But how could one ever compete with the flow of dramatic image-messages that proliferate ad infinitum on ubiquitous flat screens that range in size from the handheld devices to electronic billboards and cinema screens? Not-Moving Images ![]() That the moving image is the medium of choice for many artists is not necessarily surprising after all, the moving image is the dominant mode of visual communication and display. Works that involve a critical approach to film, video and digital technology, and related assumptions concerning spectatorship, are in fact marginal to the field. However, a survey of contemporary British artists’ film and video, such as Assembly: A Survey of Artists Film and Video, Made in Britain 2008-2013 (Tate Britain) reveals an ambivalent attitude towards the moving image. One of the defining features of experimental film and video in Britain has been its critical stance towards cinema and television. 6 Correspondingly, many of Hall’s monitor pieces and installations, from 7 TV Pieces (1971) through to A Situation Envisaged: The Rite (1988) and 1001 TV Sets (2012), are a testament to the fact that the strategies in his practice – images of a burning television, banks of detuned televisions sets, and stacked monitors turned to the wall – often turned on negation. 5 Still, David Hall’s early essay ‘British Video Art: Towards An Autonomous Practice’ was an important thesis regarding the characteristics of experimental video and the role it might play in overturning default patterns of spectatorship as prescribed by television. With video not having taken the stage in cultural studies as readily as film, and with British art institutions’ cool reception towards its pioneering video artists, propositions regarding the ‘negative capability’ of video art has not had equal attention in Britain. Rees, contributed to an exposition of highly charged aesthetic strategies and their affinity with critical theory, which captured the imagination of filmmakers and film studies alike. The most provocative account of negation to have been published in Britain is Peter Gidal’s ‘Theory and Definition of Structural-Materialist Film.’ 3 Contemporaneous essays by the filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice, as well as writing by the critics Deke Dusinberre and A.L. 1 In an alternative history, comprising films by artists associated with Dada, Fluxus and the Lettristes, one could plot a lineage that is rather antipathetic towards cinema, envisioned instead as a means of re-imagining the role of media en masse. ![]() Adams Sitney, for example, the attack on ordinary sight in the imagery of Un Chien Andalou through to the films of Stan Brakhage, allow for the rejuvenation of cinematic vision. In the tradition of ‘visionary film’ outlined by P. Negation has different aims and ends though. The history of experimental cinema is underwritten by systems and symbols of negation, from recursive strategies that that lead to exhaustion through to different ways in which the image is obliterated. In contrast, experimental film and video, which is usually characterised by what it eschews (principally narrative structure), might be defined in terms of negation from the outset. ![]() As such, negation often finds metaphorical resonance in one’s favourite existentialist auteurs (say Robert Bresson or Béla Tarr) but for the most part the negative aesthetics of film and video are suppressed in cinema. ![]() Framing is a form of exclusion cutting is destructive as well as constructive the projected image turns on presence and absence and both film and digital projection involve periods of black or blanking between frames.
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