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

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

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movements like Minimalism which utilized serialization, not as described by Rose, but as part of the critique to shift focus from the object itself and to open up the space of art, reflecting back upon the architectural and institutional places in which art is contained. While Breer (Macdonald, 1992, p.44) states that ‘the idea of making art objects that were restless was intriguing to me’ he continues by arguing that he ‘was trying to create a sort of gallery presence with them and didn’t want their activities reduced to anecdotal events.’

Figure 9. Oldenburg, Profile Airflow, 1969, (multiple wall-relief sculpture, 85.1x166.4cm).

The modernist juncture presented by the Airflow has further reverberations more generally within the Pop generation as is evident in the Profile Airflow by Oldenburg, for instance, which is considered a pivotal work in Oldenburg’s investigations in soft-sculpture, and becomes refigured in the Airflow [project] more broadly as a containing space that is precursor to The Store. Oldenburg was interested in the implications of utilizing the Airflow, an icon of modernism, and a design rooted in industrial mass-production, which was refunctioned to raise questions about ‘style’ and its relation to artistic expression and his own process within an art of mass-produced multiples.²⁸

The juncture of C. Breer’s Airflow presents a streamlining watershed for design, intended to make affordable the luxury automobile, and its comfort, efficiency and economy. It was hailed by Chrysler (1934d, p.72) as a revolution in performance providing a ‘glorious sense of freedom at high speeds’ with the trademark of the Airflow being – The Floating Ride (Popular Mechanics, 1934, p.2A). While R. Breer may or may not have been stimulated by this juncture, his imperceptibly roaming ‘creepies’, nevertheless harbor a critique, and are not clearly allied with a forwards or backwards motion, but drift incrementally towards each other and the surroundings in an indeterminate and coincidental manner. Upon point of contact the Floats retreat in a way that detaches motion from the usual grid of alignments in the graph or the infrastructure of roads and rather isolates motion in relation to the wandering participant-viewer within the gallery space.

Such spaces included the white-cube, but also courtyards and gardens, and, notably, the Floats were scaled up to six feet high for the Pepsi Cola pavilion, Universal Exhibition, Osaka, 1970.

From a macroscopic perspective the Floats expand into broader questions of direction in terms of the association of the automobile with ‘progress’ (1934d, p.72), or as Breer (Francis, 2011, p.8)

28 Image Source: (Oldenburg, 1969)

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exclaims more generally, as cited earlier, ‘it’s a delusion to think we are getting anywhere’, while at a bodily level, the Floats also alter one’s distracted perception of space over time. Against the sedate turbulence of the Airflow, the amusing quietism of Breer’s motorized ‘modernist’ Floats becomes even more sharply imbued with irony and the absurdist comedy of modernist dreams of high efficiency and speed that binds the automobile to the rhetoric of personal freedom, and escape.

Figure 10. Breer, (Almost) Everything Goes! 2011, (index-card sketch enlarged to 20m high banner for his retrospective at the BALTIC).

While (Almost) Everything Goes!²⁹ has a colloquial familiarity that plays with the advertising urgency of the closing-down sale, e.g. ‘everything must go’, it also evokes a creative, economical, and even democratic enthusiasm for inventive thrift. It presents a celebration and potential critique of the everyday that has been crucial to the avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and early Pop moments in art. The image-phrase ‘everything goes!’ quickly indicates that virtually everything exhibited is either in motion or concerned with movement and its de-functionalization, as well as, principally the thresholds of its perception. Yet, the sketch also casually indicates Breer’s (Moore, 1980, p.10) own very seriously held aesthetic concerns that differentiates his approach from the abstraction of high modernism. The importance of cinematic collage as a ‘positive welcoming of expression’ is also differentiated from the later more reactionary, less aesthetically astute moment of ‘anything goes’ postmodernism; as Breer (Trainor, 1979, p.18) argues, ‘When I make these collage films I have a theory that everything goes, not anything, but everything’. And it is the nuances of this position within Breer’s cinematic assemblages that will be explored throughout the following sections.

29 Image Source: (Lowes, 2011). Robert Breer Exhibition, 11 June -25^th September 2011, BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art.

