The Place of Artists' Cinema: Space, Site, and Screen

The Place of Artists’ Cinema

Space, Site and Screen

Maeve Connolly

First published in the UK in 2009 by

Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2009 by

Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, withoutwritten permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Tobias Putrih Venetian, Atmospheric (2007). Courtesy of the artist and Max Protetch Gallery, New York. Photograph by Michele Lamann

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Heather Owen

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-246-5

EISBN 978-1-84150-329-5

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Place of Artists’ Cinema

Chapter 1 Between Space, Site and Screen

Chapter 2 The Place of the Market

Chapter 3 Multi-screen Projections and Museum Spaces

Chapter 4 Event-sites and Documentary Dislocations

Chapter 5 Cine-material Screens and Structures

Conclusion: Materials, Places and Social Relations

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

This book incorporates substantially revised versions of numerous journal articles, reviews and conference papers, listed below, and I am particularly grateful to fellow members of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) for questions and comments that directly informed the development of my research. Sections of Chapter 1 appeared in an article published as ‘Abstraction and Dislocation in Recent Works by Gerard Byrne’, CIRCA 113 (Autumn 2005), 31–42. Chapter 2 draws upon my paper ‘Biennials and Blockbusters: The Peripheral Spaces of Artist’s Film and Video’, delivered at SCMS, Vancouver 2006 and incorporates material from an exhibition review, ‘Venice and the Moving Image’, Afterimage 33.1 (July 2005), 10–11. Chapter 3 includes ideas explored in ‘The Doubled Space of Willie Doherty’s Re-Run’, Filmwaves 23, (Winter 2004), 8–10 as well as material previously presented at Screen Studies 2007 in Glasgow and subsequently published as ‘Of Other Worlds: Nature and the Supernatural in the Moving Image Installations of Jaki Irvine’, Screen 49.2 (Summer 2008), 203–208, while other material was previous published as ‘Nomads, Tourists and Territories: Manifesta and the Basque Country’, Afterimage: Journal of Media and Cultural Criticism, 32.3 (November/December 2004), 8–9. Chapter 4 was informed by the experience of researching ‘The Necessity of Being Lost’, Desperate Optimists et al, Made in Liverpool 2006: Beneath the Skin of the City, (Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial, 2007). Chapter 5 draws upon ideas explored in my paper on ‘Imaginary Cinemas: The Architecture of the Movie Theatre in Artists’ Film and Video’ at SCMS Philadelphia in 2008 and also includes material from several earlier publications; ‘Emporium of the Senses: Spectatorship and Aesthetics at the 26th São Paulo Bienal’, Third Text 19. 4 (July 2005), 399–409; ‘Imaginary Spaces, Activist Practices’ in Jesse Jones, 12 Angry Films, (Dublin: Fire Station Artists’ Studios, 2007), 17–23; ‘Cinema Spaces and Structures at the 52nd Venice Biennale’, CIRCA 121, (Autumn 2007), 106–109.

I was fortunate to receive funding from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), Dublin, for numerous research visits over the past five years. Vital financial assistance was also provided by the Irish Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon in the form of a Bursary awarded in 2006. Sincere thanks are due to the many artists, curators, gallerists, and others, who provided assistance with documentation and production details during the research process, including Carlos Amorales, Gerard Byrne, Benjamin Cook, Mary Cremin, Sarah Glennie, Sr. Carmel Hartnett, Laura Horelli, Jaki Irvine, Jesse Jones, Bea McMahon, Anne Tallentire and Georgie Thompson. I am also indebted to Pip Chodorov, Angela Dalle Vacche, Vivienne Dick, Luke Gibbons, Tessa Giblin, Nicky Gogan, Jenny Haughton, Finola Jones, Julia Knight, Declan Long, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Francis McKee, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, Sarah Neely, Diane Negra, Volker Pantenburg, Sarah Pierce, Paul Rowley, Orla Ryan, Sarah Smith, Peter Thomas and Mick Wilson. Many other friends and colleagues provided much-needed support and advice during the writing process, including Pat Brereton, Valerie Connor, Michelle Deignan, Liam Donnelly, Georgina Jackson, Stephanie McBride, Martin McCabe, Carol McGuire, Niamh O’Malley and Stephanie Rains and I am especially grateful to Anna Colford, Liam Doona, Paula Gilligan, Sinead Hogan, Linda King, Sean Larkin, Sherra Murphy, Amanda Ralph, Elaine Sisson and Donald Taylor Black, as well as my students on the MA in Visual Arts Practices (MAVIS). I also want to thank Lucy Reynolds for her enthusiasm, rigour and insight while editing the manuscript and, finally, Angela Detanico, Rafael Lain and Dennis McNulty, for encouraging me to persist with this project.

