Description
American artist Joseph Cornell produced an extraordinary body of film work which is much less well known than his famous boxes and collage works. This book makes the case for the films' significance in the history of the 20th-century avant-garde.
About the Author
Michael Pigott is Assistant Professor of Video Art and Digital Media, a post shared equally across the departments of History of Art, Film and Television Studies and the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.
Reviews
Compared to other aspects of Joseph Cornell's art practice, remarkably little has been written about his films. Michael Pigott, in his rich and provocative engagement with these screen works, suggests that this critical silence "arises at least partly from the difficulty in accounting for [them] within contemporary frameworks." These are films, he argues, that operate as "solutions to problems that have only now become apparent as such"-films whose significance and resonance we can now, from the vantage point of intervening decades, begin to unpack. Drawing inspiration from (among others) Siegfried Zielinski's notion of anarchaeology and Michel Foucault's archaeological investigations of sociocultural stutters and abrasions, Pigott proposes positioning Cornell as a central figure in "an alternate history of the twentieth century." In this Cornellian century, the filmmaker takes his rightful place as a key antecedent of, or influential figure within, numerous movements or strains of practice: "revelationist" film, remix culture, slow cinema. * Cinema Journal *
Book Information
ISBN 9781474238458
Author Michael Pigott
Format Paperback
Page Count 144
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Weight(grams) 239g