Between the Black Box and the White Cube by Andrew V. Uroskie;

Author:Andrew V. Uroskie; [Uroskie, Andrew V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.5. Stan VanDerBeek, cover illustration for the “Cinema Delimina” manifesto, Film Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Summer 1961).

In the summer of 1965, VanDerBeek would bring a glimpse of an entirely new vision to audiences at Lincoln Center, and perhaps fittingly, it was not screened during that year’s New York Film Festival. In fact, it was not part of any kind of traditional cinema program, but rather part of a curiously hybrid production of musical composition and dance choreography organized for Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. It was a marquee performance for the artist who, only a few years before, had had to sneak into his former employer’s animation studio after hours to work and then screen his creations at his own storefront theater in the East Village. Within those few years, VanDerBeek’s dozens of short, satirical collage animations had proved remarkably successful with the audiences of New York’s independent cinematheques as well as with international juries screening experimental and animated films. Through his writings, public lectures, and interviews with news media, VanDerBeek had emerged as something of a spokesman for the “underground film”—a term many at the time credited him with inventing. His film Breathdeath (1964) had proved a high-water mark, winning awards internationally and helping him to secure both the financial lifeline of a Ford Foundation grant and a teaching position at Columbia University. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, what he had already achieved within this field of collage animation, VanDerBeek instituted an abrupt change of direction. His interest in collage would remain, as would his interest in the idea of animation. But his primary medium would no longer be the animated film. Instead, he began to spatialize the idea of animation through an interdisciplinary collage of film and performance. It was a practice for which he would become an early and steadfast proponent across his art, his writing, and his teaching—a practice he termed “expanded cinema.”

While VanDerBeek was drawn to the movement of cinematic animation, he had also long been drawn to the art of movement in a broader, more interdisciplinary sense. VanDerBeek had first met Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg when he was a student at Black Mountain College in 1951, and he had closely followed their groundbreaking collaborations in dance, music, and visual art over the next decade as he began his own practice. Their lives would become much more tightly intertwined in 1963, when VanDerBeek’s Manhattan brownstone was condemned by the city, and he accepted an invitation from Cage and Cunningham to join them at The Land, a small artist’s community in Stony Point, New York, where former Black Mountain colleagues M. C. Richards and David Tudor also lived. While building a house and beginning work on a domed theater he would call the Movie-Drome, VanDerBeek became newly fascinated by the idea of live performance and the opportunities it afforded him for rethinking his ideas about collage and animation. But his breakthrough would come when he was invited by Cage and Cunningham to occupy what had

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