9780230341449 Copyrighted Material – 9780230341449

Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 THE (MOVING) PICTURES GENERATION Copyright © Vera Dika, 2012. All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–34144–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dika, Vera, 1951– The (moving) pictures generation : the cinematic impulse in downtown New York art and film / Vera Dika. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–34144–9 1. Art and motion pictures—New York (State)—New York— History—20th century. 2. Art, American—New York (State)— New York—20th century. 3. Experimental films—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. I. Title. N72.M6D55 2012 709.0407—dc23 2011039301 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Integra Software Services First edition: April 2012 10987654321 Printed in the United States of America. Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Prologue: Downtown New York in the Late 1970s and Beyond xiii (Moving) Pictures 1 (Moving) Pictures: Introduction 3 2 Stillness/Movement: Joseph Cornell, Edison Company, Andy Warhol, Jack Goldstein 23 3 The Female Body and the Film Frame: Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman 33 4 Vivienne Dick’s Film Portraits 53 Community 5 Amos Poe and the New York New Wave 71 6 Downtown and Community: Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Nan Goldin 87 Narrative Expectations 7 Strategies of Transformation: Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman 119 8 Strategies of Opposition: Eric Mitchell, Kathryn Bigelow, Lizzie Borden 141 The Cinematic Body 9 Performance and the Cinematic: Paul Swan, Eric Bogosian 155 10 The Ephemeral Body/The Female Voice: Louise Lawler, Ericka Beckman 167 Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 viii Contents Downtown and the Mainstream 11 Incursions into Popular Culture: Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Kathryn Bigelow 181 Conclusion and Continuation 205 Notes 211 Bibliography 227 Index 233 Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Chapter 1 (Moving) Pictures: Introduction ...the avant-garde is never historically effective or fully significant in its initial moments. It cannot be because it is traumatic—a hole in the symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at least not immediately, at least not without structural change ...the avant-garde project in general develops in deferred action. Once repressed in part, the avant-garde did return, and it continues to return, but it returns from the future. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century They named it Metro Pictures. The film studio? No, the gallery. The confu- sion was intended when the New York art gallery Metro Pictures, founded by Helene Winer and Janelle Riering, opened its doors in 1980.1 Film images, film history, the institution of film had infused the work of its major “Pic- tures” artists Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, and Cindy Sherman in ways distinctive of their generation. This is not to say that previous generations of artists and filmmakers had not included preexisting film images into their work or had not drawn on cinematic sources for inspiration. Examples can be seen in the work of Joseph Cornell in the 1930s, of Bruce Conner in the 1950s, and of Andy Warhol in the 1960s. But the generation that came into prominence in the late 1970s was different. The manner in which these artists utilized aspects of the cinematic set them apart, primarily because of the way they engaged cinematic movement, time, and the body in their work, but also because of the number of different mediums they employed. The younger artists transformed performance, sculpture, photography, and film in the exploration of the cinematic itself (Figure 1).2 This impetus is embodied, for example, in Robert Longo’s sculpture of Muybridge-like sequential movement in Seven Seals for Missouri Breaks (1976), in Jack Goldstein’s rotoscoped Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 4 (Moving) Pictures Figure 1 Robert Longo, Seven Seals for Missouri Breaks, 1976 © Robert Longo film loop of a repeating action in The Jump (1978), and in Cindy Sherman’s narratively inspired photographs Untitled Film Stills (1977). And it is here, at this practice of crossing mediums in the contemplation of the cinematic, that we can extend our view to a wider group of artists, ones working at the same time and with a similar set of concerns. Certain Downtown New York performance artists, photographers, and filmmakers also engaged aspects of the cinematic to address their concerns. Eric Bogosian’s performance piece “Men Inside,” for example, is a set of temporally framed “portraits” alluding to cinematic representations, and Nan Goldin gives us a narrativized photographic slide show of her Bowery “fam- ily” in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979–present), moving in time. Amos Poe, on the other hand, uses film directly, and in Unmade Beds (1976) points to the layered history of cinema, and of the image, by “remaking” Godard’s already allusive Breathless (1959). Other artists approached more mainstream forms of filmmaking to extend their art world concerns. We can note, for example, Cindy Sherman’s engagement of the body in her low- budget Stalker Film Office Killer (1995), Kathryn Bigelow’s isolation of cinematic figure movement, as gesture, pose, and pure action, in the surf- ing movie Point Break (1991),3 and Julian Schnabel’s contemplation of disembodied cinematic vision in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). In this book I will discuss a generation of late 1970s artists—ones trained primarily in art schools rather than film schools, but whose fascination was with “the movies.” In some ways their work bears a significant rela- tionship to earlier American avant-garde film practices, especially to the Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Introduction 5 Structural film of the late 1960s and early 1970s, either as an extension of their formal and conceptual concerns or in opposition to them. In other ways, the cross-boundary impetus of these artists often explicitly references Hollywood sources, as did the work of Andy Warhol, and like that work, can sometimes edge toward mainstream practices. The younger artists, however, engage the cinematic by making sculptures of movies, photographs of movies, performances of movies, or even films of movies. And they often do so by referencing the inspiration of earlier artists and filmmakers. While the boundaries have been blurred in practice, criticism has lagged behind. The discussion of the film production during this period has largely been kept separate from the commentary on the visual and performing arts.4 And when the connection has been made, the assessment of what constitutes the “cinematic” is not clearly defined. I will address this omission by considering the practices of the period more specifically, reviewing them in terms of a distinctive cinematic impulse, and by placing them within their art and film historical contexts. Pictures In 1977 the critic Douglas Crimp introduced the term “pictures” to explain the work of a new generation of artists and to signal a return to representation after a period of abstraction in the arts.5 Since its original coinage, Crimp’s descriptive term has become widely accepted. A 2009 show at the Metropoli- tan Museum of Art entitled “The Pictures Generation: 1974–1984,” for example, revisited the period. Curated by Douglas Eklund, this exhibition expanded the number of artists initially addressed by Crimp and declared the practice to be the “last important art movement of the twentieth century.”6 Eklund’s impressive show, however, considered only a portion of the films and film-inspired productions of the late 1970s and beyond. And while the cinematic influence of some of the work included was addressed, it was not Eklund’s project to explore the cinematic in depth.7 It is here that I would like to make a contribution. In the present volume I will expand and reconfigure the group of significant artists for study on the basis of their distinctive cinematic activity. To help define this practice and to begin a consideration of the possible definitions of the “cinematic,” it is best to revisit why Crimp selected the term “pictures” in the first place. We can look at what the word implies, and later we can discuss its inherent cinematic dimensions. Crimp explained the reasons for naming his groundbreaking show in the following way: In choosing the word pictures for the show, I hoped to convey not only the work’s most salient characteristic—recognizable images—but also and most importantly the ambiguities it sustains. As is typical of what has come to be called postmodernism, this new work is not confined to any particular medium; instead it makes use of photography, film, performance, as well as traditional Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 Copyrighted material – 9780230341449 6 (Moving) Pictures modes of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Pictures used colloquially is also nonspecific: a picture might be a book of drawings or photographs, and in common speech a painting, drawing, or print is simply called a picture.8 Crimp includes “film” as one of the mediums that postmodern artists used in their return to recognizable images, but he does not explore the concept fur- ther.

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