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By ROBERTA SMITH
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 puppet-centered 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.
“Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading 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 animation-centered exhibitions — one in 2005 devoted to Pixar and another in 2009 devoted to Tim Burton. Both were organized by Mr. Magliozzi.
“They Think They’re Alone,” from the film “Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies.”
But the exhibition itself leaves no doubt that the Quays are masters above all of an unusually entrancing form of stop-action 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 art-school 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 gray-walled 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 movie-house seats, in which you can watch the brothers’ widely praised masterpiece, “Street of Crocodiles” (1986), a dreamlike excursion taken by an ascetic, sharp-eyed puppet into a tailor shop and the dusty glass-walled spaces beneath it. There he is accosted by a group of blank-eyed 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 (1892-1942), the work’s Old World interwar mood is riven with intimations of mind 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 student-film 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 music-video-like 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 one-eyed gnome that dominates a poster by the Polish poster designer Roman Cieslewicz, one of several Polish poster designers represented in the show, re-emerges in the Quays’ world as a charming ogre with a body of black twisted wire who obsessively fingers a one-haired 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 pieced-together 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 (stop-action filmmaking included) at the hands of an older man, their lessons conducted throughout a series of drawer-lined 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 hand-built 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 early-20th-century 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 free-form documentary about the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, pretentiously narrated by Derek Jacobi and full of overwrought music. The generic film-and-sculpture installation “Coffin of a Servant’s Journey,” which combines the motifs of two well-known 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 culture of their time.
“Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets” runs from Sunday through Jan. 7 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/ar...e-at-moma.html