Typology of the Moving-Still Image in Contemporary Art

Key facts

• The article was published in artpress 2 n°26 in August/September/October 2012.
• It analyzes three works from the MAC/VAL collection: Five Days in Town (2005) by Alain Bublex, Façade (2006) by Tania Mouraud, and Trésors de la mémoire (les onze enfants de l'histoire du cinéma) (2002) by Sarkis.
• Bublex's Five Days in Town combines a slideshow of about 400 photographs of Houston with around 20 videos shot from a car.
• The work references Peter Cook's 1964 Plug-in City project, with Algeco containers inserted into still images.
• Mouraud's Façade uses thousands of stills from 40 hours of footage of taxidermied animals from the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature and the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
• The video lasts just over six minutes and creates movement through rapid cuts between close-ups and longer shots.
• Mouraud cites Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat and addresses colonial traces in European museums.
• Sarkis's Trésors de la mémoire consists of black-and-white blow-ups of film stills from magazines, mounted on aluminum and linked by a pink neon line that varies with the artist's breathing.
• The article references theoretical frameworks by Roland Barthes, Thierry Kuntzel, and Raymond Bellour.
• It uses Henri Bergson's concept of 'panoramic vision of the dying' to discuss memory and the moving-still image.