Art vs. Cinema: What’s the Difference for Filmmakers?
Five experts – curators, programmers, artists and academics – debate the changing role and visibility of artists’ moving image
Five experts – curators, programmers, artists and academics – debate the changing role and visibility of artists’ moving image
Leonardo Bigazzi Over the past 15 years, as the notion of spectatorship has evolved in tandem with how we experience moving images – from vast screens in public settings to tiny devices held in the palms of our hands – crossovers between virtual video platforms, art institutions and cinema auditoriums have increased significantly. Artists born in and since the 1980s have been the ones to really capitalize on this shift, not only by navigating the opportunities that lie between the art world and the film industry, but by responding conceptually in their practices. For example, Ana’s É Noite na América [It Is Night in America, 2022], commissioned and produced by the Fondazione in Between Art and Film, exists in two forms: a feature film that was presented in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, and a three-channel installation for display in contemporary art spaces. These two versions have different durations and were edited to take into account the diverse viewing conditions of a cinema and a gallery. Which factors do you think are responsible for these accelerations in crossover between the exhibition space and the movie theatre?
Ana Vaz Experimental and expanded cinema developed as a means of rejecting the rapid colonization of cinematic forms by the industry. The worlds of art and cinema have economic and structural issues that lie at the heart of where a lot of moving-image artists find themselves today: marginalized in terms of the film industry, yet minor in terms of the art market. It is an uncomfortable and precarious position that requires a certain conceptual economy. Thinking about the specificity of screening environments becomes as important as thinking conceptually about how a narrative dialogues with a specific place, which is something that traditional cinema will not allow you to do. Hence, the installation version of It Is Night in America was a formal response to this discomfort and a way to spatialize a narrative that needs the duration and immersion traditional cinematic spaces allow, while considering the attention span of an open exhibition environment.
Moving-image artists are marginalized in the film industry, yet minor in the art market.
LB Paolo, you have a specific vantage point because you direct the Grütli Cinemas in Geneva but you’re also the cinema curator at Milan’s Fondazione Prada, and you have programmed artists’ films at various film festivals, including FIDMarseille and La Quinzaine at Cannes.
Paolo Moretti On this panel, I feel like the advocate for film theatres! Since the late 2000s, I’ve witnessed a technological evolution that has been a pivotal element in this new wave of artists’ cinema. Prior to that, many artists didn’t have access to footage of a quality that approximated the cinematographic image. Starting in the early 2000s, FIDMarseille was among the first film events to present artists’ films within a traditional film festival framework. I recall a certain resistance from the film world at the time toward seeing technically ‘poor’ images and/or concept-based narratives magnified on the big screen in a cinema setting. Since then, the landscape has evolved, driven by both technological advancements and events like FIDMarseille, which have played a key role in bridging the gap between these two worlds. Adventurous programmers are actively seeking works that disrupt and challenge established visual and narrative codes, leading to increased scouting of artists’ films by the traditional film industry. Additionally, there is now greater communication in terms of production and market dynamics. I would say that the opportunities for an artist to produce a film within a cinema framework today are incomparable to those of 20 years ago.
Programmers are actively seeking works that disrupt and challenge, leading to increased scouting of artists’ films.
Stuart Comer In terms of historical trajectory, by the time you get to Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002, you have the documentary turn, which changed the kind of material that artists were referencing. Three years after that, YouTube launched and, in 2009, Hito Steyerl wrote ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’. We’re dealing with radical shifts in scale in both directions now, from iPhones to large urban screens.
Erika Balsom If the vibrancy of the moving image in contemporary art has been reabsorbed into the film world anywhere, it’s in documentary. Even a traditional festival like International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam now has an experimental sidebar. In 2024, that category was won by a contemporary artist, Omar Mismar, with what I think is one of the greatest films of last year, A Frown Gone Mad. It is a film made for the cinema by an artist. It’s interesting to think about why this experimental documentary idiom has been the place of so much exchange between the art and film worlds. It has to do with an interest in experimenting with formal language, but also with working outside of narrative forms, perhaps outside of commercial imperatives as well. Over the last decade, the work I have found most compelling has often been made by visual artists for the movie theatre. There’s something about that space – with its different modalities of attention, attunement and temporality – that seems more relevant than ever. The cinema space is being reclaimed as the site of thinking about new forms of film history in the present, in relation to different kinds of political urgencies.
AV Also as an arena for solidarity and for experiencing the same space-time continuum, which is something that has been taken away from us in such a radical and violent way by the invasion of images in our contemporary experience of life.
