Art Review
A Universe Like Ours, Only Weirder
Robert Barker/Cornell University
Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets,
at the Museum of Modern Art, features this décor “They Think They’re
Alone,” from the film “Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies.” More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: August 9, 2012
Not all filmmakers create complete and resonant fantasy worlds, rife
with strange, sometimes frightening beings as well as mysterious
movement, emotional suspense and uncanny detail. Fewer still are honored
with extensive museum retrospectives that do these worlds full
immersive justice, allowing devotees and neophytes alike to grasp the
essence of their achievement and its evolution, strengths and weaknesses
all.
Multimedia
But this is what the Museum of Modern Art
has accomplished for the elaborate puppet-centered parallel universe
brought forth by the experimental animators known as the Quay Brothers.
At once a marvel and a marathon — first punctuated and then dominated by
numerous video screens and projections that deliver more than seven
hours of moving images — it pays tribute to the life’s work and artistic
saga of Timothy and Stephen Quay (pronounced kway), identical twins who
were born in Norristown, Pa., near Philadelphia, in 1947, segued into
film after an early career as illustrators and have worked primarily in
Europe since the late 1970s.
“Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for
Lip-Reading Puppets,” which opens to the public on Sunday, has been
organized by Ron Magliozzi, associate curator in the Modern’s film
department. Although the brothers are well known in Europe, this is only
their second show of their own in New York. (The first, in 2010, was an
exhibition of the Décors — the marvelous miniature stage sets used in
their animations — at Parsons the New School for Design that traveled to
Philadelphia and Ithaca, N.Y., and also around Europe.) This is the
first major museum retrospective devoted to their work, as well as a
huge qualitative leap for MoMA when compared with previous
animation-centered exhibitions — one in 2005 devoted to Pixar and
another in 2009 devoted to Tim Burton. Both were organized by Mr.
Magliozzi.
This exhibition reveals the Quays to be skillful jacks of several
artistic mediums. It includes too many of their designs for book and
record-album covers, although it is great to learn that a well-known
cover for the 1968 Blood Sweat & Tears album
is their work, designed while they were students at the University of
the Arts in Philadelphia. There is a contingent of occasionally lively
but rarely original drawings, collages and prints, and early cut-paper
animations, as well as works that followed their success as animators:
videos of set designs for opera and theater (in use) and two live-action
features — “Institute Benjamenta” (1995) and “The Piano Tuner of
Earthquakes” (2006) — that are in the film program accompanying the
show. (The rather unsatisfying plot of “The Piano Tuner” revolves around
seven Décors, referred to as automatons; they make only brief
appearances in the movie but are extraordinary in the flesh.)
But the exhibition itself leaves no doubt that the Quays are masters
above all of an unusually entrancing form of stop-action animation they
unveiled in 1979. Fraught with unresolved dreamlike narratives and
psychosexual tensions, these works draw on the Surreal, the Gothic and
the Victorian and also reflect the Quays’ deep attachment to the
literature, graphic arts, animation and music of Eastern Europe, which
they have cultivated since their art-school days.
The best of the animations make riveting use of puppets, dolls, stuffed
animals and related creatures (maniacal feathered demons are a
specialty), which enact their largely wordless encounters on the stages
of the Décors. These bulky, boxlike tableaus expand upon the collage
aesthetic of Joseph Cornell and the Czech artist Jiri Kolar, marshaling
an amazing range of natural and artificial materials and found objects,
and are sculptures in their own right.
Including childhood artworks and pieces by those who influenced them,
the exhibition is a kind of full disclosure that is rare even for
retrospectives, as well as an organizational and design feat. Most of
the works are arrayed in galleries whose gray-walled labyrinthine layout
echoes the Quays’ moody, often claustrophobic sensibility while
ingeniously maximizing a relatively limited exhibition space. You could
say that light relief is provided by some dozen animated television
commercials that the Quays call “deals with the devil,” since they are
done to finance more serious efforts, but they are as brilliant as
anything they have done.
