Chair of Panel: Dr. Janeann Dill
Experimental animation was presented as fine art by its creators long before the art world acknowledged William Kentridge's work, the widely-accepted marker to distinguish animation a "legitimate" language in fine art. Looking beyond the constraining nomenclature of cartoon inherited from Sergei Eisenstein and forwarded by Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss, this panel visits an earlier history of art practice and critical thinking in experimental animation that was passed over by art history and then relegated to film history, where it was equally ignored. Considered neither art nor film, experimental animation dropped out of critical consideration entirely from its 1921 origins in the first experimental animation film, OPUS I by Walter Ruttmann, until the early 1970s with the writings of Louise O'Konor (on Viking Eggeling), Standish Lawder (on experimental film), William Moritz (on Oskar Fischinger), and Jeanpaul Goergen (on Walter Ruttman). With seminal texts by P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM: THE AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE (1974), and Cecile Starr and Robert Russett's EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION: AN ILLUSTRATED ANTHOLOGY (1976), a nascent canon of critical art history in experimental animation was formed.
Rooted in the art historical trajectories of experimental animation, experimental film, digital art and expanded cinema, this panel links the critical histories of art, film, and philosophy as one. This session serves not only to excavate its panelists' individual research, but, collectively, to engender a critical authority previously languishing.
Panel/Session Date and Time: Friday, February 27, 2009 2:30-5 p.m. Concourse Meeting Room 408B, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
