Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Yesterday’s NYTimes featured an article about the forthcoming Walt Disney Family Museum to open in October in San Francisco. Former deputy director of the Harvard University Art Museums, Richard Benefield, will run the Museum. It’d be nice if a genuine animation historian were somehow involved.

I enjoyed seeing the reason Diane Disney Miller gave for feeling the necessity of the museum. A 1994 biography by Marc Eliot, “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” that depicted him as a bigot angered her. Neal Gabler’s book, “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,” also upset her. That book gave an unflattering picture of Disney’s marriage, despite the fact that the family opened all their records to Gabler.

Ms. Miller also feels that the “Empire” has passed Walt over as a person in their attempt to globally brand the Disney name. Reportedly, this comment has confused the directors of studio Disney. After all, “. . . the company recently issued collectible figurines in his likeness and runs a fan club and magazine dedicated to him.”

Diane Disney Miller hopes the museum will portray a complete picture of her father, offering positive as well as not-so-positive material to the public. The museum will include, for example, a video about Disney’s friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and acknowledge the bitter animators’ strike in 1941.

Too bad the SF Chronicle won’t be around to give us a good report on the opening. Regardless, I’ll have to schedule a trip to the city to see this site once it opens. In the meantime, the Museum’s site is already up and running offering some bits of information and an operating book store (which doesn’t sell Gabler’s book, but does offer numerous John Canemaker tomes.)

- April 4th through May 9 Paul Glabicki will have a solo show in NYC at the Kim Foster Gallery, 529 West 20th St. in NYC.

Paul is a friend who came up through the film world at about the same time as I. His interest was always more into the experimental, Independent film, and his work was always exquisitely detailed and complex films. We often found each other at the same festivals in differing categories.

I received some information about his upcoming show, and I’m posting some of the information and statements that were sent me by the gallery.

Paul Glabicki is an experimental film animator whose work has appeared at major film festivals, as well as national and international museum exhibitions. His animation work has been carefully crafted by means of thousands of meticulous hand-drawn images on paper. His films have screened at such prestigious sites as the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, the Cannes Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, and the Venice Biennale. He has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amencan Film Institute, and several grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

His new drawing series titled “ACCOUNTING for…” began with a Japanese artifact acquired by the artist several years ago: an accounting ledger book dating from the 1930s.

The relentless record keeping, the beauty of the mark-making, musings about its contents and purpose, the fact that it survived and came into his possession, the patterns that emerged when the book was carefully taken apart and arranged on a wall, the suggestion (by changes in the writing style) that more than one person made the marks, and other thoughts, images, and responses grew out of the artist’s interaction with the book.

Paul was interested in the book as a found personal, temporal object imbedded with meaning, function and mystery. Most intriguing to him was the fact that it made a leap from past to present written day-by-day; month-by-month, entry-by-entry, mundane and utilitarian (not intended to be an aesthetic object), recorded in time, and revealing patterns and rhythm over the duration of its writing.

The opening reception is Saturday April 4th 6-8pm.

You can see a 10 min short by Paul, Object Coverstion, on YouTube here.

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