James, David E. “Imposing Technologies,” ArtForum, May 2010, p. 104-104, reproductions
Among the various "last" films that have punctuated the transition from celluloid to digital media, Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction (2002) has a singular authority. At once a metanoir and a portrait of Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel, with its fabled political and showbiz ghosts, it mobilized some of the most sophisticated visual effects ever to hit the screen. In adding many kinds of magick of its own to the tropes of Surrealism and other European modernisms as they had been reconstructed in the traditions of US avant-garde cinema, The Decay of Fiction epitomized the narrow possibilities for avant-garde film at the turn of the millennium and summarized the multiple forms of its dialogue with the medium's industrial use. But as the summa of O'Neill's nearly fifty years of innovation in both experimental and commercial filmmaking, it found itself in a historical cul-de-sac. Over the decade leading up to the film's release, special effects devised by generation of industry workers and especially Linwood G. Dunn's techniques of optical printing had been reproduced by digital software programs. The procedures that O'Neill had used in a professional career that included work on Star Wars (whose success in 1977 inspired the revival of special effects in Hollywood) and which he had also turned to a uniquely personal avant-garde expressivity demanded hours of tedious manuel labor; now they could be performed overnight on Final Cut Pro, and once-prized optical printers were stacked on pallets for the wreckers. O'Neill's two newest chamber works - Horizontal Boundaries (2008) and Starting to Go Bad (2009), which receive their world premieres at Redcat in Los Angeles on May 10 - reflect his encounter with the crisis.
More severe and hermetic than any of his previous films, the twenty-three-minute Horizontal Boundaries is composed from footage of Southern California landscapes: the beach, the desert, the Southern Sierra, and Los Angeles city streets and industrial suburbs. Some shots are stationary, some mobilized by long lateral pans, and some generated by computerized geometric camera movements of the kind that, inspired by Michael Snow's La Région Centrale (1971), O'Neill made his own in the The Decay of Fiction and his earlier feature-length 35-mm work, Water and Power (1989). Superimposed up to three deep or flipped into negative or drained of color almost to the point of appearing monochrome, the layers slip separately as if each were on a television with a faulty vertical hold, foregrounding the frame lines as a purely formal or abstract syncopation. Roughly in the middle of the film, superimpositions of more disparate imagery are introduced: a gorgeously colored industrial complex, a rising theatrical curtain, drawn animation of a person speaking on a telephone, and an extremely slow zoom into an abandoned house, backed by the shadowy silhouettes of downtown LA. None of these opens into the interludes of sunshine or narrative that buoyed the two features; and despite an Irish jig played by longtime collaborator George Lockwood on fiddle, the accusatory tones of Dragnet's Sergeant Friday in the sound-track collage augment the visuals' obscure ominousness, as if to suggest that the interpenetrating scenes of wilderness and urbanity somehow trace an awful historical crime.
Made up of 35-mm footage shot in locations similar to those used in Water and Power, Horizontal Boundaries stands as a retrospective coda to the two features and as a glance back at the summary achievements of O'Neill's engagement with film and optical printing. Starting to Go Bad is a compilation of three short works from 2009, I Open the Window, Starting to Go Bad, and I Put Out My Hands; shot and composed entirely on digital video, they are not dependent on one another but are nevertheless designed to be seen in a specific sequence.
Though O'Neill has been producing digitally composed, large-scale ink-jet still photographs since the mid-1990s, the digital moving-image works indicate a new direction in his technological reorientation. Consisting of imagery shot on low-resolution consumer video, initially Hi8 and then Mini-DV (which O'Neill began using in 1993), these are likewise sophisticated reworkings of mostly landscape imagery. However, they were photographed not in the western United States (as the footage used in Horizontal Boundaries had been) but in Europe, when O'Neill accompanied The Decay of Fiction to museum screen¬ings and film festivals in Manchester, UK; Rotterdam; London; Pesaro, Italy; and many other places. On these trips, much like any other tourist, O'Neill photographed streetscapes and hotel rooms, people and animals, paintings and sculptures, and views from planes and trains, continuing to cast himself as a kind of reporter on these scenes, "an individual who wanders the land and from time to time stops to comment on it." (James Benning's new work Ruhr [2009] reflects the same skein of determinants: Also shot abroad rather than in the US, and on video rather than film, it too consists of the filmmaker's perceptions of Europe, specifically Germany, where his work is better recognized than it is domestically.)
O'Neill's mode of commentary is montage: the sequential juxtaposition of one scene with another but also, more saliently here, the use of multiple superimpositions, both forms being accompanied by similar sound collages, These visual compositings– again, significantly easier to effect using digital editing systems than film technology– have become O'Neill's master trope, displacing the mattes that in his earlier works subverted the ontology of the picture surface and created perceptual and thematic tensions between diverse iconographies. Though fragments of narratives and personal asides superimposed as verbal text imply a perceiving subject attempting to negotiate these ten¬sions, and even appear to motivate or explain some of the unstable, oneiric juxtapositions, the dominant effect is that of their objective and heterogeneous autonomy. As Adorno remarked of Surrealism's "booty" of images, they may not be neutralized into "ahistorical images of the unconscious subject," but rather remain as "historical images in which the subject's innermost core becomes aware that it is something external, an imitation of something social and historical." For O'Neill, that exteriority is– again and ever– the Möbius-like interpenetration of art in nature.
Though celluloid has recently displayed some postmortem twitches of life, especially in artists' installations, the crisis underlying O'Neill's turn to video seems not just the latest but also the last of the series of shocks that have rattled avant-garde film since the mid-70s, when agitational identity politics coincided with the emergence of videotape to superannuate medium-specific structural film. This sequence of crises in production has precipitated parallel reconstructions in the other regimes of avant-garde cinema, especially those of exhibition venues and evaluative criteria; we no longer see what we think of as avant-garde film in the same places or the same ways as we did. Though the collapse of the funding and exhibition mechanism of underground film is easily exaggerated (there never was that much of it, even in the best of times), O'Neill's mid-'80s turn to 35-mm and feature-length work was itself somewhat belated, the shift to films designed for theatrical distribution and hence financial return having been initiated by the "New Talkies" of the '70s. Like the mid-'60s shift of a phylum of 16-mm avant-gardists to 8 mm, O'Neill's recent return to short, more personal, and clearly artisanal works entails a reassertion of the amateur pole of the amateur-commercial dialectic that he has lived, to the great benefit of each area. But recently the boundaries between the different modes of production have become unprecedentedly porous, not least in respect to screening possibilities. The costs and profits of Avatar will ensure that, for the immediate future at least, expensive special effects will dominate the theatrical big screen; but other, much more accessible forms of the technological developments that film manifests also occupy the digital flat screens that have become ubiquitous in our everyday visual environment.
