Tommy Hartung's Underground Movies
Tommy Hartung
How little does an artist need in a moving image to tell a story? In this film, artist Tommy Hartung employs minimal means and materials to create animated movies, performing a series of experiments in his basement studio in Ridgewood, Queens. Hartung’s remodeled underground space functions as a workshop—or in the words of a friend, an “arena”—with colored lights, dioramas, and puppet-like characters.
Using stop-motion photography, Hartung records a series of simple actions: blowing smoke through an artificial mouth, dripping Karo syrup on a frog, crumpling plastic wrap, adjusting a doll’s clothing, and funnelling salt through a hole. Preferring what the artist terms “dead cinema,” Hartung’s hand-crafted props and their intentionally un-lifelike movements are against the grain of current computer-generated animation spectacles.
More information and creditsFeaturing scenes from the works The Story of Edward Holmes (2008) and The Ascent of Man(2009).
Featured artists
About the artists
Tommy Hartung was born in 1979 in Akron, Ohio, and lives and works in New York. Growing up on a farm in upstate New York, Hartung spent countless days alone in the woods, building forts and living in a world of his imagination—which he considers the beginning of his artistic practice. Continuing to build fantastical worlds in his adult work, Hartung combines stop-motion animation and self-produced videos with found footage and cheap consumer technologies; all of his production sets are built in his studio using found objects.
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