Robert Breer A to Z

A 50-year self-portrait drawn from interviews, personal letters and public statements of the artist from 1957 to 2009.


When you go out into the street after watching Breer’s films, everything looks and sounds different because it’s being filtered through Breer’s vision – new time sense, new relationships. You think about balancing: the abstract with the figurative... think about how objects and images metamorphose, break up, expand, deflate... how forms get pulled out of apparent chaos and are submerged again. Daily life! 

Amy Taubin, 

Soho Weekly News, 1980


It’s interesting that in a dictionary illustrations are arbitrary, totally illogical. But no one complains about the total illogic of these images. You know, you have the image of some important person and then, right after that, a duck, because they both start with the letter D.

I suppose it’s an editor who chooses these things, on a basis having nothing to do with any visual sense at all. It all has to do with the alphabet which is an arbitrary thing too, you know, A to Z.

Dictionaries are taken so seriously. I guess people don’t see that kind of arbitrariness as a form of anarchy but it is.

Robert Breer, 2006


This e-Book edition allows the reader to move seamlessly between viewing – some of Robert Breer’s films are included in their entirety – and reading.

A printed edition is available on Light Cone's website (www.lightcone.org). 

Both the printed edition and the e-Book are available in French and in English.