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Carl Breer’s most famous innovation, however, the 1934 Chrysler (Hicks, 2005, p.1) is claimed by brochures to be, ‘the first real motor car since the invention of the automobile’ which involved a total re-evaluation of the automobile’s structural design that broke many of the traditional restraints of the motor vehicle industry.²² Under the maxim of ‘fashioned by function’, C. Breer (1995, p.159) determined to pioneer the principle of

‘streamlining’ in the ‘art moderne style’ within automobile design for the mass-market, and was instrumental in initiating new technological advancements.²³

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).

For the Chrysler Airflow, C. Breer consulted with Orville Wright (aeroplane co-inventor) testing models in a small wind tunnel (similar to Marey’s document of the Triangular Prism) before building the

22 Marey (Musée d'Orsay, 2006, p.1) chronophotographer, initiates aerodynamic studies in a wind tunnel, a technique that was developed further by 20^thcentury aviation and automobile engineers.

23 such as the integrated unibody space-frame construction, balanced weight distribution, automatic overdrive, and the one-piece curved glass windshield. See also: (Chrysler UAW, 2012, pp.1-2)

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industry’s first full-scale wind tunnel at its Research Center, 1927. The futuristic 1934 Chrysler Airflow sedan was the upshot, publicized for being Chrysler’s (1934a, p.41) masterpiece,

‘America’s most modern motor car’ and an experience in ‘up-to-date motoring for modern-minded people.’

In the 1930’s, as suggested, modernism was not only the purview of fine art or high culture but had become central to popular culture and mass-media. The narrative of the Airflow operates within a quintessentially modernist problematic, with modernist innovators, such as C. Breer, stimulating mass-production, while embracing, for instance, the human capacity for change, the attempt to reshape and improve the built environment, and appealing to the wisdom, as they saw it, of Mother Nature’s designs in conjunction with scientific research and practical experimentation.

Figure 2. Chrysler Ad., ‘Why Be So Radical?’, The Saturday Evening Post, 1934.

The research-basis of the modernist approach with its ostensibly progressive vision, is likewise promoted within Chrysler’s (1934b, p.35) advertisement scenarios: ‘The very people who say ‘radical’

before they get into an Airflow Chrysler are the ones who quickly say “What a sensible idea’ after their first ride.”’ While Chrysler’s (1934c, p.27) advert ‘Nature’s Authentic Streamlining’ projects a futuristic, state-of-the-art attention to materials; ‘the new Airflow Chrysler bids farewell to outworn habits and traditions.

There is the spirit of tomorrow in its chromium-mounted seats’. It continues that the vehicle,

‘gives a ride so smooth that any sort of road seems a perfect road […] scientifically built to the laws of dynamic balance […] to produce a gentle glide.’’ This presents notable reverberations with the reconsideration of conventions in R. Breer’s later artistic inventions, the kinetic sculptural Floats (Figure 4,7) which present a minimalist subversion of materials, but also of the specificity of such motion allied to modernist notions of progress.

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Figure 3. Carl Breer, Chrysler Airflow, 1932, presents a model of the future of the automobile.

While the Airflow car was initially rejected for its appearance and a commercial flop at the height of the Great Depression, it has particularly affronting was the raked ‘vee’

shaped windshield and front grille instead of the customary flat panel windows and square grille of the ubiquitous two-box models.²⁴ In fact, these latter vehicles, soon outmoded, were so structurally inefficient that C. Breer had ascertained in the wind tunnel tests that they would be more effective driven backwards. Disappointed by the prejudices of the market, C. Breer (Daly, 2011, p.2) later objected, ‘Aerodynamics was gone with the wind. Who cared if cars were running backwards as before?’ And it would ironically be Robert Breer who took up this concern and created sculptural vehicles that roam aimlessly, in shapes and at a speed that is of a great and entirely excessive inefficiency.

Despite the divergence of aspirations, it is not entirely surprising to discover similar themes. Both lived lives in a perceptible dialectic with things, matter, and materials albeit in very different milieus. In the obituaries of Robert Breer that proliferated after his death it is implied that the sleek Airflow design inspired the minimal form of Breer’s kinetic Floats. However, it is argued here, that Breer more subtly subverts not only the form, but also the logic of his father’s prototype by his own inventive logic, which is turned, rather, towards a playful absurdity. Breer (Macdonald, 1992, p.34) discusses the discontinuity of his films and suggests a more fundamental critique of progress, ‘But since that movement is toward oblivion, in my philosophy anyhow, it might as well be backward. It’s a delusion to think that you’re getting anywhere.’

24 Image Source: (Nitro Mag, 2013, p.1)

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Figure 4. Breer, Floats, 1966, (photo).

