Cinesthesia: Museum Cinema and the Curated Screen

The shelves of film history boast rich commentary on avant-garde cinema from surrealism through experimental flicker films and beyond. There are, as well, various wide-ranging volumes on video aesthetics from banked b+w TV installations through electronic glitch art. Inevitably, each traced development of screen display, whether analogue or digital, encounters the fact—and exhibition facets—of such work’s museum inclusion. More pointedly, the critical record has given us searching genealogies of dated celluloid film entering international galleries on its own way out of commercial dominance in the escalating digital era. This latter work elicits primarily what the museum does in bracketing a fading optical hegemony, less to stockpile than to anatomize it in its medial determinations. From a complementary perspective, Cinesthesia focuses rather on what moving images do, in effect, to reframe the very idea of gallery display—and the divergent materiality of its forms. Just as the privileged canvas or paper rectangle of painting or drawing, within the established precincts of “plastic art,” cedes ground to the wall screen or video monitor, so, more recently, has the 3D emplacement of sculptural forms evolved into the occupied image space of interactive virtual reality.

In its unique approach to the question of time-based mediation—and the insistent questions this raises in a museum context—Cinesthesia exerts sustained interpretive leverage within this whole reassessed spectrum of a moving-image aesthetic. Taking up dozens of screen artifacts over the last six decades, from 16mm loops to CCTV montage, it 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.

Like Seeing from Scratch in the Kino-Agora series, Cinesthesia is being published in a pandemic-era electronic edition only. It features several dozen colour photographs of museum installations and contemporary artworks. The dazzling design and innovative layout, eliminating scrolling on standard monitors, complement the style and unique format of the author’s text to create a stunning volume perfectly suited to its topic.