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Where
the dust has settled: The Brothers Quay
What happens in the shadow, in the grey regions, also interests
us – all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can be said in
those beautiful half tones, or in whispers, in deep shade. (1)
– The Brothers Quay
The Quays were once asked by poet J.D. McClatchy for a biography. As is
typical of all of their responses to such questions, the brothers' initial
reply coyly played with the myth they had, perhaps, generated for themselves
by stating that each has one atrophied testicle and a sly liking for geese
(2).
When reading through the many critiques, articles and interviews concerning
the Quays one fact becomes readily apparent: like all of their artistic
output – filmic or otherwise – these identical twins are an enigma.
The persona projected within these texts can be read as one that is as complex
and nearly as mythical as their animated films. Emphasis is equally balanced
between absurdities (such as the brothers often finishing each other's sentences
and that they sign their correspondence simply with a 'Q') and the master
craftsmanship of their imagery. Like their response to McClatchy's request,
the Quays present to the viewer a highly personal world that is simultaneously
believable but so obviously a myth.
As if to consolidate this contradiction, the Quays continued their reply
to McClatchy by providing a biography that implied they would, by heredity
alone, become animators:
On our father's side there were two grandfathers,
one a tailor from Berlin who had a shop in South Philly, and the other,
who was apparently a cabinetmaker… Our mother's father was excellent
at carpentry and was also a chauffeur when Philly only had five automobiles
to its name. So! In terms of puppetry it's surprisingly all there –
carpentry, mechanisms and tailoring and figure skating to music to score
any of our aberrant tracking shots. Big deal, will this help you dear
fellow? (3)
Consciously or not, the Quays provided McClatchy with more than he asked
for. As well as intimating the family origins of their progress towards
animation, their reply simultaneously functions as their visual agenda:
each decaying environment and the emaciated characters that populate these
labyrinths are handmade constructions, bastard combinations of technology,
found materials and tailoring who, more often than not, fall prey to arcane
and seductive mechanisms, all carefully choreographed to the sparse geometry
of music. Taking this as the basis for all of their film and commissioned
works, the Quays have elaborated this into a cinematic aesthetic that dominates
the narrative to the extent that, at times, it simply dissolves into a series
of images that explore and indulge the Quays in their obsessions: the complexities
of seemingly endless spaces, the brief and revealing moments of light, and
the meaningful sparkle of a doll's glass eye, all haunted by the spectre
of East European art and literature.
Beginning their formal art education at the Philadelphia College of Art,
both brothers specialised in illustration. Graduating in 1969, the Quays
moved to Great Britain and enrolled at The Royal College of Art, London,
in order to continue their training as illustrators and, by this time, filmmaking.
Whilst at the RCA the brothers met Keith Griffiths who, since the successful
completion of their first film, Nocturna Artificialia (1979), has
been their producer and co-founder of their studio Atelier Koninck.
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Nocturna
Artificialia
|
Suzanne H. Buchan describes the narrative of Nocturna
Artificialia as virtually “nonexistent: a solitary figure gazes
out of his window, enters the nocturnal street, is transfixed by a passing
tram, and suddenly, back in his room, falls from his chair and wakes up.”
(4) As their first film proper, Nocturna Artificialia
is a precursor to all of the Quays' filmic output: the unidentified dreamer's
walk describes virtually all of their animations and live action cinema;
for each is like a slow journey through the dream counties, a brief excursion
into the realms of symbolic construction and myth. In addition to this,
this animation set out the technical boundaries within which the brothers
would construct their narratives. Each scene appears as an 'image', each
carefully structured through camera placement, focal shifts and dissolves
from one scene to another. Such technical considerations not only identified
the Quays' style but also provided a further opportunity in which to expand
the narrative and its symbolic implications – most notably in their
critically admired The Street of Crocodiles (1986).
Although the narrative of Nocturna Artificialia is relatively easy
to understand, as the Quays developed, their narratives became increasingly
abstract. Their animations functioned on a much more visual and associative
level, carefully grafting meaning into the mise en scène as
opposed to the narrative events.
The Quays more often than not base their animations on the work of other
writers and artists. Predominately taking their influence from East European
art and literature, their films have been adaptations of texts by Bruno
Schulz, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll. Visually, their imagery
is a hybrid constructed from the depths of art history: Ernst, Bacon, Arcimboldo,
Fragonard, Bosch and Escher all make fleeting appearances within their work.