O'Neill has yet to design works for cell phones, but the scale and modesty of Starting to Go Bad do imply the propriety of domestic reception on the home television or computer. Some of the same homespun priorities also inform his other response to the end of film: his return to sculpture and the other art forms in which he initially worked. His 2004 career retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum of Art revealed a large though largely unknown oeuvre of drawings, collages, and still photographs; but in his show at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles in 2008, he presented both sophisticated digital installations, some of whose iconography resembled that used in I Open the Window and other of his films, and handcrafted sculptures that wryly invoked obsolete film technologies and equipment. One of the latter, Yeah, 2007, was a wooden ladder, originally made by his father, a carpenter, placed against the wall like a John McCracken plank. Noticing the ladder's resemblance to the material format of film, its rungs rhyming visually with the frame lines' "horizontal boundaries," O'Neill had painted it white overall and then inscribed one of the stringers with the patterns of an analog sound track. Though such a film will never pass through a camera or projector, it resonates in the mind both as a condensed image of the artist's personal and art-historical sources and as a surreal figure for the machines and materiality that once sustained the medium.
Notes:
David E. James, "Interview with Pat O'Neill," Millennium Film Journal 30/31 (Fall 1997): 127.
"Looking Back on Surrealism," in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 89.
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Crane, Tricia. “Los Locals,” L.A. Style, Vol. 6, No. 6, November 1990, pp. 121-122 (reproductions).
“In real life we are thinking of multiple stories all the time,” says Pat O’Neill, who has rebelled against narrative realism since he started making films in the early ‘60s. “We are thinking of something in our head, we are listening to something someone is telling us, while we hear something on the radio. At the same time we are reading a sign and watching what other people are going. We are taking all of these things in and are keeping it all straight. To me this process is much more interesting than having to pay attention to only on a story on a screen, especially when I can probably predict what’s going to happen anyway.”
Even the most savvy filmgoer will have difficulty predicting the course of Water and Power, O’Neill’s latest and greatest work, six years in the making. In its opening minutes a lone silhouetted figure walks out on a trestle, climbs the railing, and jump. That’s as definite an action as occurs over the next hour, as O’Neill layer stunningly beautiful landscape photography, animation, title cards, snippets of silent film, old movie sound tracks and improvisational jazz into an abstract meditation on growth and decay, ebb and flow, the city of Los Angeles and the drained Owens Valley. The layers of images thicken and thing throughout the film, always begging for, but often eluding, identification. The image of a pipe in the desert dissolves into the streets of downtown Los Angeles as on the sound track jazz blurs into the sounds of honking car horns and sirens. What seems to be water evaporating on hot blacktop becomes what might be the melting surface of a frozen pond. Flames lick through the cracks. Could it be lava?
Shot in slow horizontal pans, the massive, ancient, cloud-shadowed mountainscapes of Sierra Nevada and the desert valleys they dominate are the stage upon which accelerated human figures dance, reduced by their speed to fleeting gray smudges. Layers melt in masterfully sustained dissolves. Graffiti burns on a building façade. A meteor shower ignites the entrance to an abandoned mine. All the while the camera moves in patterns, relentlessly panning, so steadily that it appears as if the Earth is turning before our very eyes. “The thing that involves me is ambiguity,” says the soft-spoken O’Neill, “images that do several things that never explain themselves.”
Water and Power has neither characters nor dialogue, though O’Neill intersperses narrative fragments in voiceovers and title cards. These “short stories” have an open-ended quality. One seems to refer to the filmmaker himself: “Lucy, a man, once made thousands of dollars a day. Ran out of luck. Now he does other people’s jobs. Drivers to the dump in a rented truck. And listens to the screaming of caterpillars.”
O’Neill, too, makes a living doing “other people’s jobs.” Over the past 25 years, he’s become known within the film industry as one of the very best talents in visual effects and animation. It was O’Neill who rendered Obi-wan Kenobi transparent in Return of the Jedi and who created special effects in Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist. And he works a great deal with salvaged goods. Water and Power contains leftover footage from silent films and from commercial movies and ads O’Neill has worked on. He refers to this collection of scrap as “things that seemed to have need of another life.”
Richard Edlund, head of Boss Films, a leading special-effects house, hires O’Neill when his own staff gets stuck – “when everyone is standing around scratching their heads. Pat is a legendary character. He has imagination and he understands technology. I think he keeps his optical printer in his living room.”
Almost. O’Neill’s Lookout Mountain Films is housed in a detached studio on a hillside beneath his home, high above Laurel Canyon. As he descends the dozens of steps from living to work space, the red-bearded O’Neill resembles a Western prospector going down to the mine. Most of his time is spent inside this cavelike studio, assembling and reassembling film old and new, personal and commercial. Here O’Neill maintains the machine he uses with such virtuosity: the optical printer, which allows him to rephotograph a projected film image, layering pieces of film to achieve the density of meanings he so loves. It’s essentially a business of highly sophisticated double- (and triple-, and quadruple-) exposing. In places, Water and Power is constructed of as many as nine layers.
“I know that for some people my film is taxing,” he says. “Because the narrative is absent or hard to understand it can be frustrating. I would compare [watching] it to going to a gallery and looking at paintings. People don’t expect to have to do much work when watching a film.”
For the way in which Water and Power explores the Los Angeles ecology, it won first place in the documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It was termed a “non-narrative documentary” in order to accommodate it to the festival categories, but O’Neill is not quite content with the description. “As I see it,” he said during a question and answer session after the film’s showing at the Los Angeles Film Festival, “it is an experimental narrative with recognizable locations. I don’t see it as a film about the L.A. water crisis and the battle between the farmers of the Owens Valley and the DWP, although that subtext is interesting to me.”
Alberto Garcia, competition director for the Sundance Film Festival, says Water and Power is “a prototype, like the first car of its kind off the assemble line.” Michael Renov, chair of critical studies at the USC film school, says, “I consider Pat’s work as basic research for the arts. I think Water and Power functions very well as a filmic model for Los Angeles, which can look flat and empty but is such a dense cultural and historic phenomenon.” And O’Neill’s disclaimer notwithstanding, Renov insists that in ten years Water and Power will be compared to Chinatown for the way it explores the city’s water politics.
Filmed between O’Neill’s commercial jobs, Water and Power is essentially an assemblage constructed in the editing process. “Almost everything was shot not knowing how it would be used,” says O’Neill, whose approach to filmmaking is to put himself in a situation and “see what happens. One image leads to another. And I’m always taking it apart and putting it back together.”
O’Neill, now 51, studied design at UCLA and developed a love of sculpture, photography and filmmaking. He began to work in animation, became one of the original faculty at the CalArts film school, and saw his students become the first generation of special effects specialists in the film business – though he secretly wished more of them has gone on to make art. (His wife, Beverly, who is provost at CalArts, says that “Pat is not a naïve romantic, but he is very old-fashioned about his work. He still believes there is something called art.”)
Working on his own at night and on weekends, O’Neill produced between 1962 and 1982, 14 short 16mm films that through the years have been seen and applauded by small art house audiences. He decided to shoot Water and Power in 35mm and at longer length in the hope it might fins a theatrical release. So far that hasn’t happened. And although the new film has been shown at film festivals around the world, getting it on screens in the city it describes is a real struggle.
“Los Angeles used to have really lively independent film community,” says O’Neill, “but the situation is so bad now. So many small theaters are closed and so many small distributors are gone. When I started in 1961, there was the Coronet Theater, where I went to see surrealist films, the European avant-garde, while I was at UCLA. There was a screening group at what used to be the Cinema Theater on Western Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. They had a movies-at-midnight series on weekends, and it was a packed house, a rowdy social event. People were hungry for this kind of filmmaking. And then it ran its course. The theater was sold and became a porn house.”
