UCSD Open Studios: Robert Becraft

Robert Becraft

For this film, I have tried to treat compiled, mediated images texually, so they may internally serve as narration, as well as an invocation of various subjects I establish as either central or tangential components to the work: Oskar Fishcinger, Ed Gein, Lautréamont, Melanesian Cargo Cults, and a generation Y interpretation of Kurt Cobain and the band the Wipers. I wanted to achieve a level of legibility and connectivity amongst these subjects as I processed, produced, and organized images of them, to suggest they do not entirely represent a predilection for arbitrariness or youth/punk/junk culture, but a way to indirectly engage in self-portraiture, if not with an unofficial axis through key moments in the romantically obscure legacy of graphic and absolute animation, and seemingly unrelated historic anomalies. I wanted to create impressions of endemic disruptions in time, a kind of history that is only adjunct to mainstream history, and in relation to which I am for the most part foreign-----so in a way it is compensation via recuperation and recombination.

Essentially, this is a collage film, not in the traditional avant-guarde sense, albeit in an entirely oppositional sense. Oppositional, especially to what I view as the prevalent orientation of animation towards iconography over its inherent mechanism-----in my mind, inescapably a precinct of an irregular representation that is an induction of and resistance to a kind of immanent purity and "photographic objectivity." I straight-forwardly attribute this to animation's both substitutive and illusory formation, and its use of photography.

I am interested in collage not as a way to make composition, but as a way to edit within a picture plane, in the same way as on a linear timeline. Although ground-directed, painterly concerns of placement and reaction are of interest to me, I am at the moment more invested in a kind of primitive compositing, drawing me to use recursive pictures, degenerating pictures, and combined pictures, in addition to crude, often frozen approximations of split-scan effects. My method has also been to present in combination with these objects, miniatures made of multi-color Play-doh and plaster for the sole purpose of being photographed, xeroxed, animated, and returned to black and white. I am proposing drawing, collage, and animation that fall apart as an allusion to construction that requires associative reception. The animated image that is separate from both continuos and divided temporality, as it intervenes their uniform direction with an opposite directionality, one that begins with a still. Which may be why I empathize with New Wave tropes, even if my connection is only intuitive. What Keith Sanborn describes in Artforum when referring to Guy Debord's tactics predating or parallel to the New Wave developments:

"...critical interventions in the form of intertitles, visual breakdowns of still photographs, self-reflexive voice-over technique, the blurring of the line between documentary and fiction..." I believe my own project will follow a similar track.

More important, it is what Debord mentions in Internationale Situationniste #10 (online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.godard.htm) that perfectly articulates and provides a rostrum for aesthetic exigencies with which I am concerned.

"In fact the collage, made famous by cubism during the dissolution of plastic art, is only a particular case (a destructive moment) of détournement: it is displacement, the infidelity of the element. Détournement, originally formulated by Lautréamont, is a return to a superior fidelity of the element. In all cases, détournement is dominated by the dialectical devaluing-revaluing of the element within the development of a unifying meaning."

Robert Becraft

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