The show culminates in a tiny theaterlike gallery, replete with
movie-house seats, in which you can watch the brothers’ widely praised
masterpiece, “Street of Crocodiles”
(1986), a dreamlike excursion taken by an ascetic, sharp-eyed puppet
into a tailor shop and the dusty glass-walled spaces beneath it. There
he is accosted by a group of blank-eyed tailor assistants who briefly
outfit him with a new head and brain, while screws wind up out of the
floor and roll about and a polymorphously suggestive piece of organ meat
is fitted with a pattern, stuck with pins and fondled. Loosely based on
a story by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), the work’s Old
World interwar mood is riven with intimations of mind control and the
approach of fascism.
From there the visitor can proceed to the second part of the exhibition,
downstairs in the lobby and the museum’s Roy and Niuta Titus Auditorium
(where the program of Quay films is scheduled) to view some 15 of the
Décors, most of which figure in the films that conclude the upstairs
displays, including one of the tailor’s shop in “Street of Crocodiles.”
You could say that the show unfolds something like a good Quay
animation. There are different levels of reality, unexpected twists and
lots of loose connections and vague echoes, and the closer the Quays get
to the space, light and movement of film, the better. A student-film
effort, “In the Mist,” from around 1969, shows the young artists skating
across a tennis court but also focuses relentlessly on thickets of bare
trees and branches that, beautifully hand built, will later protect or
ensnare their puppets. An early self-portrait photo collage shows the
tall, handsomely Nordic twins against a background that includes a
cathedral and a tram, elements that recur in “Nocturna Artificialia,”
their first puppet animation, from 1979.
Farther along, a group of dark, rather stiff and stilted pencil drawings
(including more trams and cathedrals) from the 1970s are redeemed by
the numinous music videos and music-video-like shorts of the “Stille
Nacht” and “Songs for Dead Children” series, in which the Quays’ talent
for marrying image and music is especially strong. The one-eyed gnome
that dominates a poster by the Polish poster designer Roman Cieslewicz,
one of several Polish poster designers represented in the show,
re-emerges in the Quays’ world as a charming ogre with a body of black
twisted wire who obsessively fingers a one-haired mole on his forehead.
He is the opening character of the 1987 “Rehearsal for Extinct
Anatomies” and also appears here in his own small Décor.
It is tempting to view the Quays as artists out of step with their
times, overly attracted to the antique and the arcane. Yet in their own
quirky way they seem eminently postmodern, not the least for their
avoidance of narrative logic. Like many members of their artistic
generation — the American painter Philip Taaffe comes to mind — the
Quays also seem to view the past as unfinished and full of potential.
Their animations and Décors show them rummaging gleefully through the
dustbin of art history, finding new uses for the engravings favored by
Max Ernst or, inspired by the collaborative photograph “Dust Breeding”
by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, devising ingenious ways to animate dust,
metal filings and even splinters.
They also expand on the potential for animation implicit in calligraphy
or in Arcimboldo’s pieced-together portraits, especially in their 1984
short “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer,” a tribute to that Czech animator.
This is basically an ebullient story of a boy’s artistic education
(stop-action filmmaking included) at the hands of an older man, their
lessons conducted throughout a series of drawer-lined spaces that
especially show off the brothers’ collage aesthetic, which is also very
much of our time. But most of all it is the emphatically physical nature
of their animations, their emphasis on texture and materials, on film
as a hand-built thing that makes their work seem so current.
There is more to be seen and enjoyed here than is possible to recommend.
Don’t miss the Svankmajer tribute or “In Absentia,” a haunting
meditation on the early-20th-century outsider artist Emma Hauck done in
collaboration with the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen; or the marvelous
documentary, enacted by assorted species of puppets, about the Czech
composer Leos Janacek.
But there are also dead spots, even in the recent work, prominent among
them an indulgent free-form documentary about the Mutter Museum in
Philadelphia, pretentiously narrated by Derek Jacobi and full of
overwrought music. The generic film-and-sculpture installation “Coffin
of a Servant’s Journey,” which combines the motifs of two well-known
paintings by René Magritte, also seems beneath them. But so what? The
Quays, like all artists, are not perfect, but they have done more than
enough to enrich the culture of their time.
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