Framing Films: On the Contemporary Art Scene, Annika Wik
Annika Wik, PhD, Cinema studies at the University of Stockholm. Her interest is directed on the exploration of intersection of movie and contemporary art. She has published books and works: "Framing Films: On the Contemporary Art Scene", "Already-Made", 1998, "Already-Made", 1998, "Installed Stolen Objects", 2000, "Exposed Temporality: Film on the Contemporary Art Scene", 2001, "Off-Screen Space", 2003. etc.
Annika Wik was talking about changes in contemporary exhibition practice caused by appearance of movie and new media. As a film theorist, she explores influence of the movie on the contemporary art scene and the ways that artists are using existing film material in domain of artistic practice. Film has come to play a major role in a large number of recent art exhibitions. One of the reasons for this is that the world celebrated the centenary of cinema in 1995 and 1996. It was not just a big occasion within the film institution, but was also very noticeable in the art world. For studying film as a motif in art, "Förebild Film. Panoreringar över den Samtida Konstscenen" opens with a number of important exhibitions which took place before, during and after the centennial celebrations. This dissertation assesses art works based on existing film material and includes work by artists such as Douglas Gordon, Christoph Girardet, Stephanie Smith, Pierre Bismuth, Pierre Huyghe, Susan Hiller, Matthias Müller, Fiona Banner, Stan Douglas, Christoph Draeger, and others who have worked in a similar field. Today, these frequent but specific art events are part of an art tradition as well as a film tradition, and their explicit interartiality calls for an interdisciplinary research method. The purpose of this dissertation is to study the phenomenon of audio-visual appropriation, a term to which i return below, to discuss conceptual, aesthetic, and contextual tendencies in the contemporary art scene, and to examine how film influences the art scene. It is important to note that the art scene is here understood as a discursive field of the art event, gallery space, exhibitions, texts, reviews, and academic discourse. For a long time, art was represented on the movie in sense of framing, examining different surfaces, two dimensionality and three dimensionality. Annika Wik insists on the opposite view, on the way that artist is choosing movie frames and how he represents them in the new, gallery space. As an example, she induced utilization of one part of famous Hitchcock movie "Psycho", which was rearranged by Douglas Gordon which has screened it in gallery space, on the semi transparent screen situated in space, so visitors could go around the screen and get new dimension of its observation - movie negative. On that occasion, movie segment was slowed down from 24 frames to only two frames per second, so we've got stop motion effect of movie sequence, which has been expanded on duration of 24 hours. By this action, function of the screen was expended as well - it is no more just a projection surface, it became a sort of a sculpture, together with projected sequences. Consequently, focus is moving from movie narration to movie as a medium of expression.