Masstransiscope: Bill Brand’s experimental film-making and the New York Subway
By Thomas Gibbs
Bill Brand is one of those artists who is only really known for one artwork – Masstransiscope (1980). This piece is an icon of the New York Subway, and probably one of the most innovative public artworks of the twentieth century – made all the more impressive by its permanence, the work is just as exciting today as it was when it was commissioned in 1980.
However, to fully understand Masstransiscope we must look at the themes underlying Brand’s oeuvre. His website showcases a pile of unremarkable oil paintings, and charming yet uninventive ink drawings. His film work is more innovative but shows very little progression from the 1970s to now. Two motifs persist over everything: layered projections and a play on the nature of film as a medium.
For example, in Susie’s Ghost (2011), Brand used aging 16mm film and shot at a lower frame rate to create a haunted sense of nostalgia for the fading remain of Manhattan’s manufacturing district. As these were wiped away by redevelopment, Brand switched to digital media, but the same themes continue in his work.
Bill Brand, Still of Ornithology 6, 2021, 4K digital video, silent, 8 1/2 minutes, (continuous loop). <https://www.billbrand.net/film#/2020s/>
2021’s Ornithology 6 features the same strobing blotch effect seen in Brand’s early films. His medium has evolved, from working directly with film to video effects, and later CG overlays on 4k digital video, but the style is consistent. Brand achieves abstraction in a fundamentally naturalistic medium by confusing the viewer. However, in the majority of his works, it is the overlaying of light and dark layers on top of the video that achieves this effect, rather than direct manipulation of the image itself.
In the late 1990s Brand started projecting his films onto the human body in what he called ‘double portrait’. In Suite: Double Nephrectomy (1998), he overlayed film of his sister’s surgery scars onto his own body. The work presents Brand’s ‘complex feelings of knowing [he has] been spared the gene that caused her disease.’ ‘In the video,’ he says, ‘I find, on my own body, the scars I imagine we share.’ This process of filming another’s body, projecting it on his own, and filming it again was repeated for 2003’s Suite: Interior Outpost, this time with his father’s family photos ‘to articulate [his] position of difference within the family experience of illness and death.’
Bill Brand and Katy Martin, Still from Swan’s Island, 2005, colour film, sound, 5 minutes. <https://www.billbrand.net/film#/2000s/>
In the 2000s Brand also experimented with using paint in place of light. He collaborated several times with his wife Katy Martin, a body paint artist. Each time Brand filmed her painted body so close up it almost became abstract. In Skinside Out (2002), he took a darkly erotic, bordering on repulsive approach to this subject. Yet in Swan’s Island (2005) the same subject takes on new meaning, Martin’s movements are choreographed to match the movements of the camera, linking gesture in painting and cinematography in filmmaking.
The motif of film projection and layering continues in Brand’s installation work. Mistakes, Out Takes and Good Deeds (2006), and Autopsy (2017) both use moving projectors and mirrors to create a panning frame that scans the walls of the gallery. This gives the viewer a focused view of the artwork, guiding them through the viewing experience. In Autopsy this is decidedly static, whereas Mistakes is a dynamic work showing the artist’s process alongside tightly cropped clips from stock footage.
Bill Brand, Pong Ping Pong, 1971, film and sound installation and performance, Western College, Oxford, Ohio, A clip of the 2019 reconstruction is available here: <https://www.billbrand.net/pong-ping-pong-at-microscope-gallery-2019>
Mistakes was an evolution of his earliest installation Pong Ping Pong (1971, 2019) – but in this more primitive version the camera and projector movements are not remotely synchronised leading to a much less intelligible film experience as the frame pans over multiple screens and the audience, arranged in a circle on the floor. The participants all crane their necks to try to see the game rippling over fellow viewers’ faces.
MTA info, Still from Reinstalling Masstransiscope, 2013, YouTube video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-_eHFXqxpQ>
This all brings me back to Masstransiscope, Brand’s most famous and most innovative work, in which the same themes are reinterpreted for an enormous public artwork. Masstransiscope is a huge installation, a 300ft long reflective painting running along the wall of Brooklyn’s abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway station. The old platform is divided from the train-tunnel by equally spaced pillars, each lit from the rear by neon tubes. Through each resulting gap you see one frame of an animation on the back-painting, but nobody stops to look at this artwork. It can only be seen from a moving subway train. And when it is seen from a moving train something magical happens.
Masstransiscope is a scaled-up linear zoetrope, a pre-film animation technology that involves a viewer peering through a slit at images moving past them so quickly it appears as continuous motion. ‘It’s a reversal of the normal film process where you sit in the theatre and the film passes through the projector. Here the film sits still, and you pass by it’, Brand explains. Here the content of the animation – some very 80s hand painted animations of geometric shapes, men dancing, and a rocket blasting off into space – is subordinate to the method of delivery. This is where Brand’s signature play on the nature of film comes through. The work is a very successful piece of public art, being both accessible and meaningful.
Paul Sharits and Bill Brand, Sound Strip/Film Strip, 1972 (restored 2007), 16mm colour film, silent, loop. <https://www.billbrand.net/ssfs>
The effect is similar to his 1972 collaboration with Paul Sharits, Sound Strip/Film Strip, except less abstract and more literal. Rather than the four framed images moving and appearing to follow on from one another, the images appear to move while actually only following on from each other, creating an unnerving experience for the modern view used to televisions bounded frame – it is easy to see the echoes of Ping Pong Ping in this space.
Bill Brand, ‘Masstransiscope restored 2008’, 2009
Brand’s animation was gradually graffitied over and deteriorated, until in 2008 the entire work was taken down to be restored. Each panel was then carried back from the outskirts of New York on the B train (they had to go through the disabled access turnstile) and carefully reinstalled as the trains roared past. A charming video records the excited reactions of commuters who had never noticed the work before: ‘Damn I ain’t never seen that shit before.’
Few people have, as linear zoetropes are very rare, requiring precise conditions and a lot of work to produce. Subway lines are one of the only places the viewers gaze and pace can be controlled tightly enough to produce the desired effect. Although zoetropes have been used for advertising in Japan, Mexico, and even Ukraine, so far as I could find, MTA Arts for Transit is the only body to have commissioned an artistic zoetrope for their subway. That makes Masstransiscope a very special artwork indeed.
Masstransiscope can be seen from the right-hand side of any Manhattan-bound B or Q train just after the Dekalb Avenue stop.
Notes:
Atlas Obscura, ‘Masstransiscope, Brooklyn, NY,’ <https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/masstransiscope>
Bill Brand, ‘Masstransiscope restored 2008,’ 29 November 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IwVD5efXz0
--- BillBrand.Net, 2019, https://www.billbrand.net
Court Tree Gallery, 2023, https://courttree.com/Bill-Brand
Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, 2023, https://www.galeriearnaudlefebvre.com/bill-brand
MTA Info, ‘Reinstalling Masstransiscope,’ 28 August 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-_eHFXqxpQ