O’Neill began Water and Power with a $15,000 grant from the NEA to develop time-lapse photography with computer-controlled movement. By the time he had finished the film, he has spent $100,000 of his own money. “Hollywood spends that on a title sequence,” he says. “But it was an astonishing amount of money for me.”
For this reason, he recently returned to making still images, which he describes as “very short films” and hopes will be easier to show. “The whole notion that you start somewhere without knowing where you are going to go is so unfamiliar in film, but totally familiar in photography,” says O’Neill. Nevertheless, the art of film is something about which he remains passionate: “I love the way you can feel the detail when you see a film projected onto a large screen, the simple pleasure of it.”
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Sicinski, Michael. “Toronto Film Festival 08 -Wavelengths preview,” GreenCineDaily.com, September 2, 2008 (excerpt)
Horizontal Boundaries - The latest 35mm abstract concerto from Pat O'Neill is actually the latest revision of a film that has been under re-construction for several years. (By my count this is the third variation, but I may have missed one.) The film instantly thrusts us into a chugging image-processing machine that arranges fragments of Southern California into a kind of superimposed light-table display in action. Rapid-fire segments of highly processed beaches, bungalows, car life, palm trees stutter across each other vertically as a horizontal line bisects the frame. Basically, the title refers to a kind of intentionally faulty registration, wherein images slip into and onto one another on the horizontal axis, as though film and projector aren't working in the same gauge. Carl Stone's thrumming washer-dryer soundtrack, punctuated with snippets of film noir dialogue, provide the counterpoint. Even though to my eyes Boundaries is more of a "container" film than a fully integrated work, it features passages of thrilling formal brilliance that only a master like O'Neill can provide. (Wavelengths 3: Horizontal Boundaries)
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Pagel, David. 'Experiments move over to art,' Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2008 (reproduction)
Pat O'Neill is an internationally renowned experimental filmmaker who, over the last few years, has been projecting his densely layered films in darkened galleries alongside, on top of and through a variety of found and handcrafted objects. His latest installation, at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, is his most successful. Neither resolved nor polished, it's terrifically stimulating in its uneven, hit-and-miss experimentation.
O'Neill's untitled exhibition appears to be the offspring of a backwoods cabin and a laboratory where surveillance tapes are analyzed. The combination of beautifully carved, sanded and finished walnut, oak, pine, acacia, basswood and sycamore burl with beautifully shot, edited and scored DVD projections jars a visitor's expectations and suggests a pretty sophisticated sort of folk futurism. It's high-tech primitivism.
As a filmmaker, O'Neill never believed in technology for its own sake. He always used whatever gizmos he could -- often adapting them to do things never imagined by their manufacturers -- to capture life's cyclical rhythms: day into night, winter to spring, ripening to decay, death to regeneration. For O'Neill, recycling is not simply something you do with cans and bottles. It's the very pulse of the cosmos.
As an installation artist, he still is finding his footing. Some pieces fall flat. Others fall short of transforming repetition into the mesmerizing flow of his films. But many work brilliantly, blending old-fashioned craftsmanship and digital wizardry to show that real inventiveness never goes out of style.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Press Release 2008
Pat O'Neill, an eminent Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker, has been creating remarkably beautiful, technically virtuosic films since the early 1960's. His work has been exhibited in major institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Tate Modern, London, and a retrospective organized at The Santa Monica Museum of Art. For his upcoming exhibition at The Rosamund Felsen Gallery, O’Neill presents two video projections incorporating multifarious sculptures. In the piece titled Wooden You a projected image animates the wall upon which an assemblage has been mounted at eye level principally dominated by a pair of wooden clogs. The soles of the shoes initially open into the apparition of a monitor, which in time, reveals itself as a window into another space dominated by another projection and another sculptural object. These pieces demonstrate a rethinking of the passive experience of viewing film by predicating the "layers of meaning" as physical entities. In these films there is no beginning or end, no actors and no language; the present time potentiates variables in a viewer's practice of perception.
Nancy Jackson, Press Release 2008
Rocky passages past chasm and cataract, twisting trees reaching towards the sky – such images are well known to those familiar with the work of Nancy Jackson. For her upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Jackson presents an installation in Gallery 3 consisting of three objects and one painting all completed in the past year. Using needlework, constructed pieces of paper and aluminum, the assiduously constructed objects elaborate the meditative process of their making. Jackson’s work has the ability to express the travails of the spiritual (and artistic) path, one’s hope for revelation and the sense of wonder inspired by the majesty and mystery of creation.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Saturday, June 14, 2008 from 5 – 7 pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Lucrecia Roa at 310.828.8488
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at SMMoA, by Branden W. Joseph of ArtForum
Recent years have seen a succession of exhibitions devoted to “expanded cinema,” a genre-busting category that includes everything from multiscreen projections to happening-like performances to early experiments with video and other electronic technologies. From the Whitney’s “Into the Light” to the Vienna Museum of Modern Art’s “X-Screen” to the ZKM in Karlsruhe’s “Future Cinema,” this once-neglected genre had returned to the artistic mainstream. With “Pat O’Neill: Views from the Lookout Mountain,” the Santa Monica Museum of Art surveys the forty-five-year career of the eminent Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker, whose ten-minute film 7362 [1967] Gene Youngblood lauded in Expanded Cinema [1970] as paradigmatic of the “kinetic empathy” to be achieved in the “Paleocybernetic Age.”
While Youngblood popularized the term “expanded cinema,” his perspective was quickly marginalized as typically West Coast. Although James Meyer has recently questioned a similar bicoastal dichotomy in Minimal sculpture, O’Neill’s retrospective reinforces rather than dispels such a divide. O’Neill’s early sculptures, a few of which appear in the exhibition, display an affinity for molded contours and smooth, lacquered surfaces that relates them to the “finish fetish” of better-known LA sculptors such as Craig Kauffman and John McCracken. More evident is O’Neill’s attraction to the collage of West Coast artists like Bruce Conner and Jess, whose seamless, Max Ernst-like montages of printed sources are echoed throughout O’Neill’s many composite images. This aesthetic is also characteristic of O’Neill’s films, which draw on the synthesizing possibilities of optical printing to layer and combine materials within a single frame. In this he distinguished himself from the important precedent of Conner’s 1958 A Movie (which O’Neill saw as a graduate student), where the primary formal attribute is the linear editing of diverse, appropriated footage. Nevertheless, like Conner, O’Neill deploys found imagery to trope the metacinematic conventions of documentary, instructional, and/or Hollywood film genre in varying degrees and combinations.
In retrospect, the erotic biomorphism that recurs throughout O’Neill’s sculptures, collage-drawings, and (especially, early) films seems to have emerged from his 1961 Atlantic Auto Wrecking Series photographs: A pair of mismatched oblong fenders with almond shaped headlights, for example, reappears as dark ovals in the high-contrast ending of his first film, By the Sea (made with Robert Abel, 1963), in the twin orbs that open 7362, and in the oscillating circles of Two Sweeps [1979]. That the Auto Wrecking photos, according to curator Julie Lazar, have never before been printed or shown only positions them all the more as the generative pictorial unconscious for what would follow.