Introduction: The Place of Artists’ Cinema

Defining Artists’ Cinema

The term ‘artists’ cinema’ has begun to recur, amongst the various publications, film programmes and exhibitions that explore and chart the shifting relationship between art practice and film-making. Either alongside or in place of ‘artists’ film and video’, some of the most prominent examples of this usage can be found in curatorial projects developed for the Frieze Art Fair and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in recent years. Ian White, coordinator of The Artists Cinema at Frieze in 2005 and 2006, and curator of the Kinomuseum programme at Oberhausen in 2007, has theorized artists’ cinema through reference to the notion of a ‘differentiated’ form, which does not fit easily into either industrialized cinema or the museum.¹ My use of the term is somewhat different, however, because I am specifically interested in the sense of ownership implicit in the notion of an ‘artists’ cinema’ and in the claims that are made by artists upon, and for, cinema. Focusing on developments since the mid 1990s, this book examines the various ways in which contemporary art practitioners have claimed the narrative techniques and modes of production associated with cinema, as well as the history, memory and experience of cinema as a cultural form. Whilst these claims are sometimes asserted within territory that has historically belonged to ‘cinema’, most obviously when artists direct films for theatrical exhibition, my focus is primarily on their articulation within the spaces, sites and contexts of contemporary art. My interest also lies in the various needs that might be served by these claims upon and for cinema, particularly within the context of processes of ‘place-making’.

My understanding of artists’ cinema as a series of claims made within the sphere of contemporary art does not resolve the problem of definition. Instead, it opens up a new set of questions about cinema and what is meant by the ‘cinematic’.² Any attempt to define an artwork as cinematic necessarily invokes pre-existing notions and expectations about cinema, which are likely to be historically as well as culturally specific. Chrissie Iles has suggested that, during the 1990s, artists working with the moving image were often particularly drawn towards the citation or appropriation of classical Hollywood film because of a nostalgic cinephilia linked to fears about the decline of cinema as a cultural form.³ By contrast, many of the contributors to Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artist’s Film and Video highlight the ethnographic and archival currents that run through artists’ cinema, from multi-screen gallery installations to site-specific public art commissions.⁴ These currents articulate a fascination with the film archive as a repository for various kinds of cinematic memory, beyond that circumscribed by Hollywood.

In fact it is possible to identify many different configurations of the ‘cinematic’ in contemporary art practice. Even in the relatively small selection of works discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 it is possible to find references, and sometimes even remakes of, early actualities, political documentary films and postclassical European cinema. Just as ‘cinema’ is no longer predominantly figured within contemporary art practice in terms of classical Hollywood, it is possible to identify a shift away from the radical, often psychoanalytically inflected, critiques of spectatorship that once underpinned artists’ film and video.⁵ Instead, it is now possible to identify a greater emphasis on the collective and social dimensions of reception, to the extent that cinema may even be understood specifically for its historical associations with an ideal public sphere. In other words, cinema history (rather than film theory) seems to hold an appeal for some practitioners because it may offer models or prototypes for collectivity. This reinvention of the cinematic within contemporary art practice is undoubtedly indebted to film and media scholarship, particularly in relation to the public sphere of early cinema⁶, but it cannot be fully understood without reference to a range of other developments, which shape not only the nature but also the scale and ambition of artists’ claims upon cinema in recent years.