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The
Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer
|
The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984) is the Quays
most explicit interpretation of influence as it is a direct homage to the
Czech master animator. Constructed as a sequence of nine lessons, the narrative
features a puppet Svankmajer who teaches both a puppet child and the viewer
“the importance of objects in [the animator's] work, their transformation
and bizarre combination through specifically cinematic techniques, the extraordinary
power of the camera to 'make strange', the influence of Surrealism on [his]
work, and the subversive and radical role of humour” (5).
As with Nocturna Artificialia, this film reinterprets and develops
the Quays' ongoing visual concerns as well as acknowledging the source of
them, particularly the use of the camera as a visual and recording device
and the potential offered by Surrealism. Within this short animation, Svankmajer's
world is one of a library of cabinets, with each drawer identified and containing
a range of objects, each awaiting their transformation upon the animator's
table. As each lesson progresses the meaning of the objects enters a state
of flux as they are analysed and combined and so releasing a much deeper
or more surrealistic meaning.
The Quays' next animation, This Unnameable Little Broom
or Little Songs of the Chief of Hunar Louse (Being a Largely Disguised
Reduction of the Epic of Gilgamesh), Tableau II (1985), relates to The
Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer in that it takes some of its key visual motifs
and develops them into a series of complex constructions: the use of drawers
and tables as devices and as mechanisms, the transformation of meaning within
an object through juxtaposition and the influence of Surrealism to create
a psychosexual drama.
Unlike Svankmajer's ordered, clean white library of objects and meaning,
the Quays describe Gilgamesh's kingdom as one that is “an entirely
hermetic universe literally suspended out of time in a black void”
(6). The pale yellow shadow-mottled walls are inscribed
with calligraphic text and its seemingly vast expanse is randomly broken
up by square holes from which medical hooks occasionally project. A table
– a mechanism and a trap – concealing female genitalia within
one of its drawers, stands at the centre of Gilgamesh's domain. High above
this space are strung high-tension wires, vibrating in the wind, one caught
with a broken tennis racquet.
As a symbolic construction, Gilgamesh's world is one of evil and deceit,
simultaneously encoded with psychosexual tension and personal resonance
for the Quays. The medical hooks, the rusting scissors, the razor sharp
high-tension wires and the sound of a chainsaw all imply a castration theme,
emphasised not just by the violent mechanical trap that Gilgamesh sets but
also by the sequence in which he places two eggs on a slicing
wicket, positioning them where his own testicles should be. Such brutal
and sexually violent imagery would continue to reoccur in the brothers'
films, most notably in Street of Crocodiles, where organic materials
are organised into representations of male genitals, pierced with a hundred
tailor's pins.
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This
Unnameable Little Broom
|
For the Quays, the title This Unnameable Little Broom refers to “the
petty bureaucrat [in the London visa office, who was trying to deport them
due to a lapsed visa] who feels it is his duty to sweep everything clean”
(7). To make this implication a little more obvious, 'hunar
louse' is a reference to the Office of Immigration and Passport Control
based in Lunar House, Croydon. Taken on this level, This Unnameable Little
Broom can be seen to reflect a paranoia of the Institution or of an
outside force attempting to corrupt the established order. As a theme, losing
control reoccurs subtly throughout the Quays' work and is one that manifests
itself most blatantly in their first live action film, Institute Benjamenta
(or This Dream People Call Human Life) (1994).
Following This Unnameable Little Broom came the Quays' most critically
admired animation, The Street of Crocodiles, an adaptation of Bruno
Schulz's novel. Filled with the spectacle of insanity and decay, Schulz's
novel chronicles a decent into madness. Taking this as a starting point,
the film constitutes a series of beautifully complex images that may or
may not have a narrative coursing through its shadows:
On display in a deserted provincial museum is
an old viewing Kinetoscope machine with a map indicating the precise district
of the Street of Crocodiles…The anonymous offering of human saliva
by an attendant caretaker activates and releases the Schulzian theatre
from stasis into permanent flux. (8)
In a manner similar to This Unnameable Little Broom, the protagonist
stalks through what may be a subterranean labyrinth, an abandoned factory
or ghetto. As this pale and emaciated character wanders through this complex
of shifting darkness and panels of mottled glass, the viewer encounters
a range of startling images: an ice cube repeatedly melting, a monkey clashing
symbols at an insane speed, a bizarre device for unknotting thread, rusting
screws slowly releasing themselves from the confines of rotting wood and
rolling off into the darkness, and a thread – as delicate as the narrative
itself – moving endlessly through the dust.
