August is upon us, and we’re in the heat of another mood swing. As with my contribution this spring, here’s a one-minute video. Once again, I’ve prepared an animation made from cut-up ink drawings, augmented digitally and set in motion to a score by artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld, with a little help from her friend Michael Foster on saxophone.
In March, when I made the first seasonal piece for these pages, I began with something comical because a spasm of laughter felt like the best response to what we were living through then. Marina provided me with a more somber score this season, and I wondered what the opposite of comedy might look like. Should we call it apprehension? Or difficulty? Or even ugliness? What is ugliness anyway? Is it something unlikable but also, perhaps, unavoidable?
So the new video is not about summer’s ease and laughter but its more vertiginous sway of apprehension, with discordant overlays and shards of narrative hurtling by, often too fast to fully grasp; the ambiguity of a season when roses bloom but their thorns also prick. Marianne Moore reminds us of this state of affairs in her 1924 poem “Roses Only”: roses, she writes, “are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew.” This work, then, is not a merry cartoon; instead, it’s an attempt to capture how things change, how alacrity can become apprehension — and vice versa.
To read the full article, and watch the new animated film by the artist Amy Sillman, click here.
