Art History & Criticism

Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic to rethink entrenched paradigms of medium- and disciplinary-specificity. While scholarship on Expanded Cinema has typically focused on European film-based performance of the 1970s, this study explores the historical and conceptual origins of the idea in mid-‘60s New York. Contesting an endemic, medium-specific framework that would reinforce film’s proper place within the cinematic theater, the Expanded Cinema to materially and conceptually displace the moving image so as to initiate a series of disruptive encounters across interdisciplinary institutions of artistic exhibition and spectatorship.
The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from practice the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2), to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and the performance stage (chapter 4).  The concluding chapter returns to 1966 to understand the Expanded Cinema in crisis at the height of its early popularity – as the introduction of video feedback helps to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse situation of televisual culture.

Published in the book:
현대 미술, 글로벌 트렌드 의 권위 를 넘어서 _ 오늘 의 미술 을 바라 보는 여섯 개의 시선 (Contemporary Art, Beyond the Authority of Global Trends: Six Perspectives on the Art of Today) - 2015, Noosphere Contemporary Art Lab - http://www.noosphereartlab.com/#!publictions/c1j7

Merce Cunningham is surely one of the greatest names in the history of 20th century choreography. His decades-long collaboration with John Cage—that unambiguous lodestone for postwar experimental music—would seem the quintessential example of an oeuvre whose basic contours have long since been established, one which confines the art historian’s labor to the realm of exegesis. Yet within this wide- ranging literature, the Cunningham Company’s investigation of “dance for camera” has been invariably dated to the mid-1970s, when Charles Atlas was established as the company’s first filmmaker-in- residence. [1] Yet as significant as this collaboration would be, Cunningham’s groundbreaking work within the field of post-cinematic choreography had actually begun nearly half a decade before, when he was invited by the legendary San Francisco Bay Area public radio and television pioneer Richard O. Moore to produce what would be the company’s first work for broadcast television. The resulting production–lost and forgotten for nearly four decades–not only presaged Cunningham’s future investigations into moving image choreography, but leveraged an unprecedented affiliation with broadcast television to stage and to consider the changing nature of public space and public art within a newly televisual public sphere.

Within William Seitz’s 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Art, the question of framing – of art’s exhibitionary situation within and against a given environment – had emerged as perhaps the major issue of postwar avant-garde practice. Beyond the familiar paintings of Johns and Rauschenberg, a strategy
of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer’s film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen’s Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer’s three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen’s aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.

