A Wider Audience: Robert Rauschenberg, the White Paintings and CinemaScope

Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings have been interpreted as enigmatic “blank slates” that question the meaning of painting and the gallery experience. First shown in New York in 1953, at the same time that widescreen cinema was launched with the CinemaScope film The Robe, the White Paintings created a dialogue between movie theatre and art gallery as places of popular spectacle. Despite the competing aesthetic claims of modernist painting and widescreen cinema in mid-twentieth-century America, both addressed the spectator as active participant. Ideas of “action painting” competed with attempts at producing screen action requiring a ranging eye. This chapter demonstrates how, at the moment Hollywood sought to promote movie-going as a “serious”, engrossing art form through widescreen picture formats, Rauschenberg sought to relegate painting to a supporting role in the activity of the everyday as shadows of the surrounding world would move across it screen-like surface.

The Screen Scene: Andy Warhol, the Factory and Home Movies

In his prodigious output of hundreds of films throughout the 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol cultivated an approach to making and viewing movies that borrowed heavily on the conventions of family home-movie culture. Warhol’s Factory studio in New York and his entourage of so-called “Superstars” functioned much like a family of misfits. This chapter explores film’s role in this context, analysing how Warhol combined improvised scenarios with personality differences to forge or reinforce intimate relations through filmmaking. It argues that his tendency to screen these films in the Factory—often before the people who appear on screen—functioned as a means of identifying, describing, and securing a nucleus of close social relations. Through comparison with the rhetoric of home-movie advertising and guidebooks, it teases out ways Warhol’s films paradoxically became avant-garde distortions of home-movie practices through strict adherence to suggestions and tips given to home-movie practitioners.

Conclusion

This conclusion briefly summarizes the book’s claims concerning the role of popular media in contemporary art. It reaffirms the need to consider wider visual and material cultural production, as well as alternative forms of media exhibition and participation, when studying moving-image-based artworks.

A Monument in Ruins: Douglas Gordon, Screen Archaeology and the Drive-in

Cinema’s 1990s centenary brought declarations of its demise amid the internet and digital filmmaking and viewing. Throughout this period Douglas Gordon embarked on a reconsideration—part autopsy, part archaeological dig—of film as a medium and social practice. Projecting images appropriated from amateur films and Hollywood classics, Gordon created exhibition environments that emphasized the screen as an active component by positioning it as a sometimes fragile, sometimes monumental object of presentation. This chapter considers multiple works by Gordon, culminating with close examination of 5 Year Drive-By, an installation situated like an abandoned drive-in in the California desert in 2001. By revisiting the drive-in as commercial cinema’s attempt to bring film and car culture together with political and historical narratives of landscape and conquest, the chapter argues that 5 Year Drive-By can function as both geological medium and archaeological ruin. As such, it aligns popular modes of cinema with discussions of the twentieth-first-century legacy of modernity.

Private Dis-Pleasures: Mona Hatoum, Mediated Bodies and the Peep Show

In subject and mode of presentation, Mona Hatoum’s 1980s and 90s video works centring on the body drew on the history of pornographic and medical imaging techniques. Making comparisons to porn peepshows and MRI, both of which were newsworthy in Britain (for very different reasons) when Hatoum left Lebanon to study art in London in the 1970s, this chapter provides a close analysis of a handful of her installations, chief among them her Corps Etranger of 1994. It examines how Hatoum’s heavily mediated images and carefully constructed environments raised questions about gender, sexuality, and the identity politics of social space. Just as peepshows became political battlegrounds eliciting heavy government regulation by testing the rules of public space and social interaction, Hatoum’s installations tested the rules and expectations of art exhibition spaces. These works opened zones where visitors would become equally aware of the potential for transgression and surveillance in their own daily performance of body and self.

Introduction: Cinema’s Grey Spaces

Art historical interpretations of the production and exhibition of moving-image works in art spaces often rest on a reductive oppositional pairing of the “white cube” of the museum or gallery space and the “black box” of the movie theatre. This introduction challenges that approach, arguing that new methods and research drawn from media and cultural studies—rather than art history—are critical to contextualizing the origins and significance of such art. It demonstrates how these works and the terms of their display may diverge from the standards of the move theatre while including aspects of other forms of popular film and video culture, from the drive-in to the peep show. It concludes by laying the groundwork for a more inclusive and historically rooted approach to the relationship between art and popular media, one better suited to identifying and measuring the artistic influence of an extraordinary range of popular media forms and practices.