Guest-edited by Eugénie Zvonkine (Paris-VIII University) and Luísa Santos (Catholic University of Portugal), in consultation with Evgeny Gusyatinskiy (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art)
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. Moreover, the use of specifically cinematographic techniques such as the dolly or the rear projection screened in the museum context, and in a loop, displays the projected image in its hybridity and, more broadly, celebrates the cinematic dispositif while refusing to view it in a nostalgic way.
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. This wooden panoramic cinema, which the artist built in 2019, immerses viewers in the eight-channel video Baptizo—a 360° experience of the Baptistery in Florence—on double-sided screens inside and outside the building. 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. Rooted in the historical traditions of the panorama, philosophical toy, and early cinema, the physical and virtual versions of Baptizo/Cineorama offer a valuable case study in reconciling our diverse viewing practices today in light of the vast array of visual media appearing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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. As Shaun McNiff (1998) has defined it, art-based research allows for gaining research knowledge through artistic experimentation. Maggi Savin-Baden and Claire Howell-Major (2013) have insisted on the capacity of art-based research to explore the artist’s and the audience’s subjectivities. The specificity of the art-based research method is that it is ‘guided initially’ by a ‘research question’ (Savin-Baden and Wimpenny 2014: 46). Here, such a question would be: 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?
The subtitles were elaborated with the help of Noah Teichner.
Videos produced by Les Melvilliens.
Watching movies may be a relaxing form of entertainment or an actually ground-breaking experience. To perform a kind of spectatorship that adequately responds to the moving images demands much more than just keeping one’s eyes open. 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 strategies are unfolded through analyses of three film installations by the Danish visual artist Jesper Just.
The migration of film from cinemas to art institutions engendered a series of metamorphoses. A metamorphosis of the medium, through the convergence of film and installation, produced the moving image. A metamorphosis of the space within the screen itself transformed the spectators’ reception of this new language of the moving image. A metamorphosis of the exhibition space resulted from its relation to the new medium. These metamorphoses require museums to redefine the ways in which they can empower their audiences through effective curatorship. 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. Accompanied by an original sound composition that reinterprets the original film score in conjunction with the grainy images in the book, the piece comes full circle. Film Book Film is part of the experimental cinema tradition of dematerializing the image—here intricately done via sound—at the same time as it lifts the book up to get us closer to the images, proving their physicality but pushing them away, all along the lines and using the tricks of narrative cinema. 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. A crucial component of net.art is direct experience: audiences truly engage with a net.artwork only when they interact directly with it. In a gallery or museum, net.art becomes more of a testimony, an object of memory, losing its fundamental aspect of unfiltered practice, as well as the elements of surprise and positive disorientationsenses that spur from the unfolding of net.art as an experience mediated by its transposition in a physical place and into an object to be exhibited. 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. The essay is not intended as an ending to the discussion or its resolution; instead, it aims to bring attention back to net.art’s social aggregator function that was lost in the age of digital disillusionment.
Adopting a transhistorical and interdisciplinary approach, this article reflects on the multiplicity of contemporary screens and their influence on today’s modes of vision. Questioning the relational ontologies between screen, moving images, and body-technology, it analyzes three exhibitions that incorporate non-linear practices, reconfiguring the screen in three essential dimensions: depth (Baklite, 2016, Alexandre Estrela), laterality (Pedra Pedra, 2018, Hugo de Almeida Pinho), and circularity (Olho Zoomórfico/Camera Trap, 2018, Mariana Silva). The article also addresses changes undergone by the images’ frames and the consequent paradigm shift in how the viewer physically relates to these images, in order to consider perceptive, cognitive, and topological reconfigurations in moving image exhibition formats in museums and art galleries.
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 (concerts of Kino, Nautilus Pompilius, Punk festivals etc.) in the modern Russian museum discourse, in the context of the tight links between the musical underground and visual artists in Russia. The archives also include the records of the seminal Russian art events: Art against Commerce in Bitsevsky Park (1986), the first Sotheby auction in the USSR (1988), the first Moscow screening of Assa by Sergey Soloviev (1988), the legendary actionized exhibition in Sandunovsky Banya (Bathhouse), organized by KLAVA Vanguard Club, and others. Since these archival records are, essentially, object-related metadata, they are of highest value not only as sources for research work, but as museum exhibits as well.
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{name=tiktok#id=7036034902617361666}
{name=tiktok#id=7036039918325452034}
{name=tiktok#id=7036047521642319106}
{name=tiktok#id=7036318109359197442}
{name=tiktok#id=7036360286873390337}
{name=tiktok#id=7036361924723952897}
{name=tiktok#id=7036362585188388097}
{name=tiktok#id=7036363437462621441}
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. These films aim at making visible a work of art made invisible by censorship and the socio-political system in place, or by its public failure, on the one hand, and its brevity, on the other. The author shows how these films work as a (trans)portable museum.
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. Similar to how a soundtrack can set a specific mood in film to heighten the emotional impact of the sights and sounds of a story, place and space can also serve to enhance the impact of characters (artworks) depicted in exhibitions, while characters can help to heighten the effect of events described in writing.