While comparisons between the many facets of O’Neill’s production afford several such connections, the exhibition evinces something of an antiretrospective thrust. Not chronologically organized, most materials date from the last decade and a half, and each of his sculptures was reworked in 2003. And since O’Neill’s Water and Power [1989] and Decay of Fiction [2002] together nearly outlast the entire output of his first twenty-five years, the daily film screenings seem similarly weighted toward the present. Implicitly questioning retrospection, however, surely complements an artist for whom the forces of place and memory must compete with the surface-oriented inauthenticity of an oversaturated, contemporary image realm. As film historian Paul Arthur notes in the catalogue, “In O’Neill’s post-narrative (rather than non-narrative) Los Angeles, history has collapsed, time is definitely out of joint, and we can no longer parse substance form illusion. Regardless, human memory persists and so does the urge to shape an otherwise confusing welter of site-specific impressions.”
While “Views from Lookout Mountain” represents a deserved celebration of one of Los Angeles’s central artistic figures, it was not the only even to feature O’Neill. Shortly after the exhibition’s opening, 7362 was screened in “A Psychedelic Picnic,” a program of experimental film projected after sundown in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to benefit the Iota Center’s film preservation program. With a lineup that included James Whitney’s Lapis [1963-66], Scott Bartlett’s Off/On [1967], Dan Fox’s Omega [1970], and Adam Becket’s Heavy Light [1973], the outdoor screening was transformed into an ersatz “be in.” Whereas the retrospective presented 7362 primarily in technical terms (Arthur only briefly notes its link “by reputation to the psychedelic ‘head trip’”), the cemetery audience freely indulged in the film’s “mind-blowing” pyrotechnics. And while the museum paid particular attention to the scored of O’Neill’s longtime collaborator George Lockwood, David Hollander, the picnic’s programmer, reveled in the fact that Joseph Byrd, who provided the otherworldly, synthetic accompaniment to 7362, would later record as Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies. (Their 1969 album, The American Metaphysical Circus, Hollander might have noted, featured guitar by Michael Whitney, whose computer film Binary Bit Patterns [1969] Youngblood also praised.) Like Byrd’s more successful venture as keyboardist for the United States of America, the Field Hippies locked his echoey, electronic noises into a production more recognizably of its moment.
Such connections may seem extraneous, if not gratuitous, in a museum context. However, in the larger reconsideration of expanded cinema, such porosity to wider cultural manifestations is precisely the point. For West Coast expanded cinema especially, the museum functions as a double non-site, disconnected from both the cinematic institution and the period’s generative, countercultural expansion. The inadvertent collaborations between museum and cemetery, then, brought an unexpectedly illuminating dialectical focus to O’Neill, whose most recent ventures (like the DVD-ROM Tracing the Decay of Fiction [2002]) continue to interrelate the artistic and the social, technical virtuosity and historical relations.
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For immediate release:
The upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be:
PAT O’NEILL
February 12-March 12, 2005
Pat O’Neill’s first solo exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, will include recent composite images, drawings and photographic work from the late 1960s.
Founder of Lookout Mountain Films, Pat O’Neill’s forty-five-year career has been based in Los Angeles as an avant-garde filmmaker, artist, and educator. O’Neill was attracted to “the collages of West Coast artists like Bruce Conner and Jess, whose seamless, Max Ernst-like montages of printed sources are echoed throughout his many composite images,” (Branden W. Joseph, Artforum). His focus lies in the reuse of graphic imagery originally intended for instructional or advertising purposes. They are joined together, overwritten and altered in ways made possible by digital processing.
O’Neill’s drawings, masses of linear and percussive marks made on 8” x 10” copier paper, are also often included in the composite works. He draws slowly, periodically rotating the page. Seemingly recognizable forms emerge, shift and disappear as the orientation changes. A drawing may be worked on for weeks, layer upon layer of pencil and ink lines.
According to O’Neill, “The distinction between the motion pictures and the static ones is that the static ones require us to make our own movie. We confront an image for a few minutes as our attention moves from place to place as we try to become located. When this process is complicated by contradictory or ambiguous clues, our perceptual movie becomes a transition, like a cinematic dissolve or wipe, one idea replacing another. What I find interesting is not primarily the subject matter, but the process of receiving it.”
The subject matter of several in this set of images seems to suggest a ravaged, depopulated planet strewn with relics of broken technologies. They point to a ruinous event, but never name it.
The composite pictures are digitally printed on paper.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. February 12, 2005 from 5-7pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Bari Ziperstein at 310.828.8488
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at SMMoA by Manohla Dargis of The New York Times
Hollywood casts a long shadow, and nowhere does that shadow seem darker, more enveloping and inescapable, than in Los Angeles. Here, when people say "the movies" they invariably mean commercial films or, in the parlance of the film industry, "product," produced by the big studios and beamed across the world.
But Los Angeles has also long been home to artists for whom film is neither a blood sport nor the means to a very lucrative end, but a deeply personal expression. One such is Pat O'Neill, a filmmaker who has brushed conceptual elbows with such radically different personalities as the avant-garde pioneer Maya Deren and that consummate commercial moviemaker George Lucas.
A native Angeleno, Mr. O'Neill has been creating startlingly beautiful, technically virtuosic films since the early 1960's, many of which engage with the city as a subject. Like many avant-garde filmmakers in Los Angeles, he has also had a foot in the movie industry, having run a small special-effects company since the mid-1970's (hence the Lucas connection).
The artist is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where his 16-millimeter and 35-millimeter films are projected in a gallery filled with his photographs, prints and sculptures, as well as a nifty interactive DVD-ROM installation. Programmed by Julie Lazar, "Pat O'Neill: Views From Lookout Mountain" - the show's name comes from the avenue where the filmmaker and his wife lived for many years - closes on Saturday.
Now 65, Mr. O'Neill began making films while a graduate student in design and photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1960's. A few years afterward, he introduced optical printing into his work, a step that allowed him to maximize the medium's plasticity several decades before computer-based composition systems made image manipulation widely accessible. In an optical printer, filmed images are copied onto raw film stock, allowing the filmmaker to subject the images to an array of photographic techniques, including fades and multiple exposures. Optical printers have various industrial uses, but one distinct advantage for film artists is that they allow them to manipulate live-action images the way animators do.
Mr. O'Neill's 1972 short, "Last of the Persimmons," opens with a black-and-white image of a man inflating helium balloons in the shape of rabbits. Onto this image Mr. O'Neill places two mirror images of an old, Fleischer-style cartoon elephant comically licking its mouth as if in anticipation of yet another layered image, that of a ripe persimmon. During this six-minute amusement, a pair of human hands prepare the fruit (slice, add lemon) amid a riot of kaleidoscopic color and densely layered imagery. As the colors shift and deepen, turning the luridly red persimmon brown, Mr. O'Neill adds some pulsing animated shapes that look like doughnuts one second, flowers the next, and seem very much to be dancing to the accompanying song, "Is It Love?," by T.Rex.
