Thinking space : adapting narrative cinema for installation art

Ellis, R

Abstract

Gallery film and video installation have been figured within a discourse on the phenomenological subject, the avant-garde and its relation to the gallery as a site of political and cultural activity, and with respect to medium specificity. A question about video and film installation has been posed by, amongst others, Kate Mondloch (2007): how to reconcile a preoccupation with object and site, that embraces the spectator in a phenomenological relationship with the art object, largely situated within a modernist framework or postmodern coda, and a distinct type of image, the film image, with its narrative, and ‘illusionism’.
An alternative position is provided, informed by a Deleuzian transcendental empiricism that locates the phenomenological distinctions between art object and spectator as a form of tracing, to reposition the subject as a synthesis of time and therefore in experience rather than related to experience. The phenomenological position prioritises a transcendental subject in a certain relationship with the screen and concomitant artistic work stages the event of experience.
A theoretical stance that repositions the spectator in relation to the artwork, in which the completion of the work is not premised on the pre-existence of the spectator, is established. Subsequently, a detailed exposition is provided, of a studio practice methodology applied to a film production process, that adapts fiction cinema and moving image with respect to form and space as constituent compositional elements of gallery film installation. The adaptive manoeuvres identified through practice outcomes are applied to existing gallery film installation works to develop the position, that the conjunction of the moving image with form and space constitutes a unique or specific instance of movement and time images. An aesthetics of gallery film and video installation, as a discrete field of cultural and arts practice with its own history, sets of formalistic devices and concerns, but that has affinities also with cinema, rather than in opposition to it, is therefore provided.
It has been suggested that the destabilising impacts of placing screens within unfamiliar contexts privileges work of this kind with a critical function. Given the repositioning of the spectator with respect to the artwork made here, it is further explored whether the transformation of the cinematic constitutes its own kind of analytic. The process, to relate the spatial configuration of screens and cinematic form, and the addition of physical space to cinematic movement and time is identified with praxis, and which affords gallery film and video installation an analytic function.

Citation

Ellis, R. Thinking space : adapting narrative cinema for installation art. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jul 8, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 8, 2022
• Award Date: Sep 27, 2021