Stan VanDerBeek (January 6, 1927 – September 19, 1984) was an American

experimental film Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, parti ...

maker known for his collage works.

Life

VanDerBeek studied

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

and

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

's Cooper Union before transferring to

Black Mountain College Black Mountain College was a private liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. The college was ideologically organized around John Dewey's educational ...

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...

, where he met polymath

Buckminster Fuller Richard Buckminster Fuller (; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing mo ...

, composer John Cage, and choreographer

Merce Cunningham Mercier Philip "Merce" Cunningham (April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009) was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of American modern dance for more than 50 years. He frequently collaborated with artists of other discipl ...

. Beginning in 1949, he took two terms of photography courses from

Hazel Larsen Archer Hazel Larsen Archer (April 23, 1921, Milwaukee, Wisconsin – May 18, 2001, Tucson, Arizona) was a twentieth-century American female photographer who attended and then taught at Black Mountain College. Her images and prints captured life at Blac ...

at the institution. In the 1950s, he directed independent art films while learning animation techniques and painting scenery and set designs for ''

Winky Dink and You ''Winky Dink and You'' was a CBS children's television show that aired from 1953 to 1957, on Saturday mornings at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 9:30 Central. It was hosted by Jack Barry and featured the exploits of a cartoon character named Winky Di ...

''. His earliest films, made between 1955 and 1965, mostly consist of animated paintings and

collage film Collage film is a style of film created by juxtaposing found footage from disparate sources. The term has also been applied to the physical collaging of materials onto film stock. Surrealist roots The surrealist movement played a critical role i ...

s, combined in a form of organic development. VanDerBeek's ironic compositions were created very much in the spirit of the surreal and

Dadaist Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris ...

collages of

Max Ernst Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealis ...

, but with a wild, rough informality more akin to the expressionism of the Beat Generation. In the 1960s, VanDerBeek began working with the likes of

Claes Oldenburg Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions ...

and

Jim Dine Jim Dine (born June 16, 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American artist whose œuvre extends over sixty years. Dine’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking (in many forms including lithographs, etchings, gravure, intaglio, woodcuts, l ...

, as well as representatives of modern dance and expanded cinema, such as

and Elaine Summers. Contemporaneously, he designed shows using multiple projectors at his Movie Drome theater at

Stony Point, New York Stony Point is a Administrative divisions of New York#Town, town in Rockland County, New York, United States. It is part of the New York City Metropolitan Area. The town is located north of the town of Haverstraw, New York, Haverstraw, east and ...

. The Movie Drome was a grain silo dome which he turned into his "infinite projection screen." Visitors entered the dome through a trap-door in the floor, and were encouraged after entering to spread out over the floor and lie with their feet pointing towards the center. Once inside, the audience experienced a dynamic inter-dispersal of movies and images around them, created by over a dozen slide and film projectors filling the concave surface with a dense collage of moving imagery. These presentations contained a very great number of random image sequences and continuities, with the result that none of the performances were alike. His desire for the utopian led him to collaborate with

Ken Knowlton Kenneth Charles Knowlton (June 6, 1931 – June 16, 2022) was an American computer graphics pioneer, artist, mosaicist and portraitist. In 1963, while working at Bell Labs, he developed the BEFLIX programming language for creating bitmap comput ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

, where dozens of computer animated films and holographic experiments were created by the end of the 1960s. These included '' Poem Field'' (1964-1968), a series of eight computer-generated animations. During the same period, he taught at many universities, researching new methods of representation, from the steam projections at the

Guggenheim Museum The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Museums in this group include: Locations Americas * The Solomon R. Guggenhei ...

to the interactive television transmissions of his ''Violence Sonata'', broadcast on several channels in 1970. He directed the

University of Maryland, Baltimore County The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university in Baltimore County, Maryland. It has a fall 2022 enrollment of 13,991 students, 61 undergraduate majors, over 92 graduate programs (38 master, 25 doctoral, ...

visual arts program until his death.

Family

He has two children from his marriage to Johanna Vanderbeek named August Vanderbeek and Maximus Vanderbeek. Three additional children from his second marriage to Louise VanDerBeek are Julia VanDerBeek and artists

Sara VanDerBeek Sara VanDerBeek (born 1976), is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. She is known for photographing sculptures and three-dimensional still-life assemblages of her own making, some of which she destroys after the photos have be ...

and Johannes VanDerBeek

Legacy

His movie ''Breathdeath'' (1963) was a huge influence on

Terry Gilliam Terrence Vance Gilliam (; born 22 November 1940) is an American-born British filmmaker, comedian, animator, actor and former member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam has directed 13 feature films, including '' Time Bandits'' (1981), '' ...

(mistakenly referring to it as ''Death Breath''). VanDerBeek's work and legacy has been the focus of several retrospective exhibitions, including the following: * ''Amazement Park: Stan, Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek'' (2009) at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at

Skidmore College Skidmore College is a Private school, private liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, New York. Approximately 2,650 students are enrolled at Skidmore pursuing a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Scien ...

, Saratoga Springs, NY * ''Stan VanDerBeek – The Cultural Intercom'' (2011) at

MIT List Visual Arts Center Established in 1950, the List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) is the contemporary art museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is known for temporary exhibitions in its galleries located in the MIT Media Lab building, as well as its admini ...

, Cambridge, MA (traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX) * ''Jon Rafman / Stan VanDerBeek'' (2017) at

Sprüth Magers Sprüth Magers is a commercial art gallery owned by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, with spaces in London, Berlin, Los Angeles and offices in Cologne, Hong Kong, New York and Seoul. The gallery represents over sixty artists and estates, inclu ...

, Los Angeles, CA, curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen * ''VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek'' (2019) at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, co-curated by Sara VanDerBeek and Chelsea Spengemann, Director of the Stan VanDerBeek Archive.

References

External links

Stan Vanderbeek
on

IMDb IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...

Stan VanDerBeek Estate

on

UbuWeb UbuWeb is a web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives. Philo ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vanderbeek, Stan 1927 births 1984 deaths American experimental filmmakers American animators Artists from Baltimore Cooper Union alumni American video artists New media artists Black Mountain College alumni Film directors from Maryland University of Maryland, Baltimore County faculty Collage filmmakers Deaths from cancer in Maryland Burials at Green River Cemetery

Life

Family

Legacy

See also

References

External links