Watching the skies: Luca Buvoli and Holly Zausner share an interest in film, sculpture and airborne forms. Buvoli's most recent animated short explores the poetics and politics of flight. Zausner's 35mm film features rubber figures in slow motion above Berlin

Raphael Rubinstein

Luca Buvoli: Fear of Flying

At times, Luca Buvoli seems like a one-man art collective. It's not unusual for an exhibition of his work to include the mediums of sculpture, drawing, animated film and the artist's book, each component launching another branch of the proliferating, comic-book-influenced narratives that are this artist's stock and trade. A few years ago, he created a fictional company called Luca Buvoli Comics to conceptually corral his diverse activities. He also saw this enterprise as a way of distancing himself from Not-a-Superhero, a recurring alter-ego character in his work who flies around the world confronting not evil villains but philosophical dilemmas.

Diversity continues to mark Buvoli's work--he's lately added mosaic to the mediums he employs--though film seems to be commanding more and more of his attention. He has also begun to subvert the make-believe ambience of his work by focusing on how specific historical events have touched his own family. Unchanged, however, is Buvoli's distinctive, faux-naive drawing style, which suggests the earnest informality of a talented teenager copying a favorite comic book or making a notebook sketch for a science project. In sculpture, he creates a similar effect by favoring everyday materials assembled into flimsy, provisional-looking, kitelike structures that function as three-dimensional diagrams. Nor has he given up his obsession with human flight. The cape-clad, sky-zooming Not-a-Superhero may have been retired (at least temporarily), but deicing gravity is still central to Buvoli's objects and visual tales. Indeed, aviation is the central theme of his most recent film, Adapting One's Senses to High Altitude Flying (For Intermediates)--an Almost Silent Version (2004), which will premiere at New York's Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 22.

This 8-minute film, which mixes video with hand-drawn and computer animation, opens with a subtitled video sequence of an elderly woman (the artist's mother) reminiscing in Italian about hearing warplanes pass overhead in her youth during WWII. As she tells how she would cover her ears, close her eyes and hide under a blanket, a few shaky, hand-drawn lines begin to surround her image. Then the video picture drops out, leaving only the animated outline of Signora Buvoli as drawn by her son. In one of those rapid metamorphoses so characteristic of Buvoli's work, the sketch of the old woman is quickly reconfigured into a drawing of a young girl, who then pulls a blanket over her head. Here, at the very moment the film switches from video to drawing, Buvoli wastes no time in unleashing the imaginative potential of animation. From this point oil, Adapting One's Senses to High Altitude Flying is almost entirely animated: Buvoli draws shifting geometric shapes (a spiral, a helix, tapering vectors), airborne human figures, and aircraft flying over maplike designs alone or in mass formation. Although, as the title says, the film is "almost silent," there is a soundtrack that includes passages of muffled organ music, as well as voices pronouncing the written words that appear, one by one, throughout the film.

Each of these words, spelled out in uppercase, sans serif letters, appears briefly in a corner of the frame, just long enough for the viewer to try to grasp its connection to the accompanying image. For those familiar with Buvoli's earlier Not a Superhero works, which feature spindly, childlike lettering, the new type-face will be a surprise, but the change hasn't been made merely for the sake of novelty. Buvoli based his new lettering on fonts favored by the Italian Futurists, especially those who celebrated aviation under Mussolini. In keeping with the Futurist concept of parole in liberta (words in freedom), Buvoli's film presents a relationship of word to image that is intentionally unstable, with words and pictures sometimes matching up and at other times seeming to drill away or run ahead of each other. It's hard to tell if the images are driving the words or vice versa.

The word sequence, which is in English and Italian, is highly associative. AIR, the first term, is followed by ARIA, MARIA, AVE, AVIATION, AIR FORCE, GRAVITY, EARTH, LAND, MOTHERLAND, FOREIGN, FOREST, FORWARD, FAR, FARTHER, PATRIOT, PARADE, PARODY, PARADOX.... This lexicon evokes a child's primer, but it also plays with etymology and psychological associations. Given that Buvoli's previous work is filled with references to Jacques Lacan (two examples: a foil-und-wire sculpture from 1992 wittily incorporates one of Lacan's diagrams into a superhero emblem and, as the artist has pointed out, the small "a" in Not-a-Superhero's name is a nod to Lacan's "little object 'a'"), it makes sense to interpret this string of words as a Lacanian "signifying chain." For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a string of words in which meaning is constantly deferred from one term to the next. Buvoli effects a similar deferral with his list of terms that glancingly touch on religion, physics, technology and ideology. Their meaning is ultimately in the very movement, the interconnection of roles and concepts. Buvoli's images also have this kind of shifting movement. Near the beginning of the film, for instance, an image of blue sky (AIR) leads to an airborne Virgin Mary (MARIA), who is replaced by a yellow airplane (AVIATION), which multiplies into hundreds of identical planes that flow over a flat landscape to gradually form a vast rainbowlike arch.