CHAPTER 1

Recapturing Constructive Movements:

Mondrian’s Neoplasticism & Richter’s Absolute Film in Constellation with Breer’s Filmic-image Form Phases IV, 1954

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Abstraction’s Horizons & the Imminent Problem of Inclusion

From 1949-1959 Breer lived in Paris³⁰ and was affiliated with the movement of kineticism at Galerie Denise René, launched in 1944 to promote early geometric painting (and its development, by Vasarély, into optical paintings). It was there, Breer notes that he began to practice the rigors of neoplasticism more intensively. However, he also discusses how during his early education at Stanford University (BA, 1949) abstraction had controversially become a stimulus. Breer gives a sense of his firsthand experience of the antagonisms that arose from the disputes between socialist realism that prevailed in the 1930s and the new potentially critical paradigms of abstract modernism that began to succeed in America in the 1940-50s.

These disputes are cursorily sketched here, drawing from Modernism and Culture in the USA, 1930-1960, in which Harris (1993) outlines the paradigm shift to the ostensibly ‘autonomous’

appearance associated with abstract art, and the transcendence or ‘purity’ of high modernism, from the image-content dealing with social and vernacular iconology. In America this latter collective and politicized artistic tendency is often associated with the espousal of US social realism, or ‘capitalist-democratic realism’ (p.13) by the Depression-era New Deal Federal Art Projects’ (FAP), 1935-43 whose primary objective was the employment of artists and production of public art (murals, posters, paintings, sculpture etc.). The prevalent use of social realist pictorial codes was gradually contested for, amongst other things, its focus on domestic issues and its populism. Such work was expressly depreciated by modernist art-critics such as, Greenberg, Rose etc. as outmoded. And along with the broader Cold War cultural and ideological suppression of socialism, it became displaced in the 1950s by the individualizing alienations of US political liberalism.

‘[W]e American’s are the most advanced people on earth, if only because we are the most industrialized,’ Greenberg (1986b, p.193) writes in ‘The Situation at the Moment’, 1948,

30 Breer(Levine, 1973, p.2) went to Paris on a G.I. bill and signed up to go to one of its art schools, noting, ‘people were still painting in the academies that have spider webs in them and they’re still painting the nude as if Mondrian hadn’t lived in Paris for fifteen or twenty years. So that the people I knew were working outside of them.’

continuing with a kind of triumphal pessimism, that the most ‘advanced’ American abstract art, likewise, is in the strongest position to face and give expression to this predicament: ‘Isolation, or rather the alienation that is its cause, is the truth – isolation, alienation, naked and revealed unto itself, is the condition under which the true reality of our age is experienced. And the experience of this true reality is indispensable to any ambitious art.’ Despite a period from the mid to late 1940s of a proliferation of divergent styles and modes of attention, the eschewal of the representational also becomes strongly tied to the narrative of the ascendency of ‘American style painting’ with its ‘inheritance’ and transposition of Parisian interwar Modernism. However, many of these same artists, famously e.g. Pollock and Rothko, had been affiliated with and supported by Federal Art Project schemes, and it is from this perspective that Harris (1993, p.37) aims to recapture a sense how the concerns of the 1930s become reconfigured in works of the 1950s, and yet goes some way to understanding, ‘why the idea and dream of an art unconnected to social and political realities became so appealing to artists who had previously been committed to the transformation of US society.’³¹

Such artists, Harris maintains, continued to respond strategically to the changing postwar climate, rebuffing wartime, then cold-war nationalism, and presented an outlook produced in a dynamic between the universal and individual subjectivity. Notwithstanding the triumphal pessimism of Greenberg’s tone, for some practitioners of American-style abstraction it was also imbued with the tragic,³² which Harris relates through Rothko’s writings to the particular climate in which the codes of pictorial ‘realism’ had become an aberration, subject to charges of anti-Americanism and fallaciously associated with Stalinism. As an exemplar raised against the associations of pictorial realism, ‘American-style’ abstraction had become distorted within the bellicose rhetoric and anti-Communist sentiment of the times, ‘despite the persistently anti-nationalist and anti-capitalist statements made by Pollock, Rothko and Newman’. (Harris, 1993, p.37) Instead of suppressing the socio-historical influence upon modernism’s aesthetics, one might for instance, also consider the complex and very different problematic highlighted by the ‘new realisms’ explored in the cubist and postcubist works of Léger and Mondrian. The interpretation of such practices and their sphere of influence was still very much in contention in the late 1940s. Breer’s (Beauvais, 2006, p.168) own illuminating experience of the tensions and suspicions of this period is given expression when he recounts that he was,

thrilled by formal arrangements – color, line. My socialist realist teachers in the Stanford Art Department had somehow organized a trip to San Francisco to see a Mondrian show

