Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (From top): Panorama (with Benoit Lalloz & Martial Galfione) 2007 [Installation view at Expodrome, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris, France • February 13—May 6, 2007]; Panorama [Detail]; Tapis de lecture 2007 [Installation view at Expodrome]; Cinéma 2007 [Installation view at Expodrome]; Panorama [Installation view at Expodrome,]; Cinéma [Installation view at Expodrome]; Expodrome [Musée d’art moderne de la Ville deParis/ARC, Paris, France; La jetée (with Nicolas Ghesquière) 2007 [Installation view at Expodrome]; Roman de Münster 2007 [Installation view at skulptur projekte münster 07, Munster, Germany • June 16—September 30, 2007] Photo: Roman Mensing/ artdoc.de; Panorama [Installation view at Expodrome]. All images © Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Courtesy of the artist. Roman de Münster courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin, Germany
In Kinomuseum: Towards an Artists' Cinema, Ian White proposes a new kind of art institution that emerges from the relationship of the museum and artists' film:
Ultimately, Kinomuseum is a proposal for considering a particular kind of cinema as a unique kind of museum: one where "originality, authenticity, and presence" are not undermined by reproduction , but where reproduction either turns these qualities into a new set of questions for the museum, almost physically disrupting it, or, perversely, where film and video as potentially infinite reproducible objects make these same terms manifest in moving images considered as works of art. It leads to a differentiated cinema, a museum based on the principles of impermanence, immediacy, the temporal and the temporary, manifested in the minds of an audience who experience it in the space and time of the auditorium that is the museum's permuting exhibition hall, and who are its active, defining agent. (13-14)
CInelandiaView of the Installation at Nocturama* MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León,May 17th –September 7th, 2008© Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Photo by Francisco Arnoso “Pixi”Courtesy of MUSAC
Keen to influence practical discussions concerning the collecting and display of film by major institutions, White's anthology - co-edited with Mike Sperlinger, and originally a series of talks and screenings at the 2007 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen - downplays the tradition of artist created spaces, notably Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau or, as in the sequence above, the contemporary films and installations of Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster. In addition to their own concerns, such projects offer a laboratory where the possible structures, materials and assumptions of a kinomuseum can be seen as under consideration.
Solarium(with Nicolas Ghesquière) View of the Installation at Nocturama* MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León,May 17th –September 7th, 2008© The artists Photo by Francisco Arnoso “Pixi”Courtesy of MUSAC
In the images here we find spaces partaking of the quality of spectacle, but where that becomes a space for the individual body to experience its own agency, counter both to the mass of the city and the notion of a passive, static, anonymous cinema audience. Here are images working into and out of the modern and post-modern city to propose their own transformations -of colour, shape, focus, space, and scale - configured towards reflection and embodiment. And as the city feeds into the structures and assumptions of a new kind of cinema, so each cinema itself makes new propositions about urban space and architecture.
