Uncanny thoughts seem to tread their own geography, so that you cross paths with them again and again over time. Here's one uncanny thought I have encountered repeatedly in my life: the proposal that time continues in dreams, whether or not you are currently dreaming them. So that if you should wake from the dream, and then dream of the same story a few weeks later, you will find that a few weeks have passed in the dream as well. There is something deeply disturbing about this proposal. It suggests that your dream is not a creation internal to your mind, but carries on its own independent life, into which you glimpse during the period that you dream it.
There is a quality like this to Hayao Miyazaki's magical 2001 film Spirited Away. The young heroine, Chihiro, encounters a town which grows progressively less abandoned the longer she stays. Chimerae, monsters, spirits, and gods move into view. It is clear they have been conducting their own unseen lives, and will continue to do so once they have become invisible again. The first act of Spirited Away is wild with menace, each major character alien and threatening, driven by sinister and unknowable motives. With the flexibility of a child, however, Chihiro settles into life in this strange alter-universe. The menace of it softens. Its evils become less fearful as they become more comprehensible. Each of the terrifying characters is revealed as two-sided, capable both of virtue and cruelty, allowing Chihiro to learn to navigate among their generosities and vulnerabilities and imperfections.
Some such aspect inheres in Andrew Sendor's extremely peculiar body of work, much of which is on view in Paintings, Drawings, and a Film, open now at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. His paintings, drawings, and film work offer flashes of an ongoing story. It is possible they are meant to occur in another world, much like our own, but different in important and unstated ways. On the other hand, we may fall into them, as through a previously unnoticed trap-door, emerging somewhere else on our own Earth, but so strangely different as to suggest we didn't understand how things were until now.
Sendor's world, like Miyazaki's, initially glitters with menace. Sendor paints in the lush black and white of the golden age of Hollywood, and appropriates many of its stagey elements: the lustrous textiles, the sparkling props, the not-quite-convincing interiors, and the stylized, eye-catching characters.
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Seven scenes from the documentary "The Interior of Delicates and the Enigma of Boris Flumzy"
2015, oil on panel, 34"x43", courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York
As we can see in Seven scenes from the documentary "The Interior of Delicates and the Enigma of Boris Flumzy," Sendor's work can appear like a disarticulated film noir, each element urgent and narrative, and yet the entirety illegible as to its history and destiny. When I first encountered this painting, it seemed to me possessed of a kind of mean hipness. It is an oil painting, but its technique is obsessively perfected. Its characters are clearly very cool, but we can never know what acts they performed, or parties they dazzled, to make them so. They appear like the ultimate in-joke: every single human being is on the outside of it. The painting is a machine for inspiring anxiety and crestfallenness.
As in Spirited Away, though, the longer you stay, the more you understand. The initial aloofness dissolves, and you are welcomed into a whispering world, numinous with alien wonder. The floating elements of narrative fall roughly into place: the male character, Boris Flumzy, is one pole of a duo, of which the other is a fleshy imp named Fenomeno.
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From the documentary "The Tchaikovsky Effect on Fenomeno at the Geirangerffjorden, Norway"
2014, oil on panel, 45"x34", courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York
Flumzy and Fenomeno appear in paintings and in Sendor's short film. Each has something the other needs. They perform a series of transactions. The only one we get to see is Flumzy burning Fenomeno in effigy, while Fenomeno quakes in - in what? Agony? Grief? Metamorphosis? The nature of the transactions between Flumzy and Fenomeno constit
There is a quality like this to Hayao Miyazaki's magical 2001 film Spirited Away. The young heroine, Chihiro, encounters a town which grows progressively less abandoned the longer she stays. Chimerae, monsters, spirits, and gods move into view. It is clear they have been conducting their own unseen lives, and will continue to do so once they have become invisible again. The first act of Spirited Away is wild with menace, each major character alien and threatening, driven by sinister and unknowable motives. With the flexibility of a child, however, Chihiro settles into life in this strange alter-universe. The menace of it softens. Its evils become less fearful as they become more comprehensible. Each of the terrifying characters is revealed as two-sided, capable both of virtue and cruelty, allowing Chihiro to learn to navigate among their generosities and vulnerabilities and imperfections.
Some such aspect inheres in Andrew Sendor's extremely peculiar body of work, much of which is on view in Paintings, Drawings, and a Film, open now at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. His paintings, drawings, and film work offer flashes of an ongoing story. It is possible they are meant to occur in another world, much like our own, but different in important and unstated ways. On the other hand, we may fall into them, as through a previously unnoticed trap-door, emerging somewhere else on our own Earth, but so strangely different as to suggest we didn't understand how things were until now.
Sendor's world, like Miyazaki's, initially glitters with menace. Sendor paints in the lush black and white of the golden age of Hollywood, and appropriates many of its stagey elements: the lustrous textiles, the sparkling props, the not-quite-convincing interiors, and the stylized, eye-catching characters.
Seven scenes from the documentary "The Interior of Delicates and the Enigma of Boris Flumzy"
2015, oil on panel, 34"x43", courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York
As we can see in Seven scenes from the documentary "The Interior of Delicates and the Enigma of Boris Flumzy," Sendor's work can appear like a disarticulated film noir, each element urgent and narrative, and yet the entirety illegible as to its history and destiny. When I first encountered this painting, it seemed to me possessed of a kind of mean hipness. It is an oil painting, but its technique is obsessively perfected. Its characters are clearly very cool, but we can never know what acts they performed, or parties they dazzled, to make them so. They appear like the ultimate in-joke: every single human being is on the outside of it. The painting is a machine for inspiring anxiety and crestfallenness.
As in Spirited Away, though, the longer you stay, the more you understand. The initial aloofness dissolves, and you are welcomed into a whispering world, numinous with alien wonder. The floating elements of narrative fall roughly into place: the male character, Boris Flumzy, is one pole of a duo, of which the other is a fleshy imp named Fenomeno.
From the documentary "The Tchaikovsky Effect on Fenomeno at the Geirangerffjorden, Norway"
2014, oil on panel, 45"x34", courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York
Flumzy and Fenomeno appear in paintings and in Sendor's short film. Each has something the other needs. They perform a series of transactions. The only one we get to see is Flumzy burning Fenomeno in effigy, while Fenomeno quakes in - in what? Agony? Grief? Metamorphosis? The nature of the transactions between Flumzy and Fenomeno constit