All Tomorrowland’s Parties: CalArts in Motion Pictures

By Robert Koehler

“It’s a great big beautiful tomorrow/And tomorrow’s just a dream away”
—from the theme song of General Electric’s “Carousel of Progress” in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland

There are few cultural contradictions to match that of Walt Disney, force behind Song of the South (1946), with its acrid, just-to-the-left-of-Griffith racism, and chief benefactor of the California Institute of the Arts (a.k.a. CalArts), arguably America’s most fecund incubator of art radicals, from feminist theoreticians to High Conceptualists. The country has always been cursed/blessed by such two-sided patronage, no better illustrated than in the 19th century robber barons Andrew Carnegie and Leland Stanford, who established foundations and groves of academe from their ill-gotten gains.

The difference with Disney and CalArts is in the extreme polarities of aesthetic and commercial concerns. On one end lies Classical Disneyana, with its aggressively middlebrow twin missions: visualizing characters in the most seamless and plasticized way possible within the limits of hand-drawn animation, and transforming the spiky blackness of the Grimm Brothers’ literature into comforting entertainments. On the other, deep in the hills of Valencia north of Los Angeles proper, lies an art school that has appeared all too happy to shatter any conventional definitions of what a standard conservatory should do, and took its cue soon after its 1961 opening from the free-wheeling Los Angeles art scene that was then in the midst of finding its voice.

But as is easily seen in the Museum of Modern Art’s rather epic-sized show, “Tomorrowland: CalArts in Motion Pictures,” the film and video work created by generations of students reflects an institution that has taken openness as a kind of religious doctrine, so that the casual viewer will notice the seeds of Pixar (co-founded by CalArts grad John Lasseter) as well as the earliest gestures of West Coast video art. That is, the commercial storytelling tradition in animation, of which Disney remains the supreme master, was no less extolled and encouraged as an option for the hungry CalArts student than the post-modern and Marxist-and-beyond traditions that question the very legitimacy of such capitalist-sponsored forms.

All of this requires a context, though, and it’s easily lost if the new show is appraised through the frame of a New York cultural reference—all too easy when it comes to anything presented by MOMA. To begin with, CalArts and its particular film and video programs could only exist in Los Angeles, and in a Los Angeles after the ‘50s, when the region had fully absorbed the revolutions in art that had exploded in the post-war US, and was home to such daring renegades as Wallace Berman (whose circle alone describes an entire art movement), Bruce Connor, and Ed Kienholz. But because of the city’s identity as “Hollywood” and its movie-factory infrastructure, an art institute in the early ’60s located anywhere nearby could comfortably accept—in contrast to the tradition-bound academies in the East—the practical and theoretical possibilities of moving-image media being integrated into an overall curriculum. Besides, what school seeded with Walt Disney money wasn’t going to have animation as a core concern?
Like the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, another safe harbour for young artists-in-progress who aim to think far outside the norms, CalArts wasn’t about to be just another art school, and certainly not a mainstream film academy in the mold of USC, the AFI, or UCLA crosstown; namely, it wasn’t necessarily going to produce an annual spawn of young pups for the Industry. (Now, if some of them strayed over to one of the studio lots, as many did, then, well, fine.) USC has always been about serving Hollywood: Each film production student is assigned to a “job” in an industrial process expressly designed to imitate the studio system. The American Film Institute, a bit less industrialized, has been no less obeisant to the strictures of the film business-as-business. Occupying a slightly alternative space, UCLA’s film program has generally encouraged quasi-auteurism, with students left to their own devices to make signature films, as well as theoretical (as represented by such resident intellectuals as Peter Wollen) and multicultural innovations. Still, led by the example of such Bruins as Francis Coppola, UCLA grads would eventually wind their way back to Hollywood, with rare exceptions such as Nina Menkes.

“Tomorrowland” is a choice title, playing on the name of the Disneyland fun zone in which the Mouse Man allowed himself to indulge in a garden’s variety of capitalist Utopian dreams (like G.E.’s theatrical suburban fantasy, “Carousel of Progress”). It indicates a school that takes the “art” in its moniker very seriously, but also without a pre-set ideology imposed from above. This explains the programming mode employed by curator Joshua Siegel, whose lineup for opening night might as well have been headlined “Ode to Eclecticism.” While much of the evening’s selection of work was fairly recent—only Dane A. Davis’ Two-Part Invention: A Portrait (1979) and Adam Beckett’s Flesh Flows (1974) date prior to 1993—it accurately portrayed a free-fire zone of visual wildcatters with little regard for strict aesthetic definitions.

Take, for instance, Naomi Uman’s Removed (1999), which applies nail-polish remover to a ’70s-era porn movie—specifically, to the women objectified in the original, now made into opaque, white blobs of mystery. Can this be called found-footage cinema, post-modernized live action, or feminist/materialist animation? The fact that Uman practices all three areas of investigation simultaneously, plus, even more subversively, that she keeps the original porn soundtrack essentially intact, deliberately confounds any standard critical response—and, more than likely in the classroom where Uman made her film, any standard pedagogical one, either.

