Watching the skies: Luca Buvoli and Holly Zausner share an interest in film, sculpture and airborne forms. Buvoli's most recent animated short explores the poetics and politics of flight. Zausner's 35mm film features rubber figures in slow motion above Berlin

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Raphael Rubinstein

Luca Buvoli: Fear of Flying

At times, Luca Buvoli seems like a one-man art collective. It's not unusual for an exhibition of his work to include the mediums of sculpture, drawing, animated film and the artist's book, each component launching another branch of the proliferating, comic-book-influenced narratives that are this artist's stock and trade. A few years ago, he created a fictional company called Luca Buvoli Comics to conceptually corral his diverse activities. He also saw this enterprise as a way of distancing himself from Not-a-Superhero, a recurring alter-ego character in his work who flies around the world confronting not evil villains but philosophical dilemmas.

Diversity continues to mark Buvoli's work--he's lately added mosaic to the mediums he employs--though film seems to be commanding more and more of his attention. He has also begun to subvert the make-believe ambience of his work by focusing on how specific historical events have touched his own family. Unchanged, however, is Buvoli's distinctive, faux-naive drawing style, which suggests the earnest informality of a talented teenager copying a favorite comic book or making a notebook sketch for a science project. In sculpture, he creates a similar effect by favoring everyday materials assembled into flimsy, provisional-looking, kitelike structures that function as three-dimensional diagrams. Nor has he given up his obsession with human flight. The cape-clad, sky-zooming Not-a-Superhero may have been retired (at least temporarily), but deicing gravity is still central to Buvoli's objects and visual tales. Indeed, aviation is the central theme of his most recent film, Adapting One's Senses to High Altitude Flying (For Intermediates)--an Almost Silent Version (2004), which will premiere at New York's Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 22.

This 8-minute film, which mixes video with hand-drawn and computer animation, opens with a subtitled video sequence of an elderly woman (the artist's mother) reminiscing in Italian about hearing warplanes pass overhead in her youth during WWII. As she tells how she would cover her ears, close her eyes and hide under a blanket, a few shaky, hand-drawn lines begin to surround her image. Then the video picture drops out, leaving only the animated outline of Signora Buvoli as drawn by her son. In one of those rapid metamorphoses so characteristic of Buvoli's work, the sketch of the old woman is quickly reconfigured into a drawing of a young girl, who then pulls a blanket over her head. Here, at the very moment the film switches from video to drawing, Buvoli wastes no time in unleashing the imaginative potential of animation. From this point oil, Adapting One's Senses to High Altitude Flying is almost entirely animated: Buvoli draws shifting geometric shapes (a spiral, a helix, tapering vectors), airborne human figures, and aircraft flying over maplike designs alone or in mass formation. Although, as the title says, the film is "almost silent," there is a soundtrack that includes passages of muffled organ music, as well as voices pronouncing the written words that appear, one by one, throughout the film.

Each of these words, spelled out in uppercase, sans serif letters, appears briefly in a corner of the frame, just long enough for the viewer to try to grasp its connection to the accompanying image. For those familiar with Buvoli's earlier Not a Superhero works, which feature spindly, childlike lettering, the new type-face will be a surprise, but the change hasn't been made merely for the sake of novelty. Buvoli based his new lettering on fonts favored by the Italian Futurists, especially those who celebrated aviation under Mussolini. In keeping with the Futurist concept of parole in liberta (words in freedom), Buvoli's film presents a relationship of word to image that is intentionally unstable, with words and pictures sometimes matching up and at other times seeming to drill away or run ahead of each other. It's hard to tell if the images are driving the words or vice versa.

The word sequence, which is in English and Italian, is highly associative. AIR, the first term, is followed by ARIA, MARIA, AVE, AVIATION, AIR FORCE, GRAVITY, EARTH, LAND, MOTHERLAND, FOREIGN, FOREST, FORWARD, FAR, FARTHER, PATRIOT, PARADE, PARODY, PARADOX.... This lexicon evokes a child's primer, but it also plays with etymology and psychological associations. Given that Buvoli's previous work is filled with references to Jacques Lacan (two examples: a foil-und-wire sculpture from 1992 wittily incorporates one of Lacan's diagrams into a superhero emblem and, as the artist has pointed out, the small "a" in Not-a-Superhero's name is a nod to Lacan's "little object 'a'"), it makes sense to interpret this string of words as a Lacanian "signifying chain." For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a string of words in which meaning is constantly deferred from one term to the next. Buvoli effects a similar deferral with his list of terms that glancingly touch on religion, physics, technology and ideology. Their meaning is ultimately in the very movement, the interconnection of roles and concepts. Buvoli's images also have this kind of shifting movement. Near the beginning of the film, for instance, an image of blue sky (AIR) leads to an airborne Virgin Mary (MARIA), who is replaced by a yellow airplane (AVIATION), which multiplies into hundreds of identical planes that flow over a flat landscape to gradually form a vast rainbowlike arch.