Author: Ben Ogrodnik
PhD Student in History of Art and Architecture and 2017-2018 Mellon Fellow in Curation and Education
Paul Glabicki, Professor Emeritus of Studio Art at the University of Pittsburgh, has spent most of his career quietly but profoundly changing the world of animated film.
From his earliest psychedelic experimentations with a Super 8mm camera, to his found-footage plunderings of TV commercials, to current interest in computer graphics, Glabicki has been concerned with animation as a vehicle for generating ideas, concepts and new modes of perception, rather than the Disney-ified usage of animation-as-entertainment that many of us may be used to. When you ask him to discuss his work, he frequently draws analogies with computers – his visuals “encode” new kinds of data directly to the viewer’s brain. He brings to the world of animation his deep interests in such fields as information theory, linguistics, continental philosophy, and classical music. His work has garnered numerous accolades in festivals around the world; and today, the prestigious Kim Foster Gallery in New York City represents him.
Glabicki completed not one, but two MFA degrees at Ohio University, in Painting (1974) and Film (1979), respectively. He moved to Pittsburgh in the 1980s at the offer of a full-time professorship at Pitt. The city in this decade was a major hub for experimental animation. Local Pittsburgh animators such as Brady Lewis and Victor Grauer opened up new ways of seeing, through the cinematic manipulation of motion/movement. At the same time, the local film scene enjoyed a constant stream of visiting artists. Thanks to the presence of the Carnegie Museum of Art’s pioneering Film Section, founded by Sally Dixon in 1970, and led by Bill Judson from 1975 on, Glabicki recalls seeing leading animators present new work in person at the Museum, such as Robert Breer, George Griffin, and Suzan Pitt. Glabicki quickly made his presence felt in the community by serving as the Board Director of Pittsburgh Filmmakers; teaching courses on art and animation; and exhibiting his work at the Mattress Factory and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Glabicki’s work is that, as an artist, he has enjoyed critical success in both the film-world and the art-world – two disciplinary spheres which do not always intersect or tend to recognize the other’s interests as valuable. Indeed, many filmmakers complain they are neglected in the art-world, which prioritizes auratic, priceless objects, like sculpture or painting. Meanwhile visual artists oftentimes struggle to create films that “succeed” with audiences in a more theatrical setting. Neither one is the case for Glabicki. His dual affinity for film and fine art is most evident in his one-of-a-kind animation technique: each film is carefully crafted by means of thousands of hand-drawn images on paper – “each drawing representing both a frame of film and a unique, complete work.” In short, his films are, by their very ontology, multidisciplinary: they exist both as fine-art objects (drawings) and reproducible copies (films/videos).
Indeed, Glabicki has been able to subsidize his time- and labor-intensive animated work (sometimes taking up to 4 years to complete a twenty-minute short!) by selling individual frames to collectors as stand-alone works.
In the 1980s, Bill Judson would visit Glabicki working tirelessly in his studio on Pitt campus, just a stone’s throw from the curator’s Museum office. There, he witnessed the slow evolution of Glabicki’s films, which were later displayed as serial drawings in art spaces, as in the 1981 University Art Gallery exhibition, Drawings and Studies for Animated Film.
The close fit between fine art and film resulted in many innovative exhibitions that broke down the barriers dividing these disciplines. For instance, Judson organized a solo exhibition of Glabicki’s computer-based work, Computer Animation Studies, in 1991, in the Forum Gallery. The installation work on display blended computer animation, drawing, and sculpture. In turn, the animated image fluidly moved across distinct formats and institutional spaces, from the traditional movie theater, to the Amiga computer screen, to the white-cube gallery walls of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
On April 11, at the Melwood Screening Room, local audiences will once more have an opportunity to survey the boundary-crossing animated work of Glabicki, across three decades of his practice.
In my role as Mellon Fellow in Curation and Education in History of Art at Pitt, I have been able to curate a retrospective of Glabicki’s animations to cap off the third and final installment of Pittsburgh’s Avant-Garde, a free microcinema series at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers media arts center. On April 11’s screening – “Anxious Optics: The Experimental Animations of Paul Glabicki” – the artist will be in conversation with Judson, discussing his hand-drawn animations from the 1970s and 1980s, and more recent computer-based works, such as Red Fence, 1999, which exist and circulate in multiple formats as video loop, installation, and feature-length films shown at festivals.
The Pittsburgh Avant-Garde film series aims to “explore rarely seen works, and honor Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ legacy as a hub for artistic experimentation and innovation.” After our inaugural screening on visiting artist Stan Brakhage, and a subsequent event on important work by gay and feminist local artists, we are thrilled for an animation-centric event that celebrates a local filmmaker’s contribution to this important cinematic tradition. Much like his artistic predecessors Oskar Fischinger, Viking Eggeling, and Walter Ruttmann, Glabicki has transformed animation into a powerful bridge, opening up new connections across painting, drawing, and the moving image.
For a complete list of works being shown, and other information about the event, please click here, or feel free to contact me directly. We hope to see you there!