Word: escher
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FANTASTIC PLANET is a splashy French animated science-fiction story. The animation is slightly halting, the style derived a little from the late Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher (TIME, April 11, 1972) and owing quite a lot to Edward Gorey. The script is too much in the debt of a lot of standard sci-fi ideas, most prominently the notion that there is a distant planet where humans are kept as pets or treated as wild animals by the native humanoid types. Fantastic Planet is about how the humans win their independence and all creatures come to live in harmony...
Mott the Hoople. It was Mott the Hoople turned me on to MC Escher's graphics in the first place. It was at a time when whim dictated my album purchases. I planned to buy the album, throw away the record, and hang the cover on my wall. Instead, I discovered that Escher had produced a collected works, and in paperback. I bought it, instead of Mott the Hoople. I filed them away, at the time with people like the Kings, Alan Price, Georgie Fame, the whole one-nighters-through-the-Midlands group. The music? Who knew? Mott more...
...example is Escher's Waterfall (1961). A water mill with columns that carry the mill stream above the wheel? Not quite. On close examination, the building is incredible. The water is flowing uphill. The columns and the millrace could never be built: they are contradictory. So Escher's water mill, turning in perpetual motion through a kind of dimensional warp, becomes a vivid warning that art is not reality...
...Escher's work was involved with many of the notions current in the more abstract sciences. The obsessive patternmaking, which appeared after he saw the Moorish tilework in the Alhambra during a visit to Spain in 1932, became a visual demonstration of field theory -for there is no "foreground" or "background" in Escher's mosaics. The outline of one figure instantly becomes the boundary of another...
...Escher knew that his work was based on paradox. "The problem itself," he said, "is a question without an answer. Why has man, from prehistoric times until today, allowed himself to be so influenced by his own suggestions of space which he depicts on a flat plane that he forgets that they are illusions?" No question about representation is more profound, and Escher's pursuit of it secures him a small place in the history of perception. "Robert Hughes