Harry Smith - Early Abstractions (1946-57) / Heaven and Earth Magic (1957)

 "To be an animator requires a methodical and systematic mind, diligence and meticulous attention to detail, and the patience and sheer stamina to withstand long-haul, labour-intensive  and hideously fiddly work. Harry Smith was unusually endowed with these qualities. Although best known for his work as a collector of obscure folk and blues 78 rpm recordings (resulting in 1952’s epochal and hugely influential six-LP compilation The Anthology of American Folk Music), McLaren’s true passion was animation. 

"Using various self-developed techniques of hand-painting and marking the film using masking tape,  working with scratch-board drawings, and cut-out images, Smith would spend years holed up in his New York apartment toiling over a single film.  His animations often reached several hours in length and required drastic editing down before he could show them.  Many projects were abandoned in an unfinished state. On their rare public performances, Smith would project the films onto special painted screens of his own construction. Music – usually jazz  – was central to his work, as with the original version of Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso” that soundtracks “Mirror Animations”.

"Like his hour-long masterpiece “Heaven and Earth Magic”, “Mirror Animations” (1956-57) emerged out of Smith’s obsessive collation of illustrative material from 19^th Century catalogues.  He filed the cut-outs – photographs or drawings of people, animals, vegetables, tools, furniture, and sundry other objects -  in glassine envelopes for protection, while noting on file cards every possible interaction that a given image could have with another image.  Yet, contradicting all this obsessive-compulsive preparation, when it came to the assembly process, Smith aimed for a state of mental vacancy akin to automatic writing. 

"The deliberately stilted movements of the snipped-out images have a quaint and creaky quality that casts back to the magic lanterns of the 17^th Century. Magic of a different kind – not conjuring tricks and illusions, but the occult and hermetic knowledge – suffuses Smith’s work....  No wonder film-maker and critic Jonas Mekas celebrated “the magic cinema of Harry Smith” while avant-jazzman John Zorn hailed him as a “Mystical Animator”."  - SR

4 images from Harry Smith's Objective Studies 

Harry Smith's notes on his work for the Film-Makers Cooperative:

My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: batiked abstractions made directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever—they made me gray.

No. 1: Hand-drawn animation of dirty shapes—the history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length. (Approx. 5 min.)

No. 2: Batiked animation, etc., etc. The action takes place either inside the sun or in Zurich, Switzerland. (Approx. 10 min.)

No. 3: Batiked animation made of dead squares, the most complex handdrawn film imaginable. (Approx. 10 min.)

No. 4: Black and white abstractions of dots and grillworks made in a single night. (Approx. 6 min.)

No. 5: Color abstraction. Homage to Oscar Fischinger—a sequel to No. 4. (Approx. 6 min.)

No. 6: Three-dimensional, optically printed, abstraction using glasses the color of Heaven & Earth. (Approx. 20 min.)

No. 7: Optically printed Pythagoreanism in four movements supported on squares, circles, grill-works and triangles with an interlude concerning an experiment. (Approx. 15 min.)

No. 8: Black and white collage made up of clippings from 19th-Century ladies’ wear catalogues and elocution books. The cat, the dog, the statue and the Hygrometer appear here for the first time. (Approx. 5 min.)

No. 9: Color collage of biology books and 19th-Century temperance posters. An attempt to reconstruct Capt. Cook’s Tapa collection. (Approx. 10 min.)

No. 10: An exposition of Buddhism and the Kaballa in the form of a collage. The final scene shows Aquaric mushrooms (not in No. 11) growing on the moon while the Hero and Heroine row by on a cerebrum. (Approx. 10 min.)

No. 11: A commentary on and exposition of No. 10 synchronized to Monk’s “Mysterioso.” A famous film. (Approx. 4 min.)

No. 12: A much expanded version of No. 8. The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land in terms of Israel, Montreal and the second part depicts the return to earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London. (Approx. 50 min.)

No. 13: Fragments and tests of Shamanism in the guise of a children’s story. This film made with van Wolf, is perhaps the most expensive animated film ever made—the cost running well over ten thousand dollars a minute—wide screen, stereophonic sound of the ballet music from Faust. Production was halted when a major investor (H.P.) was found dead under embarrassing conditions. (Approx. 3 hours)

No. 14: Superimposed photography of Mr. Fleischman’s butcher shop in New York, and the Kiowa around Anadarko, Oklahoma—with Cognate Material. The strip is dark at the beginning and end, light in the middle, and is structured 122333221. I honor it the most of my films, otherwise a not very popular one before 1972. If the exciter lamp blows, play Bert Brecht’s Mahagoney. (Approx. 25 min.)

