Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation confronts the changing contours of what we call "cinema" through an examination of uses of the moving image and references to film history in art since 1990. The past two decades have witnessed striking changes in the cinematic institution, with digitization at once expanding its mobility and reach more than ever before but also inducing fears concerning the obsolescence of celluloid and theatrical exhibition. Exhibiting Cinema looks to contemporary art as a microcosm in which to explore these developments. While artists have used film and video for decades, since 1990 figures such as Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, and Steve McQueen have produced a sustained reflection on the kinds of transformations and migrations cinema is undergoing today--all while staking out a new sector of moving image practice. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin questioned how the advent of mechanical reproduction, most forcefully embodied in the cinema, might change our conception of art. Without abandoning this notion--for it is by no means settled--this dissertation chiastically inverts this inquiry for the twenty-first century to ask: how does the progressive integration of film and video into the gallery and museum change our conception of cinema? And how does it respond to changes in cinema's status within culture at large? Exhibiting Cinema argues that cinema occupies the peculiar position of entering the museum as older than new, digital media--as an obsolescent medium in need of protection--but newer than truly old media, such as painting or sculpture--thus supplying a dose of spectacular novelty and entertainment value. These issues are explored through an examination of how cinema has been mobilized in contemporary art, ranging from exhibitions dedicated to the history of film, uses of 16mm that align the medium with a spectral historicity, the limited-edition film print as a collectible objet d'art, practices of remaking and recycling old movies, the resurgence of fiction and documentary modes, and the pervasive affective states of grief, melancholy, and nostalgia that mark this strain of aesthetic production.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2010)
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Citation
Balsom, Erika,
"Exhibiting Cinema: The Moving Image in Art After 1990"
(2010).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z07W69F1
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....