Books by Andrew V Uroskie
Jonas Mekas: The Camera was Always Running, 2022
On a cold night in late February 1964-through a basement coal chute, under cover of darkness-Jona... more On a cold night in late February 1964-through a basement coal chute, under cover of darkness-Jonas Mekas broke into the Midway Theatre off Times Square accompanied by Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and the cast of the Living Theatre. 1 They had all been there the night before for what was supposed to have been the final performance of Kenneth H. Brown's The Brig. The company had been served with an eviction notice, and that evening's performance was to mark the end of its fifteen-year residency in New York. But Mekas had been overwhelmed-by the work as well as the occasion. After a few minutes, he stormed out of the crowded theater to wait alone outside, possessed by an idea: out of the ephemeral experience of a live performance, he would craft an unscripted documentary record on film. Three years earlier, Shirley Clarke's cinematic adaptation of The Connection, the Living Theatre's prior effort, had become one of the breakthrough successes of the fledgling New American Cinema. Yet Mekas did not wish to follow Clarke's path: "I am not interested in adapting plays, I always said so." He would produce "not an adaptation of a play" but "a record of my eye and my temperament lost in the play." 2 This was what had necessitated his sudden departure: "I didn't want to know anything about what would happen next in the play," he later wrote in his "Movie Journal" column for the Village Voice. "I wanted to see it with my camera. I had to film it, not knowing what will come next, like real life." 3 Outside the theater,
Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expa... more Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic to rethink entrenched paradigms of medium- and disciplinary-specificity. While scholarship on Expanded Cinema has typically focused on European film-based performance of the 1970s, this study explores the historical and conceptual origins of the idea in mid-‘60s New York. Contesting an endemic, medium-specific framework that would reinforce film’s proper place within the cinematic theater, the Expanded Cinema to materially and conceptually displace the moving image so as to initiate a series of disruptive encounters across interdisciplinary institutions of artistic exhibition and spectatorship.
The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from practice the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2), to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and the performance stage (chapter 4). The concluding chapter returns to 1966 to understand the Expanded Cinema in crisis at the height of its early popularity – as the introduction of video feedback helps to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse situation of televisual culture.
Papers by Andrew V Uroskie
Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2020
As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seei... more As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic out of the immateriality of the film screen and separate it into its physical components within the gallery space. How to read these reformulations of the cinematic medium - and their critique of what it is and has been? In Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, leading film theorists consider artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configuration of the key categories of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, so interrogating the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. This book takes film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposes it with artworks that render cinema as a material object. In the process, it unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have commonly been seen as virtually incompatible, renewing our understanding of each and, more to the point, their interactions.
Choice Reviews Online, Dec 18, 2014
Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art
The contemporary form of David OReilly’s Everything (2017) belies its engagement with the past – ... more The contemporary form of David OReilly’s Everything (2017) belies its engagement with the past – specifically, with the origins of both ecological consciousness and our globalized informatic economy in the visual culture and systems thinking of the late 1960s. The work’s central formal device is the mode of scalar visualization popularized within the Eames’s iconic Powers of Ten (1977). That film placed Man at the literal and metaphorical center of its universe, obviating both non-human life and ecological relationality to do so. By contrast, OReilly’s world solicits our identification with literally ‘everything’ – living and non-living, from the cosmically large to the microscopically small – except the human. A soundtrack featuring the late Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts reinforces its vision of total relationality.
Limitado por el estilo academico de su formacion pictorica en los Estados Unidos, Robert Breer se... more Limitado por el estilo academico de su formacion pictorica en los Estados Unidos, Robert Breer se traslado a Paris a principios de los anos cincuenta y congenio con el "nucleo duro" en torno a la galeria Denise Rene. Sin embargo, en lugar de seguir la tendencia pictorica del "Op-Art" de Vasarely que haria famosa a la galeria, Breer siguio su propio camino. Volviendo al antiguamente abandonado espectador del "mutoscopio" de la prehistoria del cine industrial, Breer experimento con la creacion de un nuevo tipo de animacion abstracta que puede ser contemplada dentro de la galeria de arte ya sea como pelicula o como escultura. Si bien habia sido olvidado tanto por los estudios de cine como por la historia del arte, las obras para mutoscopio que creo de 1958-1964 fueron un punto de inflexion crucial en el arte de la posguerra: la realizacion del nuevo concepto de instalacion de imagenes en movimiento en el espacio fisico muy iluminado de la galeria de arte, ...
journal of visual culture journal of visual culture
Journal of Visual Culture, 2011
Page 1. journal of visual culture journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] SAGE Publica... more Page 1. journal of visual culture journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) Copyright © The Author(s), 2011. Reprints and permissions ...
Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, 2020
The contemporary form of David OReilly’s Everything (2017) belies its engagement with the past – ... more The contemporary form of David OReilly’s Everything (2017) belies its engagement with the past – specif icially, with the origins of both ecological consciousness and our globalized informatic economy in the visual culture and systems thinking of the late ‘60s. The work’s central formal device is the mode of scalar visualisation popularized within the Eames’s iconic Powers of Ten (1977). That film placed Man at the literal and metaphorical center of its universe, obviating both non-human life and ecological relationality to do so. By contrast, OReilly’s world solicits our identification with literally “everything” – living and non-living, from the cosmically large to the microscopically small – except the human. A soundtrack featuring the late Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts reinforces its vision of total relationality.
Secuencias Revista De Historia Del Cine, 2010
Información del artículo El juguete filosófico como modelo: Duchamp, Breer y la emergencia del ci... more Información del artículo El juguete filosófico como modelo: Duchamp, Breer y la emergencia del cine en el espacio expositivo durante la posguerra.
Organised Sound, 2012
Within William Seitz’s 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Ar... more Within William Seitz’s 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Art, the question of framing – of art’s exhibitionary situation within and against a given environment – had emerged as perhaps the major issue of postwar avant-garde practice. Beyond the familiar paintings of Johns and Rauschenberg, a strategy
of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer’s film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen’s Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer’s three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen’s aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.
Francois Bovier, ed., Early Video Art and Experimental Film Networks. An earlier version was published in "The Exhibition of a Film / L'Exposition d'un Film," edited by Mattieu Copeland, 2015, 2016
Merce Cunningham is surely one of the greatest names in the history of 20th century choreography.... more Merce Cunningham is surely one of the greatest names in the history of 20th century choreography. His decades-long collaboration with John Cage—that unambiguous lodestone for postwar experimental music—would seem the quintessential example of an oeuvre whose basic contours have long since been established, one which confines the art historian’s labor to the realm of exegesis. Yet within this wide- ranging literature, the Cunningham Company’s investigation of “dance for camera” has been invariably dated to the mid-1970s, when Charles Atlas was established as the company’s first filmmaker-in- residence. [1] Yet as significant as this collaboration would be, Cunningham’s groundbreaking work within the field of post-cinematic choreography had actually begun nearly half a decade before, when he was invited by the legendary San Francisco Bay Area public radio and television pioneer Richard O. Moore to produce what would be the company’s first work for broadcast television. The resulting production–lost and forgotten for nearly four decades–not only presaged Cunningham’s future investigations into moving image choreography, but leveraged an unprecedented affiliation with broadcast television to stage and to consider the changing nature of public space and public art within a newly televisual public sphere.
Published in the book:
현대 미술, 글로벌 트렌드 의 권위 를 넘어서 _ 오늘 의 미술 을 바라 보는 여섯 개의 시선 (Contemporary Art, ... more Published in the book:
현대 미술, 글로벌 트렌드 의 권위 를 넘어서 _ 오늘 의 미술 을 바라 보는 여섯 개의 시선 (Contemporary Art, Beyond the Authority of Global Trends: Six Perspectives on the Art of Today) - 2015, Noosphere Contemporary Art Lab - http://www.noosphereartlab.com/#!publictions/c1j7
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Books by Andrew V Uroskie
The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from practice the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2), to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and the performance stage (chapter 4). The concluding chapter returns to 1966 to understand the Expanded Cinema in crisis at the height of its early popularity – as the introduction of video feedback helps to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse situation of televisual culture.
Papers by Andrew V Uroskie
of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer’s film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen’s Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer’s three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen’s aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.
현대 미술, 글로벌 트렌드 의 권위 를 넘어서 _ 오늘 의 미술 을 바라 보는 여섯 개의 시선 (Contemporary Art, Beyond the Authority of Global Trends: Six Perspectives on the Art of Today) - 2015, Noosphere Contemporary Art Lab - http://www.noosphereartlab.com/#!publictions/c1j7
The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from practice the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2), to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and the performance stage (chapter 4). The concluding chapter returns to 1966 to understand the Expanded Cinema in crisis at the height of its early popularity – as the introduction of video feedback helps to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse situation of televisual culture.
of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer’s film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen’s Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer’s three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen’s aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.
현대 미술, 글로벌 트렌드 의 권위 를 넘어서 _ 오늘 의 미술 을 바라 보는 여섯 개의 시선 (Contemporary Art, Beyond the Authority of Global Trends: Six Perspectives on the Art of Today) - 2015, Noosphere Contemporary Art Lab - http://www.noosphereartlab.com/#!publictions/c1j7