This Unassuming Drawing

by Stephen Cummings

How often do you come across a really good drawing? I mean a really good drawing. Something that grabs hold of you and won't let go. For me it's not that often. I think of Leonardo's portrait of The Virgin and Saint Anne, or Seurat's portrait of his mother. Maybe some of those spare, celebrated arrangements by Schiele? Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great drawings out there, but some take it to another level. Fortunately you can see what I'm talking about, provided you get yourself over to the Hammer to have a look at one small piece by Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi.

It's a self portrait, like every piece in this particular body of work (unless that Pazuzu sculpture can be said to be included), and untitled like the rest of them as well. What makes it stand out is its solidity, its straightforwardness, and the absolutely exquisite handling of the materials.

Looking out from the page is the head of a heavyset man, with no pretense to anything else. And I should go further and say, a drawing of the head of a heavyset man, with no pretense to anything else. Lines unravel toward the edges of this paper like those of the old masters. This thing does not seek to be a window onto a world; it's a drawing. Marks bold and delicate make up the concentrated but serene figure. It's a confident draftsman who can allow the tiniest lower eyelashes to coexist on the page with a flattened haze of hair and fat lines around a fat neck. Moving across the face a near sculptural right eye composed of clear, concise marks gives way to the soft, sfumato whisper of the left side of the head, a rich, receding space cut out by the bold, dark lines that define the form's left edge. Because the crudeness of these lines brings us firmly to the surface of the paper, it's as if the face is sunk into the space beyond. Elsewhere can be found a stubble made not of stippled pigment, but of depressions poked into the page, possibly with the staples mentioned in the list of media. These same holes form pores in other areas, and in still others mere stippled value. In an otherwise graphite palette, the ear and cheek on the right side betray subtle hints of color, and the whole fleshy guise sits atop a collar pushed forward by its whiteness, whiteness achieved with help of that white-out tape you can find at office suppliers as well as some coarse scraping away of the paper. This drawing, in short, is a tour de force.

There are artists who take great pains to insist that virtuosic draftsmanship is superior to other forms of art. Their work is boastful and self-conscious and stale. And Cuoghi, with this matter-of-fact, fat beauty, displays a level of virtuosity that they can only dream of.

Amidst All This Nothing

by Stephen Cummings

So word is that the staff at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is all aflutter because a hummingbird built its nest in their courtyard. And while that in itself might have elicited a certain amount of excitement on any normal day, this little construction project happened to coincide with the installation of the Hammer's latest show, and in that show there is a piece which, in a one hour video, on a little Toshiba flat-screen, features — are you ready? — a hummingbird, asleep on a twig.

It's pretty magical.

All Of This And Nothing, which opened last week and runs through April 24th, features works by fourteen contemporary artists from LA and without. According to the museum, "these artists conceptually and emotionally invest simple [...] materials with a newfound poetic meaning while offering a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of our lives and the objects that make up the world around us." It's kind of a nebulous notion that, thought about from different angles, could describe a huge swath of the artwork from now or the past. But the show hangs together pretty well, though it does rely heavily on the assumption that certain things just are amazing.

For example, do you think it would be amazing to watch a hummingbird sleep? Well then you probably are going to find Fernando Ortega's video to be pretty amazing. (Though now of course you can watch in real life just outside the galleries. Undercut?) What about the idea of a spider weaving a web in place of a harp's strings? Then get ready for three dull photographs of just that, none more interesting than the next, and possibly less interesting as a series. With curatorial complicity, Ortega is absolutely the worst offender in this, staking his work almost entirely on our wholesale acceptance of his profundity. But it's not just him; from room to room too much is being made of things all over the place.