The mass of yellow airplanes is one of several sequences in Adapting One's Senses to High Altitude Flying that was created by computer animation. In Buvoli's previous films, the thousands of frames had to be individually drawn by the artist, making such a sequence almost unthinkable. Later in this film, computer animation again comes into play when the "camera" circles around a ribbonlike helix shape rising from a flat plane into the sky. This form was borrowed, the artist told me, from Surviving Spin, a textbook that teaches pilots how to pull out of a spiraling dive. (In making this film and the one before it, Flying--Practical Training for Beginners, 1999, Buvoli immersed himself in the technical aspects of aviation.) But despite this digital element, and the inclusion of two video sequences, the film retains the low-tech, do-it-yourself look of Buvoli's previous efforts. Along with the constant allusions to childhood, this unpretentious style is crucial to the success of Buvoli's animation, drawing viewers into his conceptually dense films.

As is usual with Buvoli, the shapes that appear on screen also exist as sculptures. For an exhibition at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2003, he created a large-scale sculpture of the "vectors" that appear in one of the film's sequences. Made from cast polyurethane resin mixed with a variety of substances including Gatorade, these zigzagging blue, orange and gray girderlike forms, which were suspended above viewers' heads by thin wires, seemed to trace the flight path of some confused pilot. In fact, they take their form from the outline of a man with his arms spread out as if trying to fly (presumably the Gatorade is meant to help him in this strenuous athletic activity). Buvoli has also painted small posters for his film with similar flying-man-and-vector motifs. Both sculptures and posters carry references to Italian Futurism, which is full of such graphic effects in its attempts to convey movement. These Futurist speeding-mass motifs, Buvoli suggests, may have influenced the streaks and lines used to depict speed in American comic books. If true, this iconographic link gives Buvoli's own iconography a certain logic, while also suggesting a resemblance between the Fascist pilot hero and the superheroes of Marvel Comics.

In the film, there's a video shot of an elderly man (Buvoli's father) striking the same pose as the figures depicted on the posters and in the vector sculptures. Accompanying his image, which is replaced for a split second by the shot of a small boy in the same pose, and then by computer-aided animations of the man-and-vector motif, is a word sequence that begins "PATRIOT, PARADE." Here, the artist is evoking his father's past as a test pilot for the Italian air force during WW II and in the postwar period. On the soundtrack a children's chorus is heard singing a Fascist-era Italian song about the "pilot's beautiful life." The lyrics, translated into English, are spelled out in time to the music in sing-along fashion. The ironic contrast between the sweetness of the children's voices and the propagandistic lyrics emphasizes how little is "beautiful" in a war pilot's life. At the center of all Buvoli's art, perhaps, is a quest for the child's perspective on adult folly. If he summons the notion of the superhero, it's only to demolish the ideology behind it, just as his fragile wire-cloth-and-plastic sculptures are as far from the monumental and "heroic" as possible.

In the catalogue of his recent show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, N.C., (an extremely long and narrow spiralbound volume that continues the artist's practice of using eccentric formats for his exhibition catalogues), Buvoli recounts how the impact of current events moved him to examine his family's past. Since 9/11, he tells curator Ran Platt, "a whole culture of fear has subsequently developed around the experience of flying.... I felt strange giving lectures on my work after those events. And, the Flying project was--in name at least--about teaching individuals to fly, which was exactly what the hijackers themselves had gone through. I started to get paranoid about going through airport security and being on a plane with my workbooks and papers. Things could have really been misinterpreted, at least this is what I thought. What until that time I had perceived as a metaphorical space in the project's Beginner's level, now I have re-addressed as real issues of control and power. This has triggered my desire to explore my father's experience of flying planes."