SC In ‘Signals’, our recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York [MoMA], co-curator Michelle Kuo and I tried to suggest that there are deeply political and important forms of cinema that are not about being together in the same space, but are about transmitting images: Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Hole in Space [1980], for instance, which was technically the first live feed. Despite being bombarded with visual content now, I don’t think we’ve lost the critical capacity to deal with different kinds of global connections. How can we find ways around conventional architectural structures to think differently about forms of connection and solidarity?
The vibrancy of the moving image in contemporary art has been reabsorbed into documentary.
LB The circulation of moving images was revolutionized by virtual platforms on which you could share and transfer videos. If I look at the shelf in front of me, I see DVDs and pen drives: that was how films were sent to me when I started curating in 2008. Two or three years later, those physical relics disappeared.
EB Technology has had a huge impact on how curators and programmers work. Even this interest in alternate histories of cinema would be unthinkable without the digitization of film heritage and people sharing bootleg copies of obscure films that they then programme for the public. However, online platforms have not yet evolved into major exhibition spaces for artists’ film and video. I feel many artists have decided that this is not how they want their work to be shown. While there are some examples of artists making work specifically for online platforms, in general they cling to the cinema or the gallery space, exploiting the specificity of those environments. The internet is a place to preview or study works, but not so much to see the ‘real thing’.
AV I think it’s an important platform for connecting with places that have very little access to the infrastructure of cultural institutions.
Watching a film online develops the desire to see it magnified.
PM Having a huge shelf full of DVDs and VHSes is somehow reassuring in the sense that it’s tangible: I miss those objects that were present in my life for so many years. But I would say from a programming perspective that, when you are confronted with a large quantity of material, being liberated from the physical side of it is a relief. You can see so much more content from all over the world.
SC It’s shocking to me how quickly we’ve taken all of this for granted. I remember around 2008, a couple of years after the launch of YouTube, the number of PhDs in experimental cinema exploded. We have to think of online platforms as a study resource or an analytical resource, as much as a space for presentation. It may not be the ideal place to experience a work as it was intended, but it is the space for analytical thinking.
PM Often, watching a film online is like a teaser for watching the same work in another context: it develops the desire to see it magnified.
LB Something else that interests me is how artists are experimenting with multiple temporalities and fragmentation – the bodily experience and the perception of moving images in space. In works such as Until we became fire and fire us [2023–ongoing] for instance, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme ask viewers to disrupt their passive relationship with the image, offering them an active role in self-editing the work via their own physical movements in space.
One of the huge crises that we traverse today is our disconnection from real time and space.
AV Working with the fragmentation of space and time is inherent to cinematic practice. The forceful taming of cinema into linearity is a construction that comes from the film industry. Technology saturates us with access to different modalities of experience, whilst also creating false ideas of proximity and distance, as if we were together in the same time and space. I’m looking for ways to insist on the importance of experiencing the different historical, political, spectral and sensitive layers of space, and how space is able to anchor us in the world. One of the huge crises that we traverse today is our disconnection from real time and space.
EB I agree. Part of the value of artists’ film historically has been its oppositional nature, offering an alternative to a mass-media sphere that is commercialized and often imposes rhythms and ways of being on us that are probably better rejected. Artists’ film doesn’t exit the realm of technology: it embraces this guilty, fucked-up medium and tries to use it to a different end. That is a very powerful gesture. Claire Bishop’s recent book, Disordered Attention [2024], tries to make a claim for the value of hybrid forms of looking and the dispersed gaze. But, while I think she’s right in identifying that is how many viewers experience exhibitions today, it’s not something I want to endorse. I’m not interested in dispersing my gaze further – it’s already too dispersed. I want to go to exhibitions that take me into something.
Artists’ film doesn’t exit the realm of technology: it embraces it and tries to use it to a different end.
SC I would push Bishop’s notion of attention to something I think is even more urgent now: alertness. We need to be alert. In the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s re-election as US President, very few people on the left wanted to engage with the news. That is a dangerous position. If we don’t create forms of media that promote engagement, if you’re not aware of the politics of the room, if you’re not using media to make you alert to those politics, then there is a big problem.
LB Going back to this idea of an ‘open’ work – one that is constantly re-sampled and re-edited according to the space – is also a real challenge to the concept of the edition, which has historically been used as a way to associate film works with scarcity.
AV Associating film with scarcity is an oxymoron created by the art market. Films cannot be owned – this is their value. The only interest there is in working between the film industry and art institutions is to short-circuit the way that capitalism operates in both industries to capture the emancipatory energy of certain works. I like thinking of films as open-ended and able to carry a different significance in each specific place and time. We need to think beyond the monumental aspect of enclosed works.