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The
Street of Crocodiles
|
The Street of Crocodiles is a piece of unsurpassed
filmmaking. Aside from the delicate and disturbing movements of this ghetto's
inhabitants, it demonstrates the Quays' reflexive approach to the process
of animation itself. Often referred to in articles and interviews as the
liberation of the mistake (for example, in Suzanne H. Buchan's “The
Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime”),
the brothers developed a range of visual strategies which not only seek
to complicate the physical space in which the characters move but also to
extend the mise en scène of the narrative. The Street of
Crocodiles develops their use of the camera as “the third puppet”
(9) by creating a parallel between the protagonist and
the camera itself. Through a combination of macro lenses, shallow focal
planes and fast pans, the majority of the images within the film appear
as point of view shots. By allowing the camera to become the protagonist's
vision, the environment and its inhabitants slowly shift into uneasy forms,
where the furtive glance of the camera echoes the protagonist's sharp turns,
catching glimpses of occurrences that hover on the edges of the frame: unsure
of his – and, by implication, our – position within this darkened
warren, the film has a palpable paranoia that recalls the subtle
unease of This Unnameable Little Broom and acts as a precursor to
Institute Benjamenta.
As if to make this connection of seeing, or the act of seeing, more apparent,
the Quays place considerable emphasis on the characters' eyes. As Jonathan
Romney explains, the eye, the act of seeing and the cinematic device that
is the camera is central to the Quays' narratives:
A major discovery for the Brothers – in
The Street of Crocodiles – was the glass doll's-eye, which
by its presence or absence implicates the viewer in the film's scopic
dramas. The petrified glare of that film's desiccated doll-hero is parodically
returned by the tailor dolls he encounters, whose china heads have empty
sockets illuminated from within. The myth of the eye as window to the
soul could hardly be more remorselessly defused. (10)
Apart from producing their own films, the Quays' filmography
is populated by commissioned works and documentaries. Although functioning
outside of the notion of personal work, these animations – such as
De Artificiali Perspectiva or Anamorphosis (1990), Are We Still
Married? (Stille Nacht II) (1991), and Can't Go Wrong Without
You (Stille Nacht IV) (1993) – are deeply ingrained with
the Quays' vision, consolidating the notion not just of auteur but also
of artisan. In addition to this, other commissions have included set design
for theatre, ballet and opera (most notably A Flea in her Ear, Love
of Three Oranges and The Hour in Which We Knew Nothing of Each Other)
as well as book cover illustrations.
Of these works, the Quays have said that they are, in
some way, connected to their personal output with “just the same dark
drift, basically inscrutable. It's gently mysterious” (11).
Michael Atkinson describes the Stille Nacht series of music videos
as “shorts [which] seem to function as working junk drawers, using
up whatever the Brothers couldn't squeeze into their larger films”
(12). Atkinson continues by stating that the music video
Can't Go Wrong Without You (Stille Nacht IV) “may be
one of the Quay's most disturbing pieces, a bizarre Easter suite with the
resourceful stuffed rabbit from Stille Nacht II battling the forces
of evil (a pixillated human in horns and skullface) for the possession of
an egg” (13).
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The
Phantom Museum
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The commission The Phantom Museum (2002) produced an animated short
that explored the intricately catalogued storerooms of the Henry Wellcome
Collection. Wellcome, businessman, philanthropist, and a patron of science,
created one of the most obscure collections within modern history, gathering
together historical and contemporary medical objects. The aesthetic of the
Brothers Quay is ideally suited to this material, with their vision transforming
each object into one that is simultaneously what it is and something that
it isn't. Echoing The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, The Phantom Museum
is an exploration into the extraordinary range of objects contained within
Wellcome's collection: on occasion, drawers are opened by a seemingly floating
pair of white cotton gloves, with each drawer revealing its secrets in the
delicate chiaroscuro. Upon their revelation some of these objects
are given life through colour whereas others twitch and flex in what may
be either reanimation or a death throe.
