Crossing Borders: Artist Film-Makers in the New Decade

Abstract

In 1999 the art critic and historian Julian Stallabrass published a polemical attack on the phenomenon then widely known as YBA (Young British Artists). High Art Lite’s acute analysis railed not only against the work produced by the artists embraced by the brand, which he found generally vacuous and ‘easily digestible’, but also the institutions which interpreted, promoted and marketed the phenomenon, including public and private collections, galleries, salerooms and art journalism (1999: 2–4).1 The response of most critics he found at best inadequate and craven and, at worst, lending the work spurious weight and substance. Echoing his complaints, the literary critic John Carey subsequently pronounced recent exhibitions of conceptual art conceptually weak and declared the puffery of their accompanying catalogues to be often unintelligible and apparently intent upon confounding a general readership (2005: 258–9). The 2006 expanded and nominally revised edition of High Art Lite found Stallabrass as trenchant as ever. Here, responding to the analysis afforded by Stallabrass, I want to examine the migration of a number of gallery artists who came to prominence in the 1990s to feature film production in the last ten years, and the distribution of their work in a more public realm. Some of these artists fall into the category ‘YBA’ as outlined by Stallabrass in 1999 and 2006, some not: it could even be argued that the publicity generated by the YBAs was allowed to overshadow the work of their contemporaries. The trend is exemplified by such releases as Who I