Commentators within the domains of both art criticism and film studies have noted a new emphasis on the moving image within museums, and galleries since the mid- to late 1990s.⁷ The enhanced visibility of artists’ cinema during this period could be partly explained by increased access to production, post-production and projection equipment amongst artists and art institutions, but a range of other factors must also be considered. The overt commercialization of film and television production over the past decade, especially within the UK context, may have impelled certain practitioners towards the gallery. In addition, my research highlights a range of developments within cultural policy, curatorial discourse, urban redevelopment and art practice, which I argue have structured the relationship between art, cinema and place in recent years. Chapter 1 contests certain claims regarding spectatorship and the reception of the moving image within the gallery, situating contemporary artists’ cinema at the intersection of multiple genealogies of art and film, with a particular emphasis on theorizations of place, landscape and location. Chapter 2 employs the frame of the ‘marketplace’ to investigate points of convergence between the economics and politics of place; noting the evolution of critical curatorial strategies associated with ‘New Institutionalism’ and charting the rise of the art fair and biennial exhibition, while also alluding to broader shifts in the organization of labour, time and space. Even though my research is attuned to the widespread instrumentalization of art practice within processes of place-making, it nonetheless seeks to highlight the complexity (and potential criticality) of artists’ cinema. It is for this reason that Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are structured around in-depth analyses of twenty four different examples of production and exhibition.

Place, Location and Relation

It is important to note that this book is not specifically concerned with the representation of place in artists’ cinema; rather it explores the more ambiguous intersections between the claims made by artists upon cinema and the temporal and relational processes that shape an experience of place. My discussion is informed by a rethinking of place within both social geography and art practice, which gives rise to an understanding of place ‘as a mutable concept (an intersection of mapped location, urban mythology, power dynamics and social interaction)’.⁸ As Claire Doherty points out, through reference to the work of both Miwon Kwon and Doreen Massey, ‘feeling out of place is the cultural symptom of late capitalism’s political and social reality’, to the extent that creating a sense of place may actually involve engendering a sense of dislocation. It could be argued that ‘location’ is more central to my analysis than place, given its particular association with cinema through the use of the term in film production. Yet location tends to imply a certain straightforwardness and specificity, lacking the (often usefully problematic) associations of place.

A focus upon place in accounts of art and film practice sometimes signals a concern with ‘authentic’ experience, rooted in the particular. In The Lure of the Local (1997), for example, Lucy Lippard bemoans what she identifies as ‘the absence of value attached to specific place in contemporary cultural life, in the art world’.⁹ She suggests that a sense of place can be recovered through the excavation of forms of local knowledge that are physically embodied and ‘written in the landscape or place by the people who live or lived there’, and she sets up an opposition between place, as ‘seen from the inside’ and landscape, which is seen ‘from outside, as a backdrop for the experience of viewing’.¹⁰ Some theorizations of place and displacement in avant-garde and experimental film have taken this notion even further in their claim for a position of ‘outsideness’ or marginality. In The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place, for example, Scott MacDonald appears to draw a parallel between the exploration of landscape and another form of ‘outsideness’, understood in terms of the ‘immense world of alternative media that has developed generally outside the commercial histories of the movies and television and remains outside the awareness of both the mass audience and most teachers, critics, and scholars of media, the humanities, and cultural studies.’¹¹

The works that I discuss in this book definitely do not claim a position of outsideness or marginality, even if they are physically located outside the gallery. Instead, the vast majority exist as art objects that are bought and sold, belonging to the contemporary art economy even if they gesture towards other value systems. My understanding of ‘place’ is distinct from that offered by both Lippard and MacDonald, and perhaps closer to the model explored in Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar’s survey of place-centred art practice. Noting that the term ‘landscape’ refers not to a natural feature but to the organization of land, Dean and Millar also link place itself with the concept of organization, as suggested by the phrase ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. Here, ‘place’ is not something fixed, which can be uncovered or recovered, but rather it is something that is continually being made, continually in process. Dean and Millar’s publication also briefly traces a shift in emphasis within rationalist philosophy from place to space, and subsequently to site, noting that the measured distance between things has come to be regarded as less important that the situation of things in relation to each other.¹² This emphasis is borne out in their selection of works, many of which call attention to the interdependency of the relational and the situational in contemporary art practice.

While my research focuses primarily on artworks made since 1997, it is informed by the analysis of developments in cultural production since the late 1960s, particularly the critique of labour and management offered by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism.¹³ Their concept of the ‘projective city’ is particularly valuable because it offers a distinctively relational model of place in which the ‘city’ is understood as a social formation that is continually constituted and reconstituted. My analysis of cultural policy also engages with debates surrounding urban renewal and the role of the art museum within the discourses and operations of regeneration. Drawing upon Andreas Huyssen’s analysis of cultural amnesia and cultural memory,¹⁴ my discussion explores the relationship that exists between the actual physical spaces that house art museums, and which may once have housed factories or train stations, and the museum as landmark building within a regeneration scheme. Finally, I am also interested in the public and collective aspects of the marketplace, where buyers, sellers and intermediaries continue to gather in order to be physically present to each other and, in some instances, to engage in the spectacle of highly public transactions.

