Documenting The Visual Arts

Description

Bringing together an international range of scholars, as well as filmmakers and curators, this book explores the rich variety in form and content of the contemporary art documentary. Since their emergence in the late 1940s as a distinct genre, documentaries about the visual arts have made significant contributions to art education, public television, and documentary filmmaking, yet they have received little scholarly attention from either art history or film studies. Documenting the Visual Arts brings that attention to the fore. Whether considering documentaries about painting, sculpture, photography, performance art, site-specific installation, or fashion, the chapters of this book engage with the key question of intermediality: how film can reframe other visual arts through its specific audio-visual qualities, in order to generate new ways of understanding those arts. The essays illuminate furthermore how art documentaries raise some of the most critical issues of the contemporary global art world, specifically the discourse of the artist, the dynamics of documentation, and the visuality of the museum. Contributors discuss documentaries by filmmakers such as Frederick Wiseman, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jia Zhangke, and Trisha Ziff, and about artists such as Michael Heizer, Ai Weiwei, Do Ho Suh, and Marina Abramović. This collection of new international and interdisciplinary scholarship on visual art documentaries is ideal for students and scholars of visual arts and filmmaking, as well as art history, arts education, and media studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures Acknowledgements List of contributors Introduction Historicizing the art documentary Conceptualizing the art documentary Notes PART I: Historical foundations 1. Henri Storck’s Le Monde de Paul Delvaux and Pygmalionist cinema Delvaux and cinema Staging perspectives on the nude The Surrealist documentary and Pygmalionism Sequel Notes 2. A sculptor’s life on screen: John Read’s film portraits of Henry Moore for BBC television Film portraiture The making of the filmic sculptor Expanding Moore’s point of view Portraiture, canonicity, and iconicity Conclusion Notes Acknowledgements PART II: Representing the artist 3. A portrait of the artist as automaton: creativity, labor, and technology in Tim’s Vermeer Tim’s Vermeer and the artist at work Art, illusionism, and automatism Tim’s automatisms and Vermeer’s Notes 4. Flesh and vision: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Dong China? The filmmaker and the artist: composition in time Notes 5. Globalizing Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei: performativity, participation, and politics The question of authority Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry and the problem of authorship The textual foregrounding of individual authority Flipping the bird: marketing an icon Conclusion Notes PART III: Questions of documentation 6. Film and the performance of Marina Abramovi´c: documentary as documentation Notes 7. Gained in translation: site-specificity in recent documentaries Models of site-specificity A filmmaker’s perspective: Site reimagined in Levitated Mass Conclusion: observer, collaborator, provocateur Notes 8. The wages of !W.A.R.: activist historiography and the feminist art movement Notes Acknowledgements PART IV: Museum gazing 9. When art exhibition met cinema exhibition: live documentary and the remediation of the museum experience Space and mobility (Im)mobility, detail, and materiality The guided gaze and curatorial intent Incongruous liveness Conclusion Notes 10. Museum movies, documentary space, and the transmedial Heterovisuality Notes 11. “Seeing too much is seeing nothing”: the place of fashion within the documentary frame Notes PART V: Art worlds and film worlds 12. Challenging the hierarchies of photographic history Notes 13. On the history (and future) of art documentaries and the film program at the National Gallery of Art The art documentary Finding an audience Film on art Film as art Looking to the future Notes Index