Book Description

In this profusely illustrated meditation on the phenomenon of "museum cinema," the screening of films in art museums, Garrett Stewart explores the aesthetic and formal issues raised by the proliferation of screens and films in museums in the digital era. Taking up dozens of screen artifacts over the last six decades, from 16mm loops to CCTV montage, Cinesthesia investigates in exemplary depth an array of landmark innovations from the 1960s down through the latest conceptualist exhibitions. Probing and comparative at once, it is the first study to place individual works under close formal and cultural analysis, and in steady dialogue with each other, not just as intrinsic experimental ventures but as medial challenges: challenges both to their parent forms and genres (theatrical film, broadcast TV) and to the contemplative aesthetic of museum looking. The kinetics of watching are found in this way, repeatedly and often ironically, to reroute or even derange – and ultimately to reform – the apprehending gaze. Cinesthesia includes 44 full-page colour illustrations by nearly 30 artists, including Christian Marclay, Tacita Dean, John Akomfrah, Rodney Graham, Eve Sussman and Matej Kren. "How is it – by what aesthetic criteria – that we, in ticketed public space, go to see film without going to the movies? What happens, that is, when screening times are replaced by the intermittent and elective time of transient viewing in sectored zones of a gallery layout? What new (audio-) visual parameters, in other words, are set in place when moving-image work finds itself welcomed into the environs of the proverbial 'fine' (or plastic) arts?" — Garrett Stewart