For those who are interested in such things: No. 1 to 5 were made under pot; No. 6 with schmeck (—it made the sun shine) and ups; No. 7 with cocaine and ups; Nos. 8 to 12 with almost anything, but mainly deprivation, and 13 with green pills from Max Jacobson, pink pills from Tim Leary, and vodka; No. 14 with vodka and Italian Swiss white port.*

via P. Adams Sitney's "Animating the Absolute: Harry Smith",  Artforum, 1972 

".... An eccentric polymath. He painted, made experimental films, practiced occult alchemy (he was ordained in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, a spiritual group affiliated with the magician and self-appointed prophet Aleister Crowley), and believed that the careful accumulation and ordering of things could bring about new knowledge....  Smith collected all sorts of stuff: paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, figures he made by looping or weaving lengths of string, anything shaped like a hamburger, and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of 78-r.p.m. records... Like many serious collectors of arcane but precious objects, Smith could be irascible, mean, and single-minded to the point of psychopathy. There are stories of his thieving, particularly when he believed that an item would be better off in his care. He never married, drank to unconsciousness, went absolutely nuts if anyone talked while he was playing a record, and, according to his friend Allen Ginsberg, kept “several years’ deposits of his semen” in the back of his freezer for “alchemical purposes.' "

 - Amanda Petrusich, in The New Yorker, on The Harry Smith B-Sides, a box set of the flipsides of all the 78 rpm tunes that he collected on The Anthology of Folk Music. 

                                       

Confession: I have owned the reissue of The Anthology for a couple of decades now,  but only ever got round to playing one of the discs. When I did, I unawares miscued the CD-player controls -  as a result, one particular Dock Boggs song played over and over for about 35 minutes. It took me quite a while to notice - about 20 minutes in, I was like "wow this is intense, this endless incantatory folksong saga, verse after verse!". Eventually I twigged what had happened. 

Never went back to the set - never seemed like the right time, always something more pressing in the present, or a corner of the past that seemed more compelling. Perhaps it's finally time - indeed the box is sitting reproachfully near the front of the records by the stereo. Should definitely listen to it  first, before getting on to the B-sides... 

                                                     Harry Smith contact sheet by Allen Ginsberg

Sätty - "The Cosmic Bicycle " (1972)

 

Art and designs - Wilfried Sätty

Music by Parasound, inc (aka Paul Beaver + Bernie Krause)

Camera and art direction - William Stuart Walker 

Music editor - Richard L. Birnbaum 

Produced by Les Goldman

"Wilfried Sätty was a  collage artist and poster designer who lived and worked in San Francisco during the 1960s and 70s. Sätty (pronounced “SEH-tee”) was born Wilfried Podriech in 1939. He spent his early childhood playing in the bombed-out rubble of his home city Bremen, Germany. In the early 1960s, Sätty came to San Francisco and quickly emerged as a prominent member of the San Francisco rock poster art scene. He organized and hosted some of the most hip counterculture parties in his fantastical subterranean play-land the “U-Boat of North Beach”. He died suddenly in 1982, leaving his estate and prolific body-of-work to his long-time friend and collaborator, the writer and rock art historian Walter Medeiros.."

— Ryan Medeiros, https://www.sattyart.com/

"As a child, the ruins of his city, which was heavily bombed during WW2, provided the contradictory backdrop for his many magic realists artworks, lithographic prints, and hundreds of black and white collages, regularly citing that the horrors of his childhood felt more like a burgeoning surrealistic playground that sustained his artistic impulses. Sätty was an artist who used collage as a means of subverting commercial advertising during most of 1960’s and 70’s America. Producing large-scale poster prints, collage books and animations, his artwork recounted stories ranging from San Fransisco’s unruly history during the Gold Rush era to psychedelic vignettes of UFO’s and ancient aliens.

"During the 1970s many of his collages were used as illustrations in both the counter cultural movements of the time as well as in establishment periodicals, sometimes alongside psychedelic music promoter Bill Graham. 

