Complete video (7:38): MOV
First published in Bomb 118 (Winter 2011)
Pinky's Rule, a seven-minute animated drawing, premiered at the opening. The sound track features Sillman reading Bernstein's poem. In making the work, the collaborators went back and forth, toggling from image to poem and poem to image, so that it is impossible to say which came first. All the images bounce off the poem and the poem is constantly grappling with and extending the graphics. Sillman made more than 2000 images for the film.
Pinky's Rule and "Duplexities" offer a Moebius twist on illustration and ekphrasis: the poems do speak out of the images, but the images reply in turn, and vice versa. Bernstein & Sillman have created a large-scale serial work that is overlaid and interwoven: the words offer versions of the pictures and the pictures are transfigurations of the words. They call their process iconophrastic (both speaking picture and pictures speaking). In the animated drawiung, Pinky's Rule, and in "Duplexities," the associated image/poem collaboration, motifs and icons are constantly permuted, turned over and upside down, and oscillated for good measure. Figuration dissolves into abstraction and abstraction bursts into song.
more info These video recordings are being made available for noncommercial
and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author.
© 2011 Amy Sillman.
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