continued Mobile Homes: The Art of Rudy Burckhardt
by Vincent Katz

Recently, Burckhardt has concentrated on making collage films, which derive their structure from poetic, musical, patterns, combined with visual acuity.  The collage films are based on the twin acts of seeing and showing.  Daisy (1966) is a film that looks forward to the many collage films Burckhardt has made in the last two decades.  Shot in Maine in black and white, it demonstrates Burckhardt’s ability to take seemingly slight subjects -- flowers, fields, a pond -- and  invest them with consequence by the simple act of looking.  Instead of thinking about a daisy, compiling a list of its literary references, and planning a rise-and-fall drama based on a mental construct, Burckhardt simply sets out with his camera and films.  As he shoots, he goes closer and closer to his chosen subject, putting the viewer into a trance, intoxicated by textures of petals, the myriad-flowered center, the unchoreographed dance the daisy makes on a breezy day.
            As time went on, Burckhardt was able to add complexity to this basic aesthetic gambit.  He has made startling juxtapositions of city and country, black-and-white and color, clothing and nudity, night and day, winter and summer, rain and sun.  The soundtracks he chooses give these films their propulsive forward energy, and the eye leads the mind into ever deeper canyons and heights of reverie.  It is hard to get an idea of one of these films without actually seeing one.  Here is the final section of Mobile Homes (1979): “Ice floating in water; pink flower; (tenor aria, flutes, oboe); water dripping off porch, focus shift to trees across road; tracking shot of day lilies; fast-motion clouds passing behind skyline silhouette with water tower, tilt down city ‘canyon’ view; tight close-up of yellow maple leaves still on tree; churning water; tight close-up pansy; pan of snow-covered nearby rooftop skylights, tilt to gothic gable roof clock; long shot of same building, red in dying sunlight, fast-motion clouds behind different silhouettes of rooftops/watertowers, sudden shift to normal speed.  Credits over night scene shot from above, NY car lights going down screen.”
            As Richard Bartone notes, in a cogent piece of film criticism on Burckhardt,    it is his editing which forces a certain reaction, or chain of reactions, in the viewer.  In Night Fantasies, a collaboration with Yvonne Jacquette, set to a piano piece of the same name by Elliott Carter, a meditation on night goes through variations which are, by implication, endless.  As in his early films, Burckhardt works in sequences.  Quickly edited close-up shots of objects covered by snow are followed by a long shot that gives an overview of all these details.  After an interlude, this process is repeated on a different snow scene.  A constant tension of equivalencies is tested.  As in Burckhardt’s preferred musical form, the fugue, ideas which seem simple enough on their own are layered in a way which rapidly precludes their distinction.
            In Night Fantasies, this principle is applied strictly to night scenes.  There are equivalencies between New York and Hong Kong, city and country, winter and summer -- all within the somber palette of the nocturne.  One thinks of Whistler’s bays and the influence of Jacquette’s own paintings, that frequently take night views of city lights as their subject.  The lights of the city coming on, filmed so as to appear in fast motion, take on the beauty of a natural phenomenon.
            The films about and including artists allow the camera to linger on their subjects, supplementing them with minute visual detail.  For Alex Katz Painting (1978), an interview of Katz by Henry Geldzahler was filmed, and it appears briefly.  Katz’ responses to Geldzahler’s questions are used throughout as voice over, but we never hear Geldzahler.  The films Burckhardt made with Joseph Cornell are textures all to themselves, with Burckhardt’s signature looking at the street (in What Mozart Saw On Mulberry Street), birds, and trees (in the Nymphlight trilogy) buoying Cornell’s calculated limitations.  Cornell would suggest things to shoot and did not believe in editing.  He was often disappointed with the day’s rushes.  As  Burckhardt says, though, things arose simply because these two were there to see them -- for instance, a group of boys that goes bounding over a fence onto a lawn, where they roughhouse and tumble, until, as though at a signal, they all get up and run away again.
             Burckhardt’s films of the dance are artworks as well as being documents.  Paul Taylor:  Junction contains footage of Taylor dancing about a year before he stopped.  Scenes of Yoshiko Chuma, Douglas Dunn, and Dana Reitz (with and without their companies), shot either in New York studios, on a huge heap of rubble in Long Island City, or in a Maine forest, are unique choreographies preserved in film.  The way in which Burckhardt combines different musics within a single film is highly eclectic.  The sources for Mobile Homes are Elliott Carter, Blondie, Franz Liszt, Gabby Pahihui, James P. Johnson, Cecil Taylor, Domenico Scarlatti, Percy Sledge, Musique, and Lauritz Melchior.  Probably someone played him the Blondie song; possibly it was his son Tom, who is seen skateboarding while the song plays.  It was Burckhardt who realized that, harmonically, the song would fit at that exact position. 
            In his films, more starkly than in his photographs, we see why Burckhardt has been uncategorizable in the history of recent art.  To make such films -- light, childlike, comedies, and ephemeral, poetic, studies -- central to one’s oeuvre is curious.  While his films are all distinct, each from the rest, they constitute a consistent esthetic, dating from his earliest productions.  He still makes films 10 to 30 minutes long, and he still makes travel films, often combining material from several different sources.  He has not made any narrative comedies in recent years, preferring to shoot on his own, much as he photographs, not in function of a story line.  He never attempted the large-scale forms of Warhol’s lengthy investigations, nor did he care to experiment with new media -- deconstructing film by making it part of an environment.  The evanescence of his recent films and the modest radicalness of all his film work make it hard to classify his films and so accept them as part of the standard canon of ambitious, great, art.  Burckhardt’s art comes at us from a different angle.  It catches us by surprise, giving us a start of recognition.

VI.  Envoi

Rudy Burckhardt is at home in the 20th-century technique of collage, as he is in the 15th-century compositions of the Italians.  His worktable in New York is a mass of images -- postcards from friends, a sexy comic book Jacob brought back from Cuba, images of women from lingerie ads, baseball players, poems, his own photographs.  Outside, there are views on three sides of Chelsea, the neighborhood Burckhardt has inhabited for sixty years.  Looking out, one sees countless images from films, photographs, and paintings -- the watertower he filmed during its construction, the courtyard with its fire-escapes and views into other people’s lives, the rooftops which stretch out in the haphazard pattern he has often happily noted.
            Ultimately, it is not the randomness of existence that is Burckhardt’s subject, but rather the significance of it all, as in the James Schuyler lines, “I can’t get over/ how it all works in together.”  The things we see out our window everyday may be arbitrary, but they are the textures that surround us.  Rudy Burckhardt’s art celebrates these textures, leading us inside them, to see them with a detail and in a light we never imagined possible.  In this way, he achieves his low-key revolution, by transforming the way we look at the world.  At the same time, he does something else.  He helps us to look at people differently, with appreciation, respect, and delight.

1998

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