Why Cinema Is Exhibited: Flux Against Flux
The essay examines the presentation of moving images within modern art museums, positing that it enhances cinema through increased screen availability, closeness to viewers, and the blending of roles between visitors and spectators. This mobile viewer can generate personal tracking shots, reminiscent of early cinema prior to 1907-1908. However, this perceived freedom may be deceptive, mirroring the waning of shared utopian ideals. Unlike commercial cinema, exhibited cinema prioritizes non-commercial objectives and features endless looping displays. Citing Jean-François Lyotard, the author characterizes it as 'figural' and draws on Roland Barthes's concept of the spectator. The essay highlights the materiality of moving images as 'dust,' valuing it over mere representation. Recent works showcased at Documenta 11, such as Steve McQueen's 'Western Deep' and Salla Tykkä's 'Lasso,' reflect themes of weightlessness and the flow of consciousness.
Key facts
- Exhibited cinema expands cinema in three paradoxical ways: multiplication of screens, proximity creating monumentality, and merging visitor and spectator roles.
- The mobile spectator revives the primitive spectator of early cinema before fixed seating was introduced around 1907-1908.
- Exhibited cinema is non-mercantile and escapes the movie theater or domestic TV screen.
- Digital discs enable endless looping projections, competing with pictorial plasticity.
- The author characterizes exhibited cinema as 'figural' (non-interpretable but traversable), citing Lyotard.
- Roland Barthes's concept of a spectator with two bodies (narcissistic and perverse) is applied to the visitor-spectator.
- Exhibited cinema shifts from representation to presentation, revealing the materiality of images as 'dust'.
- Bernard Stiegler's 'temporal object' concept is used to describe the tension between the film's flow and the viewer's consciousness.
- Works from Documenta 11 (2002) by Steve McQueen, Salla Tykkä, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and Igor & Svetlana Kopystiansky depict floating and weightlessness.
- Political artists of the 1920s-30s dreamed of projecting films to mobile crowds to liberate consciousness.
Entities
Artists
- Salla Tykkä
- Pipilotti Rist
- Stan Douglas
- Steve McQueen
- Eija-Liisa Ahtila
- Igor Kopystiansky
- Svetlana Kopystiansky
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Roland Barthes
- Bernard Stiegler
- Jean Louis Schefer
- Gene Youngblood
- Stan Van Der Beek
- Jonas Mekas
- Dominique Noguez
- Charles Baudelaire
- Jean-Luc Godard
Institutions
- Documenta 11
- Centre Georges Pompidou
- Cahiers du cinéma
- Galilée
- artpress
Locations
- South Africa
- Quartier latin
- Paris
- France
Sources
- artpress —