Taken as an individual work, The Phantom Museum
can be viewed as much as a catalogue of the Quays' motifs as an exploration
of the Wellcome collection. The visual style and latent themes of their
entire output rest within each of The Phantom Museum's images: the
reanimation of dead matter through construction, the intensely intimate
close ups which reveal not just the aesthetics of surface and decay but
also the subtleties of character and movement, the dream-like narrative
enhanced by the equally dream-like imagery, all appearing against an endlessly
black background. And, as ever, the disjointed dramas of life, sex and death
quietly weave themselves through the abstract narratives.
As if to consolidate their status as auteurs, the Quays' commercials are
as equally imbued with their personal vision. Calling this work their “pact
with the devil” (14), the brothers have produced
adverts for, amongst others, Coca-Cola, MTV and The PSA National Drug Council.
Regardless of the client, the Quays have somehow managed to subtly work
in a number of their motifs into these advertisements: using a half lit
library as the setting for their Fox Sport commercial, a lone man frantically
positions piles of books around the edge of a table. As the camera draws
closer, the man is revealed to be a Detroit Red Wings fan and, upon the
table, an ice hockey match is being played by animated constructions. As
the match increases in intensity a fight breaks out between rival players,
which the spectator immediately breaks up with a half bitten pencil. Engrossed
in this spectacle, the man is oblivious to the girl who now stands at the
table watching him watching the game. Cutting to her point of view it is
revealed that the table is empty, that the match is merely being played
out in the fanatic's mind.
Photographed in fading sunlight, the library is presented as an environment
drained of colour and full of settling dust. The camera's movement is slow,
whilst the physical action is frantic and the attention to detail, to decay,
is visualised in the close ups of the animated players and the chewed pencil.
Perhaps the most obvious of all the Quays' traits is the act of watching
and of being watched as well as the potential insanity of the Detroit Red
Wings fan.
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In
Absentia
|
As a subtle theme within the Quays' work, insanity quietly drifts through
their narratives. Appearing in both a physical form, as in In Absentia
(2000), and as source material itself, madness seems to further the emotive
quality of their work. It almost appears as another texture, another layer
in the abstraction of the images and the narrative. This is, perhaps, most
evident in In Absentia: a collaboration with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen,
the film is shot in a combination of black and white and colour, live action
and animation, and features another lone figure, this time a woman who repeatedly
writes a letter with a broken piece of lead. Outside her window, the constantly
changing lighting conditions intimate her emotions. In conclusion, the Quays
dedicate the film to "E.H. who lived and wrote to her husband from
an asylum."
In Absentia is undeniably tragic. Intense sadness and loneliness
seems to seep out of each image, recalling the moment in The Street of
Crocodiles where the small plastic child tries to resurrect the Light
Bulb character using a broken mirror to reflect light back into the light
bulb elements.
In the ever-shifting fictional realities of the Brothers Quay, madness takes
on both emotive and creative potential. For their first live-action film,
the Quays adapted Robert Walser's novel Jakob von Gutten into
Institute Benjamenta. Like the untimely death of Bruno Schulz, Walser's
life is another gesture to the tragic within the Quays work:
[Walser] spent the last twenty-six years of his
life in an asylum. At the beginning he still wrote, then he stopped. He
said, 'I am here to be mad, not to write.' He died on a walk in the snow
on Christmas Day…[he] was found face-down in the snow with his hat
falling off, one hand on his heart. (15)
Shot in soft and subtle shades of grey tone, Institute Benjamenta's
narrative combines Walser's novel with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:
Its hero [Jacob], the scion of a wealthy family,
is an innocent venturing into an ogre's lair, who, in his desire to abnegate
all elements of his self and will, signs on at this institute that claims
to train servants. There, under the tutelage of Herr Benjamenta and his
haunted, doomed sister Lisa, Jacob learns to lose himself in a series
of monotonous and singularly pointless exercises, presided over by head
boy Kraus, described as the 'perfect zero'. (16)
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Institute
Benjamenta
|
Apart from the obvious relationship between Jacob's lessons and the physical
act of animating an object for film, Institute Benjamenta's sublime
moments once again play out the obsessions of the Quays. Like the Unnameable
Little Broom, the Institute is a symbolic structure that is infused with
latent sexual tension, most obviously, within the growing attraction between
Jacob and Lisa Benjamenta. Further moments lie within a vial containing
powdered stag semen and in the anamorphic representation of rutting deer
on one of the Institute's walls.