31 Harris (1993, p.52) suggests that public expression is smuggled in the work through the convention of the mural’s scale, and refigured by Abstract Expressionist work but still intimating a social function for art, or the possibility of a new kind of history painting in contrast to the usual interpretation of the move from easel painting to wall size canvases being related to the scale of American landscapes and gritty grandeur of their loft studio spaces.

32 (e.g. contrasted in Mondrian’s writings to the non-tragic dialectic presented by neoplastic artwork)

which blew me away and I immediately started painting abstractions. I was subsequently told by these same teachers that if I continued to paint abstractly they would not/could not continue to teach me.

One of these teachers, the Russian born Victor Arnautoff, a fresco mural painter who had worked as an assistant with Rivera, tried to dissuade him from abstraction during a three-hour meeting, with the undesired effect of piquing Breer’s curiosity more resolutely. Eventually through the intercession of the department head, he was given a separate studio-space and left to his own devices. Nevertheless, Breer (Cummings, 1973, p.4) relates with disgust how Arnautoff’s own career had later been nearly destroyed, culminating in a 1956 summons to appear before a subcommittee of The House Un-American Activities Committee over a political cartoon commenting on McCarthyism, entitled DIX McSmear, removed from the San Francisco Art Festival, 1955.

This encounter with passionate proponents of American socialist realism at Stanford during his formative years and Breer’s emergence as an artist during the period of so-called US political liberalism undoubtedly had an effect on his practice. This might be perceived not so much in terms of Breer’s lasting refusal to deal overtly with socio-political content in a realist manner as this mode had to a great extent fallen out of favour and its cultural currency decimated. But one might observe more deeply the persistent way in which his practice comes to problematize an overarching ideological adherence to form.

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Aesthetic Politics of Form & Question of Origins

Breer’s characteristically unorthodox practice, that is entangled in the legacy of modernisms and the avant-garde, as will be touched on, can also be understood for the way it complicates the narrative of Modernism’s ‘apolitical’ aesthetic autonomy, which verges on a hegemonic antipathy towards its cultural others, (mass-culture, kitsch, kitsch-art, and both populist and classicist antecedents). In such accounts high Modernism’s putatively ‘affirmative’ abstraction is considered an extension rather than subversion of tradition.³³ Yet, for many of its proponents, modern abstraction must also be taken to reflect a consideration of the ‘tragic’ disequilibrium, (Mondrian, 1987i, p.136) or volatile instability in the conditions of a reality utterly transformed by new technologies, intensified mass-production, and the industrialized machinery of warfare. The

33 (the implications and debates about the investigations of ‘truth to materials’ becomes rather a stringently received Greenbergian aesthetics)

desire for the recuperative possibility of art (e.g. Mondrian’s controversial concern with the non-tragic possibilities opened by the moment of art) associated with its polemical search for the underlying principles of arts’ expressive content, should be distinguished from, say, the studied neoclassical focus in abstract composition of the balance and hierarchies of form.

The reproach of purportedly apolitical, autonomous modernism is furthermore differentiated, for instance, by Bürger (1984) amongst others, from the criticality of the avant-gardes by ascribing to the latter a fundamentally socially consequent role in its critique of bourgeois culture, which is rooted in its reflexive criticality directed at Art itself.³⁴ New relations in the work of art, the legacy of the readymade, the use of systems and chance to critique subjective authorship, the fragmentation of spatio-temporal representation by montage etc. had all begun to subvert art’s traditional categories and autonomy. Yet, when tightly bound to an oppositional political aesthetics, the historical avant-gardes are, despite these momentous shifts, typically lauded as a heroic failure.

