ANDY HOLDEN – LAWS OF MOTION IN A CARTOON LANDSCAPE

I recently visited one of my favourite spots in London, The Cinema Museum to check out their visiting exhibition - Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape by Andy Holden.

To begin with, The Cinema Museum is a must attend venue, which unfortunately is currently in threat of closure, and I encourage you to not only visit but support the museum through their Save The Museum campaign. From entering the doors, visitors experience the grandeur of golden age Hollywood and are immersed in an enclave of artefacts from the silver screen. To the right there is a small cinema, where I watched the opening part of the  Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape by Andy Holden. Continuing on a red carpet to the opening hall, there are so many fantastic pieces on display all the way up to the first floor where visitors can see a collection of Charlie Chaplin memorabilia. The main room houses a giant screen where the presentation of Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape by Andy Holden was screened and visitors can also sit and relax, grab a coffee, tea, drink or snack and just enjoy the space and presentation.

Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape was a fun educational experience which provided a useful way to learn about theories in animation. The study was highly useful in understanding the concepts of animation and movement, and how in early cartoons, laws were formed which form the basis of an animation theory, and how this could be employed in my own projects in virtual reality combining animation principles. 

Created over five years, “Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape is the result of more than five years work and contains a full realised animated theory proposing the world is best now understood as a cartoon. The film examines the formation of ‘laws’ within cartoons as a way of making sense of the world we are now within, a space where anything could potentially happen. Made from hundreds of cartoons clips the work adopts a part-lecture, part-documentary, part-conspiracy theory tone, with the artist rendered as a cartoon avatar in order to narrate his theory. Laws such as “Everything falls faster than an anvil” and “Anybody suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation”, are mixed with Greek myths, philosophy, politics, physics and the history of animation to create an hour long exploration of the world as an irrational space where anything can happen, yet certain things reoccur, and in which a new set of Laws have formed. The Golden Age of animation proved a premonition of the world we now find ourselves within. From Aristotle to Newton to CERN, from Google to the 2008 banking crash to Trump, the film splices speculations with animation history of the work of directors such as Tex Avery and Chuck Jones to look at how the physic and ethics of the cartoon world might help us understand the world today, and how we might navigate this new terrain. 

For its presentation at the Cinema Museum the upstairs auditorium is showing the updated two-screen hour-long animated film, on a loop and playing every hour throughout the day. Downstairs in the small cinema are a series of recent animated short films; each the length of a cartoon, exploring aspects of the Cartoon Landscape in more detail. These include an exploration of Scooby-Doo houses set to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and a walk through Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner landscapes, combined with fragments of Wordworth’s Prelude narrated by the artist’s ‘last man’ animated avatar. The final cartoon short is “set in 2016”, a point taken as the start of the “Cartoon Landscape”, in which the animated cartoon artist finds herself wandering inside memes and unlikely moments from recent viral internet history.”

The exhibition was first seen at Glasgow International in 2016, and has since been shown at Venice Biennale (2017), Lancaster Arts (2017), Kunsthal Viborg, (2017), Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine (2017), Front International, Cleveland, USA (2018), Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2018). This first London presentation is generously supported by Lancaster Arts.

“Holden takes us through the history of animations and how the physical laws of the cartoon world deviate from the everyday Newtonian universe. It’s a hugely entertaining melange of redundant erudition, linking the sublime violence of Disney and Looney Tunes to quantum physics and Stephen Hawking. Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape is worth an hour of anybody’s time. The real point is that the precariousness of the cartoon predicament mirrors modern life, with gravity against us as we try our best not to fall. Don’t look down.” Adrian Searle (The Guardian)

Andy’s website is www.andyholdenartist.com, where you can find out more about this exhibition, as well as images and clips for previous related exhibitions.” 

http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/2019/andy-holden-laws-of-motion-in-a-cartoon-landscape/