Robert Breer’s Perpetual Motion Machine

Abstract

Embodying and balancing the European avant-garde movement of the 1920s and the dialectical U.S. neo-avant-garde aesthetics of the 1960s, Robert Breer encompassed various art forms in his painting, sculpture and film. In doing so, he created a distinct style that embraces both photographic representation and non-figurative abstraction – a heterogeneous assemblage of sorts – to advocate taking an intermediate stance in the act of rendering the relation between artistic tradition and innovation. By looking at A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957), Fuji (1974) and LMNO (1978), I show three strategies devised by Breer that help generate the vital energy in these animations: metamorphosis, gradational abstraction, and self-moving objects. All three strategies point to Breer’s dualistic endeavour to experiment with the aesthetic and ontological possibilities of moving images and with the animated objects within the frame in spite of photographic, realist and rational confinements.