Angela Bulloch

A storm in a pixel

The brooding opening sequence of Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm (1997) assumes some importance in the recent work of Angela Bulloch. It begins with a train making its way from New York to the suburbs. The train grinds to a halt in the middle of nowhere and Paul Hood, the nerdy adolescent the film converges upon, reads to himself from the November 1973 issue of his favourite comic book, The Fantastic Four. ‘It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four…because they weren’t like other superheroes; they were more like family. And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other…without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal antimatter.’ This fragment of narrative from the comic is an allegory of the entire film, which tells of the insidious ramifications husband and wife swapping had on the nuclear family during the Watergate era. All of this action is played out against superlative examples of ’70s interior design such as Verner Panton shag-pile carpets and lamps, making it all the more enticing a subject for Bulloch.
Bulloch has been progressively working through films from the late ’60s and the turn into the ’70s that take their respective epochs as their subject matter. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) was the subject of Blow-Up TV in 2000 and his Zabriskie Point (1970) provided the point of departure for Z-Point in 2001. So given this progression through time, it is no surprise that she has now moved on to the early ’70s with the recent Antimatter series, albeit by way of a ’90s film about the period.
In the present series of pixel boxes, minimalism is used to establish a language through which a narrative scenario can be played. The seemingly unified formal vocabulary that Bulloch fashions often leads to a certain level of opacity in her work – a consequence of how she abstracts from the films the pixel boxes are premised on. Thus although Bulloch relies on the formal rigour of minimalism to render the surface design of the art work instantly legible, beneath this veneer all kinds of action takes place which percolates through to the viewer slowly. The precise way Bulloch uses the films is key to this process. In each work a short sequence from the selected film is slowed down and a sophisticated system of digital motion image processing is used to filter it. Digital imagery is hereby recast as a new pixel-based architecture in which the rudimentary components of narration and cinematic image are dismantled.
The sequences from the given film are chosen because they are particularly striking. For example, the modernist house the heroine watches being blown-up in the desert in Zabriskie Point is taken as the point of departure for the series Z-Point. The sequence begins by showing her as she leaves a luxury villa in her car and shifts to some financiers discussing plans for building luxury houses in the desert. The camera then returns to the heroine gazing almost paralysed at the villa as it suddenly explodes. There follows a series of slow motion explosions from the interior wherein food, clothing, books and furniture are propelled through the air. In the finished animation sequence of Z-Point, these slow motion shots have an entrancing effect as they are submerged in bright, light blue tones into which one or two single, dark brown, slightly moving pixel squares are deposited.
A series of glass-fronted wooden boxes contain the fluorescent tubes bringing the pixels to life. Using custom-made software the diagonally arranged tubes inside the cubes can be modulated to an almost infinite variety. The individual cubes form the elements of a modular system that are stacked up in different combinations, in cubes, towers, or columns. The colours move constantly and result in lyrical waves of change, differing according to the particular sequence that has been manipulated.
In the new series based on The Ice Storm each member of Paul Hood’s family constitutes a different particle of antimatter. The series appends the formal vocabulary of the earlier ones by painting a phrase associated with the respective character from the comic on the wall behind the pixel box unit. Antimatter3: The Thing (2004) is a portrait of Paul’s father Benjamin Hood and comprises 13 pixel boxes in which reds and greens pulsate against the word WHROOM! which hugs the wall behind it. Meanwhile, Antimatter3: Invisible Girl (2004), a portrait of Paul’s mother, consists of only five pixel boxes wherein pinks and blues dissolve into whites and the word SCREEEEEEEEEE! graces the wall. In a further work from the series Paul Hood himself is represented by the Human Torch and the phrase FLAME ON zips across the wall.
A fascinating point of correspondence can be found between the periods from which the films Bulloch uses derive and the internal development of minimalism. Consider how Bulloch’s series starts with Blow Up, a film contemporaneous with the austerity of high minimalism, and then moves onto Zabriskie Point released four years later in 1970 in a moment that marks the full onslaught of the critique of minimalism. Artists who really came into their own during this period such as Robert Smithson injected the raw forms of minimalism with narrative, later enhancing this by actually using film itself. The upshot is that while the basic language of Flavin et al is significant for Bulloch it is only by way of its critique through post-minimalism and its reintroduction of narrative.
For narrative to be fed through such a rigorous language is unusual and that a certain level of ambience results is even more so. As Bulloch filters the late ’60s and early ’70s through her work it enables us to see these decades afresh, in relation to the film and design culture of their time, pixel by pixel.