Throughout the 1970's Mr. O'Neill continued to explore how film creates fictions, not in storybook terms, but through illusions of texture and perspective. His hypnotic 1974 short, "Saugus Series," begins with a finger tracing black paint across the bottom half of the frame, in essence creating a horizon line. This ephemeral landscape gives way to a series of images - rocks, a man sawing wood, a flower pot - that are seemingly disconnected from one another and from any obvious context. In the film's most enigmatic composition, a stream of paint pours on a bit of twig that looks as if it has pierced an animation covered with geometric shapes and confettilike specks of color. In a witty touch, a creaky disembodied voice explains that artists must introduce a "certain amount of variety" to remain interesting.
Mr. O'Neill's films evince a long-evolving pleasure and preoccupation with the materiality of film, with all the ways in which the physical object can be steeped in eye-popping color, scratched, flopped, layered, halved and quartered. While this attention to the surface of the image may seem like an extended exercise in form, the filmmaker has long been preoccupied with landscape and in exploring the tension between exterior and interior spaces, between the natural and built environment. In many of the films, nature often seems in play with Mr. O'Neill's abstractions, much like that stick poking through the image in "Saugus Series." Meanwhile, in other films, clouds scud through the air via stop-motion photography, stretches of desert floor become the backdrop for color studies and cactuses transform into hands reaching toward the heavens.
It was while a student at U.C.L.A. that Mr. O'Neill started attending screenings of works by avant-garde filmmakers like Deren, who shot her landmark film "Meshes of the Afternoon" in a bungalow off Sunset Boulevard. Although Mr. O'Neill's work carries traces of influences from other avant-garde pioneers, it feels closer in dialogue to both still photography and Hollywood than to any avant-garde film movement. In his sumptuous 1989 film, "Water and Power," his interest in landscape takes the shape of a story told in rather different fashion in Roman Polanski's "Chinatown." In Mr. O'Neill's version, the water that flows from the Owens Valley to slake Los Angeles's thirst doesn't lead to apocalypse, but a slipstream of human activity.
In Mr. O'Neill's most recent film, "The Decay of Fiction" (2002), he uses the old Ambassador Hotel to construct of powerful vision of Los Angeles glamour and decay that would make a terrific double bill with David Lynch's similarly hydra-headed "Mulholland Drive." Set in and around the now-shuttered hotel, a former Hollywood hot spot now mostly remembered as the site of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, "The Decay of Fiction" is at once a memento mori and a poetic metaphor. As the camera prowls through the Ambassador, taking in peeling walls and eerily billowing curtains, ghostly men and women in period costume drift past like extras from some long-forgotten pulp fiction. In Mr. O'Neill's eyes, even in a city that works desperately to erase its own history the past will not be denied.
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at SMMoA by Holly Myers of LA Times
Whether dense or delicate, his films, photographs, collages, digital prints and other works can engage the viewer on many levels.
Pat O'Neill's 2002 film "The Decay of Fiction" — the most recent of 20 films included in a terrific retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum of Art — begins in a small, empty room that appears to have been long abandoned. A thin white curtain flutters in the breeze of an open window and, in the course of only a minute or two, a sunbeam slides across the littered floor, accentuating the passage of time.
An inter-title identifies the room as belonging to the Ambassador Hotel, the Wilshire Boulevard landmark that's been boarded up for 15 years, suspended in bureaucratic purgatory since acquisition by the L.A. Unified School District.
As O'Neill's smooth, melancholy camera explores the remains of this grand institution, ghosts begin to emerge: translucent black-and-white figures dressed in the fashion of classic Hollywood noir. A cocktail waitress, two detectives, a starlet, a reporter — they shed fragments of conversation as they pass, tracing loose narratives through the faded corridors and ballrooms as vaguely familiar melodies float in and out of earshot.
The film, which is 74 minutes long and took more than a decade to produce, is O'Neill's first foray into scripted narrative and among the most accessible of the films included in the show. There are moments, as with most contemporary imitations of noir, when the acting feels self-conscious, strained or a little corny, but the overall effect is mesmerizing and a fitting tribute to the place and the facet of L.A. history it has come to represent.
I toured the Ambassador myself a few years ago, and my own experience of the place was uncannily similar to the film, imagined narratives and all. Walking past the broad, paint-chipped pool, I also imagined leggy women in broad straw hats with tropical drinks and magazines. Traversing the scarlet carpet of the Cocoanut Grove, I saw the same glamorous couples laughing and sipping martinis.
This layering of external and internal perception — the compiling of the tangible, the impressionistic, the intellectual and the imaginative, all on the same picture plane, often with a layer of sound overtop — is among the more distinctive and profound qualities running through O'Neill's remarkable oeuvre, in these films (his best-known works) as well as the photographs, collages, digital prints, drawings and sculptures that make up the rest of the exhibition.
"The Decay of Fiction" limits itself primarily to two layers: the physical space of the hotel and the narrative space of the characters wandering through it, with occasional eruptions of other images here and there along the way. (A DVD-ROM version of the work, made in collaboration with USC's Labyrinth Project, includes a layer of historical information and commentary.) More dense films such as "Water and Power" (1989) and the breathtaking "Trouble in the Image" (1996), however, compile dozens.
There are landscape shots, urban shots, shots with actors, classic film clips, fragments of old educational films, figurative and abstract drawings, drawings on paper, drawings on the film stock itself, still drawings and animated drawings, original music, film music, atmospheric sound and fragments of movie dialogue — all jostling together in much the way that images, sounds, smells, words, numbers, memories and fantasies jostle together in the human brain at any given moment.
On film, each of these layers is distinct and luminous. Made with an optical printer and a truly mystifying variety of techniques (the fact that O'Neill has run a commercial special-effects studio on the side for much of his career gives some idea of the sophistication), the works have an exquisite sense of depth and a lush quality lacking in the more common video art of today.
Similar qualities characterize O'Neill's early photographs and collages, which are modest in size and often very spare. One of the most evocative is simply a found photograph — an old sepia-toned print made in an early-20th-century portrait studio — with a hole roughly the size of a human figure carefully torn out of the center.
Most of these early works feel like sketches in which we find O'Neill exploring surfaces and textures and experimenting with qualities that will come to define later work: the interplay of light and shadow, the tension between presence and absence or surface and depth. The layering is delicate and precise, yet poetic. One of the most beautiful is a virtually abstract black-and-white photograph from the early '60s that overlays two contrasting textures: a piece of floral upholstery — perhaps a cushion or part of a suitcase — and a glossy gray slab of what looks like shale.
In the 1990s, O'Neill began making large-scale digital collages and the shift illustrates many of the advantages and the limitations of digital media. Viewed at close range, these prints lack the fine quality of the photographic work: The layers are compressed, the surfaces flat and lusterless. The relative ease of their construction leaves them feeling less labored and therefore less intense than many of the other works. It would be easy, one senses, for O'Neill to whip out a dozen of these a day, all more or less equally appealing.
That said, they are appealing works: big, flashy, spontaneous and often enchantingly peculiar. Most have the same dense, frenetic tone as the films — they could be stills — but also in their stillness allow for a more sustained, thorough contemplation.