Evan Holloway took some real bad photos, but there they are on prominent display. Paul Sietsema's drawings are not bad by any objective test, but being told about the "obsessive" process of their making does not catapult these papers into the hyperbolic realm the curators see them occupying. Frances Stark makes good work, but the collages in this show are rather clunky. Yet it seems we are asked to regard them more highly simply because they depict the artist at work in her studio. And then there's Charles Gaines' Manifestos, in which he used historical texts as the basis for musical compositions through an arbitrarily applied system of assigning notes to letters. As Gaines himself admits, "I could do any text in the world [...] apply it to the system, and it would sound the same." So why this grand treatment? Is it necessary that these huge drawings of the specific texts and corresponding scores accompany the music? And four thirty-some inch flat screens perched oddly on hardboard podiums? Really? And why hardboard? I guess the artists is at fault here too though, having made those silly drawings in the first place. It's all just so . . . overblown. Perhaps one of the docents put it best when she said of the Ian Kiaer installation that opens the show, "You're supposed to kind of go back to when you were five in this room. I don't know why, but."

That said though, this show is very worth seeing. Gaines' piece is worth hearing, Sietsema's drawings are kind of interesting, and Ortega has a kinetic sculpture/installation on the ground level that makes you go, Huh. But more than that, amongst the smattering of glorified whatnot, a handful of pieces stand out as whole, and not overdone, and you are encouraged not to miss them.

In the third gallery sits the show's most commanding piece, a high, broad section of wall and doorway from the studio of Gedi Sibony. The Cutters exists in that tradition of assemblage begun by Robert Rauschenberg, but is a much more minimal, quiet, solitary thing, something akin to Agnes Martin or the drawings of Georges Seurat. Revealing little more than drywall, metal framing, primer, and some hanging canvas, the economy of language in this piece is striking. [1] Passing around and through it gives such a clear sense of its completeness that it's no wonder Sibony felt the need to physically cut it out of his work space. However he managed that, it was worth it; with a couple of other pieces offering an even greater economy of materials and arrangement, Sibony's presence in the museum has a singular authority.

Midway through the exhibition, Sergej Jensen offers up one of those minimal compositions that strikes an iconic position in your mind almost before you've become aware of it. One of his three contributions to the show, this particular untitled arrangement of various sewn fabrics reposes in a muted palette of grays. It's a constructed fitting together of rectangles that you almost feel like you've seen before. But this familiarity, while it may allow you to pass by without too much consideration at first, keeps the piece with you, and you may find a nagging urge to keep returning to it, if for nothing else than to figure out what you must have missed.

Toward the end of the show you will find Paul Sietsema's Anticultural Positions, a gorgeous black and white film featuring close-up stills of the surfaces of the artist's work tables intercut with text modified from a 1951 lecture of the same title by Jean Dubuffet. The pairing has the sort of arbitrariness that went into collaborations between John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and it has that sort of success too. These two inputs compliment one another. An exceedingly close examination that can be likened in some ways to Chuck Close is kept from being tedious by the addition of Dubuffet's words, and those words in turn seem to make an effort relate to the changing images that precede and follow. Despite the separation of half a century, these two languages hold together quite well.

And before you escape the circuit of galleries you will encounter at last the great white expanse of Karla Black's Once Cut, a broad field of plaster powder sprinkled evenly across the gallery floor and interrupted by the addition of a few colorful bath soaps and liquids. It's a thing that makes you stop and wonder about it, whether you're new to art and questioning whether any of this is art at all, or if you're more experienced and trying to decide whether this composition and its materials hold together the way you expect. In either case, one thing is sure, you won't be able to see it at all if you don't make it out to this show.

1. The museum gets a little carried away again, stating, "Sibony conjures the magical from the mundane." But hasn't that been the nature of art since, you know, forever? Paint being essentially mud and all that. Silly museum.
2. The original version of this post featured a paragraph about the work of Jorge Macchi. It has been removed after further viewing caused me to rethink such high praise.

Art 2010: A Wandering Best Of

by Stephen Cummings

I didn't spend enough time in any one place this year to claim to present a synopsis of a region's best, but I did, in my wanderings, see a good deal of good art. (Mostly I was in Seattle.) Some have been praised already, both on this blog and off, and some I would be remiss if I let the year pass without giving them mention. So before the date turns, here are the best new things I came across in 2010, in no particular order.

