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"Inventories of Limbo": Post-Minimal Aesthetics in Cinema From the Readymade to Institutional Critique

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dc.contributor.advisorZryd, Michael
dc.creatorHorwatt, Elijah Saul
dc.date.accessioned2016-09-20T16:36:51Z
dc.date.available2016-09-20T16:36:51Z
dc.date.copyright2015-12-04
dc.date.issued2016-09-20
dc.date.updated2016-09-20T16:36:50Z
dc.degree.disciplineCinema and Media Studies
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation charts the philosophical premises of post-minimalism in the practices of experimental filmmakers and video artists, exploring specific reorientations of cinematic works since the late 1960s. Post-minimalism refers to a myriad of aesthetic transformations initiated by the conceptual art movement, interrogating the ontology of art from a perspective outside its historical bonds to medium, style, and Kantian aesthetic judgment. I examine three strategies in the progression of post-minimal aesthetic practice: the readymade, institutional critique, and seriality. A central goal of this research is to remap entrenched language and ideas in the spheres of the arts and cinema to point to a profound reciprocity between cinematic technology and post-minimal aesthetic intelligence, perception, and judgment. This research moves away from the problems raised by artificially constructed movements and prescriptive categories which inevitably produce important sites of exception, and look instead to the aesthetic engines of post-minimal artmaking offering opportunities for constant renewal, evolution, and refinement. I follow these aesthetic engines like a knights tour in chess, jumping through history, appearing in unexpected places and at unexpected times to draw continuities in the approach to the heretical breaks from modernism found in post-minimal aesthetic intelligence. I will primarily focus on four objects: William E. Jones Tearoom, Robert Smithsons Underground Cinema, Lis Rhodes collaborative intervention into the Film as Film exhibition, and Christian Marclays The Clock. Examining the use of Marcel Duchamps concept of the readymade, and its profound assault on both medium specificity and authorship, I illustrate radical new ethical imperatives in the presentation of found footage filmmaking. My two core chapters grapple with ontological and locative explorations of cinematic architectures and sites. The two projects discussed engage with institutional critique, a philosophical model of artmaking which directly engages the sites, economic infrastructures, administrative imperatives, and power dynamics of the cinema, museum, and gallery. Finally, I examine a case study in contemporary post-minimal practice through Christian Marclays 24-hour installation The Clock, and will explore its relationship to archival projects engaging in the collection, ordering, and hermeneutic approach to 20th century media. I will explore this installation as symptomatic of both a technologically determined grammar of collection for the now immense digital archive, and an archeological inclination for artists to thematize film history.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/32164
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectArt criticism
dc.subject.keywordsPost-Minimalism
dc.subject.keywordsExperimental Film
dc.subject.keywordsAvant-garde film
dc.subject.keywordsInstitutional Critique
dc.subject.keywordsReadymades
dc.subject.keywordsSeriality
dc.subject.keywordsConceptual Art
dc.subject.keywordsLand Art
dc.subject.keywordsLis Rhodes
dc.subject.keywordsRobert Smithson
dc.subject.keywordsKenneth Jacobs
dc.subject.keywordsWilliam E. Jones
dc.subject.keywordsChristian Marclay
dc.title"Inventories of Limbo": Post-Minimal Aesthetics in Cinema From the Readymade to Institutional Critique
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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