Benedict Drew's Portal
April 2012

Picture from Benedict Drew's The Persuaders installation, 2012
Follow artist and musician Benedict Drew's choice links to cartoons, music and other online ephemera. Drew is featured in The Wire 339 in an article by Nick Cain. Drew's Gliss exhibition takes place at London's Cell Project Space, 19 April–27 May.
Silly
Symphony: "The Skeleton Dance" (1929) An
early Disney cartoon. I love this period of animation where
anything is possible and everything is interchangeable: the
skeletons become xylophones, the cat a cello and so on.
The Multiplane
Camera A short film of Walt Disney
introducing the Multiplane camera, a technique that helped add
depth to backgrounds in cartoons. I find Disney deeply sinister but
am really into the movement the Multiplane camera creates,
alongside the painted backgrounds. But this is where cartoons
became 'high art', which was a bad thing: they stopped being an
anthropomorphic world where the relationship between the subject
and object was unstable, and instead started to be about right wing
morality.
Hibernator:
"Prince of the Petrified Forest" In 2007 the
artist's collaboration London Fieldworks created an animation
studio at London's Beaconsfield gallery looking at the links
between animal hibernation, the Cryonics movement and myths
surrounding the death of Walt Disney (who was rumoured to have been
put into a deep freeze after his death). They had an animatronic
model with the head of Disney, the front legs of Bambi and the hind
legs of Thumper set up in front of a green screen. Behind it they
projected different animations and created the 9 part
Hibernator series.
Wojciech Bruszewski's Yyaa (1973) One of
my favourite works from this period in experimental film making,
both conceptually tight and viscerally powerful. I first saw this
work at Arika's Kill Your Timid Notion festival in Dundee and it's
even more powerful on the big screen.
Lobster
Club Milo Waterfield's animated short
Lobster Club. Me and Tom Chant made the soundtrack. I've
known Milo since I was about 5 and we've collaborated many times.
He animated the eyes in my 2011 video installation The Glass
Envelope. this film is about sex tourism with crustaceans.
The Wilhelm Scream Here, YouTube user
Cinexcellence has put together a collection of the most famous
scream used in cinema soundtracks: 'The Wilhelm Scream'. Originally
recorded for use in 1951's Distant Drums, it's since been
used in Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Lord Of The
Rings and many others.
Hollis Frampton:
Letter to Mr Donald Richie, 7 January, 1973 A
letter to MoMA from the film maker Hollis Frampton, explaining in
minute detail why artists should get paid for their work.
Paul McCarthy's Painter This beautifully
describes everything one needs to know about the process of art
making.
ISO Footage of ISO (made up of Ichiraku
Yoshimitsu, Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide) performing in the garden
of a temple in Yamaguchi, Japan. I was fortunate enough to work
with Otomo (also in Yamaguchi) on his large Ensembles
project. I have been to this garden: it was designed by an artist
and so at the back of the garden there is a little graveyard for
dead paint brushes. Amazing.
Smoo (full version) "Deep in a dark, dank cave in
the north of the north of Scotland, an ancient and inbred tribe
celebrate something or other." A video by the geniuses that are
John Bisset and Ivor Kallin. As far as I'm aware they produce their
amazing videos in John's front room. One day the Tate will buy them
all.
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