Description
Artists have long been fascinated by film, but recent decades have seen an explosion in direct artistic engagements with mainstream cinema, particularly from the classical and post-classical eras of Hollywood filmmaking. Ranging from directly sampling film clips to imitating aspects of films, these engagements deploy highly recognizable examples of cinema to activate collective cultural memory. Artists' Moving Image presents a diverse and wide-ranging body of works from established artists such as Steve McQueen and Douglas Gordon, to emerging artists like Jesse Jones, Shezad Dawood and Rachel MacLean, reinvigorating the existing 'canon' of cinematic artists' films.
Beyond discussing individual pieces, Sarah Smith categorises and analyses the trends in this expanding area of art practice, arguing that the point of interest is not cinema (and its history) per se, but what its evocation as cultural archive can illuminate about the legacies of the past in the present. Examining subjects such as found footage as feminist poetics, the documentary turn in contemporary art and the unfinished film, she shows how artists' films interrogate dominant cinematic forms and their cultural meanings. For anyone interested in contemporary art, film studies or exhibition practice, this book is a much needed and defining exploration of how cinema operates as twentieth-century archive in recent artists' moving image.
This book analyses art which directly engages with mainstream cinema.
About the Author
Sarah Smith is Head of Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art, UK. She is one of a small number of leading experts on Scottish experimental and artists' film and also researches in the areas of feminist art and Irish national identity. In addition to working within academic contexts, her research is disseminated through a variety of public platforms such as gallery and cinema talks, curating and programming, exhibition catalogue essays, magazine articles and reviews.
Reviews
This brilliant book discusses some of the most important installation video and film art pieces and their intersections with contemporary cinema, as well as discussing numerous other ambitious and influential installation art works that may not be as well known. It explores these projects in rich detail, offering many surprising and illuminating insights. It's a remarkable and deeply researched book - essential reading for film and video historians - examining some of the key works of 20th and 21st century film and video art. -- Wheeler Winston Dixon, Professor Emeritus of Film Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
Book Information
ISBN 9781788313988
Author Sarah Smith
Format Hardback
Page Count 200
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
