When leaving Brooklyn on the BQ train, your commute is pleasantly disrupted by the flashing scenes of experimental filmmaker Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscope” (1980), recently restored by the MTA’s Arts for Transit program.
Masstransiscope is a 20-second kaleidoscopically colorful animation based on the principle of the zoetrope, a 19th century optical toy. Where in a standard zoetrope, the animation spins in front of you, Brand’s is a linear zoetrope, propelling you past abstract forms culminating in a rocket's launch -- all just before you’re hit by blinding daylight as you cross the Manhattan Bridge. Housed in the long-abandoned Myrtle Ave. Station just after the DeKalb stop, Masstransiscope is the only sanctioned art in New York’s subway tunnels, and it remains the only subway animation in the U.S. that is not advertising-based. Bill Brand is the founder of the seminal optical printing house BB Optics, which has provided services for avant-garde filmmakers including Stan Brackhage, Carolee Schneeman and Todd Haynes, as well as the Nixon Library, N.Y. Public Library, and the archives of Hollis Frampton. Brand’s feature Home Less Home (1990) was included in the 2007 "Essential Documentaries” series at New Directors/New Films Classics and is scheduled to be shown at Anthology Film Archives in February 2009. Brand originally conceived Masstransiscope as an exploration of the role of the audience in experimental work. His previous work includes several experimental shorts exploring and reworking early film and its techniques. They are well-received films with extremely limited audiences.
Brand says, “While I was thinking about what makes a film fundamentally a film, I was also asking myself, what does audience have to do with how I think as an artist? Turning the subway into a movie machine was a way of exploring these ideas with a very large audience.”
Initially, Masstransiscope was planned as a photo animation, with images that unspooled to subway riders one at a time over several months, allowing the audience to experience the act of creating animation. But this time and resource intensive process was quickly put aside for a relatively simpler process with more visually striking images. Brand’s new, more graphic images were painted with transparent ink on large 3M retro-reflective sheeting by painter Theresa DeSalvio. Brand says DeSalvio’s “superior handling of the brush was very important, and her own ideas as a painter were very sympathetic.”
After several years of good press and thousands of viewers, the piece fell into disrepair and obscurity -- except to dozens of graffiti artists who took advantage of Brand’s key spot. An opportunity for Masstransiscope’s revitalization arose last Spring when the MTA sold part of the old Myrtle Ave station to a housing development to be built above it. The changes gave Brand the opportunity to inspect the piece and plan the restoration.
Cleaning the 228 panels was a daunting prospect, even though Brand had the forethought to protect the original panels against the inevitable tags. Unsure if he would be able to save the art under the graffiti after so long, Brand called upon his supporters at MetroClean Express. They played archivist and found the right combination of chemicals and elbow grease to save the work, buried under layers of graffiti. After cleaning, the panels were reinstalled and relit in the tunnel for it’s Fall 2008 reemergence. Although graffiti has gained recognition as it’s own art, Brand hopes taggers will again respect the boundaries of art on exhibit, and that Masstransiscope will remain unscathed.
In addition to running BB Optics, Brand teaches film at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and at NYU, and he continues to promote the idea that film and video artists need to play a role in preserving their own work. His current works in progress include a 16mm film on the disappearing urban landscape of his Manhattan neighborhood, and a series of archival pigment prints of the Masstransiscope panels.
Brand says “The image for Masstransiscope was inspired by a Diego Rivera mural created and destroyed in the '30's and it is all about sudden change, evolution, fear and hope. So maybe this is a good time to have it back in public again.” # posted by Rose Vincelli @ 11/30/2008 06:10:00 PM
