Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art
Andrew V. Uroskie
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0226842991
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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effectively summarized the past and predicted the future of multimedia spectacle, the decidedly low-tech, artisanal, and critically unheralded Expanded Cinema Festival would serve both as its antipode and critical rejoinder. Minimalist rather than maximalist, the “expansion” in its name did not concern the size or number of screens, nor the speed or intensity of the imagery projected on them. A conceptual rather than a formal expansion, it did not concern the formal qualities of cinematic image
its situations, these have been treated merely as technical problems to be mastered rather than artistic elements to be explored. That is why, for Marc’O, the most fundamental basis for a future art of the moving image lies in the investigation and development of these kinds of framings, both the manner in which they engender particular forms of spectatorial receptivity and the effects of the distortion and transformation they effect on the representation of things in the world. This new model
and Op Art in the years to come—have long been taken as the principal formal and conceptual innovations of the Movement exhibition. Yet beyond these two forms, Movement invoked a specific idea of the moving image—of cinema—whose aesthetic and conceptual significance within postwar art would grow in the years to come. Vasarely, then the dominant figure at Galerie Denise René and author of the exhibition’s “Yellow Manifesto,” made no secret of his profound interest in the idea of cinema. Channeling
work “is meant to dispel the idea of secrecy, substituting instead the experience of an intelligible process and its duration.”46 Yet the simplicity of Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making is profoundly deceptive. Far from culminating in a l iteral, self-reflexive demonstration, the formal reduction inherent in Morris’s Box was not unlike the “transparency” with which Breer understood his mutoscope works: a magnifying glass held up to a supposedly simple mechanism so as to reveal its
attempting to understand this state of affairs, Mekas evoked the institutional situation of the festival at Lincoln Center: “There are good people working for the festival. Their intentions are good. But they are split between their own tastes and what Lincoln Center stands for.” Just as MoMA had come to be understood not simply as an institution of modern art, but as the very arbiter and bellwether of artistic modernism, the festival’s prestigious location signaled the long-desired cultural