Nevertheless, the non-negating, anti-classical approach within modern and avant-garde aesthetics, as espoused by Mondrian, Richter and Schwitters, is important for a consideration of the neo-avant-garde approach, which it is argued here, is also apparent in Breer’s work. It should be signalled that between the poles of the avant-garde’s anti-aesthetic negation and high modernism’s apolitical asceticism, Breer sought a critical value, for instance, in his film Form Phases IV, 1954 and more overtly in the film Recreation, 1956. He does this by self-reflexively commingling aspects of modernist tropes, along with the utilization of a vernacular of non-art materials and technology, in a democracy of everyday and kitsch objects within his geometric films and subsequent cinematic assemblages.

The importance, for instance, of neo-avant-garde interdisciplinarity is touched upon when Breer (Obrist, 2001, p.7) describes the significance not only of a relation to the ‘film context’ but also later to the situation of art in New York. This was rooted in Breer’s meeting and camaraderie with Klüver which developed during their involvement on Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 1960 and led to Klüver acting as the key technical facilitator on Breer’s Floats for the Pepsi Cola Pavilion, Universal Exhibition, Osaka, 1970. Breer (Obrist, 2001, p.7) recounts, ‘Billy Klüver introduced me to all the pop artists. […] It was mainly with Pontus (Hultén) and Billy (Klüver) that I met Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol eventually, and all those people. And I felt connected

34 Thomson (2006, p.60) in ‘Modernism or Avant-garde?’ suggests this became a more entrenched political refraction later, and signaled a distinction between progressive and reactionary strains within early 20^th Century movements, typified by ‘the modernist, who wishes to emancipate society through culture, and the avant-gardist, who wishes to destroy [bourgeois] culture in order to emancipate society’.

to them in a way I didn’t feel with others. […] they were all being very successful and me, I had nothing but films. So I wanted to be in the gallery situation. I wanted to have attention, serious art attention.’

Such an attitude during this period including the cooperative endeavor between artists, as well as technological specialists is principally unconcerned with the canonization of avant-garde ‘firsts’, key to the marketing of art’s ‘originality’, and which to an extent structures Sitney’s (2002) consideration of Breer in Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1974. However, it is important to reflect that the journal Film Culture with which Sitney (2000a, p.1) was affiliated, was one of the few publications at the time, with its inception in 1955, that produced scholarship, which aimed to take experimental film seriously but which also aimed to establish a canon of key independent cinematic works.

Sitney’s framework, outlined in Film Culture, can be seen at one level to operate within the broader art-historical periodization which is typically marked by the international hegemony of US art institutions and then to a large degree by US art itself. For artists, these debates tended to be framed as the displacement of the perceived artistic center from Paris, along with the imported cultural hegemony of European modernism and the heritage of abstraction within French painting. American artists had begun to contend with the strategies of the European avant-gardes on new ground, with a differing sense of contemporaneity in which the very

‘subject’ of abstraction comes to be reframed. These shifts are reflected in Breer’s work as explored throughout this thesis.

Sitney’s focus develops a conception of American avant-garde film genre, where such works were deemed largely to operate in a sphere of radical negation, or radical beyond the realm of conventional narrative or commercial cinema. Experimental filmmaking was characteristically framed in terms of its independent artisanal urgency and pitted at times explicitly, but oftentimes tacitly, against the goliath of Hollywood, both the ideological dominance of mainstream film and the industrial structure of its production and distribution networks. Sitney (1978, p.vii) expressively interprets avant-garde film as that which, ‘reflects back upon another cinema, itself unnamed and undefined - against the darkness of which it shines’.

With this intent Sitney develops a fairly stringent emphasis upon film form in which to situate and explore Breer’s work. While Breer’s work should be differentiated from the conventions of live-action narratives, this should also include the animation industry, oriented by a pre-scripted and storyboarded narrativity, as well as the simulation of primarily naturalistic, albeit exaggerated, movements. Divisions of labor are commonplace within commercial production, with tasks

typically divided to allow for future specialization within a studio setting of writers, directors, storyboard and layout artists, primary to assistant animators and inbetweeners, character designers, background artists, editors etc. This undoubtedly produces a particular trajectory that the poetics of animation in works by artists such as Breer not only avoid but also explicitly reject.

In document Robert Breer: Single-frame Aesthetics and Inherited Modernisms in Relation to the Neo-avant-garde and Debates on Film Animation (Page 43-200)