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12/5/12 Quay Brothers Retrospective at MoMA - NYTimes.com
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ART REVIEW
A Universe Like Ours, Only Weirder
Robert Barker/Cornell University
Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for LipReading Puppets, at the Museum of ModernArt, features this décor “They Think They’re Alone,” from the film “Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies.” More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITHPublished: August 9, 2012
Not all filmmakers create complete and resonant fantasy worlds, rife
with strange, sometimes frightening beings as well as mysterious
movement, emotional suspense and uncanny detail. Fewer still are
honored with extensive museum retrospectives that do these worlds
full immersive justice, allowing devotees and neophytes alike to grasp
the essence of their achievement and its evolution, strengths and
weaknesses all.
But this is what the Museum of
Modern Art has accomplished for the
elaborate puppetcentered parallel
universe brought forth by the
experimental animators known as the
Quay Brothers. At once a marvel and a marathon — first
punctuated and then dominated by numerous video
screens and projections that deliver more than seven hours
of moving images — it pays tribute to the life’s work and
artistic saga of Timothy and Stephen Quay (pronounced
kway), identical twins who were born in Norristown, Pa.,
near Philadelphia, in 1947, segued into film after an early
career as illustrators and have worked primarily in Europe
since the late 1970s.
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12/5/12 Quay Brothers Retrospective at MoMA - NYTimes.com
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“Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s
Prescription for LipReading Puppets,” which opens to the
public on Sunday, has been organized by Ron Magliozzi,
associate curator in the Modern’s film department.
Although the brothers are well known in Europe, this is
only their second show of their own in New York. (The first,
in 2010, was an exhibition of the Décors — the marvelous
miniature stage sets used in their animations — at Parsons
the New School for Design that traveled to Philadelphia
and Ithaca, N.Y., and also around Europe.) This is the first
major museum retrospective devoted to their work, as well
as a huge qualitative leap for MoMA when compared with previous animationcentered
exhibitions — one in 2005 devoted to Pixar and another in 2009 devoted to Tim Burton.
Both were organized by Mr. Magliozzi.
This exhibition reveals the Quays to be skillful jacks of several artistic mediums. It includes
too many of their designs for book and recordalbum covers, although it is great to learn
that a wellknown cover for the 1968 Blood Sweat & Tears album is their work, designed
while they were students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. There is a contingent
of occasionally lively but rarely original drawings, collages and prints, and early cutpaper
animations, as well as works that followed their success as animators: videos of set designs
for opera and theater (in use) and two liveaction features — “Institute Benjamenta”
(1995) and “The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes” (2006) — that are in the film program
accompanying the show. (The rather unsatisfying plot of “The Piano Tuner” revolves
around seven Décors, referred to as automatons; they make only brief appearances in the
movie but are extraordinary in the flesh.)
But the exhibition itself leaves no doubt that the Quays are masters above all of an
unusually entrancing form of stopaction animation they unveiled in 1979. Fraught with
unresolved dreamlike narratives and psychosexual tensions, these works draw on the
Surreal, the Gothic and the Victorian and also reflect the Quays’ deep attachment to the
literature, graphic arts, animation and music of Eastern Europe, which they have
cultivated since their artschool days.
The best of the animations make riveting use of puppets, dolls, stuffed animals and related
creatures (maniacal feathered demons are a specialty), which enact their largely wordless
encounters on the stages of the Décors. These bulky, boxlike tableaus expand upon the
collage aesthetic of Joseph Cornell and the Czech artist Jiri Kolar, marshaling an amazing
range of natural and artificial materials and found objects, and are sculptures in their own
right.
Including childhood artworks and pieces by those who influenced them, the exhibition is
a kind of full disclosure that is rare even for retrospectives, as well as an organizational
and design feat. Most of the works are arrayed in galleries whose graywalled labyrinthine
layout echoes the Quays’ moody, often claustrophobic sensibility while ingeniously
maximizing a relatively limited exhibition space. You could say that light relief is provided
by some dozen animated television commercials that the Quays call “deals with the devil,”
since they are done to finance more serious efforts, but they are as brilliant as anything
they have done.