Born in Inglewood, educated at UCLA, onetime faculty member at CalArts, a founding father of the avant-garde film scene and occasional player in the mainstream one, O'Neill is a quintessential L.A. artist. The city itself is one of his principal subjects and I can think of few — Ed Ruscha, Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler come to mind — who get it quite so right. It's not only that the city appears in so many of his works but that the works embody its spirit and texture: its energy, its density, its breadth and depth. Like the city, the work reveals itself in layers. It may take time — indeed, with more than a hundred works and nearly six hours of film footage, this exhibition is downright overwhelming — but it's a rich and thoroughly rewarding process.
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 at SMMoA by David Pagel of the L.A Times
Twenty years ago, mainstream movies and avant-garde films had so little in common that their respective audiences seemed to live on different planets — in different galaxies. Commuting was out of the question.
That didn't stop Pat O'Neill, an artist, visual effects inventor and experimental filmmaker whose diverse works from the last 40 years are surveyed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in "Pat O'Neill: Views From Lookout Mountain."
O'Neill has traveled between the commercial world of big-budget productions and the less financially lucrative world of experimental film without missing a step because he always treated the seemingly disparate realms as if each were just another part of a big, multilayered whole, one riddled with contradictions and filled with possibility.
Inhabiting both has been a practical matter. "I got into [the visual effects business] through the back door," O'Neill said. "I wanted the equipment. I wanted to have a way of rephotographing film. From the very first film I did with Bob Abel [a 10-minute, black-and-white silent movie from 1963 called "By the Sea"], he and I tried to find ways to shoot something and make a print of it and then change the tonal range of the print. We learned about optical printers. We tried to build our own."
They succeeded, more or less. The process was tedious. Their homemade image duplicator was limited to basic operations: superimposing images and assigning colors to different values.
In 1967, O'Neill made another film, "7362." "It got a certain amount of splash and a number of commercial people approached me with projects," he recalled. Eventually, he took out a loan and purchased his own optical printer, "for a lot of money at the time."
"I set up a little company and had various people working for me. We took on jobs, bid on jobs. It was everything from archival stuff to putting animated figures in live backgrounds to doing titles with colored letters and so forth."
Born in Los Angeles in 1939, O'Neill is a soft-spoken man whose matter-of-fact tone and humble demeanor suggest that he doesn't romanticize the past. His words are carefully chosen, and he's comfortable with long silences and the slowly unfolding thoughts they sometimes give rise to.
Finding time to use the printer for his own projects was a challenge. "Being a business, you had to put the customer first. So sometimes whole years would go by when we did nothing but work."
O'Neill founded Lookout Mountain Films in 1974. He and his crew worked on many commercials, independent films and Hollywood features, including the second and third episodes of the "Star Wars" trilogy. Among the visual effects they contributed were the lightning bolts that flashed from Darth Vader's fingertips in "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) and "The Return of the Jedi" (1983).
Despite such high-profile jobs, O'Neill harbored no illusions about the relationship between his commercial and creative work. Even though he used the same technology for both, he never confused the two. "They always seemed completely separate to me. Unless you have the final word on whether it's done or not, you're working for somebody."
Nothing wrong with that, but working for yourself — or for no one — is what it's all about for O'Neill. "The conflict for me is that I really love the studio. I love working independently on a number of things at once. Filmmaking generally is very different in that if you're working with a lot of people everything has to be regularized."
Hollywood movies are also expensive and designed for mass appeal. "It's often the stuff that's un-digestible that you spend the time with and that ultimately teaches you something."
O'Neill earned a master's degree in art at UCLA in 1964, taught there from 1966 to 1967 and was a founding faculty member in film and video at CalArts in 1970, where he taught until 1975, when a cerebral hemorrhage necessitated a leave of absence. When he recovered, he didn't return because he felt the barrier between the film/video and art departments was too rigid to work around. Since 1965, he has been married to Beverly Morris, a classmate from UCLA who recently retired from a 15-year stint as the provost of CalArts.
The Santa Monica exhibition, organized by independent curator Julie Lazar, features 110 works, including sculptures, collages, drawings, photographs and digital prints as well as 20 films. Three of the films have been transferred to DVD and 17 are screened in their intended state: in a dark room via 16- and 35-mm projectors.
Regardless of medium or differences between abstraction and representation, O'Neill relishes whiplash shifts in scale. He also savors the sensuality of matter (especially light) and travels freely between past and present. The sensation of being in two — or more — places simultaneously predominates.
The four sculptures look both prehistoric and futuristic. Made of cast iron, wood, animal horn and polyester laminate, they are covered with many layers of lacquer, which O'Neill sanded down to reveal underlying colors in oddly concentric patterns.
His page-size drawings are dense yet delicate webs of lines and symbols that have the presence of imaginary weather maps or the scores for strange symphonies.
Some of his black-and-white photographs zoom in so close to the simple things they depict that it's difficult to know what you're looking at. His collages and superimposed photographs meld even more spaces. And computer technology allows him to overlay still more information onto single surfaces. In this, his art recalls the photography of Robert Heinecken, one of O'Neill's teachers at UCLA and "always a liberating influence."
At CalArts, O'Neill taught alongside John Baldessari, a conceptual artist who often uses film stills in his work. "He was in film and I was in art," Baldessari said. "The whole idea of the school was to encourage interaction, and of course that didn't work." But "Pat O'Neill was the most artist-friendly faculty in the film department. He was a kind of bridge between the two. He has kept his feet in both worlds. Of that class, which includes David Salle, Matt Mullican and Jack Goldstein, Pat always had the respect of other artists. I have nothing but respect for him."
Of the comparison to Baldessari O'Neill said: "In a way, our work has been sort of parallel. I mean, we've been in separate ghettoes. John's the guy who had the career, and I'm the guy who didn't."
After a chuckle, O'Neill turned serious. "I remember when the idea of having a career was just anathema. I mean, nobody wanted to think about that. It's maybe something you did. But the work might not lead to a career."
That was no reason not to pursue it. And that's what O'Neill did in his films, which are among his most influential works.
'A profoundly inspiring person'
David WILSON, the founder and director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant), thinks of O'Neill as a kindred spirit. "Pat was the reason," Wilson said, "that Diana [his wife] and I came to L.A. in the first place."
In rural Colorado in the late 1960s and early '70s, it was hard for the young couple to see the experimental movies that interested them. They compensated by reading books. In Gene Youngblood's "Expanded Cinema," Wilson saw some O'Neill stills and was smitten. "I thought, 'This is what I want and need in life. I should go back to school and learn more.' "
Wilson learned that O'Neill was teaching at CalArts, enrolled and moved to Los Angeles. But within three months, O'Neill had the hemorrhage and Wilson never got to study with him. Instead, the two started the Oasis Film Collective, an ad hoc group of enthusiasts who met monthly and screened hard-to-find films for anyone interested. They've been friends ever since.
"Pat was a profoundly inspiring person to both Diana and me," Wilson said. Not only were his own works important, but "he was one of the best, the most creative people doing commercial work. His skills were so far beyond ordinary. That was an amazing and wonderful period, a very powerful time, and the ripples are still affecting lives today."
