Thomas Hicks: MUSIC & MOVING IMAGES 1: EXPERIMENTS & EXPLORATIONS

The trajectory of Thomas Hick’s animation  – from early experiments that celebrated the glitches of his animation process to corporate commissions to illustrate the songs of Skunk Anansie and Paul McCartney – could be read as a journey into the commercial heart of modern animation. Hicks describes himself as an illustrator and animator, and his later music videos make a virtue of bringing out the detail of the song.

Following a chronological presentation of his own work, Hicks introduced Cirrus by Cyriak (2012): ostensibly a video for a track by Bonobo, it served as a dramatic contrast to Hick’s increasingly polite approach. The music is a mere soundtrack to Cyriak’s manipulation of footage from 1950s’ USA: isolating and collaging fragments, it evolves into a mechanistic series of integrated activities, casting the sentimental Americana as a factory of human pleasures, soulless and expansive.

Hick’s attitude is more gentle: for two of his videos, he includes the lyrics within his animations (exposing, in the case of McCartney, how generic and dull his song-writing became after The Beatles), and he places his animation at the service of the music. This does see diminishing returns. By 2010, when he starts to get more famous artists to commission him, the intriguing use of flicker and mistake has been replaced by footage of musicians in animated backdrops: the idiosyncratic and provocative student style has been replaced by a polished precision.

Hick’s strength is in his ability to add to a song’s atmosphere, rather than use it as a template for his own style or content. Consequently, his work with Gravenhurst is more experimental and intimate in tone, while the McCartney collaboration is bombastic and spectacular. There’s a sense that he has been commissioned to add a quirky energy to some bland songs – no disrespect to his process, but rather a reflection of how the music industry uses video.