In and Out of the Museum: New Destinations of the Moving Image

Issue 04 of The Garage Journal publishes innovative scholarship on the relationship between the moving image and the museum. It analyzes ways in which cinema, video art, and curatorial practices inform and influence each other. Dissecting this intricate relationship, the issue challenges traditional assumptions and opens up a discourse where affinities and oppositions coexist.

This article analyzes the complex and plethoric video artist Mark Lewis and his Willesden Launderette Reverse Dolly Pan Right Friday Prayers (2010), highlighting how he works with cinema theories and devices. The article demonstrates that the paradoxical allusions that Lewis’s work makes toward the ‘classical’ dispositif of cinematic projection shine a light and at the same time challenge cinematic theories and theories of perception. 

This article investigates the relationship between audiences and the moving image in cinematic and virtual space(s) outside of the museum through Canadian artist Levi Glass’s new media project Cineorama. The article focuses on the outdoor public display of Cineorama at the 2020 Luminocity exhibition in Kamloops, Canada, and Glass’s digital adaptation of the project for viewing on personal devices or virtual reality headsets.

The art-based research project Narrate an Exhibition as a Film aims to construct an ‘imaginary museum’ composed not of art pieces (as the one invented by André Malraux), but of individual memories, emotions, and imaginations. What do educated and non-educated visitors remember after an exhibition, what makes a visit memorable, and, most importantly, how do visitors construct in their minds what an exhibition and a narration are?

This article explores what is at stake when cinematic works are exhibited in the museum. It focuses on different strategies to apply when it comes to inciting the spectator: by explaining artistic interpassivity, analogue virtuality, and preclusion of the gaze, as well as by introducing seductive deconstruction, this article offers several examples of how film installations can challenge the museum visitor and their ways of looking. 

The migration of film from cinemas to art institutions engendered a series of metamorphoses. This research article analyzes these transformations through cases of contemporary uses of moving images to propose a theory on how to curate moving images in the museum of the twenty-first century.

Film Book Film is a transmedial artwork that starts with a children’s book adaptation of a film, picking up the discarded book and translating it back into a film again. A new experience evolves as the film alternates between objective and subjective shots where we are both readers and spectators, punctuated by humor.

Net.art represents an artistic language which, by virtue of its hypertextual essence, can connect people with one another by centering its practice on the interaction with audiences. This visual essay dwells on pioneering projects that need to be reconsidered in order to further historical, museological, and curatorial discussion of net.art based on its intrinsic qualities, diffusion, and exhibition. 

Adopting a transhistorical and interdisciplinary approach, this article reflects on the multiplicity of contemporary screens and their influence on today’s modes of vision. The article also addresses changes undergone by the images’ frames and the consequent paradigm shift in how the viewer physically relates to these images. 

This experimental essay, a set of TikTok videos, focuses on the video archives of Sergey Borisov, a photographer and a chronicler of the Russian unofficial art culture of the perestroika and later period. The problems raised in this essay have to do with the reflections concerning the role of documentary musical video recordings in the modern Russian museum discourse, in the context of the tight links between the musical underground and visual artists in Russia.

This text examines two cases in order to start outlining the aspects of a specific relationship between cinema, on the one hand, and museum and exhibition spaces, on the other. It studies two films (Assa by Sergei Solovyov and Jean-Luc Godard, The Disorder Exposed by Céline Gailleurd and Olivier Bohler) as models of cinematic conservation and curating invisible and ephemeral museal art forms. 

For the closing of Issue 4 of The Garage Journal, the author adopts one core methodology common to the practices of both film and curating: storytelling. All stories have a time, a space, and characters. Following the Rashomon effect, each one of the stories below could offer entirely different points on the relationships between the moving image and the museum.