Being Between: Selection, Organization and Categorization

This book has evolved partly through dialogue with colleagues and students within film and media studies. It has been shaped by, and attempts to account for, their perceptions of the increased visibility of ‘artists’ cinema’ since the mid-late 1990s. As such, it has been written partly for readers who have an understanding of film history and theory but who may be less familiar with the modes of production, distribution and exhibition associated with contemporary art. Although I emphasize the scale, scope and particularity of artists’ claims upon cinema over the past decade, I do not want to suggest that the recent wave of activity in this area is entirely unprecedented. My exploration of recent intersections between art and cinema draws specifically upon the work of Dudley Andrew, Angela Dalle Vacche and others who have sought to highlight and theorize earlier exchanges, across various historical contexts.¹⁵ I refer to a number of works from the 1960s and 1970s, several of which undoubtedly form part of the art historical ‘canon’, but my discussion focuses primarily on more recent developments. The status of works that date from the late 1990s and early 2000s in relation to an emerging canon of artists’ cinema is yet to be determined. This book could be said to contribute to processes of canon formation simply because it constitutes a selection, which might form the basis for a programme of study. There are obvious parallels here with the scenarios discussed in Chapter 2, whereby the public exhibition of an art work often serves to increase its commercial value. But this trajectory is complicated in the case of artists’ cinema by the fact that it is difficult to ‘teach’ these works in the manner of film or media studies programme. Review copies are not always available and, in many instances, classroom presentations of these copies are explicitly prohibited.

This study does not aim to offer a definitive survey of artists’ cinema over the past decade. Instead I have chosen to place specific works in relation to each other in order to highlight certain modalities of artists’ cinema, so Chapters 3, 4 and 5 each focus upon a particular arena of practice. The three modalities that I highlight are the multi-screen projected video installation in the public museum or gallery (Chapter 3), the moving image work that references an earlier event through documentation, re-enactment or remaking (Chapter 4) and the exploration of cinema and screen architecture within a museum, gallery or pavilion (Chapter 5). Although I do not argue for a progression from one modality to another, several works in Chapter 3 date from the late 1990s while all of those discussed in Chapter 5 are more recent, with the oldest dating from 2004. My categorizations are not mutually exclusive, to the extent that it might be possible to move certain works into different frames of analysis.

Within each chapter, the eight works explored in depth have been selected and organized according to several factors. First, I have restricted my discussion to works that I have actually viewed in a public exhibition context, with some minor qualifications.¹⁶ Second, while I generally discuss only one work by each artist in detail, I have sought to select examples that are broadly representative of the artist’s practice and concerns, or at least not wholly anomalous.¹⁷ Certain artists are also referenced across several chapters, most notably Pierre Huyghe, whose exploration of the event and the replay has been particularly important in shaping my analysis. Finally, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are all structured around an opposition or tension. Thus the first part of Chapter 3 focuses on works where the production location (also the setting of the work) holds a particular resonance, such as the multi-screen video installations Stasi City (Jane and Louise Wilson, 1997), eraser (Doug Aitken, 1998), Re-Run (Willie Doherty, 2002) and Baltimore (Isaac Julien, 2003). The second part deals with works where settings are narratively motivated, but generic, and also characterized by a degree of anonymity – The Silver Bridge (Jaki Irvine, 2002), Consolation Service (Eija-Liisa Ahtila, 1999), Turbulent (Shirin Neshat, 1998) and Drift: diagram vii (Anne Tallentire, 2005).