The last shot of the film is of Buvoli's father being interviewed by his son (who remains off-screen) about his wartime experiences. In a reversal of the opening sequence of the artist's mother, the scene, shot in an antique-looking kitchen adorned with well-used copper pots and pans, starts with an animated portrait of Signore Buvoli, which is then filled out and replaced by a color video image. After recalling that he never spoke about the war when his son was growing up, he says that now he has forgotten nearly all the details of that time. "It's better this way," he concludes. Even though the younger Buvoli offers no rejoinder, we can be sure that he disagrees, for his allusive animated essay on the poetics and politics of flight is also an artful meditation on the necessity and complexity of remembering.

Holly Zausner: Rise and Fall

Practically invisible but absolutely essential to the opening shot of Holly Zausner's film The Beginning ... (2003) is a tiny, distant figure moving about on the vast flat roof of Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. The camera, positioned on a higher building across the street from Mies van der Rohe's 1960s late masterwork, also takes in an array of buildings and trees, and some sparse traffic passing in front of the museum. Only the greatly reduced speed of the vehicles tells the viewer that this scene has been shot in slow motion, as was the entire film.

One can't determine what the person on the Neue Nationalgalerie roof is doing until the next shot, a much closer view that reveals a brown-haired woman repeatedly throwing a floppy yellow thing some 20 feet into the air and catching it as it comes tumbling back down. The camera follows the yellow object on its slowed ascent and fall. Occupying most of the flame behind this strange game is a panorama of the Berlin cityscape and an expanse of hazy sky. Another cut and we see an even closer shot of the woman, dressed as before in black sweater and black skirt, now gracefully hurling a large rubbery pink object onto the gravel-topped roof that she is standing on. The camera lingers a moment on the piece after it lands, allowing us to see that it is a stylized human figure whose attenuated arms and legs are connected to form two large loops on either side of the body. Disconcertingly, the bubble-gum colored figure quivers for a second after it hits the gray roof. The woman reaches to pick it up, then the film cuts away again to show her still in the act of reaching down, but this time to pick up a canary-yellow figure on a different rooftop in front of an ornately domed church (the historic Franzosische Dom, which today houses Berlin's Huguenot Museum) and, farther away, a giant construction crane. It was only after repeated viewings of the film in its DVD version that I noticed how the yellow figure echoes the gilded statue atop the Franzosische Dom. This doubling is hardly accidental, for everything in this beautifully composed and paced film, from the particular buildings visible in each scene to the prevailing meteorological conditions, is the result of careful planning and exhaustive retakes.

For the rest of this roughly 8-minute film, we see Zausner on a variety of Berlin rooftops, performing duets with her colorful rubber sculptures, which is in fact what these strange floppy things are. The sites were selected not only for their visual properties but also for their historical associations. In addition to performing on Mies's modernist monument, which is located close to where the Berlin Wall stood, Zausner also appears on the roof of the Max Tauthaus, originally a department store designed by the famous modernist Max Taut and now a residential and commercial building whose tenants include filmmaker Wim Wenders; the roof of the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), a foundation that sponsors artists and writers to live and work in Berlin; and a rooftop from which one can see the famous Pergamon Museum. Two of the most striking shots, both toward the end of the film, show Zausner on the roof of the Altes Museum and the Zeughaus, surrounded by large Neo-Classical statuary. The Altes Museum (1822-30) was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose work influenced Mies. The Zeughaus, originally an arsenal, served as a military museum under both the Prussians and the Nazis, and became a museum of German history for the Communists and, since 1990, for the reunited Germany as well. The final scenes were shot on the roof of the building that houses the offices of the Berliner Zeitung, a wide-circulation daily newspaper. Here, it was not the building itself that mattered so much as the view it offered of the Mitte, a neighborhood that was once Berlin's Jewish quarter and that has become, in recent years, the center of the city's thriving art scene.

As well as summoning up the history of Berlin, Zausner, an American who divides her time between Berlin and New York, evokes a range of emotions in the film. Sometimes she emphasizes the physical effort involved in hefting the larger sculptures. With their over 30 pounds of elongated deadweight, they are both literal and symbolic burdens, seeming in some shots like colorful cadavers that the artist engages in a kind of danse macabre. Other scenes are of a more exuberant nature, suggestive of a child joyfully tossing a ball or piece of clothing into the air. Because they are made of rubber, a substance nearly impossible to break no matter how ill used, these pliable figures also seem to signify human resiliency.