“Although he was accepted as a peer by the poster artists among whom he worked, often designing advertisements for rock concerts, Sätty's mode of expression was only remotely related to the upbeat, exuberant style of psychedelic art. His work evidenced its Germanic roots with a more somber, dreamlike realm of utopian, surrealist fantasy spiced by disarming accents of the bizarre and grotesque. Generally excluded from the museum and gallery world, Sätty had by the early 70's, been largely turned away from making posters, adopting the published book as his principle vehicle.” 

"Sätty also produced two collage books, ‘The Cosmic Bicycle’ and ‘Time Zone’.

"The Cosmic Bicycle was also made into a short stop motion animation in collaboration with Les Goldman.... With depth and subtlety, Sätty's collage aesthetic weaves essences of Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte with the otherworldliness of René Laloux's La Planète Sauvage.

"As an artist, Sätty occupied a curious kind of no man's-land in the San Francisco art world. He wanted to create a visual language as an alternative to the impersonal imagery of the mass media saturation that dominated his mental landscape. His was a language in which the imagination was liberated and connections with ancient motifs and pagan ritual symbologies were re-kindled. His sense of social mission led him to utilise techniques of mechanical mass reproduction, to reclaim the technology for the perpetuation of his collages. Whilst his artworks were generally not conceived as being unique or original pieces, they acted instead as prototypes for photographic reproductions and archetypes that resonated with ancient history and the occult."

- Visual Melt

"Mass media, Sätty believed, had created a “state of mental pollution” in which people “don’t know the difference between the truth and lies.” In order to learn, they must “open up their subconscious.” Surrealism exerted its influence on him, and he studied architecture, engineering, and design, honing his drafting abilities. Born as Wilfried Podriech in 1939, he spent his childhood playing in the bombed-scarred WWII ruins of his native Bremen, a place he called “a big surrealistic playground.”

"When he came to California, the artist adopted the name Sätty, “intended to be reminiscent of the Egyptian Pharaohonic name Seti,” Jonathan Coulthart notes. “The umlaut over the ‘a’ gives the pronunciation setty.” The linguistic reference was probably lost on most Americans, but Sätty wasn’t interested in being accessible. His goal was the transmutation of contemporary art and design into what he called “another world within our world.” Sounding very much like Aleister Crowley, he claimed that getting there is only “a matter of will.” - Josh Jones, Flashbak 

The Cosmic Bicycle book

A slideshow of Sätty's work 

His other book Time Zone. 

"Prominent in the hippie scene, Satty (Wilfried Podriech, 1939-1982) transformed 2141/43 Powell into what the late SF Chronicle art critic Thomas Albright described as: "a surreal environment that resembled a cross between Mrs. Havisham's parlor in Great Expectations and something out of Luna Park. Using detritus he had found in trash bins of the more affluent Satty covered the dirt floor with oriental carpets, the walls with fur and mirrors, and created a " warren of variously weird compartments like the different rooms in Hesse's Magic Theater." It was said to have "as many levels and ladders, as a Hopi Indian pueblo." Baby dolls, alchemy books, a human skull, a large incense burner were all part of the decor.  Satty was considered a master manipulator. Maddened when another resident of 2141 allowed his bathwater to overflow, flooding Satty's opulent underworld, he suggested to the landlady that she evict all the other tenants and hire him as building manager. (Clearly this was before the rent and eviction control statutes and such a thing was still possible) Satty then installed his friends, including David Singer and Mark Twain Behrens, two other poster artists of the 1960's, in various other apartments on the premises.

"The new building tenants dubbed 2141 "The North Beach U-Boat" for its extravagant underground compartments. Friends hypothesized that Satty fashioned the so-called bunker as a result of childhood trauma during the World War Two bombing of Bremen, his hometown. Satty himself said he styled it partly on the underground grottos that Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria had built. 

"... All good things must come to an end. According to Thomas Albright: "Sequestered like a medieval copyist in his cell, working with the meticulous perfectionism of a Dutch diamond cutter and the obsessiveness of a paranoiac possessed by an "ide fixe", Satty combined and recombined fragments into often magical collages where it was impossible to tell where reality ended and fantasy began." And he began to drink excessively, lost his wife, and went into detox.  

"Friends thought a change of locale might be helpful to Satty because the place was redolent of the fast fading hippie past, but "As long as he stayed inside its walls, it was still 1967, and Satty could never quite square the fantasy world he had created then with the reality of the 1980's." 

"In January of 1982 Satty, drunk, fell down one of the ladders that led to his underworld, and died..."

- Holly Erickson, "Satty and the 'North Beach U-Boat'"