The first part of Chapter 4 focuses on public art projects by Laura Horelli, Tacita Dean, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (also known as desperate optimists) and Jeremy Deller. In some of these works the production location is close to, or coheres with, the site of initial exhibition, while in the works by Pierre Huyghe, Stan Douglas, Melik Ohanian and Gerard Byrne, this convergence between sites of production and exhibition is less apparent. Finally, in Chapter 5, I differentiate between works that engage with the cinema as space for collective experience, such as Kultur und Freizeit (Andreas Fogarasi, 2007), Trick (Thomas Demand, 2004), Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula (Francesco Vezzoli, 2005) and Venetian, Atmospheric (Tobias Putrih, 2007) and those that explore dynamics of fragmentation, concealment and reflection through the materiality of the screen, such as Citizens and Subjects (Aernout Mik, 2007), [in,the] visible state (Bea McMahon, 2008), Dark Mirror (Carlos Amorales, 2005), and Théâtre de Poche (Aurélien Froment, 2007).

By isolating individual works by artists and placing them in relation to each other according to particular modalities, I could be accused of favouring the art ‘work’ over the art ‘practice’. Where possible, and relevant, I have tried to counter this tendency by referencing contextualizing and mediating materials produced by artists or curators to accompany these works. I have also deliberately included artists whose practices encompass painting, drawing, sculpture or performance, emphasizing the extent to which explorations of cinema within the sphere of contemporary art actually extend well beyond the media of film and video. My strategies of selection and organization are designed to both complement and complicate existing accounts of these disparate practices, providing new insights into the place of artists’ cinema. These insights are particularly important where they relate to the production and circulation of moving image works as commodities within an art market structured by the intersection of public and private interests. Somewhat ironically, given my stated emphasis on spatial matters, my research also reveals the temporal dynamics at work in contemporary artists’ cinema; in the relationship between the architecture of museum and the ephemeral qualities of the multi-screen video projection; in the folding of events and documents into each other through processes of re-enactment; and, finally, in the staging of collectivity through reference to rituals of cinema-going.

Chapter 1

Between Space, Site and Screen

Pierre Huyghe

L’Ellipse, 1998

Beta Digital, 13 minutes

Courtesy Galerie Marian Goodman Paris / New York

Everything, then, passes between us. This ‘between’, as its name implies, has neither a consistency nor continuity of its own. It does not lead from one to the other; it constitutes no connective tissue, no cement, no bridge. Perhaps it is not even fair to speak of a ‘connection’ to its subject; it is neither connected nor unconnected; it falls short of both; even better, it is that which is at the heart of a connection, the interlacing … of strands whose extremities remain separate even at the very center of the knot.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural.¹

Introduction

Over the past decade, major museums have repeatedly sought to explore and stage a history of dialogue between art and film, whilst in parallel, curators and programmers have begun to reflect upon the various ways in which being ‘between’ might be a mode particular to artists’ cinema.² Charting some of these forms of ‘between-ness’, Stephanie Schulte Strathaus emphasizes that many artists were first attracted to the moving image in the 1960s in order ‘to create a counterculture to commercial movie theaters’. She suggests that the distinction between art and film, together with ‘the differentiation between commercial and independent film’, served to constitute a ‘space between’ and she goes on to explore this space by highlighting the relationship between film programming and montage, concluding that ‘a program always needs at least two films that together form this in-between, this third space that the viewer will remember together with the films themselves.’³ This comment underscores the complex interplay between the site and space of the auditorium, the experience of the ‘film programme’ as a distinct temporal entity and the processes of remembering through which cinema acquires meaning.

It is also possible to conceptualize artists’ cinema through reference to broader notions of the interstitial, intermediate or in-between, as encountered in architectural and economic theory. In an analysis of art and architecture that references a number of moving image works, Jane Rendell invokes Edward Soja’s triad of space, time and the social in order to theorize a critical spatial practice that can emerge in ‘a place between’ art and architecture.⁴ A different approach to ‘between-ness’ can be found in studies of organizational culture and the knowledge economy. For example, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello highlight the importance of mediating activities in the creation of networks and economies that are organized around the ‘project’. They perceive the activity of mediating as increasingly identified and valued in its own right, ‘separated from the other forms of activity it had hitherto been bound up with’.⁵ Informed by these disparate perspectives, this chapter explores the various intersections and interstices where artists’ cinema comes into being, extending from the ‘space-in-between’ of the multi-screen installation, to the interplay between production and exhibition in site-based works, and the forms of translation and exchange shaping the development of the ‘cine-material’ practices discussed in Chapter 5.

