LONDONFIELDWORKS

What do you get if you cross the most famous animator of all time with two of his best-loved creations? A sinister animatronic man-rabbit-deer chimera called Hexer, it seems. I have the pleasure of meeting him in the upstairs space of Beaconsfield Gallery in Vauxhall, south London, which has been transformed into a green-screen studio by London Fieldworks artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson. As I chat to Bruce and Jo about their latest project, Hibernator, something moves in the corner of my eye. Walt Disney is fluttering his eyelids at me. His Bambiesque front legs are still, are as his Thumperish hind legs. But his face has come to life; a brow comically raised, eyes googling for attention. "Ah, he's woken up," Bruce murmers fondly, as if speaking about his newborn child.
"Hexer" is derived from the Hopi name for the ever-lasting soul. If the soul of Walt Disney were to take any form, Hexer would be it. Hibernator is a an ongoing project at Beaconsfield, whereby Bruce and Jo create eight films (or "visions") in as many weeks, each one starring Hexer. The tables are turned as the dead animator becomes the animation. Upstairs, they work on their visions, downstairs, you can watch the fruit of their labours.
When I visit Beaconsfield in the first week of the project, only the first vision is completed. Walking into the gallery, I am immediatley ushered, by myself, into the dark, labyrinthine screening room - which is so black I that I can barely see my own hands. What I'm faced with on the screen matches the lonely strangeness of the setting. Apocalyptic scenes, so dark I can hardly register what they are: wastelands, old Bambi dolls, a Native American Kachina doll.
The voiceover holds me in a trance: "It's over," says a weary American voice. "No more fairy tales. This is not a dream. Something out there is giving up the ghost. Something out there is over." (Later on, I learn that it's the voice of cartoonist and musician Peter Blegvad.) "Did you really think you could live forever? Did you think you could fake your own death?" It's a voice that speaks directly to the dead cartoon legend, and his mythology. Who hasn't heard the one about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen after a premature death from lung cancer?
The cryogenics myth was the starting point for Bruce and Jo. Inspired by Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience (his reading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead), Hibernator, in Jo's words, is all about "reanimating the great animator - not in a Utopian Disney landscape , but in a landscape of visions". But what is it about Walt Disney? "Disney is a brand," says Bruce. "It makes $30bn a year, it's culturally embedded, in the public domain. But Walt Disney was not as squeaky clean as his films suggest." All manner of prancing deer and singing dwarves hide the rotten core of the Disney legend: the Nazi connections, the greed, the megalomania. Hibernator inverts the idealised American landscape of his cartoons, turning it into something - as Jo puts it - "much more fucked up".The script (already written) is by Steve Beard, Hexer is created by Paul and Laura Carey, the claustrophobic score - which draws on the music from thr original Bambi - by Dugal McKinnon, working remotely over the weeks from New Zealand. This is true 21st-century art: technologically advanced, temporal, international, collaborative and, most importantly, breaking down the icons of the century just past. I only have a glimpse of what Hibernator will become but, over the weeks, London Fieldworks will create a fictitious, surreal, "shamanic" biography of Walt Disney. How apt it seems for America's greatest dream-weaver to become the subject of his own nightmare.

Entrance to the Hibernator 'screening room' in Beaconsfield's lower arch space.
photo: James Robertshaw