The risk in an anything-goes atmosphere like the one CalArts foments is that anything gets thrown up on the wall: the worst nightmare embodied in Daniel Clowes’ Art School Confidential and the enfeebled Terry Zwigoff movie feeding off it. But it also permits for sheer virtuosity, like that displayed in Danielle Ye’s Departure (2002). With a woozy, Kronos-like string quartet in the background, Ye combines Muybridge human-figure studies with what looks like found footage of everything from children placed in front of a menacing, elderly lady knife-thrower—easily the most disturbing set of images I’ve seen this year—and other antique forms of recreation and entertainment, and in the course of seven minutes gets to the collective sense of what it means to have, and be imprisoned by, a body.

This, of course, was one of the many issues that feminist theory attacked back in the heady days of the ’70s, and “Tomorrowland” keenly archives examples of what happened when theory was put into practice by artists who also happened to be feminists. Suzanne Lacy’s Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976) skewers Julia Child’s then-popular PBS cooking shows by having the host/chef (Lacy, naturally) stroke the raw to-be-cooked meat until it brings out the animal—literally—in the supposedly civilized and TV-friendly host. Lacy developed into a world-class performance artist based on such work, and one measure of the importance of her CalArts videos is that her subsequent work would have been impossible without the germinating process the school permitted her, just as it’s impossible to consider the history of performance art without Lacy’s mature work.
Another benefit of this survey’s retrospective glance is how it confirms a suspicion I’ve long harboured, and argued rather vociferously with (usually male) skeptics: A whole lot of feminist artists—in this case, videomakers and some filmmakers—have been damn funny. Not just Lacy, but a consistently witty videomaker/performer like Susan Mogul, who in Time Off (1974) sits at a table pleasuring herself with a vibrator and relates in her best deadpan delivery how and when she bought her device. Time Off shows that Mogul already had her comic voice in place well before she established herself as one of the more engaging West Coast video artists.
Siegel has made sure that a panorama of important artists, from Susan Greytak and David Salle to Tony Oursler, Matt Mullican, and James Welling, are sampled, as if to underline one of CalArts’ tenets, which is to bust down the old demarcations between media. Salle, whose videos are shown on a program with work by Jack Goldstein, Mitchell Syrop, and the distinctly SoCal pair of Chris Langdon and Fred Worden, came to international awareness as a painter, but at CalArts, he was known as a man of all trades, from live performance to Conceptualist videos that would push the continuous static shot to extremes.  

As could be expected, though, the larger show casts a strong light on the school’s astonishing animation program, so it’s no surprise that the telltale thank-you notes at the end of most films prominently display the name of Jules Engel. (One of the interesting games that the truly dedicated “Tomorrowland” viewer can play is spotting the frequency with which key CalArts artist-teachers are thanked. Engel wins by a mile, but others often mentioned include Thom Andersen, Betzy Bromberg, Raimund Krumme, Suzan Pitt, Maureen Selwood, and, holding up the cause for cineastes, Bérénice Reynaud. And Siegel extends the biggest thank-you of all to Steve Anker, a key force today in CalArts’ film program and co-head, with Reynaud, of CalArts’ vigorous film programming at the REDCAT space in downtown Los Angeles’ Disney Hall complex.)

Engels’ own intensely musical and playful animated works do have a palpable influence on his students. Henry Selick, before he made his mark as a defiantly anti-digital, stop-motion puppet animator, works over some of Engels’ style in Phases (1978), which reconsiders the art of cave paintings, and David Brody’s Beethoven Machinery (1989) keeps the faith with the somewhat dubious animation tradition of “visual music.” But even more frequently, this programming suggests that Engels’ students and more recent alumni have gone off on various directions far from the master’s considerable shadow. Lasseter’s Lady & the Lamp (1979), though quaintly analog in hand-drawn ink and what looks like pencil, contains all of the basics of the computer-animated Pixar feature and its consciously post-Disney embrace of traditional storytelling. Criminal Tango (1985) pulsates with animator Solweig von Kleist’s adoration for Los Angeles noir, graphic-novel expressionism, and an extremely seductive talent for creating the illusion of a constantly moving, swooping, and leaping point of view. Rather than frowned on in CalArts’ animation hallways, insanely anti-social and politically incorrect work—two prime examples being JJ Villard’s hilariously nasty Bukowski adaptation, Son of Satan (2004) and Q. Allan Brocka’s gay sitcom spoof with Playmobile figures, Rick and Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World (2000)—appear to have been embraced as an avenue of experimentation within narrative structure.

Oh, and by the way, there are those ambitious few who have actually made features while still at CalArts, shattering the presumption that film-school projects mean never cracking the one-hour time limit. “Tomorrowland” contains a surprising number of these, most notably David Fenster’s wry, minimalist California-desert road movie, largely set in the bizarre proto-industrial town of its title, Trona (2004), that incidentally does a far more intriguing and comically inspired job of capturing the place than Wenders attempted in the final hour of Land of Plenty (also 2004). In its wide-open black-and-white observations of figure and ground and its interest in geographic literalism, Fenster’s film contains the friendly echoes of CalArts figures such as James Benning and Thom Andersen, who must have cracked a smile when he saw that Trona plays itself.

It never declares it in so many words, but the show in all its encyclopedic range describes how the children of Walt Disney rebelled against his cheery form of American imperialism even as they took over his business. As anyone witnessing the state of American animated features over the past 15 years could attest, Lasseter’s Pixar has trumped Jeff Katzenberg’s Mouse House. Now, Pixar and Disney are joined at the hip: The inmates have taken over Tomorrowland.

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All Tomorrowland’s Parties:
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