In 2007 Isaac Julien’s three-screen installation Baltimore (2003) was presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Coming to the art world from a filmmaking background, Julien brought a cinematic approach to his gallery work that was invigorating and felt like a rebirth of cinema. His editing style – distributing a single narrative across multiple screens – combined with a high degree of technical sophistication, set the work apart from other video artworks of the time. This was already six years after a major exhibition of Julien’s work had been presented at the MCA in Sydney,[i] and, despite the number of artists approaching the creation of moving image installations from a similarly cinematic perspective, film installation was still an emerging form.

Fast-forward a decade and thanks to the domestication of digital video technologies and the ubiquity of screens in our lives, moving image is no longer considered the interloper it once was in gallery exhibitions, and the image quality and sophistication of moving image art has improved exponentially. Artists such as Julien, or Steve McQueen, Chantal Akerman, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and Ben Rivers (to name but a few) have straddled the divide between art and cinema throughout their careers, yet confusion over the categorisation of the output of artists working between film, video and installation persists. The ‘artist’s film’ has become a popular term at film festivals and art galleries alike, and the ‘essay film’ is a category that has also recently gained traction. Both these terms – used to refer to single-channel work made for either a cinema or gallery – seem to imply that a film is a work that exists in single-screen format. Yet, the work of artists and filmmakers producing what can be described as film installations expands our understanding of what a film can be.

During the last few years, there have been several significant works commissioned by Australian galleries that occupy this not-so-new, yet still somewhat transgressive territory. Last year ACMI commissioned Manifesto, a thirteen-channel installation by German artist Julian Rosefeldt – known for his film installations, which deconstruct and expose the mechanisms and artifice of film. Manifesto, a collaboration with Cate Blanchett, draws the cinematic world into the gallery in a more complex way. Blanchett embodies thirteen different personas – including a homeless man, a school teacher, a funeral orator, a factory worker and a newsreader – each of whom delivers a speech collaged from artists’ manifestos. In compiling the scripts, Rosefeldt drew on the writings of the futurists, dadaists, and situationists, as well as individual artists, architects, choreographers and filmmakers such as Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer, Dziga Vertov and Jim Jarmusch.

While famous for her film work, Blanchett is well-known for her engagement with the arts more broadly, especially in theatre; and this is not the first time she has collaborated with an artist on a moving image work. In 2008 the National Portrait Gallery commissioned Portrait of Cate Blanchett, a single-channel installation by David Rosetzky, made in collaboration with choreographer Lucy Guerin. During the past year, Blanchett has also been involved in the making of RED, a film work by Del Kathryn Barton, commissioned by the Art Gallery of South Australia. In addition to these, there was also the inaugural Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, awarded to Angelica Mesiti in 2013 for the cinematic, three-screen installation The Calling; and in 2014 the Adelaide Film Festival, Carriageworks, and the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art joined forces with several others[ii] to commission Hossein Valamanesh’s Char Soo, a four-screen collaborative installation with his son, filmmaker Nassiem Valamanesh.

These are all ambitious projects with extremely high production values; most were shot on location, and were planned and produced according to a model that reflects a quasi-film industry mode of production. And they are not low-budget projects. Compared with a feature film, the budgets may be small, but in the art world context, these are large-scale projects that increasingly require a consortium-funding model. In the case of Manifesto, for example, ACMI was one of eight institutions to invest in the project;[iii] and RED is supported by no fewer than five funding bodies and multiple collectors.[iv] As the popularity of such funding models grows, artists are able to access the increasingly affordable technologies that allow them to produce work of cinematic quality.

As we know, the cinema and the gallery provide very different conditions for viewing, and audiences approach these environments with expectations conditioned by the conventions of each space. The gallery allows for greater ambiguity and films that offer open-ended propositions and provocations, rather than presenting resolved plots. While this is, of course, achievable in a cinema feature film, it is not a mainstream approach and is most often associated with directors who are likely to also produce work for the gallery environment (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Amy Gebhardt, Warwick Thornton, or Amiel Courtin-Wilson, for example). Presenting cinematic work within the gallery draws viewers into the mode of attentiveness and absorption that is associated with the cinema,[v] yet also allows them the freedom to move and engage with more or less immersion, as they desire. For artists/filmmakers whose feature films already challenge the conventions of the cinema, working within the gallery environment offers a space for experimentation, where they can explore the physical relationship between the viewer and the moving image, and challenge the single-screen convention associated with film.

Many artists working with film installation have used the space of the gallery to interrogate the nature of film itself and our engagement with cinema as a form. Candice Breitz, Tracey Moffatt, Douglas Gordon, Christian Marclay, Damiano Bertoli, Johan Grimonperez, Pierre Huyghe, Sheena Macrae, Yang Fudong, and Julian Rosefeldt are just a few of the artists, whose installation works deconstruct, critique and give new meaning to cinema culture. Candice Breitz, for example, appropriates and re-works footage from mainstream cinema to reflect on celebrity, identity and the overlap between mass-media fictions and lived reality; whereas Yang Fudong draws on cinematic influences including Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Luc Godard and Chinese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s to construct his own exquisitely-styled film installations, which reflect on aspirations and anxieties prevalent in contemporary China.