Diana Wilson, who was the bookkeeper at Lookout Mountain Films from 1982 to '83 and worked for O'Neill on the third "Star Wars" movie, agreed: "Pat is an extraordinary artist. I have infinite respect for his work. He is incredibly thoughtful about whatever he does.
"It's fascinating to be around him. Everything takes on a numinous quality, so it's fun. He's a plant lover, and his plants practically seem to be his personal friends. In the studio he kept a jar of black widows. He's so kind he seems to be living in a parallel reality, especially for someone who has done so much work in the film world. He's patient and wise and magical. He doesn't seem to age, and he's a very joyful person."
Unlike many experimental filmmakers, O'Neill isn't opposed to storytelling.
"I always dragged in other references," he said. "To me that's what's really interesting. You may start out thinking it's one thing, but then it turns out to be something else. And maybe the third or fourth time you see it you realize there's still other differences. And I like that. I like the fact that you can go back to it and it continues to feed you. You can't really explain it by one set of parameters. And you don't need to.
"To try to encapsulate things immediately is a shame. When I started doing film, it was a more hopeful time. It was before Nixon and Reagan. It seemed like consciousness might come to be defined a little differently."
'Things converge in him'
Today, the art world and the experimental film world are still segregated. For Lazar, the curator, that's a problem for institutions, not artists. "These media," she said, "have always talked to each other. It's not a large leap" to organize an exhibition that bridges the worlds.
But differences still exist. "I don't think every filmmaker is a visual artist," she said. "Pat has come out of the history of visual art, that's his career trajectory. And he moves back and forth. So why can't we look at it like that? The ideas walk back and forth, and it's important to see how they cross-penetrate and commingle.
"I feel he's a convergence artist. Things converge in him. You see the traces of everything he has seen: Minimalism, Conceptualism, collage. He incorporates them all. It becomes his own. He makes poetry out of it and leaves it up to the audience. It takes time, and there's a tremendous reward."
O'Neill's two most recent films are his most ambitious. "Water and Power" (1989) was shot in the Owens Valley, downtown Los Angeles and Marin County's Tomales Bay. The goal, he said, was to capture "geographic time" or to "exactly represent what's there. Like evidence. It's just physical."
"The Decay of Fiction" was shot at the Ambassador Hotel. O'Neill then spent 10 years in post-production. The 72-minute movie "treats the action as dance, as an abstract representation of the body. It was a huge bust financially," he said. "But I did get what I wanted out of it."
A strong strand of '60s individualism runs through all of O'Neill's works, which embrace chance occurrences yet are driven by rigorous formal logic. Do your own thing — to the point of virtuosity — is the rule his art lives by.
As a filmmaker, O'Neill tries to make "a sort of viable alternative to the business of influencing our minds. We're constantly being influenced by people who have an agenda to advance. Perhaps one of the things you can do with art is stand a little bit outside of that and produce another kind of record. In a sense, it's basically a desire to get outside the world and get some relief from it.
"I feel like art has saved my life on various occasions. And maybe some of that can be passed along."
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at SMMoA, Views from Lookout Mountain, September 11-November 13, 2004.
From September 11 through November 13, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Pat O’Neill: Views from Lookout Mountain, the first museum exhibition to provide a complete film retrospective in conjunction with a survey of the visual artworks by this important Los Angeles artist. Julie Lazar, director of International Contemporary Arts Network, is guest curator. Although O’Neill’s films enjoy a devoted following in the avant-garde film community, the exhibition at SMMoA locates these works in a visual arts context where they can be most fully appreciated as powerful projections of temporal painting, aural composition, and visual poetry. For the majority of visitors, the exhibition will be an edifying introduction to the work of an artist whose unique vision engages all the major aesthetic progressions of the post-war era, and whose techniques anticipated technological innovations before their time.
Combining a range of media-sculpture, photography, photographic composite prints, film projection, film installation, drawing, and interactive DVD-ROM, Pat O’Neill: Views from Lookout Mountain brings to light the artist’s major works from the early 1960s to the present. What makes the artist’s hybrid aesthetics compelling is his underlying mastery of the pure techniques that structure them. O’Neill’s practice is convincing because of his effortless ability to speak in many artistic idioms at once without becoming subject to any of them. In the accompanying catalog, artist Erika Suderburg sums up: “He deploys co-existing strata of obsolescence, repose, revolution, consumption, and anarchic agitation. Ultimately he engages us in seeing.”
Film historian David E. James sees in Pat O’Neill’s films, “connections with the industry and industrial kinds of production on the one hand and the aesthetic sensibility that’s associated with the avant-garde on the other.” O’Neill says that “the illusion and the denial of the illusion, are both present at the same time…. [Optical printing on film] is a technology particular to a very specialized craft, which I am re-using, if you will, in the spirit of collage.” Howard Singerman writes about the interplay between the strategies of O’Neill’s early static work and his films, “The collages are not matted or backed, but suspended, sandwiched between two panes of glass, a reference not only to windows but to the “gate” of a camera or projector or an optical printer, open to light on either side. Where O’Neill’s film work often suggests the influence and presence of still photography, these heavily framed collages seem the inverse, an attempt to put film at the center of a studio practice in a way that would reference both the artisanal making of the sculpture and the hand processing of film.” In his essay, Paul Arthur observes about the film, Water and Power (1989) that, “Within a complex calculus of elemental and man-made properties, O’Neill positions cinema alongside water, heat, and land as aspects of a single ecological system, in which technology is neither inevitably hostile nor naively redemptive. In this fashion fixed formal, symbolic, and topographic oppositions can start to bend and interpenetrate: abstract animation versus straight photography, interior versus exterior; industry versus culture; desert versus city.”
Artist and educator Pat O’Neill has always been open to acquiring knowledge as a springboard for the ever-expanding desire of his vision. His graduate studies at UCLA focused on graphic design and photography. In the mid-1960s O’Neill transitioned his body of work to a sculptural practice. As a photography instructor at UCLA, and as a film instructor at the California Institute for the Arts from 1970–76, O’Neill turned increasingly towards working with film, drawings and composite prints. In 1975, O’Neill began Lookout Mountain Films, a special effects and optical printing company that has allowed the artist an unusual relationship to the mainstream motion picture industry. In his latest work, The Decay of Fiction (2002), O’Neill utilizes a computer to accurately record the position and movement of a film camera through the course of a take, resulting in evocative overlapping of ghostly images in a tandem dance with scenes from the present. Working with The Labyrinth Project at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, the artist transformed this material into a separate work for interactive DVD-ROM. O’Neill is the recipient of awards from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, The American Film Institute, The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation. He lives and works in Pasadena.
The 240-page, full-color book accompanying the exhibition is co-published by Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, in association with Santa Monica Museum of Art, and is distributed by DAP. The book, designed by Michael Worthington and edited by Stephanie Emerson, features color film stills; reproductions of the artist’s visual works; documentary photographs; an introduction by Julie Lazar; scholarly essays by art historians Paul Arthur, Howard M. Singerman, and Erika Suderburg; an interview with O’Neill by John G. Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and a commissioned artist's project in collaboration with graphic designer Michael Worthington. The exhibition travels to Cornerhouse, Manchester, England in the fall.
