Artists’ Moving Image : Cinema as Archive

Artists have long been fascinated by film, but recent decades have seen an explosion in direct artistic engagements with mainstream cinema, particularly from the classical and post-classical eras of Hollywood filmmaking. Ranging from directly sampling film clips to imitating aspects of films, these engagements deploy highly recognisable examples of cinema to activate collective cultural memory. Artists’ Moving Image presents a diverse and wide-ranging body of works, from established artists such as Steve McQueen and Douglas Gordon to mid-career artists like Jesse Jones and Rachel Maclean, reinvigorating the existing ‘canon’ of cinematic artists’ films.

Beyond discussing individual works, Sarah Smith categorizes and analyzes the trends in this expanding area of art practice, arguing that the point of interest is not cinema (and its history) per se, but what its evocation as cultural archive can illuminate about the legacies of the past in the present. Examining subjects such as found footage as feminist poetics, the documentary turn in contemporary art and the unfinished film, she shows how artists’ films interrogate dominant cinematic forms and their cultural meanings. For anyone interested in contemporary art, film studies or exhibition practice, this book is a defining exploration of how cinema operates as twentieth-century archive in recent artists’ moving image.