As a motif, the deer plays an important part to the background
of the narrative as well as bringing further associations to the Quays'
work. When Jacob first enters the Institute he is taken to Herr Benjamenta's
office where he is seated so that the deer antlers on the office wall appear
to grow out of his head. Benjamenta continues this allusion by calling him
a '12 point' and measuring the space between 'his' antlers. As more of Benjamenta's
office is shown, we notice that it is rife with deer remains, including
a drawer of catalogued deer pellets. As Buchan explains, the repeated use
of the deer motif becomes a totem, “a world of suppressed Victorian
eroticism [where] they become obsessive, dark and ambiguous” (17).
As the narrative of the film progresses, it becomes apparent that Jacob
may not be a prince but a perverse saviour who will release the Institute
and its inhabitants from their suppression. In moments of brief confession,
Jacob arouses in Lisa not love, but desire, an emotion so unfamiliar that
she is unable to understand or cope with it. As she descends further into
despair, Lisa simply decides to stop living. In a final moment of emotional
dialogue, Lisa explains to Jacob that she is “dying from those who
could have seen and held me. Dying from the emptiness of cautious and clever
people.” Leaning forward she brushes her lips against Jacob's and dies.
This inverted kiss of death concludes the narrative but, as with all of
the Quays' adaptations of myth, is again typical inverted: As Lisa is mourned
by her brother, she opens her eyes once more.
To return from the dead, to be reanimated, is the essence of the Quays'
work. Taking found objects and constructing them into new forms with new
meaning is only the beginning of their dark material. In their fictions
narratives need not move as smoothly as we would like and nor should their
imagery be as obvious. In all, these films are like their makers: identical
enigmas, a life within a life, and a dream within a dream.
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes: An Addendum
It is possible that the Quays have only ever made one film. Their second live action film, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), satisfies this possibility in many ways. Like a true auteur, the Brothers consistently return to similar themes, similar narratives and to similar techniques, with each film not necessarily being different from but an extension of their primal narrative. For the Quays that primal narrative is tragedy, a failed attempt to escape from beautifully sinister and arcane mechanisms. When such a narrative is sited within a world constructed and populated by the lost, the lonely, the rejected and the damaged, then an intense melancholy descends and the dream becomes a complex shifting of realities: narrative is given over to imagery and story dissolves into timeless myth. It is here that The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes exists, a film that surrenders its narrative to the beauty of the image in order to create the mythical. Such is the extent of this content that the film struggles to be anything more than an extension of the Quay's concerns. This is ironic, as the surface narrative (baring resemblances to some narrative elements of Institute Benjamentia) is perhaps the most explicit of all the Quays' films – a failed attempt to rescue a beautiful woman. Given this, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes functions as a composite of choreographed action, symbolic dialogue, exquisite animation and overt sexual imagery that maintains some narrative coherence but eventually dissolves.
Perhaps, in order to understand the Quay's intentions one must return to the opening of the film. Playing out another of their typical elements, the Quays begin The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes with a quote. It informs the viewer that what they are about to see is not real, that “These things never happen but always are”. In many ways this is true of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes: for the Quays their film is yet to begin but it has already happened.
© James Rose, January 2004
© Addendum, November 2005
Endnotes:
- Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, “Dream Team: Thyrza Nichols
Goodeve Talks with the Brothers Quay”, Artforum, April 1996,
p. 84.
- Michael Atkinson, “The Night Countries of the
Brothers Quay”, Film Comment, 30, September/October 1994,
p. 37.
- Atkinson, p. 37.
- Suzanne H. Buchan, “The Quay Brothers: Choreographed
Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime”, Film Quarterly, Spring
1998, p. 3.
- The Brothers Quay: Volume 1, 1991, Connoisseur
Video.
- S. Weiner, “The Quay Brothers' The Epic of Gilgamesh
and the 'metaphysics of obscenity'” in J. Pilling (ed.), A Reader
in Animation Studies, London, John Libbey & Company, 1997, p. 28.
