Film and Video Art by Stuart Comer

 

In this book Stuart Comer edits a collection of Film and Video Art.

“Experiments in film and video have encouraged significant shifts in our understanding of the intricate relations between images, perception, authorship, time, space and our own corporeal [physical] presence as viewers.”

Film and video art figure heavily in The Tanks programme and it is important to acknowledge the role they have in shaping the space and people’s experience of it. Film and video art encompass and reference cinema, performance, gallery, television and the internet, whilst simultaneously dissolving the boundaries between these divergent practices. Comer reckons that “artists have used the projected image as a mirror, a weapon, an analytical tool and a mise en abyme in which the virtual and the real unfold into one another with increasing complexity.”

A ‘mise en abyme’ is a way of describing the visual experience of standing between two mirrors with the images in each recurring infinitely. It lends itself as a formal technique in art where an image recurrently contains a smaller copy of itself. Perhaps this is the most apt articulation of the potential of The Tanks: The Tanks as mise en abyme: an abyss of light and image recurring infinitesimally.

What I also took from this book was that he explains that typically, ‘non-object’ forms of artwork (like performance, film and choreography) are difficult to exhibit in museums because they aren’t stable, unlike paintings or sculptures. Performance art (including film and choreography) has a rich but obscured history, partly because of the difficulty curators face in presenting these works. Galleries and museums are about passive viewing, about preserving things, petrifying them – they are the antithesis of the live event – and The Tate is no different. And yet The Tanks differs from a traditional gallery/museum because it is about encountering art, not looking at it. The Tanks is about changing how people behave in a museum and it is about artists and artworks that both develop and shape that change.