Cinema as ‘found’ footage in experimental Argentine video

Clara Garavelli

doi:10.1386/ncin.13.1.65_1

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the use of cinema in Argentine artists’ videos. In an age of open access to myriad moving images, the production, distribution and consumption of films and videos have reduced their costs and become a common popular activity. This contemporary visual excess seems to be dominated by postmodern processes of citation and resignification of objects and images in circulation, taken mainly from the mass media and the Internet. Accordingly, this article aims to examine experimental Argentine video productions that not only cite but also use cinema as an inter-trans-medial dispositif and thus as a source of renewal of video art. It studies ways in which video has moved from its dialogue with television to that with the cinematographic, from addressing archives or ‘found’ footage to problematizing, in a Bourriaudian vein, the use of ‘cultural artefacts’.

Highlights

This article explores the use of cinema in Argentine artists’ videos
The cultural and artistic paradigms have changed, moving away from the radicalism of the historical avant-garde to a disillusioned late capitalism, where notions of creation, authorship and originality are re-examined (Weinrichter 2009a: 19; Bourriaud 2005: 7). It is in these disciplines’ blurred boundaries – i.e. between the Arts and Cinema – that we find the experimental videos we are concerned with in this article – productions that explore the ethos of ‘relational aesthetics’4 and ‘found footage’, as well as the various forms of production, distribution and consumption of moving images
Many art historians have pointed out that video art precedes the actual use of video technology by artists and traced the origin of this art form to works that were created in film, such as the seminal work by Wolf Vostell Sun in your Head (1963), which consists of single-frame sequences of images taken from a TV set that suffer periodic distortions while captured with a 16-mm and Super 8 camera

Summary

Introduction

The artists who will be analysed in what follows problematize the culture of shared forms as defined by Bourriaud (2005) in their (mis)appropriation of moving images and in the relationship they establish with spectators, the film industry and the Art institution.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion