Installation and the Moving Image

Abstract

Installation and the Moving Image Catherine Elwes, Wallflower Press, 2015Since at least the Sixties, there has been a large divide between artists who made film and video for the gallery and those who made it for the cinema. This divide could be broadly characterised as indifference/ ignorance of the gallery artists towards the cinema artists and suspicion/jealousy flowing the opposite way, with side skirmishes between the materialists of film and the pluralists of video. A large frustration on the cinema side has been a sense of the ignorance or even duplication of history and a disregard for the dialogue that has developed over the course of that history on the part of the art market.Catherine Elwes' new book is a helpful corrective for some of these divisions. As a survey of the artist moving image, the most remarkable thing is that she writes a wide path into the history of the installation. Early on in the book, she claims that she is not describing a trajectory that brings everything together, "arriving triumphant at the high renaissance of today's digital gallery installations". Rather, anyone approaching this book as a primer on installation art will instead receive a high degree of insight beyond the gallery canon. Elwes first discusses the impact of architecture, painting, sculpture and performance on how artists deal with space, object and time-, which are logical but often underplayed antecedents to installation. This sets the stage for a remarkably extended tour of film history, complete with a thorough discussion of structural film and its connection with expanded cinema-both of which, through their polemics or ephemerality, were originally positioned quite opposite to the gallery project (ironically, expanded cinema- like performance-is often the history that the current art market seems most interested in reclaiming). Most of Elwes' focus is on disciplinary practices, but she devotes a strong chapter to the longstanding debate on spectatorship. She describes various theories of spectatorship, investigates the central gallery/cinema argument about whether the ambulant or sitting spectator has more power, and briefly suggests that cognitive theory may provide new answers to these ongoing questions.As mentioned, a large majority of the book does not describe much in the way of blue chip installation art (although Bill Viola and Douglas Gordon do get some play), instead focusing on an array of film and video sub-disciplines that exists outside the gallery context. Even contemporary gallery transplants like Anthony McCall are linked to the role his early work had to the cinematic context. …