Film and video create an illusory world, a reality elsewhere, and a material presence that both dramatizes and demystifies the magic trick of moving pictures. Beginning in the 1960s, artists have explored filmic and televisual phenomena in the controlled environments of galleries and museums, drawing on multiple antecedents in cinema, television, and the visual arts. This volume traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Sound is given due attention, along with the shift from analogue to digital, issues of spectatorship, and the insights of cognitive science. Woven into this genealogy is a discussion of the procedural, political, theoretical, and ideological positions espoused by artists from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Historical constructs such as Peter Gidal's structural materialism, Maya Deren's notion of vertical and horizontal time, and identity politics are reconsidered in a contemporary context and intersect with more recent thinking on representation, subjectivity, and installation art. The book is written by a critic, curator, and practitioner who was a pioneer of British video and feminist art politics in the late 1970s. Elwes writes engagingly of her encounters with works by Anthony McCall, Gillian Wearing, David Hall, and Janet Cardiff, and her narrative is informed by exchanges with other practitioners. While the book addresses the key formal, theoretical, and historical parameters of moving-image installation, it ends with a question: "What's in it for the artist?"

Critic, curator, historian of the moving image and artist, Catherine Elwes's account of media installation is by turns authoritative, illuminating, intelligent and moving. Her eye and ear for the nuances of works and ideas, and most of all her emotional intelligence, brings her to the forefront of commentators on the most important art form of the 21st century. -- Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London

About the Author
Catherine Elwes is Professor of Moving Image Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and founding editor of Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ). Elwes is the author of Video Art: A Guided Tour (2005) and Video Loupe (2000) and the founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ).

Reviews
[A] wild ride of a book... Elwes has made an admirable assault on the field and I am sure this book will influence generations of students. Art Monthly Fascinating. Cinema Technology


Awards
Winner of Moving Image Publication of the Year 2015.



Book Information
ISBN 9780231174510
Author Catherine Elwes
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Wallflower Press
Publisher Columbia University Press