An ‘Automatic Escape’ or a ‘Beautiful Question’? Cinema and Experimental Film after Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’

Abstract

This article considers the small run of experimental films made by Robert Morris in the years immediately after the publication of Michael Fried’s essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’. The author argues that Morris’s films were a form of reply to the essay and enact, on screen, many of the issues at play in the discussions between Fried and Morris and other Minimal artists from the time, such as theatricality, the mobility of the viewer and medium specificity. With the films by Morris as a starting point, the article goes on to consider parallel concerns within Structural Film and the historical and aesthetic crossovers between sculpture and the then new concern with cinematic media. As such, the author explores the cinematic condition of sculpture after Minimalism and the ways in which images ‘moved’ within the cultural and economic discourse of what was then contemporary art.