The exhibition will feature daily screenings of O’Neill’s complete filmography, 1963-2002, shown from 12 noon to 6 pm, Tuesday through Saturday.
The exhibition and accompanying catalog are made possible through the generous support of an anonymous donor, the American Center Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Kwon Family, The Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center, and the Pasadena Art Alliance. Santa Monica Museum of Art is grateful to the following foundations and organizations for general operating and specific project support: The Annenberg Foundation; the California Community Foundation; the City of Santa Monica Cultural/Arts Organizational Support Grant Program; the Good Works Foundation; and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Special thanks to the Board of Trustees and the Friends and Members of the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
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at SMMOA by Doug Harvey of L.A. Weekly
Fade in on a close-up of a frantically spinning desk globe, superimposed over a time-lapse landscape of an L.A. hillside — Echo Park, maybe. As the camera pulls back and pans left, the landscape fades out, and we see we’re in some kind of old workshop, complete with broken radios and a wood stove. A new landscape — downtown now — fades up and commingles, then what appear to be the translucent silhouettes of two men drinking beer and engaging in an apparently heated discussion, though the soundtrack consists of comical kazoos. In the background, a small neon sign is reflected in a vanity mirror, reading “STUN NUTS,” and we realize the two men are actually the same figure, doubled. The entire scene fades except for a window, which shows the rapidly setting sun. The window flips into a high-contrast graphic image, and the camera pans back to a close-up of the “STUN NUTS” sign, and pauses. Between the sign and its reflection is a statuette of a catlike entity. Tiny fireworks go off above its head, and a rectangle of flickering light appears behind it, then begins showing a fragment of a silent-film version of Moses leading his people to the Red Sea. This tableau darkens and is absorbed into the shadows of a new landscape — the salty desiccated rock forms of the Owens Valley. This describes just a couple of minutes from Pat O’Neill’s dazzling 1989 experimental documentary, Water and Power, winner of a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, featured in the Whitney Biennial, and now included as a portion of O’Neill’s retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
O’Neill’s films are first and foremost audio-visual experiences, with only provisional allegiances to linear verbal models like cinema theory or narrative. Even today, when many of the intricate superimpositions he built up frame by frame using an optical printer can be replicated with a few clicks of the mouse (and turn up in debased form in commercials and music videos), his films retain a breathtaking beauty and cognition-jamming novelty. “O’Neill’s images,” laments film-studies professor Paul Arthur in his essay for the lavish exhibition catalog, “tend to elicit agonizingly detailed accounts of what is happening on the screen at any given moment; how an image first appears then is transformed, rather than what it contributes to our understanding of the world.” But it’s hard to resist the temptation to simply marvel at the visual complexity and inventiveness of these dreamlike passages, rather than offer up some theoretical interpretation. His layering of images is as accomplished as that of master painters like Robert Rauschenberg, Vernon Fisher or Sigmar Polke. Had he been working in a less ephemeral medium — painting or photography or even installation — he would be an art-world household name.
One of the revelations of SMMOA’s “Pat O’Neill: Views From Lookout Mountain” is that the artist’s lengthy engagement with film is in fact bracketed by considerable bodies of work in traditional media, and that he was actually a pioneer of the projection installation. Born in Inglewood in 1939, O’Neill gravitated at an early age to custom car culture and the Beat scene in Venice before enrolling at UCLA — first as a design student, but finally graduating with an M.A. from the fine-art department. Although his earliest film works date from this period, O’Neill was also pursuing a number of static visual avenues, including photographs, glass-mounted collages and — toward the end of the decade — gorgeous abstract sculptures like L’il Neverbetter (1969–2003) that combined the vocabularies of the lacquer fume–inspired eye candy of Finish Fetish with the idiosyncratic cartoonishness of Funk Art.
At the same time, O’Neill’s reputation as an avant-garde filmmaker was growing. In 1970, he was invited to teach at the newly created CalArts, and his non-film studio work ground to a halt. He lasted five years, just enough to influence a generation of L.A. experimental filmmakers. He quit CalArts in 1975 after establishing his own commercial studio, Lookout Mountain Films, which went on to produce effects for the Star Wars movies among others. During this period (apart from working in the Industry, helping run the Oasis film screenings and surviving an aneurysm that obliged him to spend several years re-acquiring the ability to read), he began creating and exhibiting film installations like Let’s Make a Sandwich (1978), which was seen for only a few days at LACE, and hasn’t been re-staged in its intended form until this exhibition. Meanwhile, he began filling sheets of typewriter paper with intricate all-over pencil doodles, a sort of pretending-to-pay-attention-while-Mr.-Lucas-is-talking pastime that continued into the late ’90s and eventually led into his second substantial body of non-cinematic artwork — the ink-jet prints that have occupied him for the last five years or so.
In truth, imposing these kinds of timelines on O’Neill’s artistic progress is misleading. As with the films, his entire oeuvre has a layered, looping, nonlinear quality that frustrates any attempts at narrative reduction. He’s used the McLaren-Brackage-Smith (still fighting it out in avant filmmaker hell as we speak, no doubt) technique of drawing directly onto film stock for most of his career, and his vocabulary of stock ideograms — coils and waves and coronas of energy — has remained consistent. Many of the contemporary iris prints could be stills from his ’80s films. Without the context of the film work, O’Neill’s sculptures, drawings and prints conjure innumerable (mostly West Coast) art associations: Max Ernst, Bruce Conner, Ed Kienholz, Alexis Smith, Mark Tobey, Lee Mullican & the Dynaton, Wallace Berman, Craig Kauffman, John Baldessari, William Wiley, David Salle and so on. Presenting them, as they are in this exhibition, as aspects of an overarching multimedia vision lends the work further dimension, informing them with the history of experimental cinema — Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow, etc., etc. (It would have been interesting to see some of Lookout Mountain’s commercial work included to further confuse things, though I’m not sure I’d want to sit through Superman IV — The Quest for Peace).
O’Neill’s genius is one of synthesis and brinkmanship. While creating luminous and innovative pastiches that successfully integrate an encyclopedic array of modern visual tropes, he constantly toys with how much narrative and free-floating symbolism are needed to keep the audience hooked — incorporating enough structuralist emphasis to intrigue the intellectual set. His latest feature-length work, The Decay of Fiction (2002), is his most accomplished hybrid to date, superimposing intricately choreographed actors going through vague but archetypal film noir routines on top of gorgeous full-color time-lapse footage of the entropy-shredded Ambassador Hotel. But O’Neill’s greatest balancing act is a much subtler one, between the different durational modes of viewing still pictures and film. Contemplating paintings requires a willed passivity, while cinema requires the viewer to commit a certain amount of a certain kind of attention. Both have their unique rewards. Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner successfully oscillated between the two. And while there have certainly been previous overlaps — great cinematographers have hidden ravishing images in the most mundane potboilers, and many a picture’s worth a thousand words — Pat O’Neill is the only artist I know of whose work hinges on blurring the distinction to the enrichment of both. Move over, Thomas Kinkade, here’s this century’s Painter of Light.
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