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Mary Ellen Bute: Reaching for Kinetic Art
Mary Ellen Bute (1904-1983) was one of the first abstract filmmakers in the United States. Between 1934 and 1953 she made over a dozen films with such materials as oscilloscopes, mirrors, three dimensional objects often to classical music. Her films were presented in commercial theatres across the country. Bute rarely spoke about how she became a fillmmaker.
On May 7, 1976, she gave a talk at the Art Institute of Chicago. The following was assembled from her remarks.
I was a painter in Texas and lived on a ranch until my Houston art teacher arranged for a scholarship for me at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. This was a whole new world for me. Practically all of the articles and journals that had reached my part of Texas were very against modern art.
So when I went to Philadelphia I was deeply impressed by the wonderful Picassos, the African art, the Paul Klees, the Braques, the Kadinskis. Kadinski used abstract, nonobjective canvas the way you experience a musical composition. Well, I thought it was terrific but these things should be unwound in time continuity. It was a dance. That became my objective.
I came to New York and tried to find the technical means. The most developed thing at the time was stage lighting. I went to an art school where we did many things with lighting, but that wasn't adequate, an art medium per se. Then by fluke I got into Yale, and they had a fabulous switchboard and I became one of its runners, reaching for my kinetic art form.
From Yale I got the job of taking drama around the world and got to see the Noh of Japan and the Taj Mahal of India, where gems surrounded the building. I looked into the gems and saw reflected the Taj Mahal and the lake and the whole thing appealed to me enormously. It was romantic and a kinetic, visual thing. I started entertaining myself by imagining these designs and patterns all in movement.
Back in New York I related all of this to Thomas Wilfred, who at that time had developed a color organ. This was in 1929. Then I heard from Leon Theremin and apprenticed myself to his sound studio to learn more about composition. He became interested in my determination to develop a kinetic visual art form and helped me with experiments.
We submerged tiny mirrors in tubes of oil, connected them to an oscillator, and drew where these points of light were flying. The effect was thrilling for us, it was so pure.
But it wasn't enough. Finally we got s Bolex camera and started to make my first film, Rhythm in Light. It was mostly three-dimensional animation, pyramids, and ping pong balls, and all inter-related by light patterns and I wasn't happy unless it all entered and exited exactly as I had planned.
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