A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter

Early in the year I walked past a well-made black box in Seattle's Lawrimore Project and couldn't be bothered to examine it more closely. It was clearly related to Robert Morris's Box with the Sound of its Own Making, a fixture in Seattle Art Museum's Minimalism gallery, but the night was wearing on and I was eager to make my way home. Mistake. Only later did I learn in The New York Times Magazine that this piece by Caleb Larsen actually tries to sell itself on eBay . . . all the time. All the time? Yes. Once someone buys it, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter sets up a new auction with a newly revised opening bid, and the owner is required to send the piece along once sale is made. A hilarious take on the consumerism that is the art market, I bid Larsen's Tool Godspeed in repeatedly raising its own price into perpetuity — or not — and pointing out one of the absurdities that has been made of art in our time.

Untitled (Shit Happens)

Another irreverent favorite, found in Indonesia, was Malaysian artist Ahmad Fuad Osman's presumably operational blender serving as home to a fish and a water plant. I hate to heap praise on an art star, but Untitled (Shit Happens) was so blunt, so cocky, so absurd, and so unsettling, I can't help but mention it again. The very real possibility of so easily snuffing out an unsuspecting, if inconsequential, little fish — and the neon letters seemingly taunting you to do so — is a surprisingly disturbing prospect. It's the kind of thing that makes people object. 'This isn't art!' (Notice it's not about the fish.) But it knows, and it loves it, and it is.

Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death

Also previously mentioned was Seattle Art Museum's staging of Love Fear Lust Pleasure Pain Glamour Death, a selection of photographs and short films by American master Andy Warhol. What was refreshing about this show was how much the museum stood back, and allowed the work to just be on display. Then of course, the work was powerful and enthralling all on its own. And in what ended up the humblest of curtain calls, Dennis Hopper's Screen Test was made more poignant with the coincidence of his death.

Chuck Close Prints

In the other Washington, another American master. There's nothing surprising about a collection of Chuck Close's work coming off as impressive, large as it tends to be, but what was most impressive about Chuck Close Prints at the Corcoran Gallery was its deep insight into the art and process of printmaking. I worried at first that it would be instructive like that time Bobby Jindal talked to us all on national television, but the museum assumed no stupidity in its audience, and managed to present printmaking from its fundamentals to a number of elaborate and unconventional processes in a way that was both interesting and understandable — and not patronizing. The lens of Chuck Close's oeuvre offered an ideal and commanding structure for this heavy undertaking.

Wall

A very different deconstruction of process could be seen in March at Seattle's Western Bridge. In a three-day performance, Corin Hewitt cut, removed, reinforced, rearranged, and otherwise fiddled with the inner and outer portions of gallery walls where he could be observed both directly within the gallery and by closed circuit video from the outside. I preferred the video, in which objects became suddenly not themselves when they were revealed to be photographic reproductions, or stacks of the like, and photographs became objects as the mind lost track in the jumble. Unsurprisingly, it's not really about the wall.

A Dirt Crown Worth Its Weight

Continuing a tradition of good work, Bryan Schoneman staged a thesis performance in the University of Washington's 3D4M Gallery in which he operated an oversized machine built solely for the purpose of pouring dirt onto his head. Schoneman may contradict me on this, but I'm convinced it's not really about the dirt. Instead, The Dust Settles seemed to be about the slow, eerily peaceful atmosphere arising from the artist's bizarre, trivial exertion. In either case, it later won an award. (Congratulations.) With any luck, galleries will learn to accommodate the mess so more of us can see Schoneman perform in the future. And if they don't, they'll miss out, because I'm sure he'll manage to find other venues.

Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass)

The other highlight of the MFA season was Samuel Payne's installation and/or assemblage at the Henry Art Gallery's UW MFA Thesis Exhibition. (Full, if cryptic, disclosure: I was personally involved with this show.) Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass) has been called overkill, but such is the specificity of Payne's language that this piece was anything but. Surely it was difficult to decipher, but Payne's work needs to be understood in the context of its past incarnations, and this piece built upon a personal iconography developed by the artist over the course of years. There were the paper covering that began on his studio wall, the shoes oriented maybe in cardinal directions to allude to his travels, the music stand from a number of previous pieces, the sound of chopping wood from — from who knows where. It's hard to be specific about this piece without being really specific, which is why I hope to write more about it in the future, if I can muster it. In the meantime, just envision a complicated conglomeration of recycled forms and works and memories.

Beat Memories

Speaking of memories, Allen Ginsberg took some photographs, and the National Gallery mounted an exhibition. If I am to mention a photography show, it would certainly be appropriate to include MoMA's first ever retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but we already knew he was a great photographer. Allen Ginsberg, the poet, was the more surprising. Plus, in addition to some darn good photography, each print included a hand-written caption of sorts, a little prose poem inseparable from the image, which added that much more richness to the experience. I'll let Ginsberg close us out, with the caption that stayed with me all the rest of the year.

I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized my own world the familiar background, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailanthus ("stinkweed") "Trees of Heaven," with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartments' upper floors two blocks distant on 14th Street, I focus'd on the raindrops along the clothesline. "Things are symbols of themselves," said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. New York City August 18, 1984

Allen Ginsberg

Kitsch Reigns in Yogyakarta (But There is Hope)

by Stephen Cummings

Visit Djogjakarta — spelling is flexible — and you will be asked to visit a batik shop. Please, do not buy. You will be much better off if you make your way first to the Museum Batik so you can get a feel for what really is good before rushing into any purchasing decisions. As with any art, there is a lot more bad than not, and outside this small museum, batik is Yogyakarta's most abundant form of kitsch. It's made to appeal not to satisfy, like so much vacuous American cuisine. (Incidentally, there are some really big KFCs here.) Foreign visitors have obviously driven this colorful binge, and I suspect the same is true for Yogya's contemporary art market.

Like their batik counterparts, the works here cry out for attention. Generally large, and generally painting, all are working hard to be impressive to the international buyer. There seems to be almost no Asian influence in terms of style, these artists having bought fully into the plunge we've all taken from the European Renaissance. (Many are, however, happy to point to their own Asian-ness; a way to give specificity to the current in which they operate perhaps, and/or to appeal to Asian and Western buyers seeking representation from the East.) At Bentara Budaya Yogyakarta, the opening of a new show had vague hints of interest, but really was just flat. At Tujuh Bintang Art Space: a host of painters eager to proclaim their own relevance with references ranging from Frida Kahlo to Jasper Johns to Antonio López García and James Rosenquist and Picasso all at once. One artist even fancied himself Picasso's heir, maybe the greatest absurdity of my entire visit. (A note to those: painting a picture of an artist does not demonstrate an understanding of and/or influence by his or her work.) Others seemed to think large representations of attractive women would carry the day. One painted dinosaurs.

At Sangkring Art Space heroicism was the order of the day. Marvel At My Ambitious Achievement. A lot of hot air. Here though, our first exception: Ahmad Fuad Osman blows just as much smoke as the rest; he just does it better — sometimes. His irreverent sense of humor is evident in Recollections of Long Lost Memories (2007), in which he's placed himself (in this version) into thirty-six historical photographs hung in a grid, as well as in Untitled (Shit Happens) (2010), wherein a blender is plugged into the wall, and has a fish living inside. He's an asshole, but you have to respect the wit. He did however also make some of those huge, full-of-himself, bad paintings I was complaining about, so where do I go with that? (I could not bring myself to kill the fish.)