LB Stuart, in your current position as chief curator of media and performance at MoMA, and thinking back to your previous role as the first curator of film at Tate Modern, how do you see acquiring institutions changing their collecting policies to welcome these kinds of open practices?
SC When I started at MoMA in 2013, we were beginning to develop new digital databases that could keep up with evolving technological formations. More recently, the AI landscape has raised fundamental legal questions that, for me, have been extremely exciting to think about. These extend far beyond the conventional discussions around copyright that arose at the height of a lot of work rooted in appropriation. We are having to be vigilant about the questionnaires that we send to artists when we acquire their work, and the basic conservation questions we ask them are constantly evolving. How do you respect the open-ended structure of these works so that you don’t shut them down and foreclose their meaning?
Contemporary art is not only innovating the language of cinema, but shaping the future of the film industry.
PM From a traditional film-industry perspective, leaving something open is really the most revolutionary thing to do. A film has to be closed as soon as possible.
LB Do you think AI will be the next technology to radically reshape the way we relate to moving images now and in the future?
SC I would say yes, alongside augmented reality. Similarly to the way iPhones fundamentally reshaped our lives within a matter of years, there will soon be some kind of device that further collapses the distinction between so-called real life and the virtual world of cinema and moving images. These technologies will change things. What will happen to the loop in a world of generative art? What will cinema look like if it’s no longer about circling back to the beginning of a narrative but is instead constantly evolving? That could produce radical and exciting new forms.
LB There are already artists working in that direction, of course, like Ian Cheng, who creates self-generative worlds that potentially evolve endlessly in time.
PM In the traditional cinematographic industry, promoting AI is considered to be stealing jobs. Encouraging these practices was perceived as an act of aggression from parts of the film industry. Even when used very accurately and pertinently, AI is triggering reflection in terms of its political, ecological and social implications.
AV We cannot consider any use of AI without acknowledging the exploitative nature of its labour force, mostly located in the Global South, nor the environmental impact of how it is produced and maintained, in terms of both energy consumption and extraction. Working with moving images, one must acknowledge the toxic inheritance of this industry. I have decided to work with old technology and expired stock as much as I can to try and recycle existing waste from the last century of image-making.
SC The environmental impact of filmmaking is a huge concern. Any use of AI today should only really take place with a full awareness of the implications of the medium. Also, museums are becoming more rigorous about trying to reduce their carbon footprint by not building as many displays and by not shipping things worldwide. There is a mistaken notion that turning to video because it only involves sending a file is somehow the answer, but that doesn’t take into account the construction of a space in which to screen the work: the classic black box is an environmental nightmare. Presenting these works in the physical environment that everybody wants requires enormous resources. The off-gassing from the carpets alone is a problem. There isn’t really a perfect solution.
Use of AI should only take place with a full awareness of the medium’s implications.
PM I’d like to hear your views on the perceived differences in practice between filmmakers and artists working with moving images.
EB Something of a distinction definitely persists. We talk about overlap and blurring, but there are still two pretty different production cultures, with very different histories and critical criteria. It’s a generalization, of course, but film people just do not go in for a lot of the stuff that gets really celebrated within a contemporary art context, and vice versa. Some see the sphere of experimental film and video as an autonomous, alternative scene that is not involved with the commercial art world at all.
LB Also playing into this is a radical shift in funding, which is reducing every year in the film world for those practices that are more experimental and less driven towards cinema distribution. And so those filmmakers are getting closer to the contemporary art context because they feel there is still the kind of freedom in relation to the actual process of making a film that there used to be in experimental filmmaking.
SC In relation to the dichotomy between the film world and the art world: when I was on the jury for the Orizzonti section at the Venice Film Festival in 2011, it seemed like no one knew that the art biennial was happening, even though it was taking place at exactly the same time and in the same city.
LB Last year, programmers from film festivals such as Rotterdam, FIDMarseille and Locarno came to see ‘Nebula’ – an exhibition of new video commissions by Fondazione in Between Art and Film – during the Venice Biennale. A few years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case. Nowadays, film programmers are looking at what is happening in contemporary art. I believe that’s due to an interest in a certain innovation of format that is happening more in contemporary art contexts than it is in traditional film production. Contemporary art is not only innovating the language of cinema, but shaping the future of the film industry.
This article first appeared in frieze issue 250 with the headline ‘Industrial Action’
Main images: Audience in the cinema (detail), 2013. Courtesy: iStock / Getty Images Plus