Robert Breer, (Moore, 1966) pictured with a collection of his self-propelling Floats, exposing one of the objects mechanism, 1966. Discussing the contingence of his background, Breer (Cummings, 1973, p.10) nevertheless states, ‘I think rebellion might be a necessary distance-taking to permit you to capitalize on the things that are already there. […] I had to back away from my old man and his long shadow to find myself […]. But once I got further away I could compare my shadow with his and then the shadows were then basically the same thing.’

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the single-frame mechanism: shuffled index-cards

Other iterations of Float-like objects crop up in his animated index-card films, such as, 69, 1968 (Figure 6) with the question of the speed and self-reflexivity imparted by its visual rhythm within the single-frame film form invariably dealt with in a technically different manner, yet both are constructed out of what Breer (1974, p.35) describes as ‘time intervals and space changes’. Breer’s film 69 (Figure 5) is part of a return to his exploration of neoplastic hand-drawn imagery and stencils first explored in his Form Phases IV, 1954.

In a play of flatness and depth, hard-edged geometric shapes are set up spatially in 69 by utilizing the dynamics of the span of the frame and the frame-edge. The industrially-shaped objects revolve in and out of the frame-edge and skim across its surface punctuating the center, in strong repetitive rhythms, and in a manner suggestive of the relentless mechanics of heavy manufacturing, as well as, film’s own claw mechanism whose action and optical assault, however, is wittily offset, and catches against the sound of a metronomic busy signal, the telephonic tone of being put on hold.

The index-card animation of hand-drawn elements predominantly utilizes mechanical drawing tools, the straightedge ruler, stencils, spray-paint, industrial screentone textures. The pronounced pulsation of its rhythms is further condensed by the way that its objects and movements are constructed out of a composite of frames. Breer (Levine, 1973, p.13) utilizes a pulsating,

effect between color, lines, and positive and negative space to create the synthesis of its filmic image or what he has called the ‘recreated image’. Breer (Beauvais, 2006, p.158) states that the interest in ‘mixing projected light’ and exploring the ways it operates differently from ‘mixing pigments’ began with Form Phases IV, 1954. In 69 this becomes explicitly apparent as the movements and forms that have been built up are periodically obliterated by a freeform counter cycle in which the index-cards are shuffled and color blocks, line, and motion become disconnected into constituent parts. Breer (Mekas & Sitney, 1973, p.48) states of 69 that it is a filmic analysis of ‘frame by frame synthesis’.

Figure 5. Breer, 69, 1968, (4.24min,16mm, 8 stills).

Its driving tempo is also interspersed with ‘soft’ fluid line drawings, some evocative of Oldenburg’s ‘soft sculptures’ but also reminiscent of Breer’s film A Man and His Dog out for Air, 1957. The lines, however, do not coalesce and roam about the extent of the frame’s surface but are rhythmically tracked and disperse before the taut minimally evoked crosshairs of a gun or a camera’s view-finder scanning the deep white space of the screen’s center point. Out of the cross hairs the winding lines disappear like plumes of smoke or the confetti of shifting shapes before any coherent semblance of activity becomes discerned.

The line, at one point, is evocative of a rotating Calder-esque mobile whose sculptural kinetics is motivated by natural phenomena e.g. the flow of air. The quality of the moving line, a mobile-like drawing in air, is described by Breer (Cummings, 1973, p.12), when discussing his own rarely seen sculptural works, called the Bent Wire, explaining that ‘it’s a long wire that just undulates and not in any regular way except it revolves around an invisible axis. When you revolve it slowly it does seem to undulate, although actually it’s a wire turning. When you see it in profile it looks like a wavy line and this was the way of solving the problem of kinetic drawing.’ In 69 Breer makes

hidden mechanical movement of the Float sculptures, as well as a sense of the rotating mechanisms within the apparatus of the film medium itself.

Figure 6. Breer, 69, 1968, (4x6in index-card).

Likewise, all of these differently delineated aspects of motion in 69 are intercut with the monochromatically colored frames that flicker, and further complicate the flow of movement by its flattening staccato. The sound stops and, with its cessation a sense of release is conjured from the noise and build up of the film’s construction, complemented by a free-flowing soundless ‘afterimage’ of random fleeting occurrences of hard-edge geometric shapes and fluid lines. The sound like a motor starts up again. This is accompanied by instances of the Floats drawn on index-cards (Figure 6), which glide and float past each other at a busy intersection, in a seamless and orderly, almost futuristic fashion, but reminiscent of 1950s futurama, or the perfect synchronicity of a factory floor.

