“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the sequel to the 2018 reimagining of the arachnid-adolescent superhero, doubles down on the first installment with an imaginative and magpie visual style. The result is, at least in part, a crash course in art history (literally, since characters often crash into works of art).
While the film was largely rendered in computer-generated animation that accelerating at a dizzying clip, there are moments of slowed down, even stunning beauty: the backgrounds dissolve with painterly effect, moving into emotive abstraction reminiscent of, in turn, the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Hilma af Klint. The cityscape of New York is softened in hazy, Impressionistic swaths. Ben-Day dots stutter across the screen, a nod to the story’s comic book source material, but also invokes Roy Lichtenstein’s renderings of the same.
Justin K. Thompson, a film director, said the collision of techniques and applications was intentional. “We wanted to emulate dry brush, watercolor, acrylic,” he said. “I look a lot at the work of Paul Klee, the work of Lyonel Feininger.” The experimental films of John Whitneya pioneer of computer animation, is another inspiration.
There are also some more direct allusions to contemporary art. An early set piece in the Guggenheim Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building allowed the filmmakers to leave in awe. A version of perennial Spider-Man villain Vulture seemingly lifted from a Leonardo da Vinci parchment drawing struts through the museum’s rotunda, wielding weapons inspired by da Vinci’s fanciful and terrifying inventions Vinci and wreaks havoc on what appears to be a Jeff Koons. looking back. The battle scene deploys several sculptures of inflatable toys by Koons, such as “Lobster” (2003) and “Dolphin” (2002), which are thrown as projectiles. Naturally, a Koons Balloon Dog, his most recognizable work, receives top billing.
“When we talked about Balloon Dog, we said, ‘What can we do with it? What’s going to be special?'” Thompson told me. Koons recalled, “really said, ‘You know, one thing about the Wolf Dog is that it has a lot to do with breathing. It is full of human breath. But we’ve never really seen the inside of one. How about we open one and see what’s inside?’ And we kind of just looked at each other, like, ‘But what’s inside?’ And he said, ‘Whatever you want.'”
What’s inside ends up being a sight gag that follows after the Vulture knocks off the head of a 12-foot-tall Balloon Dog, which spawns countless smaller Balloon Dog sculptures, satisfying the maverick. attracted suspicion that Koons’ outsize works were in fact elaborate piñatas. (The scene recalls an episode earlier this year, where a collector accidentally visited the Art Wynwood fair in Miami. smashed a 16-inch edition Filming is well underway.)
“It moves me,” Koons said in a phone call from Hydra, Greece, “because I’ve always thought of Balloon Dog as a sort of ritualistic work, something that can have a mythical quality to it. , somewhat like a Trojan horse or Venus of Willendorf, where there will be some form of tribal community.” (His own wolf Venus (doesn’t appear to have made the final cut.) Koons considered Balloon Dog’s presence in the film as “really participating in a larger community where people can rally around it.”
The scene, which also features some of Koons’ earlier, stranger and less exposed works, such as the polychromed wood sculpture “String of Puppies” (1988), from the “Banality” series, the stainless steel bust that “Louis XIV” (1986), and some of his 1980s vacuum cleaner assemblages, is a tribute to an artist who served as an original, if indirect, influence for the direction of the first “Spider-Verse” film. In 2014, while in an early concept stage and in a disagreement over how to create a kind of postmodern version of the immortal hero, Phil Lord, a co-writer of the screenplay, and Christopher Miller, a producer, visit the Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum. The Lord said that the exhibition crystallized their thinking.
“You can look at ‘The New,’ ‘Equilibrium,’ ‘Luxury & Degradation,’ ‘Antiquity,’ ‘Hulk Elvis,’ all different bodies of work that could potentially be like this kind of multiverse,” Koons offered . “Where you can have things at the same time but in different ways.”
Whether this deep dive into Koons’ oeuvre resonates with casual viewers is another story. As the plot shifts between slight teen angst and extrapolations on quantum physics — itself an extended metaphor for the angst-inducing, open-ended possibilities of adolescence — the art in-joke feels like a concession to the more -adult aesthetes. (“I think it’s a Banksy” is a one-liner recycled from the first film, referring to something not unlike a Banksy. Everyone laughed at the joke at the Upper West Side screening I attended, but not at the Koons stuff.)
The idea that, in an alternate universe, Jeff Koons’ career booster took place at the Guggenheim instead of the Whitney is perhaps the most in-joke of them all, something even seasoned art world insiders might not fully appreciated. “There was discussion for years that I would have a retrospective at the Guggenheim — it never happened,” Koons told me. “So it was wonderful to see.”
For his part, Koons said about the result: “I think the film is really wonderful, and I think culturally it plays a very important role for a whole generation of young people to let them know the about the possibilities of perception.” He added, “I’ve never seen better colors – the reds are amazing!” Koons was born in ’55 and grew up in Disney. “There was a certain point in the ’70s maybe where we saw animation fall,” he says, “and then with Pixar we saw this huge leap forward. Film uses that technology as a base but brings back a texture , really the texture of the senses. I mean, it’s like how we see a Rembrandt or a Titian.”
Asked if he was upset to see representations of his work superseded by animated superheroes, Koons responded with Zen Buddhist diplomacy. “I care a lot about the world. I care about life. I care about existence,” he said. “Everything turns to dust. The world around us turns to dust, universes turn to dust. What is important is how we can enjoy the world we are in, and have a perception of what our future will be. As an artist, it’s exciting to feel in some way that the arts are participating within the culture.”
