Professor Duesing’s film “Tugging the Worm” will be shown in “Underground Cartoons” at the Tate Modern on February 19. The work is on loan from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Marv Newland’s early counterculture animation Bambi Meets Godzilla stages a brief, irreverent encounter between the two characters, whereas Standish Lawder’s Runaway subjects a short cartoon loop to a series of hypnotic mediations and interventions. The generation that followed continued this dialogue, with a critique of marketing speak in the commercial cartoon industry in George Griffin’s New Fangled (‘Do you think this has enough of a loyalty-attracted factor?’) and Sally Cruikshank’s space-age update of a Fleischer Brothers wonderland in Quasi at the Quackadero. Victor Faccinto’s Filet of Soul flouts good taste in portraying the sexual journey of his character Video Vic, while James Duesing’s Tugging the Worm plays out as a Lynch-meets-Linklater surrealist drama.