Yet, the noise is neither high-tech nor does it connote speediness, but is humorously reminiscent of an ‘old fashioned’ engine idly chugging at a standstill. With the new interjection of the previous bold rhythms reasserted, the fluid intersecting zone of ‘tanks’ begins to ‘breakdown’

into the disorder of its own trajectory, and becomes a flicker of jump-frames, sticking static frames, and a haltering reversal of freeze-frames. The mechanical whir and pulsating rhythms of 69, in many ways, presents the filmic counterpart to Rees’ (2002, p.83) argument that ‘Cars and movies grew in tandem. Like most machines of the nineteenth century, they apply the technology of intermittent motion, as did the sewing machine, the steam train and the machine gun.’ But Breer’s film 69 turns itself inside-out to take a cunning Pop shot at the manufactured aesthetics of cinema’s factory of dreams.

Figure 7. Breer, Floats, 1966-7, (2 photodocuments).

The masked mechanization of the Floats²⁵ (Figure 7), despite their minimalist concern with materials and pared-down contours, have been described as figurative references to buoyant and gently drifting nautical markers, as well as the exhibition vehicles used in processions and parades. They have been likened, Breer (Kuo, 2010, p.6) recounts, to motorized molluscs, and as a quintessentially American absurdist gesture, resembling the motorization of the rocks of a Zen garden (when exhibited in the 1970’s World Fair, Osaka). However, despite relating to his ‘past fascination with automobiles and planes’, the Floats are rarely elaborated in a direct connection with the popular art of the automobile.

Such works did release sculpture from the pedestal, but in this frenetic world of hyper-mediated speed, they still surprise with their tenaciously gradual pace, which paradoxically contributes to their constructedness. It is a gentle détournement that defunctionalizes the expressions of commodity culture and grapples through the medium of motion, with the difficulty of their close approximation to non-art objects (with other examples of the Float vehicles including a drifting wall, columns, and rumpled creeping rugs, Figure 7). But it does so, in a manner other than the declarative power of naming ‘something art as an act of provocation’ as Breer (Obrist, 2001, p.5) argues was initially done with readymades.

25 Image Source: Left: (Moore, 1967), Breer, Studio View, 1967, including motorized Column, Tank and Rug.

Right: (Breer, 2010) Breer, Floats Slice Tank, 1966, motorized sculptures approximately 14x24x48cm, painted metal, styrofoam, wheels and motor, other materials include: polystyrene, foam, plywood, and later fiberglass, various sizes.

Figure 8. Rauschenberg, Linoleum, 1966, (13min, document clip of performance, 3 stills).

A few of Breer’s Floats feature in Rauschenberg’s film of the performance piece, Linoleum, 1966.²⁶ Traced in white chalk by Rauschenberg one scuttles out of the confines of the film frame. Breer’s ironic, aimlessly wandering Floats, are seen, Spector (1997, p.235) states, ‘transgressing their limits – creating, perhaps, a visual metaphor for the liberating tendencies of Rauschenberg’s theater.’

Burford (1999, p.83) likewise, quotes critic Rose²⁷ in a press piece noting that, ‘Breer’s work transcends this limitation [of serial art] because it is neither programmed nor computerized. […]

Floats, or ‘creepies’ [have an] uncannily human, as opposed to mechanical, quality. Patterns, random configurations.’

It could be added that the way in which Breer’s work heightens the perception of space is through its subtle, anti-kinetic changes, which are initially imperceptible, but evoke the temporal suddenness of distance. Distinctive instances become detected in the flow of slowly shifting reconfigurations of the space, which the Floats inhabit and activate. Time is serialized by the moments of elusive surprise in the alterations of space. Discussing the Floats in relation to the illusory motion of film, Breer (Macdonald, 1992, p.45) notes: ‘I am not particularly interested in demonstrating motion, as such, and have deliberately kept my pieces monolithic. There are no visible moving parts. Movement only takes place outside the piece, between it and the surrounding space and thus becomes part of the atmosphere, like light… These almost motionless floats occupy the same threshold I’ve crossed over a thousand times in making my animated films. It’s a question of putting two and two together and getting five.’ The kinetic processes at work in the minimal sculptures which are almost static or imperceptibly kinetic are inevitably set in contrast to the viewer’s perception of movement and its intermittent breakdown.

This is paralleled in the rapid-fire imagery of divergent frames within Breer’s animated films, or his hand-cranked mutoscopes and flip-books of index-card imagery.

With such considerations Breer’s work might be thought to connect with the discourse of

26 Judson Dance Theatre, NOW Festival at the National Roller Rink, Washington D.C., 1966.

27 N.Y. Magazine, Arts section, 08/06/1973.

In document Robert Breer: Single-frame Aesthetics and Inherited Modernisms in Relation to the Neo-avant-garde and Debates on Film Animation (Page 36-43)