FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art ERIKA BALSOM Amsterdam University Press Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art Erika Balsom This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library (www.oapen.org) OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative in- itiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe. Sections of chapter one have previously appeared as a part of “Screening Rooms: The Movie Theatre in/and the Gallery,” in Public: Art/Culture/Ideas (), -. Sections of chapter two have previously appeared as “A Cinema in the Gallery, A Cinema in Ruins,” Screen : (December ), -. Cover illustration (front): Pierre Bismuth, Following the Right Hand of Louise Brooks in Beauty Contest, . Marker pen on Plexiglas with c-print, x inches. Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, New York. Cover illustration (back): Simon Starling, Wilhelm Noack oHG, . Installation view at neugerriemschneider, Berlin, . Photo: Jens Ziehe, courtesy of the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Casey Kaplan, New York. Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: JAPES, Amsterdam isbn e-isbn (pdf) e-isbn (ePub) nur / © E. Balsom / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustra- tions reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction – The Othered Cinema Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition The Passages of Cinema Projection and Patrimony Black Box/White Cube The New Blockbusters The Myth of Activity Media at MoMA Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins Post-medium Post-mortem Indexing the Past A Little History of mm Ruinophilia Analogue Aura Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives Ambivalent Appropriations The Four Operations Precursors The False Promises of the “Utopia of Use” Remaking Fandom “Room-for-Play” VCR Memories Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction Anti-anti-illusionism Hybrid Forms Rehabilitating Narrative A Return of the Real Two Images of Death Conclusion –“Cinema and...” 6 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art Notes Bibliography Illustration Credits Index Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the kind cooperation of many individuals who assisted in the process of viewing work that often circulates in only a limited manner: Andrew Beccone, Bram Bots, and Rose Lord at Marian Goodman Gallery; Janice Guy and Fabiana Viso at Murray Guy; Rosalie Benitez and Anna Fisher at Barbara Gladstone Gallery; James Woodward at Metro Pic- tures; Tanya Brodsky at Regen Projects; Katherine Brinson, Arnaud Gerspacher, and Sandhini Poddar at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Monika Flores at Artpace San Antonio; John Kelsey at Reena Spaulings Fine Art; Magdalena Sawon at Postmasters Gallery; Silvia Kolbowski; Mike Plunkett at David Zwir- ner Gallery; Jessica Lin Cox and James Cohan Gallery; Christoph Draeger; Catherine Clark at Catherine Clark Gallery; Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet; Thomas Erben Gallery; Gareth Long; Chris Moukarbel; Colby Bird at Frederic Petzel Gallery; Kathryn Hillier and Bruce Hackney at Yvon Lambert Gallery; Nick Lesley at Electronic Arts Intermix; Alex Galloway/Radical Soft- ware Group; Jessica Bradley Art + Projects; Boshko Boskovic at Sean Kelly Gal- lery; Johan Grimonprez; Sarah D’Hanens at Zapomatik; and Christopher Moss at Peter Freeman, Inc. An additional thanks goes to the many individuals who helped me to secure permission to reproduce images of the artworks discussed in this book. This project began as a dissertation in the truly special department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Infinite thanks to my advisor, Mary Ann Doane, to my committee members, Wendy Chun and Philip Rosen, and to Michael Silverman, who was a thoughtful and encouraging voice in the early stages of this project. I am deeply grateful for the friendship and support of- fered at Brown and since by my fellow PhD students, the always-wonderful trio of Susan McNeil, Liza Hebert, and Richard Manning, and especially the gang at Charlesfield. During a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, the department of Film and Media warmly welcomed me and helped me to negotiate the transitions from grad student to faculty member and from dissertation to book. Thank you in particular to Jonathan Haynes, Erica Levin, Kristen Whissel, Linda Williams, 8 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art Federico Windhausen, and the students of my “Art and the Moving Image” seminar. Many thanks to my colleagues in Film Studies at Carleton University, particu- larly Malini Guha, and to John Osborne, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, for his support of this project. Bart Testa, Kevin Wynter, and anonymous readers at Screen and Public pro- vided me with very helpful feedback on particular sections of the book. I am especially grateful for the encouragement and criticism of Mieke Bal and Ursula Frohne. This project would not have been possible without financial support received from Brown University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Carleton University. Most of all, thank you to Catherine Balsom and Michael Gallagher. Introduction – The Othered Cinema [T]he need is to propose new answers to the question that is now raised in all institu- tions dedicated to modern and contemporary art: How is film to be exhibited and how is film to attain the status of an artwork? –Bruno Racine, president, Centre Georges Pompidou, To open, an Overture.In, Stan Douglas produced a mm work that re- cycled some of cinema’s earliest images and one of its earliest genres, the phan- tom ride. Douglas paired recycled footage from two Edison films shot in the Canadian Rockies, Kicking Horse Canyon () and White Pass, British Columbia (), with a soundtrack of passages excerpted from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Overture consists of three image sections, each separated by black leader, and six passages of text. These passages are read by a male voice-over through two repetitions of the image track, resulting in the same image being accompanied by different text in the second iteration of the seven-minute loop. The phantom ride celebrates technologized perception, bringing together two of its most powerful incarnations: the speed of the loco- motive and the mechanical eye of cinema. At a time when it was not possible to move the camera, the genre functioned as one way of enabling a mobile gaze. The iconography of the train, meanwhile, is inextricably linked to the birth of cinema through the inaugural rush of the Lumières’ L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (). In Overture, the train winds around the mountains, supplies views of the landscape, and travels through tunnels of darkness, offering the spectator a glimpse of how train travel would appear from the front window of the conduc- tor’s car. On the soundtrack, a monologue unfolds that is drawn from those fragile moments between sleeping and waking. Seemingly opposed to the fast- moving views of faraway lands seen on the image track, the voiceover speaks of private, internal experience. And yet, as memories rush in and surround the narrator, he describes the experience in distinctly cinematic terms: “Everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years.” He then goes on to discuss the inability to separate one sensation from another with reference to the illusion of movement achieved by the proto-cinematic device of the Bio- scope. Overture thus brings together two conceptions of time that are central to late nineteenth-century modernity: the public, standardized time that is closely linked to the development of the railway and the subjective time of in- 10 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art voluntary memory as elaborated by Proust. Somewhere between them – be- tween regularity and contingency, public and private – lies the time of cinema. Stan Douglas, Overture (). Overture would not be out of place amongst the many works of the experi- mental film tradition that have drawn upon the preclassical cinema, such as Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (), which also uses footage of a phantom ride. How- ever, Overture is not an experimental film, but a film installation. It belongs not to the movie theater, but to the art gallery. It is an early example of the ways in which artists would claim the gallery as a space to investigate film history in the s, mobilizing two strategies that would become central to this under- taking: the remake of an existing film and the investigation of mm as a me- dium aligned with historicity. Overture is, then, something of an overture for the explosion of references to film history and uses of the moving image that would occur in artistic production from around onwards. From one fin- de-siècle to another, it is a return to the subjective transformations brought about by the invention of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century amidst those initiated by new electronic media at the end of the twentieth. As an index- ical trace of pastness, the grainy footage of the Edison films contains within it Introduction – The Othered Cinema 11 the very force of time that Proust’s narrator sought to recover, testifying to the way in which the past can be summoned in all its anachronism to challenge the present.