The show culminates in a tiny theaterlike gallery, replete with moviehouse seats, in which
you can watch the brothers’ widely praised masterpiece, “Street of Crocodiles” (1986), a
dreamlike excursion taken by an ascetic, sharpeyed puppet into a tailor shop and the
dusty glasswalled spaces beneath it. There he is accosted by a group of blankeyed tailor
assistants who briefly outfit him with a new head and brain, while screws wind up out of
the floor and roll about and a polymorphously suggestive piece of organ meat is fitted with
a pattern, stuck with pins and fondled. Loosely based on a story by the Polish writer Bruno
Schulz (18921942), the work’s Old World interwar mood is riven with intimations of mind
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control and the approach of fascism.
From there the visitor can proceed to the second part of the exhibition, downstairs in the
lobby and the museum’s Roy and Niuta Titus Auditorium (where the program of Quay
films is scheduled) to view some 15 of the Décors, most of which figure in the films that
conclude the upstairs displays, including one of the tailor’s shop in “Street of Crocodiles.”
You could say that the show unfolds something like a good Quay animation. There are
different levels of reality, unexpected twists and lots of loose connections and vague
echoes, and the closer the Quays get to the space, light and movement of film, the better. A
studentfilm effort, “In the Mist,” from around 1969, shows the young artists skating
across a tennis court but also focuses relentlessly on thickets of bare trees and branches
that, beautifully hand built, will later protect or ensnare their puppets. An early self
portrait photo collage shows the tall, handsomely Nordic twins against a background that
includes a cathedral and a tram, elements that recur in “Nocturna Artificialia,” their first
puppet animation, from 1979.
Farther along, a group of dark, rather stiff and stilted pencil drawings (including more
trams and cathedrals) from the 1970s are redeemed by the numinous music videos and
musicvideolike shorts of the “Stille Nacht” and “Songs for Dead Children” series, in
which the Quays’ talent for marrying image and music is especially strong. The oneeyed
gnome that dominates a poster by the Polish poster designer Roman Cieslewicz, one of
several Polish poster designers represented in the show, reemerges in the Quays’ world as
a charming ogre with a body of black twisted wire who obsessively fingers a onehaired
mole on his forehead. He is the opening character of the 1987 “Rehearsal for Extinct
Anatomies” and also appears here in his own small Décor.
It is tempting to view the Quays as artists out of step with their times, overly attracted to
the antique and the arcane. Yet in their own quirky way they seem eminently postmodern,
not the least for their avoidance of narrative logic. Like many members of their artistic
generation — the American painter Philip Taaffe comes to mind — the Quays also seem to
view the past as unfinished and full of potential. Their animations and Décors show them
rummaging gleefully through the dustbin of art history, finding new uses for the
engravings favored by Max Ernst or, inspired by the collaborative photograph “Dust
Breeding” by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, devising ingenious ways to animate dust,
metal filings and even splinters.
They also expand on the potential for animation implicit in calligraphy or in Arcimboldo’s
piecedtogether portraits, especially in their 1984 short “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer,”
a tribute to that Czech animator. This is basically an ebullient story of a boy’s artistic
education (stopaction filmmaking included) at the hands of an older man, their lessons
conducted throughout a series of drawerlined spaces that especially show off the
brothers’ collage aesthetic, which is also very much of our time. But most of all it is the
emphatically physical nature of their animations, their emphasis on texture and materials,
on film as a handbuilt thing that makes their work seem so current.
There is more to be seen and enjoyed here than is possible to recommend. Don’t miss the
Svankmajer tribute or “In Absentia,” a haunting meditation on the early20thcentury
outsider artist Emma Hauck done in collaboration with the composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen; or the marvelous documentary, enacted by assorted species of puppets,
about the Czech composer Leos Janacek.
But there are also dead spots, even in the recent work, prominent among them an
indulgent freeform documentary about the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia,
pretentiously narrated by Derek Jacobi and full of overwrought music. The generic film
andsculpture installation “Coffin of a Servant’s Journey,” which combines the motifs of
two wellknown paintings by René Magritte, also seems beneath them. But so what? The
Quays, like all artists, are not perfect, but they have done more than enough to enrich the
12/5/12 Quay Brothers Retrospective at MoMA - NYTimes.com
4/4www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/arts/design/quay-brothers-retrospective-at-moma.html?pagewanted=all…
A version of this review appeared in print on August 10, 2012, on page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: AUniverse Like Ours, Only Weirder.
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culture of their time.
“Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for LipReading Puppets”runs from Sunday through Jan. 7 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 7089400,moma.org.
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