The filmic anomaly: Moments in post -minimalism (1966--1970).
Item
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Title
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The filmic anomaly: Moments in post -minimalism (1966--1970).
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Identifier
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AAI3063823
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identifier
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3063823
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Creator
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de Bruyn, Eric Charles Hendrik.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Anna Chave
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Cinema
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Abstract
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The Filmic Anomaly presents a forgotten chapter in the early history of media art by focusing on the films of five American visual artists: Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. The films by these post-minimalists were intended to be viewed within the institutional framework of the visual arts and, therefore, do not belong to the pre-existing genres of documentary or experimental cinema. It is precisely the anomalous status of filmic projection within the gallery setting that these five artists were determined to exploit.;Post-minimal film represented a hybridic practice that was situated in the charged overlap between different technical procedures, discursive positions and historical moments. Three genealogical strands of art history were interwoven in post-minimal film: modernism, minimalism and pop art. Barry, Bochner, Graham, Nauman, and Serra adopted the medium of film in order to work through this multiple lineage in a critical and self-reflective fashion. In their hands, film gained a distinctly serial and performative aspect that worked to decenter the contemplative viewer of modernist aesthetics. At the same time, the post-minimal practice of film raised the issue of the transformed status of the art object within a post-modern society of mass communication. Hence, the underlying paradox of the post-minimal turn to film which referenced the productivist methods of the historical avant-garde but also acknowledged the very obsolescence of film within the present age of television.;The dissertation is organized around a set of specific case studies which are situated within the wider, transformational field of institutional, discursive and technical practices that marked the historical period of the later sixties. Not only does The Filmic Anomaly reconstruct the exhibition history of post-minimal film between 1966 and 1970 and analyze the artists's appropriation of such popular inventions as the Super 8 mm camera, but it also brings the conflictual arena of contemporary theory and criticism to bear upon the performative staging of subjectivity in post-minimal film.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
