Twilight of the Vanishing Points: 7:25, digital animation with sound, 2023
About Twilight Of The Vanishing Points
As a child I was influenced by a book of emphatic architectural engravings demonstrating the rules of perspective. This book, Hans Vredeman de Vries’s Perspective, has essentially been in print ever since 1604 –– less for its pedagogy (which is neither original nor entirely accurate) than as an exhaustive pattern book of hallucinatory classical plazas, galleries, colonnades, and (mostly) deserted interiors, slashed through by omniscient rays of vision. Artists of every era have owned copies, and for various reasons, from Rembrandt to Max Ernst. In the 1960s, Dover Books revived Perspective as an affordable large-format paperback, and distributed it along with works by Piranesi–– which affected me that much more–– and dozens of other public-domain graphic masters. (Please see my article in Cabinet about Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature to read about another impactful Dover title.)
When I happened on my old copy of Perspective in my parents’ basement a few years ago, each page activated a long-lost neural imprint. I’d been thinking of how to approach a film accompaniment to a searing Mozart string quintet: perhaps these elaborate but ghostly spaces were the key to a cinematic realization of the music as a tragic architectural epic. (Please see my films Beethoven Machinery and The Placeless, Flowing Space of Tones for attempts at visualizing music). As has often been the case, however, that dream was deferred–– enthusiastically–– in favor of an engagement with the material on its own terms.
As a child, my drawings were preoccupied with perspective, thanks in part to de Vries. Many years later, the perspective grid returned, becoming central to my art practice–– that translucent, phantasmic trick of geometry having been the departure point of my abstract paintings since the early 1990s. To probe into this personal history, I attempted to recreate the architecture of certain images from Perspective in virtual 3-D, which turned out to be no simple matter. First of all, default computer simulation uses a lens-based, curving perspective that has an infinite number of vanishing points around a spherical horizon, depending on where the virtual camera is pointing. By contrast, the various perspective schemes of the book are based on one, two, or three vanishing points (although the film features one print that seems to come close to intuiting an orbital scheme), and these can be manipulated directly, a priori, whereas in a 3-D environment vanishing points can only be inferred, as a function of focal length and other factors. Add to this the surprising inaccuracies of de Vries (or more likely, his engravers) and often I was forced to distort implicitly modular and symmetrical architecture in order to make it seem modular and symmetrical. But these distortions, inherent and accidental, are part of the prints’ forceful, almost obsessive, graphic character.
I call Twilight of the Vanishing Points a FilmDrawing because, even more than my other films, it is a conversation between two and three dimensions. It is my most insistently spatial film, yet was largely animated in flat layers. In assembling the film, I sometimes “misused” the tools of 3-D animation to create non-perspective space. At other times, well-behaved 3-D effects were produced by 2-D mimicry— which is to say, by the art of perspective.
A revival of the Four Walls Slide and Film Club, a periodic Williamsburg symposium, spurred me to assemble some of my experiments into a sequence, to be accompanied by the resident band (artist/musicians Tim Spelios, Brian Dewan, David Scher and Paul Scher). The following summer I completed the film and sent it to Zig Gron, with whom I had collaborated on 8 Ecstasies and Proliferation.
I had always had music in mind when constructing the sequences and rhythms of the film –– no longer pre-existing music, as with the dream of Mozart, but that of a collaborator who would respond to my shifts of scene with interpretive imagination, and seize the foreground where I left space for musical development. Gron insightfully diagnosed and intensified the abstract narrative. He created new sounds, often uncanny ones, to paint each scene with synesthetic precision. In a crucial sequence he added ghostly echoes of music from the dawn of modern harmony, not far in time or place from the discovery of the rules of perspective in 15th Century Italy. It is no coincidence, in my view, that rationalized space and systematic tonal relations are historically intertwined. To me, they are really two aspects of the same thing.