At Jogja Gallery the 4th Anniversary show, which closed Sunday, was likewise clogged with that brand of contemporary painting loathe to relinquish any of the hard-won draftsmanship acquired in art school, and trying desperately to synthesize something new from our accumulated cultural detritus, but ending up just so much more of the same. Britney Spears and graphic novels featured. One sculptor seemed to make work expressly for that terrible cirque gallery at Bellagio Las Vegas. But the gallery did well with its choice for the show's banner: Bunga Jeruk's Boy With No Name (2009) is kitsch with a sense of humor. An absurd, resigned, cartoon of a boy carrying over his head an equally shiny though passably realistic canvas sack, this painted resin sculpture might be a heavy handed comment on child labor if handled any differently. As it is, the message comes across — or is that the message? — but with a smirk. On a nearby wall Dedy Sufriadi's You Can Take This Season #3 stood out from the rest with a rigor and urgency akin to the Abstract Expressionists, with layer after layer of paint, and spray painted and markered scrawl interwoven with a minimal arrangement of blue rectangle on light background. It's classic-ish, made now with the nod to graffiti, without being overdone.

All of this work risks falling off into effete, but for the moment these four at least stay with you, exuding that certain amount of authority that's lacking in things like . . . bad batik. I hope these artists will continue to not do what their peers are doing (and in Osman's case, I guess, stop doing part of what he's doing). This is work I can get behind. The rest, is cheap.

Opera at the Movies: Better Than the Real Thing?

by Forrest Jones

I just saw the New York Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. The singing was beautiful, the special effects were impressive, and set design was innovative. It was all of the things that we have come to expect from the richest opera company in the U.S., but there were a few things that you may not expect. First, it was only $22, and I only had to drive five minutes from my house in Reno, Nevada to see it. It was The Met: Live in HD at my local movie theater.

Opera companies are struggling to stay open and put on shows, and I am glad to see this move to reach out to new audiences. In an age of instant gratification and limitless entertainment opportunities, very few people are going to shell out $100 or more to watch a three or four hour opera. Not to mention the fact that you won’t see an opera of this quality unless you are in New York, San Francisco, or a handful of other major cities. Unlike the European state operas, American companies receive very little help from government funding. They are very heavily reliant on donations from individuals and foundations. They needed to make a move to change this downward trend and bring in some new revenue.

Here it is: live operas broadcast all over the country in movie theaters, accessible to both wealthy city dwellers and regular, rural Americans like me. Some may ask, “Is it really the same as going to see the real thing?” No, it isn’t the same, but neither is the price. 22 bucks seems like a lot for a trip to the movie theater, but a live opera would be at least three times as much for the cheap seats, and about 15 times as much if you want a view like the one you get on the movie screen.

And when I say it isn’t the same, I don’t mean it’s worse. In fact, there were some things that I enjoyed more than a live show. For one, the camera work is excellent. Using high-definition cameras, this production gets you closer to the singers than you could ever be in the audience of the actual auditorium. Watching the excellent acting of Bryn Terfel as the Norse god Wotan made the story much more compelling, and being able to see beads of sweat rolling down Eric Owens’ face (excellently portraying Alberich) makes you really appreciate how hard these singers are working up there.

Normally, the costumes and props are fuzzy because they are so distant, but tonight I could easily see the rippling muscles of the two giants and the fiery fingers of Loge, the God of Flame. The makeup and hair styles are also more easily appreciated. I was particularly impressed with the dreadlocks of Alberich that lit up whenever he cast a spell. These are all things I might have missed sitting in the back of the balcony of a live performance.

Another aspect of the filmed production that nobody in a live audience normally sees was the behind the scenes features before the performance. I enjoyed watching the three Rhinemaidens trying to learn to float across the stage on harnesses at an early rehearsal (“I’m F-ing Scared!” one of them said on her first try), and the pre-concert interview with Bryn Terfel, in costume and about to perform, was insightful and gave a personal touch to the show.

