Artist, Nam June Paik began using magnetic tape in Portapacks, SONY’s portable, analogue video recording unit, as well as experimenting with and exhibiting cathode ray tube televisions as a sculptural object, in 1960s Germany. By 1968, the Museum of Modern Art had already begun acquiring and exhibiting Paik’s video work. Yet the bonafide rise of video as a museum object, and the scholarship that would follow, is associated with the succeeding decade. Moving image, derived from magnetic tape, had a clear freedom from the constraints of the dominant cinematic dispositif, architecturally and mechanically, lacking the intention to be played within the darkened movie theatre structure. Without being confined to the rules of filmic display, video
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Except, unlike Gance, filmmakers chose for this experience to exist outside the parameters of the theatre space. Although artists experimenting with moving image media expanded to the museum partially due to video, it also opened the doors to their work on film. Paul Shartis’ Dream Displacement (1976), which used four separate projectors to create a multi-channel work, was initially displayed at Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1976, upon the flat white walls of the open gallery space. The red and yellow dyed filmbase and its perforations are visible to the viewer upon projection, as they seemingly horizontally meld into each other. In this case, no longer is the projector necessarily oriented behind the audience, instead placed in the center of the room, treated as both the means of mechanical production and sculpture. This orientation of the projector, which subverts elements of the dominant cinematic dispositif by changing its orientation from being above and behind the viewer, echoes the rise of installation as an accepted art practice, recognized in the …show more content…
Numerous scholars blatantly use the word “new” when highlighting the phenomena of moving images in the white cube. For example, Noam Elcott enthusiastically claims that new historiographies emerged due to new ways of screening in the post-war era. Chrissie Iles has claimed definitively that film installation began in the 1960s, as both the end and beginning of an era. Erika Balsom has also claimed that the emergence of 16mm film in the gallery leads to new dispositifs and that, until this emergence, film had a specific history, similarly playing into the prevailing history of apparatus theory. Although the assertion of newness is erroneous in this context, due to evidence of much earlier instances of projection in the white cube, what was indeed novel is the volume at which artists, scholars, and affiliates of fine art institutions recognized that the dominant cinematic dispositif had been evidently disrupted by the choice to display film on white walls, among flatworks, sculpture, and within alcoves. A majority of moving image displayed in the white cube in the ‘90s was specifically video and digital-borne media. If film in the gallery is evinced by scholars, such as throughout a collection of essays included in Art of the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, it’s resoundingly mentioned with
Except, unlike Gance, filmmakers chose for this experience to exist outside the parameters of the theatre space. Although artists experimenting with moving image media expanded to the museum partially due to video, it also opened the doors to their work on film. Paul Shartis’ Dream Displacement (1976), which used four separate projectors to create a multi-channel work, was initially displayed at Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1976, upon the flat white walls of the open gallery space. The red and yellow dyed filmbase and its perforations are visible to the viewer upon projection, as they seemingly horizontally meld into each other. In this case, no longer is the projector necessarily oriented behind the audience, instead placed in the center of the room, treated as both the means of mechanical production and sculpture. This orientation of the projector, which subverts elements of the dominant cinematic dispositif by changing its orientation from being above and behind the viewer, echoes the rise of installation as an accepted art practice, recognized in the …show more content…
Numerous scholars blatantly use the word “new” when highlighting the phenomena of moving images in the white cube. For example, Noam Elcott enthusiastically claims that new historiographies emerged due to new ways of screening in the post-war era. Chrissie Iles has claimed definitively that film installation began in the 1960s, as both the end and beginning of an era. Erika Balsom has also claimed that the emergence of 16mm film in the gallery leads to new dispositifs and that, until this emergence, film had a specific history, similarly playing into the prevailing history of apparatus theory. Although the assertion of newness is erroneous in this context, due to evidence of much earlier instances of projection in the white cube, what was indeed novel is the volume at which artists, scholars, and affiliates of fine art institutions recognized that the dominant cinematic dispositif had been evidently disrupted by the choice to display film on white walls, among flatworks, sculpture, and within alcoves. A majority of moving image displayed in the white cube in the ‘90s was specifically video and digital-borne media. If film in the gallery is evinced by scholars, such as throughout a collection of essays included in Art of the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, it’s resoundingly mentioned with