Andrew Warstat | Manchester Metropolitan University (original) (raw)
Papers by Andrew Warstat
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Nov 16, 2018
Drawn from Life, 2018
This chapter considers animation’s relationship to the document and documentary form from a broad... more This chapter considers animation’s relationship to the document and documentary form from a broadly Marxist perspective. It uses Marxist aesthetic theory to demonstrate how analysing an animated film’s ‘constructedness’ can allow for critical examination of the construction of reality as lived under capitalism. Specifically, the chapter analyses the stop-frame and cut-out animated films of Lewis Klahr. Klahr’s films show capitalist reality not as an unmediated realm, but as a reality enmeshed in American and European image cultures. His films are literally built from the material residue of the recent past, creating dense psycho-social narratives out of re-animated ‘dead’ images. This chapter views Klahr’s films as realist documents in relation to two arguments. Firstly, Siegfried Kracauer’s suggestion that film engages reality through its constructed “material dimension”. Secondly, Theodor Adorno’s proposal that the shuddering (animated) image is encoded with a hidden, social conte...
This chapter discusses how J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Dead Astronaut” is fixated on a melanc... more This chapter discusses how J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Dead Astronaut” is fixated on a melancholic and alienated future that never arrived. The narrative is, literally, a disaster story, containing astral traces of a dead or absent future. In Ballard’s tale the protagonist’s return to this stalled future is premised on the absence or impossibility of a primal scene to return to: the future is inaccessible and has yet to happen. Instead of productively mourning one particular version of the future (which might then provoke further futures), the story melancholically reiterates a stalled, traumatic process of nachtraglichkeit or “coming after.” What, the chapter asks, does Ballard’s story tell us about our impulsion or compulsion towards the future? Is the text the narrative of an interminable post-modern stasis, of “dialectics at a standstill”? Or does it allegorise what happens in the commodification of the future?
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13534641003634697, Apr 8, 2010
... Schwitters led an amazing and tragic life, worthy of WG Sebald. I sense a real connection bet... more ... Schwitters led an amazing and tragic life, worthy of WG Sebald. I sense a real connection between them. ... Elaine Scarry talks about it as self-adjacency.5 5 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001). ...
Parallax, Jan 1, 2010
Little is known concerning the extinction of images. [ . . . ] At one time he was convinced -had ... more Little is known concerning the extinction of images. [ . . . ] At one time he was convinced -had convinced himself -that he could visit, unaffected, the realm of the dead (a result, no doubt, of wide but undisciplined reading) and this held out to him the hope of subliming his most pedestrian fears -to pass, as he put it, from this terrible world to a world of pure terror.
Andrew Warstat’s piece ‘The Artist as Stan Laurel (Lucky Dog)’ bends the object of photography in... more Andrew Warstat’s piece ‘The Artist as Stan Laurel (Lucky Dog)’ bends the object of photography into other spaces. Democratising the processes and techniques of film, photography and drawing, Warstat plays with both the indexical and material character of the ...
Books by Andrew Warstat
On Not Knowing How Artists Think, 2014
“I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful.” This is how Kafka... more “I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful.” This is how Kafka’s short story, The Burrow, begins.1 It is a story, recounted by an unnamed narrator, of the construction of a burrow to protect against some unseen but perennially felt threat. The narrator feels, or believes, something is trying to get in and destroy them.
The burrow’s rooms are a source of constant worry to the narrator. The rooms cause the narrator to engage in repetitive, apparently unending, maintenance to ensure that what should be a security measure does not turn into a security liability—that every escape tunnel might conceivably become a death trap, every escape hatch an unanticipated weakness that allows a predator access.
I want to propose that Kafka’s story tells us something about the relation between an artist and their work—that the inhabitant of the burrow is like an artist, and the burrow itself a work of art.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Nov 16, 2018
Drawn from Life, 2018
This chapter considers animation’s relationship to the document and documentary form from a broad... more This chapter considers animation’s relationship to the document and documentary form from a broadly Marxist perspective. It uses Marxist aesthetic theory to demonstrate how analysing an animated film’s ‘constructedness’ can allow for critical examination of the construction of reality as lived under capitalism. Specifically, the chapter analyses the stop-frame and cut-out animated films of Lewis Klahr. Klahr’s films show capitalist reality not as an unmediated realm, but as a reality enmeshed in American and European image cultures. His films are literally built from the material residue of the recent past, creating dense psycho-social narratives out of re-animated ‘dead’ images. This chapter views Klahr’s films as realist documents in relation to two arguments. Firstly, Siegfried Kracauer’s suggestion that film engages reality through its constructed “material dimension”. Secondly, Theodor Adorno’s proposal that the shuddering (animated) image is encoded with a hidden, social conte...
This chapter discusses how J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Dead Astronaut” is fixated on a melanc... more This chapter discusses how J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Dead Astronaut” is fixated on a melancholic and alienated future that never arrived. The narrative is, literally, a disaster story, containing astral traces of a dead or absent future. In Ballard’s tale the protagonist’s return to this stalled future is premised on the absence or impossibility of a primal scene to return to: the future is inaccessible and has yet to happen. Instead of productively mourning one particular version of the future (which might then provoke further futures), the story melancholically reiterates a stalled, traumatic process of nachtraglichkeit or “coming after.” What, the chapter asks, does Ballard’s story tell us about our impulsion or compulsion towards the future? Is the text the narrative of an interminable post-modern stasis, of “dialectics at a standstill”? Or does it allegorise what happens in the commodification of the future?
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13534641003634697, Apr 8, 2010
... Schwitters led an amazing and tragic life, worthy of WG Sebald. I sense a real connection bet... more ... Schwitters led an amazing and tragic life, worthy of WG Sebald. I sense a real connection between them. ... Elaine Scarry talks about it as self-adjacency.5 5 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001). ...
Parallax, Jan 1, 2010
Little is known concerning the extinction of images. [ . . . ] At one time he was convinced -had ... more Little is known concerning the extinction of images. [ . . . ] At one time he was convinced -had convinced himself -that he could visit, unaffected, the realm of the dead (a result, no doubt, of wide but undisciplined reading) and this held out to him the hope of subliming his most pedestrian fears -to pass, as he put it, from this terrible world to a world of pure terror.
Andrew Warstat’s piece ‘The Artist as Stan Laurel (Lucky Dog)’ bends the object of photography in... more Andrew Warstat’s piece ‘The Artist as Stan Laurel (Lucky Dog)’ bends the object of photography into other spaces. Democratising the processes and techniques of film, photography and drawing, Warstat plays with both the indexical and material character of the ...
On Not Knowing How Artists Think, 2014
“I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful.” This is how Kafka... more “I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful.” This is how Kafka’s short story, The Burrow, begins.1 It is a story, recounted by an unnamed narrator, of the construction of a burrow to protect against some unseen but perennially felt threat. The narrator feels, or believes, something is trying to get in and destroy them.
The burrow’s rooms are a source of constant worry to the narrator. The rooms cause the narrator to engage in repetitive, apparently unending, maintenance to ensure that what should be a security measure does not turn into a security liability—that every escape tunnel might conceivably become a death trap, every escape hatch an unanticipated weakness that allows a predator access.
I want to propose that Kafka’s story tells us something about the relation between an artist and their work—that the inhabitant of the burrow is like an artist, and the burrow itself a work of art.