My final verdict on this experience? I thought it was incredible. There may be a little more excitement and electric energy in the actual Metropolitan Opera House, but you can’t see as well and you don’t get the behind-the-scenes look that you do in the movie theater. Most importantly, we have to look at the huge pocketbook advantage. If I went to the live performance, I would have had to spend $1,500-$2,000, including a plane to New York, a hotel, meals, cab to the show, and the show ticket itself. Not to mention missing work for a day or two. Instead, I had about 90% of the experience for 1% the cost. Sounds like a good deal to me. I recommend seeing the next one in a theater near you, and if enough people jump on this bandwagon (orchestra wagon?), maybe opera in America can make a comeback.

Read Banned Books!

by Sean Flannigan

This week, starting yesterday actually, is Banned Books Week, an annual educational affair sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA). It is a week of celebration for the intellectual freedom of thought, of being exposed to new ideas or being the one exposing. The right to information through free speech, as outlined in the first amendment, has had a difficult slog through the stubbornness of human ignorance and religious fundamentalism, and has only been protected by the tireless advocates of those freedoms, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ALA.

Throughout history, American and otherwise, books have been dashed from the shelves with gleeful fervor by the iron-fisted arbiters of our various republics and democracies. Anything deemed offensive, heretical, subversive or overly critical, among other things, by any ruling government or religious majority has been challenged and banned with great speed. Beyond these supposed threats to incumbent ruling classes and ideologies, there are also the books which are banned in order to shield the eyes of the innocent from anything untoward or obscene, as decided by the seemingly frightened and hyperbolic. This sort of backwards "burn the witch" mentality, one would assume, should be a thing of the past, something we have worked through and gotten over, like a bad flu or adolescence, but it is still alive and well today at a school or library near you. Many books have been challenged and banned in the U.S. and Canada in just the past year. You can find the PDF here. One from this list I would like to point out is the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which was pulled from the Menifee, California Union School District because a parent complained when their child came across the term "oral sex" whilst perusing the "O" section. The district is forming a committee to consider a permanent ban. Maybe this parent should scan the dictionary for any other entries they find unnecessary, in order that we could appropriately abridge that book of words. The past two decades have been rife with these sorts of challenges and bans, the most popular of which you can find listed here (2000-2009) and here (1990-1999).

Books, in case it's unclear, must be challenged before they are banned. Here are some visual aids concerning our recent past, provided by the ALA (click to enlarge):

Challenges by Year

Challenges by Institution

More information about challenges and bans in history can be found here, plus further statistics. Partial lists of banned books can be found here and here.

A popular and popularly banned book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary and has, as recently as November 2009 (aforementioned PDF, page 6), been banned in certain schools and libraries the country over. This gives proof that great ideas can withstand the tyranny of ignorance over time, even despite lingering righteous outrage. So, wish it a happy fiftieth and read it if you haven't. Libraries all over the U.S. are participating in Banned Books Week, which they call "Think for Yourself and Let Others Do the Same." Check out your local library for Banned Books Week events and displays. Go read some banned books. Think for yourself. Let others do the same.

Here are some further resources and opinions:

• Celebrate Banned Books Week
• How To Fight Literary Censorship
• Banned Books Week Dot Org

Pixar's Day & Night

by Stephen Cummings

For the past few years, I've had a growing complaint about Pixar: their films are too conventional. The studio may have pioneered the technology that forever changed the animation industry, but as they continued to improve upon its texturing and simulation abilities, everyone else caught up. Movie houses are now saturated with that sleek 3D world which has become so pervasive and homogenous as to be the antithesis of innovation. There have been examples of relief, fortunately, coming mostly from lesser known studios and filmmakers, and/or from overseas. But what of the studio with the expressed goal of "making the greatest animated films ever"? Pixar's sole venture into unconventional form came with WALL-E, wherein live action humans were used to represent the past — their future counterparts, though, still of the ubiquitous, smooth, cute variety. (WALL-E is more profound than I'm giving it credit, but we won't go into it here.) So as critical praise continued to be lavished upon the Emeryville team, I grew weary.

