effect, is how reality was depicted by this visionary artist of the 1960s. His films emerged from the landscape of New York’s filmmaking avant-garde, populated by figures such as Tony Conrad, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, and Jack Smith. In the case of See Saw Seems, 1965—the namesake work of this presentation at Magenta Plains—the artist’s TV-production experience played a significant role. Within his milieu, few were as versatile and as technologically gifted as VanDerBeek. Only a handful could tease film apart as he did, lay bare its world-making illusions, or match his faith in the idea that art will always amount to so much more than the newest technology.
In addition to See Saw Seems, two other films were featured in the artist’s exhibition here: A La Mode, 1960, and BreathDeath, 1963. The thread that bound these predominantly stop-motion animations together was the visual pun, which served as the hinge that enabled VanDerBeek to shepherd the viewer from one scene to the next at high velocity. (And if a sequence of images seems to present a case for believing that the veil has been parted to reveal truth’s ground zero, it is immediately transformed into something else to destabilize the viewer.) While these works certainly owe a formal debt to early-twentieth-century avant-garde filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and Dziga Vertov, they wear those influences lightly. Their sense of absurdity can be traced back to the beginning of cinema, to the popular cinématographe of the Lumière brothers, and especially the early films of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
A La Mode is all Victorian soft-core porno full of buttocks and breasts, with Model Ts and musclemen cavorting on a nude torso “landscape.” Faces of fashion models are bombarded with all sorts of objects or are depicted as facades—their features fall away to reveal still other moving-image scenes. Sometimes their heads are supported by a scaffolding, as if they were human Potemkin villages. Hollywood fakery is supplanted by the authenticity of vanguard experimentation. Reality is never in doubt—the artist is always broadcasting the message that the truth is multidimensional, elusive, tricky.
BreathDeath is a black-and-white film 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 showing people dancing the twist in a jungle setting, parading troops, faces morphing into mushroom clouds, computers, skeletons, and death heads. Intertitles announce BREATH and DEATH against a carnivalesque soundtrack. The film is dedicated to Chaplin and Keaton, and we see the latter lighting his cigarette with the burning fuse of a bomb. (Breath and Death, indeed.) Further sequences in this strangely surreal work include vignettes featuring the artist, his wife, and their daughter. Some of these segments are framed by a print of a proscenium arch, a TV screen, or a conference room. But despite these banal tableaux, the subtext is always war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Chaplin’s head bifurcates, revealing a mushroom cloud. Death rides on horseback. A speech bubble incredulously asks, DON’T YOU EVER KNOCK?
In 1966, VanDerBeek wrote, “Sights and sounds, the changing illusion of the world in which we live, and the world that lives only in the mind, are the basic materials of film creation.” The artist still had faith in humanity’s ability to discern truth from fiction. He longed to create a space for genuine self-realization through technology, not in spite of it. In this regard, he was more pragmatic and optimistic than McLuhan. The global-village guru proclaimed our instantaneous unconscious connection to each other via electronic technology, while VanDerBeek insisted on the individual’s right to construct their own network of truth-affirming experiences. One wonders what the artist would have made of AI and other forms of digitality, their distortionary powers, and the impact they’ve had on our social and political landscape. I imagine he, too, would have been startled to see all those televisual surfaces shatter into billions upon billions of seductive, confusing, and life-altering pixels.