For Rosefeldt and Barton, working directly with an actor such as Blanchett inevitably brings an element of the fame and celebrity culture associated with the film industry to the artwork. As has been seen through other works featuring famous actors (such as Doug Aitken’s projects with Tilda Swinton, Donald Sutherland, and Chloë Sevigny, or Isaac Julien’s Playtime featuring James Franco), the celebrity drawcard can result in increased publicity and recognition, but there is no guarantee this will translate into deeper engagement with the work for those visitors who have been attracted predominantly by the pull of star power.

In her visceral film RED, Barton has created a conceptually-driven work, in which the ‘star’ is the redback spider, whose life-cycle becomes a metaphor for feminine power. Blanchett, in the lead role, is clearly recognisable, but her ability to give herself over completely to a role serves to generate a film that succeeds through the talents of all involved rather than one individual’s star power. This is an artist’s film; it is Barton’s first foray into live action, and the sensuous visual styling of the film (which includes animated elements) contains numerous filmic references – from the Jorōgumo of Japanese anime to the work of David Lynch and Floria Sigismondi. While Barton’s previous film project (Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, 2015, co-directed with Brendan Fletcher) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, RED’s premiere at the Art Gallery of South Australia as part of the 2017 Adelaide Festival places it immediately within a distinctly art world context.

Manifesto, in contrast, positions Blanchett front and centre, boldly emphasising the filmic nature of the work and highlighting the artifice. Bringing an actor predominantly known for her film work together with the texts of artists’ manifestos becomes a powerful statement about the nature of art, film and entertainment in contemporary society. The democratisation of creativity in contemporary culture is accompanied by a media obsessed with celebrity. Blanchett’s immediate recognisability lends the work something of her own celebrity status, but the diverse personas she performs also highlight the difficulty of gaining individual traction in our media/communication saturated world. This juxtaposition underscores the strength of the declarations and demands made in the manifestos, ‘but also shows how curiously unreal it would seem if we were now to proclaim universal ideals in the form of a manifesto’ today.[vi]

By collaborating with Blanchett on the project, Rosefeldt questions the power of art in a contemporary society saturated with entertainment options and leaving little space for either rupture or reflection. This approach could have resulted in a work that used these historical texts as nothing more than fodder for the production of yet more entertainment, but Manifesto does not fall into this trap. Rather, through humour and Blanchett’s talent for transformation, the work demonstrates the complexity in the relationship between the nature of art and the nature of humanity. The collaged texts and their constructed performances act out the human desire for revolution, and form a plea to contemporary artists and audiences to reconsider the necessary and political role art plays in society. The alternative, Manifesto seems to imply, is for our essential humanity – the life-giving passion that is the force behind the manifestos – to become lost in pretence.

Manifesto produces, through simultaneous projection, as well as through the collaging of original texts, a chorus – a babel of ideas – within which visitors can focus on each performance in the order of their choosing. The synchronisation that occurs, in tone at least, once in each cycle as the characters break into hypnotic direct address, presents these characters as ciphers for the ideas that resurface again and again in the manifestos; history collapsing into a moment. The immersion experienced within the installation is not something that could be achieved in the cinema, where immersion comes in a different form. It will be interesting to see the way in which Rosefeldt has adapted Manifesto into the single-screen feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year.

Manifesto powerfully demonstrates that film installations have the capacity to use cinematic language together with the physical possibilities of the gallery to engender an experience that moves beyond conventional cinema presentation. An artist working with the language of cinema is, of course, nothing new. But for many moving image artists, there has long been a desire to carve out a distinct space separate from the cinema, television, and other screen-based platforms. Artists such as Rosefeldt, Julien and the many others actively working between the cinema and the gallery demonstrate the ongoing possibility for adaptation of existing forms, showing that the gallery and the cinema alike continue to be spaces for experimentation.

ENDNOTES

[i] The Film Art of Isaac Julien, MCA, Sydney, 15 Feb–22 April 2001, a touring exhibition from the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, curated by Amada Cruz.

[ii] Carriageworks, Adelaide Film Festival, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia in association with Sydney Film Festival and produced by Felix Media

[iii] Manifesto is co-commissioned by the ACMI – Australian Centre for the Moving Image Melbourne, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Sprengel Museum Hanover. The work is co-produced by the Burger Collection Hong Kong and the Ruhrtriennale. It was realised thanks to the generous support of the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and in cooperation with Bayerischer Rundfunk.

[iv] RED was produced by Angie Fielder; executive producers are Cecilia Ritchie, Art Gallery of South Australia, ARNDT Art Agency, Besen Collection (Melbourne), and Burger Collection (Hong Kong); the film was financed by AFTRS, Art Gallery of South Australia, Besen Collection (Melbourne), and Burger Collection (Hong Kong).

[v] Sam Ishii-Gonzales, (2012), ‘Suspended Meaning: On Bergson and Cinematic Perception’, in World Picture, issue 7, Autumn 2012, http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_7/Ishii-Gonzales.html

 [vi] ‘To Give Visible Action to Words’, in Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto, London: Koenig Books, 2016: 87