From Pictorial Collage to Intermedia Assemblage: Variations V (1965) and the Cagean origins of VanDerBeek’s Expanded Cinema

Post 1964, after a half-dozen years pursuing an increasingly successful career as an independent producer of animated films, Stan VanDerBeek began to devote himself to a more performative and interdisciplinary practice he termed ‘expanded cinema’. This article contends that the most significant moment and motivation in this transition was the artist’s close collaboration with John Cage and Merce Cunningham in the production of Variations V, and that an examination of VanDerBeek’s Movie-Mural in the context of that production helps us to understand the important role played by his former Black Mountain College teachers in the genesis of this vision. The author proposes that an interdisciplinary rhetoric of ‘assemblage’ in this period can help bridge the aesthetic and conceptual gap between the artist’s early practice of collage animation and his later turn to expanded cinema and intermedia performance.