El video, la fotografía y el cine han tenido un papel clave tanto en la definición de nuevos desafíos metodológicos, analíticos o teóricos para la historia del arte, como en la reformulación crítica de nociones y modelos modernistas de la especificidad de los medios, y en la inevitable expansión de las nociones de historia y arte para dar cuenta de nuevas relaciones prácticas y teóricas en arte y medios. El VIII Simposio de Historia del Arte ha invitado a la reflexión y discusión sobre dichos desafíos, reformulaciones y expansiones, teniendo como referentes tres problemáticas que definen un espacio metodológico y conceptual en el cual se ubican las conferencias y las ponencias participantes. 1. Rosalind Krauss publicó en el año 2000 un controversial ensayo para el cual adoptó el título de la película Un viaje en el mar del norte, dirigida y producida por Marcel Broodthaers en 1973. Allí reformuló la discusión modernista sobre el medio en respuesta al surgimiento del video en los años sesenta. Ella propuso una noción post-medial entendida en términos de estructuras de soporte compuestas por elementos "diferenciales" y autodiferenciadores (vg. el celuloide, la cámara, el proyector y la pantalla de cine), y en términos de las diversas posibilidades de interacciones entre dichos componentes. Por su parte, Carol Armstrong ha propuesto una interpretación feminista de la "marca puntillista" de Georges Seurat y en términos de lo que su actual proyecto de publicación recoge bajo la idea de una "compleja matriz de materiales y materialidades interrelacionadas", así como de elementos corporales, táctiles, y generativos. En esta línea, el Simposio propone la discusión y reflexión sobre obras de arte y las prácticas artísticas desde perspectivas que enfatizan la materialidad y la creación dentro de condiciones y dinámicas de interrelación entre diferentes medios artísticos o de interacción entre los aparentes "elementos de autodiferenciación" de un medio artístico. 2. En su libro Between Film, Video and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age (2016), Ji Hoon Kim ha mostrado que la especificidad del medio y la propuesta de Krauss difícilmente ayudan a estudiar obras de arte que utilizan otros dispositivos de exposición y plataformas para "escudriñar la complejidad material y técnica del cine". Por su parte, en su libro Between the Black Box and the White Cube (2014), Andrew Uroskie evidencia cómo los artistas de los años cincuenta y sesenta usaron la escultura y otros medios para "abordar aspectos fundamentales de la experiencia cinematográfica". Él propone que los artistas y el público asumieron el cine menos en términos de "una ontología de la forma material" y más en términos de "la historicidad contingente de la elaboración cultural de esa forma" y los regímenes en los que el cine tenía lugar. En esta dirección, la segunda problemática versa sobre el modo como la producción y la recepción de obras de arte tiene lugar en términos de regímenes de percepción y comunicación, y su relación con la hibridación de los medios. 3. En 1990, Raymond Bellour publicó su referencial obra L'Entre-Images: Photo Cinéma Vidéo. Él argumentó allí que los artefactos de video, electrónicos y digitales no disolvieron el cine ni sus estructuras, sino que habilitaron su desarrollo al tiempo que impulsaron la tarea de reexaminar la relación entre los nuevos medios y los antiguos. Esta tarea ha sido asumida y reformulada por la "arqueología de los medios", bien sea en la línea histórica desarrollada por

The contemporary form of David OReilly’s Everything (2017) belies its engagement with the past – specif icially, with the origins of both ecological consciousness and our globalized informatic economy in the visual culture and systems thinking of the late ‘60s. The work’s central formal device is the mode of scalar visualisation popularized within the Eames’s iconic Powers of Ten (1977). That film placed Man at the literal and metaphorical center of its universe, obviating both non-human life and ecological relationality to do so. By contrast, OReilly’s world solicits our identification with literally “everything” – living and non-living, from the cosmically large to the microscopically small – except the human. A soundtrack featuring the late Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts reinforces its vision of total relationality.

Limitado por el estilo academico de su formacion pictorica en los Estados Unidos, Robert Breer se traslado a Paris a principios de los anos cincuenta y congenio con el "nucleo duro" en torno a la galeria Denise Rene. Sin embargo, en lugar de seguir la tendencia pictorica del "Op-Art" de Vasarely que haria famosa a la galeria, Breer siguio su propio camino. Volviendo al antiguamente abandonado espectador del "mutoscopio" de la prehistoria del cine industrial, Breer experimento con la creacion de un nuevo tipo de animacion abstracta que puede ser contemplada dentro de la galeria de arte ya sea como pelicula o como escultura. Si bien habia sido olvidado tanto por los estudios de cine como por la historia del arte, las obras para mutoscopio que creo de 1958-1964 fueron un punto de inflexion crucial en el arte de la posguerra: la realizacion del nuevo concepto de instalacion de imagenes en movimiento en el espacio fisico muy iluminado de la galeria de arte, ...

The contemporary form of David OReilly’s Everything (2017) belies its engagement with the past – specifically, with the origins of both ecological consciousness and our globalized informatic economy in the visual culture and systems thinking of the late 1960s. The work’s central formal device is the mode of scalar visualization popularized within the Eames’s iconic Powers of Ten (1977). That film placed Man at the literal and metaphorical center of its universe, obviating both non-human life and ecological relationality to do so. By contrast, OReilly’s world solicits our identification with literally ‘everything’ – living and non-living, from the cosmically large to the microscopically small – except the human. A soundtrack featuring the late Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts reinforces its vision of total relationality.