Between The Black Box And The White Cube

Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence, Between the Black Box and the White Cube travels back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art. Explaining that the postwar expanded cinema was a response to both developments, Andrew V. Uroskie argues that, rather than a formal or technological innovation, the key change for artists involved a displacement of the moving image from the familiarity of the cinematic theater to original spaces and contexts. He shows how newly available, inexpensive film and video technology enabled artists such as Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, and especially Andy Warhol to become filmmakers. Through their efforts to explore a fresh way of experiencing the moving image, these artists sought to reimagine the nature and possibilities of art in a post-cinematic age and helped to develop a novel space between the “black box” of the movie theater and the “white cube” of the art gallery. Packed with over one hundred illustrations, Between the Black Box and the White Cube is a compelling look at a seminal moment in the cultural life of the moving image and its emergence in contemporary art.

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

These essays explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art, seeking to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based.

This book examines key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through a series of case studies and through an extensive reference gallery of 150 different films.

Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.

Cinema plays a major role in contemporary art, yet the deeper influence of its diverse historical forms on artistic practice has received little attention. Screen Presence explores the intersections of film, popular media, and art since the 1950s through the examples of four pivotal figures - Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Mona Hatoum and Douglas Gordon. While their film-related works may appear primarily as challenges to conventional cinema, these artists draw on overlooked forms of popular film culture that have been commonplace, and even dominant, in specific social contexts. Through a range of new sources, including advertisements, specialty magazines, postcards, technical guides and souvenir programs, Stephen Monteiro demonstrates the dependence of contemporary artists on cinema's shifting applications and interpretations, offering a fresh understanding of the enduring impact of everyday media on how we make and view art.

Film festivals have had varied and complex histories starting with Benito Mussolini's invention of the form in Venice in 1932. Since then (and too often) festivals are thought of only in terms of the Hollywood film industry. This text is a celebration of all things un-dependently cinematic. The essays contained in this volume explore the cultural value of alternative film festivals from a wide range of perspectives and experiences. Contributors to this book include Gene Youngblood, Sasha Waters Freyer, Roger Beebe, Michael Betancourt, Charles Lum, Caryn Cline, Alexie Dmitriev, Clint Enns, Leslie Supnet, Chip Lord, Ben Popp, Kristen Lauth Shaeffer, Tina Wasserman, Gerry Fialka, Kamila Kuc, Steve Polta, Bryan Konefsky, Caroline Koebel, and Bart Weiss.

This edited book considers the vital position of artistic research in the landscapes and ecosystems of new materialism(s) and post-humanism(s), in and for higher education. The book aims to satisfy an urgent desire for change in the ways we link artistic and critical research practices, asking what new ways of thinking and creating for twenty-first century artistic and educational contexts we need in order to address the kinds of global complexities we face. Organised around five key themes including fictioning, reading, embodying, inhabiting and folding, the book acts as an entry point for academics, artists and scholar-practitioners to participate in the shaping of new forms of artistic research and practice that are relevant, participatory, and that urgently address the kinds of complex issues emergent in our twenty-first century context. In doing so, the book makes a key contribution to the development of emerging inter- and transdisciplinary artistic research practices across a range of fields, responding to the question - what kinds of research and practice worlds do we wish to create in times of urgency, crisis and complexity?