Watts With Eggs1967

"By 1967, Menken had become interested in the work of Fluxus artist Robert Watts and made a short animation piece, Watts with EGGS, in which she animates his chrome-casted Box of Eggs. The film opens with lights reflected in the eggs (of course), then, through single framing, pixilates a man's hand arranging eggs in different patterns. The hands (those of John Hawkins) fill the box back up with eggs. Next, the eggs do the same routine, but more magically, more serenely, without the assistance of the hands. Menken also introduces a string and a feather duster into animated action, so that the eggs, one by one, seem to be coming directly out of the duster (objects infect objects). By the end, the eggs are magically back in their box... The event structure of Watts's work paralleled Menken's effort to create and event-based film. Watts was interested, as Menken had been in her earlier work as a painter, in how the performative and participatory could be activated. Another important level of aesthetic inquiry that Watts's own projects inspired in Menken was her own fascination with objects as items of fetish." -Melissa Ragona, from "Swing and Sway: Marie Menken's Filmic Events" in Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, ed. Robin Blaetz, p. 37