DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-661414
title: The sculptural screen: spectatorship, exhibition, and Hollywood in contemporary film/video art

description: Film has always had an important relationship to the art world and a number of well-known artists, such as Fernand Léger, Salvador Dalí, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol, have long been known for their film work.  However, the filmic pursuits of these artists were generally considered secondary to their work in more traditional artistic mediums.  With the birth of structural film and the rise of video art in the 1960s, the art world embraced artists whose primary mode of practice was the moving image.   This movement has continued in recent years to include projected--often feature length--images, turning the gallery space into a place for film viewing and moving away from the small screen so associated with video art.  This dissertation examines the projected images created by a group of contemporary artists whose work directly engages with the mainstream film industry either through remakes and revision or through an appropriation of Hollywood's aesthetic practices.  The core artists of study for this project are Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, and Doug Aitken. This project positions these works within the history of avant-garde filmmaking and considers them as extensions of the interventions with mainstream media that avant-garde film has been invested with from its inception.  Additionally, it examines how this position within the art world raises important questions for what it means to be avant-garde with a shift from an underground, radical position to that of a culturally mainstream, commercial, high profile position. ❧ The move to the museum also poses specific spatial, environmental, and behavioral concerns for the artist and spectator to engage with and this project is engaged with an evaluation of these concerns.  Specifically, it examines the phenomenology of the gallery and how this viewing environment complicates theories of spectatorship since the gallery is not constrained by the conventions of the theatre space. In conjunction with this, the project is focused on medium specificity and considers how the properties of specific formats, primarily video in both its analog and digital forms, function within the art world.  It positions these moving image media works as ones that are distinctly interested in the medium and that often function as a showcase for obsolete technologies.  As a result, this project situates these new works within historic concerns about medium specificity within 20th Century art historical discourse. ❧ This project does not seek to be an overall history of the projected image in media art, but rather looks at specific artists--Huyghe, Gordon, Aitken--as case studies that show the multitude of issues at stake in these types of work, such as commodity, technology, medium specificity, spectatorship, fandom, and phenomenology.  While the work of these artists has been written on by art historians and surveyed in museum exhibitions, there has been relatively little work done on them by the field of Film and Media Studies.  As a result, this dissertation furthers existing scholarship by positioning these works within the framework of Film and Media Studies theory and practice in order to consider how these moving image media art pieces question the modes of viewing and creation that are so central to the field.  This dissertation also seeks to position itself within Visual Culture and the interdisciplinarity of that field with its engagement with Art History, Film Studies, and other cultural practices.