A self-portrait (a collection of Robert Breer's interviews, correspondence and statements over fifty years).
Robert Breer A to Z is a self-portrait of Robert Breer. His life and work are presented as an imaginary lexicon, a form which he always admired as being emblematic of the joyous, unexpected, and chaotic nature of life itself.
“A 50-year self-portrait drawn from interviews, personal letters and public statements of the artist from 1957 to 2009. When you go out into the street after watching Breer's films, everything looks and sounds different because it's being filtered through Breer's vision – new time sense, new relationships. You think about balancing: the abstract with the figurative... think about how objects and images metamorphose, break up, expand, deflate... how forms get pulled out of apparent chaos and are submerged again. Daily life!”
Amy Taubin, Soho Weekly News, 1980
“It's interesting that in a dictionary illustrations are arbitrary, totally illogical. But no one complains about the total illogic of these images. You know, you have the image of some important person and then, right after that, a duck, because they both start with the letter D. I suppose it's an editor who chooses these things, on a basis having nothing to do with any visual sense at all. It all has to do with the alphabet which is an arbitrary thing too, you know, A to Z. Dictionaries are taken so seriously. I guess people don't see that kind of arbitrariness as a form of anarchy but it is.”
Robert Breer, 2006
Robert Breer (1926, Detroit - 2011, Tucson) spent fifty years building up a totally atypical body of work which plays with different genres and abolishes the notions of space and time. Starting off as a painter, he then deconstructed his neoplastic works and ended up with
kinetic objects. He dealt next with the thresholds of awareness and perception, both as a
sculptor and a
filmmaker. His films are composed of a jumble of images that pass at great speed, while his Floats move almost imperceptibly, in accordance with an unpredictable logic. Robert Breer developed his light yet rigorous style while associating with the
New York underground in the
Pop years. Continuing his subtle exploration of movement, his work still today causes the space of reality—irrevocably unstable—to waver.