Enter Teddy Newton's Day & Night. Only rarely does one see a film which calls attention to the nature of its medium, but this six-minute short, which runs ahead of Toy Story 3, manages to do so three-fold.

In film, as in painting, there is a tension between flatness and depth. Is the rectangle a window, through which to view an entire, other world? Or is it a surface, upon which media is applied? — or projected, in film's case. The greater part of modernist painting, of course, was devoted to this question, but film has been much less aggressive in its approach. More often than examining the tension, filmmakers have exploited it for the purpose of visual effects, making objects appear larger or smaller in relation to other characters, for example. (See Tim Burton's giant in Big Fish.) [1] In animation, the modernist dilemma was examined in films like Hans Richter's Rhythm 23, and had an influence on popular practitioners like Chuck Jones who took animation on a new, flatter course, [2] but Disney's hold on the medium maintained a certain amount of focus on something "more realistic [...] giving us a real feeling of three dimensions." With the advent of digital animation, the dream of a completely three dimensional world was achieved. Or was it? A film, remember, is still contained in a rectangle, still a projection on a flat surface.

Day & Night addresses this problem directly by combining 3D digital animation, with traditional, two-dimensional hand-drawing in a way that's never been done. Rather than inserting two-dimensional characters into three-dimensional spaces à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the makers of Day & Night have defined its two protagonists only by the flat black surrounding them (along with the whites of their eyes), while their bodies serve as windows onto a world of depth. In this pairing, the dominant reality seems to be the flattened foreground. But while the two characters draw attention to the factual flatness of the medium, apparently driving the action of both the flattened and deep spaces, they are at times subject to the topographies and actions of the world inside (or outside?). For the protagonists, every moving part is diegetic, while for the world beyond, those two characters are as an audience, disconnected. It is a delightful and fascinating treatment that poses the problem of what propels this film: its reality or its fantasy? (And which is which?)

Equally delightful — and fascinating — is Day & Night's use of sound. The two main characters may drive the physical action in this film — sort of — moving about freely, and seemingly independent of the background, but they are incapable of uttering sounds of their own making. All diegetic sound in Day & Night is a result of activity in the background, even as it corresponds to foreground actions. This begs the question of whether the foreground characters truly can move about freely, or whether they are beholden to the three-dimensional reality in order to express themselves. Are they really dominating this scene, or does it in fact drive them? Plus, the disconnect between the diegetic sound of the background, and the action of the foreground — that is, its being closely related to, but not precisely the sound you might expect for a given foreground action — calls attention to the tricky relationship between sound and film in general. In something akin to Chuck Jones's Now Hear This, this auditory disconnect illuminates the fact of Foley in the making not just of animated films, but in live-action as well. Sound, apart from voices, is rarely recorded along with action, instead added later by a team of artists. This being the case, what business do audiences have expecting sounds and actions to align?

All of these contradictions and competing realities speak to the nature of cinematic experience. Of course viewers do come to watch a flat surface, but in doing so we allow ourselves to be temporarily transported into an alternate space. While watching, we embrace this outside reality as our own, just as Day & Night's two characters when they discover the worlds inside each other. But unlike the continuous, and, for them, factual space those characters find, the one we embrace is limited, and constructed, one not captured, but created. This is especially true for animation. The question in Day & Night as to which reality is the predominant one is undercut by the fact that neither is in fact a reality at all.

In short, this is hardly conventional filmmaking. Given the trajectories of the big American animation houses, Day & Night is the kind of thing you might expect to come out of France or Japan. With all the mess of questions posed and assumptions challenged by this latest short film, Pixar has firmly reasserted itself as a leader of animation innovation.

Now if we could only get them to make something without a happy ending . . . .

1. "Director Tim Burton Commentary" on Big Fish, Dir. Tim Burton, 2003, DVD, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2004.
2. "Drawn for Glory: Animation's Triumph at the Oscars" on Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection: 15 Winners - 26 Nominees, DVD, Warner Home Video, 2008.