- Weiner, p. 33.
- The Brothers Quay: Volume 1
- Jonathan Romney, “The Same Dark Drift”,
Sight and Sound, March 1992, p. 25.
- Romney, 1992, p. 25.
- Romney, 1992, p. 24.
- Atkinson, p. 40.
- Atkinson, p. 41.
- Romney, 1992, p. 26.
- Goodeve, p. 118.
- Jonathan Romney, “Life's a Dream”, Sight
and Sound, August 1995, p. 13.
- Buchan, p. 15.
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Quay
Brothers
|
Filmography
All
films are animated shorts, unless stated otherwise
Nocturna Artificialia (1979)
Punch & Judy (Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy) (1980)
Ein Brudermord (1981)
The Eternal Day of Michel de Ghelderode (1981)
Igor – Chez Pleyel – The Paris Years (1982)
Leos Janacek: Intimate Excursions (1983)
The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984)
This Unnameable Little Broom (1985)
The Street of Crocodiles (1986)
Rehearsal for Extinct Anatomies (1987)
Dramolet (Stille Nacht I) (1988)
Ex-Voto / The Pond (1989)
The Comb (From the Museum of Sleep) (1990)
De Artificiali Perspectiva or Anamorphosis (1990)
The Calligrapher Parts I, II, III (1991)
Are We Still Married? (Stille Nacht II) (1991)
Long Way Down (Look what the Cat Drug in) (1992)
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Nocturna
Artificialia
|
Tales
from the Vienna Woods (Stille Nacht III) (1992)
Can't Go Wrong Without You (Stille Nacht IV) (1993)
Institute Benjamenta (or This Dream People Call Human Life) (1994)
feature
Duet - Variations for the Convalescence of 'A' (1999)
The Sandman (2000)
In Absentia (2000)
Dog Door (Stille Nacht V) (2000)
The Phantom Museum (2002)
Poor Roger (2003)
Oranges and Lemons (2003)
Green Gravel (2003)
Jenny Jones (2003)
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005)
Bibliography
Michael
Atkinson, “The Night Countries of the Brothers Quay”, Film
Comment, 30, September/October 1994, pp. 36–44.
Suzanne H. Buchan, “The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro,
Enigmatic and Sublime”, Film Quarterly, Spring 1998, pp. 2–15.
Leslie Felperin, “Institute Benjamenta”, Sight and
Sound, Winter 1995, pp. 46.
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, “Dream Team: Thyrza Nichols Goodeve Talks
with the Brothers Quay”, Artforum, April 1996, pp. 82–85,
118, 126.
Laura U. Marks, “The Quays' Institute Benjamenta: An Olfactory
View”, Afterimage, September/October 1997, pp.11–13.
Jonathan Romney, “The Same Dark Drift”, Sight and Sound,
March 1992, pp. 24–27.
Jonathan Romney, “Life's a Dream”, Sight and Sound, August
1995, pp. 12–15.
S. Weiner, “The Quay Brothers' The Epic of Gilgamesh and the 'metaphysics
of obscenity'” in J. Pilling (ed.), A Reader in Animation Studies,
London, John Libbey & Company, 1997, pp. 25–37.
Articles
in Senses of Cinema
Through
a Glass Darkly: Interview with the Quay Brothers
by André Habib
Tribute
to Raymond Durgnat by The Brothers Quay
Web
Resources
Zeitgeist
Films | The Brothers Quay
The 'official' web presence for the Quays. Includes profiles of the Brothers
and a number of their films as well as links to sites containing their
commissioned works.
Shifting
Realities: The Brothers Quay - Between Live Action and Animation by Suzanne
Buchan
Online version of the Buchan's essay, exploring the content and context
of Institute Benjamenta.
The
Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime by Suzanne
Buchan
On line version of the Buchan's essay which examines the majority
of the Quays output, from Nocturna Artificialia to Institute
Benjamenta.
The
Phantom Museum
The official site for Henry Wellcome Collection, which features two downloadable
excerpts from the Quay's The Phantom Museum commission.
Believemedia
Features downloadable adverts animated by the Quays for Fox Sports,
PSA National Drug Council and Round Up Weeds.
Brothers
Quay: In Absentia
Interview.
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