In one striking scene atop the Neue Nationalgalerie, Zausner conveys a sense of tenderness and compassion as she lifts up a large violet sculpture (the genitals signal that it's a male figure), cradles it in her arms and then slowly lets it go. The effect is of a cinematic, secular Pieta. While each shot in the film is composed with attention to color, light and shadow, this one is especially effective, with the whites and grays of the smooth stones on the large-gravel roof, the glistening violet rubber and the mottled yellow wall of a large modernistic building (the Scharoun Bibliothek) in the background. It's a composition worthy of Godard or Antonioni. At the end of this shot, which looks like it was filmed in early morning or late afternoon, Zausner's body casts a distinctly Giacomettian shadow.

The chromatic richness--of both sculptures and settings--has a lot to do with the fact that the film is made in 35mm, an expensive, technically complex medium that not many artists take on. Zausner, who originally thought of doing the work in video, turned to 35mm when she realized that it was the only way to achieve the kind of slow-motion effects she wanted. The production probably wouldn't have been possible without the support Zausner found in Berlin's film community. She also benefitted from the remarkable openness of German institutions such as the Neue Nationalgalerie.

If a central subject of the film is Berlin and its architecture, just as important is the history of sculpture. It's obviously not by chance that Zausner chose to have herself filmed amid the Neo-Classical statues of the Altes Museum and the Zeughaus, or with the gilded statue on the dome of the Franzosische church in the background. These settings contextualize her rubber figures, underlining their affinity when airborne with the athletic grace of Classical sculpture. The effectiveness of the film owes much to the power of Zausner's figures, which subsume and reinterpret so much sculptural history, including prehistoric fertility figurines, the Baroque in all its sinuous eroticism, German Expressionism's distorted sufferers, Giacometti's stretched-out bodies, the shape-shifting industrial esthetic of Post-Minimalism (Serra's splashed lead, Benglis's poured latex, Hesse's extended filaments), and the polychrome vitality of Yves Klein and George Sugarman.

In the final six shots of the film, we see only the sculptures in flight against a blue sky, tumbling, twisting, practically floating. Given the setting of this film, it is hard not to think of the high-dive sequences in Olympiad, Lent Riefenstahl's documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. After this dramatic, graceful realization of that old sculptural ambition to draw in space, the film closes with a printed out quote from French filmmaker Claire Denis: "Remorse is the beginning of freedom." This rather Sartrean-sounding phrase is uttered by the protagonist of Denis's Beau Travail (1999), a film set on a French Foreign Legion base in Africa. In the context of Zausner's film, the observation highlights the moodiness pervading these slow-motion scenes of bodies taking brief flight. The phrase might additionally be read as an oblique comment on the course of postwar German history.

The last sequence of flying sculptures is not only the conclusion of the film but also a signal moment in Zausner's artistic evolution over the last 10 years. Until the mid-1990s, Zausner was a relatively conventional sculptor, using plaster, Hydrocal, burlap and clay to make totemic, colored figures that she exhibited singly or in groupings. Around 1996, she began to wrap her sculptures, some now made from silicon rubber, around pieces of furniture such as Eames chairs and hotel beds. The next step in her development involved tossing her silicon rubber figures into the air on the rooftop of her Chelsea studio and having a photographer take pictures of the tumbling pieces in mid-flight. (She has also created performances in museums and galleries that involve her throwing numbers of her rubber sculptures onto large pedestals.) The engagement with photography ultimately led her to film. Despite her exploration of different mediums, Zausner has kept the focus on her sculptures. In the photographs and the film, her sensual, long-limbed figures are always protagonists, never props, even though they are now made with the specifics of cinema in mind. Although for The Beginning ... she served as director, choreographer and performer, and is continuing to experiment with film, video and photography, Zausner remains primarily a sculptor, an artist deeply involved with the rich history, physical challenge and corporeal presence of three-dimensional form.

Recent exhibitions of Luca Buvoli's work have been seen at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, N.C., the Glassell School of Art, Houston, and the Austin Museum of Art; his film Adapting One's Senses to High Altitude Flying (For intermediates)--an Almost Silent Version will premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on Nov. 22. Holly Zausner's film. The Beginning ... will be shown at the Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, as part of the Loop video festival [Nov. 18-24] and at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in Spring 2005.

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