Roundtable – The Cinematic Enters the Gallery

Moving images have been a mainstay of galleries for half a century. Discussants with backgrounds in a wide range of interdisciplinary programming examine questions regarding the increasingly complex world of the gallery, of presentation formats and settings. Have the lines between artforms blurred, have audience expectations shifted, how have these phenomena altered curatorial practice? Do moving images necessarily imply the cinematic? How easily does expanded cinema manage to shuttle between the white and the black box or the public space outside either one of these more traditional venues? How do new media works further defamiliarize the gallery setting? How have visual artists working with moving images in film, video or new media altered the terrain of the ‘experimental’? What do these terms mean within the expanded contemporary playing field?



Abstract:

Chris Eamon: By the mid-1990s, time-based media began to claim space as installations within the heart of the visual arts world, real estate within its public institutions. Still not every work of time-based media is or need be an installation. What does that mean within the current context of hybridity of media types?

Steve Loft: I would argue that participation by indigenous people’s in new media art constitute a trajectory of adaptability and cultural connectivity perfectly in keeping with Aboriginal worldviews and contemporary artistic practices. As well, that an indigenous aesthetic based on pre-contact customary practice and post contact colonial imperatives and ensuing interactions with settler societies is perfectly compatible with new media technologies. This does however imply a differing contextual environment in which the work must be viewed. Just as language, as cultural signifier evolves, new media production by Aboriginal artists is transformative and transformational, a shape shifter and an act of proprietary self definition and cultural self determination.

Andréa Picard: Moving images have been a mainstay of galleries for half a century (think Fluxus, video art, etc.. ), though today's exacerbation of moving image art has increasingly blurred the lines between artforms, expectations, reception, education, curation. I think that speaking interchangeably about cinema and film poses many risks, that the distinction between the social institution that is the cinema and the medium of film is a crucial one. Thus, a few questions to explore: do moving images necessarily imply the cinematic? Does cinema require an architecture? What is the importance of materiality in the age of the digital? Where lie artist and curatorial responsibility when budgets are tight and technology is at a premium? With many examples to choose from (from Warhol to Godard, Tacita Dean to Apichatpong), an argument can be made that the cinematic has entered the gallery rather waywardly. When the historical and complex divide between filmmaker and artist persists (in economy, codes, conventions, spectatorship, criticism -as paradoxical as these may and can be--), complications can arise for the curator and the artist. What if we revised the premise and finally considered the cinema as a gallery or a museum?

Peter Ride: My specific interest as a new media curator and researcher is working with new media in the gallery context in developing an understanding of the experience of the audience in encountering new media works. I argue that the relationship between the audience and new media is often fundamentally different from the relationships that occur in other areas of media, phenomenologically and structurally and at many levels we recognise this in order to engage with an artwork. Furthermore I am endeavouring to discover not only how it can transform the gallery experience, but how this knowledge can be part of the documentation of the work.

« Home    Ι     Schedule at a Glance    Ι    Full Schedule