Between Genealogies

As I have already suggested, the term ‘artists’ cinema’ does not signify a unified or coherent historical formation. Instead, it refers to a series of competing claims made for and by artists and art practice in relation to cinema and the wider context of moving image culture. Some of these claims are overtly ‘genealogical’, seeking to frame artists’ cinema as an extension of another form of art practice, such as experimental film, post-minimalist installation, video art or performance.⁶ In recent years, critical attention seems to have focused on the ‘gallery film’ as a distinct area of moving image practice, one with a particular debt to experimental film. Chris Dercon has offered a typology of artists’ film, in which the first ‘layer’ consists of the film avant-garde (Maya Deren, Michael Snow, Paul Sharits and Kenneth Anger, among others) while the second is an ‘artistic avant-garde’ working with video installation (Bruce Nauman, Gary Hill and Bill Viola).⁷ Drawing upon Dercon’s analysis, Catherine Fowler proposes that the gallery films (by artists such as Steve McQueen, Stan Douglas, Shirin Neshat, Douglas Gordon and Eija-Liisa Ahtila) constitute a third ‘layer’. Noting that references to classical or popular cinema are often made explicit, she argues that the gallery film’s debt to experimental filmmaking is less likely to be acknowledged.

Others have also called attention to a degree of amnesia in the production and exhibition of artists’ cinema. Writing in 2000, Chris Darke charts the migration of cinema into the gallery during the 1990s and notes an attendant erasure of critical memory with respect to video art. In fact, he suggests that the rise of the gallery film in the UK has produced a ‘curious effect … where a new generation of artists has elected to work with video and, in so doing, has frequently aped the work of innovators in the form such as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Marina Abramovic almost as though they had never existed.’⁸ Interestingly, Darke also suggests that the gallery has been cast as an ‘alternative site’, in opposition to an increasingly pervasive ‘Hollywood monoculture’. This monoculture, encompassing video games and mobile media as well as film and television, addresses the viewer as consumer rather than citizen. In contrast, Darke posits that the experience of the moving image in the gallery appears to offer a respite from the commercialization and privatization of domestic space.

An alternative lineage is suggested in a short typology of film and video space developed by curator Chrissie Iles which notes a possible connection between the evolution of artists’ film and video in the 1960s and the modes of large-scale display that were associated with contemporary commercial events such as the World’s Fair of 1964 in New York.⁹ She places particular emphasis on the exploration of public space within artists’ film and video during the 1960s, noting a recurrent desire to break down the boundaries between public and private space, and offering a complex typology that extends from the ‘mirrored space’ of Dan Graham to the ‘adversarial space’ of Bruce Nauman, the ‘durational space’ of Peter Campus and the ‘theatrical space’ of Vito Acconci. These differences were explored in the exhibition ‘Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964–1977’, curated by Iles at the Whitney Museum (2001–2002). In her contribution to the exhibition catalogue, she cites various philosophical precedents for the creation of a hybrid or intermediate space, a space of enquiry where the light is ‘dimmed’ but not extinguished. She also notes that post-minimalist art brought about a transformation of ‘actual space’ (whether in the form of the gallery, museum or ‘alternative space’) into a perceptual field that often took the form of ‘a hybrid of white cube and black box’.¹⁰ This notion of a hybrid is intriguing, pointing towards a possible connection between the practices of the later 1960s and early 1970s and the more recent explorations of the ‘cine-material’, theorized in Chapter 5.

For some commentators, the self-consciously ‘cinematic’ practices of the 1990s can be seen to extend (or at least reiterate) the perceptual and phenomenological investigations of the 1960s and 70s. Writing in 2000, Iles suggests that contemporary ‘film and video space has become the location of a radical questioning of the future of both aesthetic and social space’.¹¹ Her relatively upbeat view of contemporary artists’ cinema is, however, contested by others. Catherine Elwes, an artist with a longstanding involvement in video practice in the UK, has emphasized an opposing trajectory. She charts the movement of artists’ video from the margins to the mainstream, extending from Nam June Paik’s experiments within and beyond the gallery during the 1960s to the commercial acceptance, if not dominance, of video installation in the 1990s. Elwes is not convinced by claims that the gallery has been transformed into a ‘newly radicalised cinematic space’ by virtue of the presence of the projected image:

In fact, dispensing with the television set, and replacing it with pure cinemascope illusionism elevates video and film to a kind of electronic mural painting in the grand manner, enveloped in the silence of the rarefied quasi-cathedrals of art that