The Place of Artists' Cinema

"Maeve Connolly is the first film scholar in any language to explicate in depth contemporary artists' insights on the cinema, new media, photography and cinephilia. She engages the specialist as well as the educated reader, by addressing the difference between information and translation, animation and re-enactment in the context of major art exhibitions all over the world. In discussing installations, immersions, performances and interactive experiences, Connolly demonstrates the central placement of the cinema as the source of creative and conceptual inspiration for the media of the future." - Angela Dalle Vacche, Professor of Film Studies, Georgia Institute of Technology 'The Place of Artists' Cinema's rigorous interdisciplinary inquiry into the conditions of production and exhibition associated with post-1990's artists' cinema, both inside and outside the institutional context of contemporary art, is a welcome and long overdue contribution to the extant literature.' Kate Mondloch, 'Placing Artists' Cinema', Jump Cut 52, Summer 2010 http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/mondloch/text.html 'This is a timely work - one that formulates ideas about the flowering of film and moving image work that has taken place since the 1990s: something that is only now being reflected upon. As a contribution to this debate, Maeve Connolly's book is a welcome and a critical one'. Mo White, Review of The Place of Artists' Cinema, The Art Book, Volume 17, Issue 2 May 2010, pp 65-66 '[Connolly] pays particular attention to how social relations are structured within these spaces, and to the relationship that moving images within the gallery have to notions of place and site. [...] One of the most interesting chapters in the book focuses critical attention on attempts to make film and video legible within the discourse of art and therefore legible to the market.' Dan Kidner, Review of The Place of Artists' Cinema: Space, Site and Screen, LuxOnline, October 2009. http://www.lux.org.uk/blog/dan-kidners-round-recent-books-artists-film 'The concept of 'artists' cinema' is tirelessly operationalised and consistently enlivened across five detailed, rather different and differentiating (but always cogent) substantive chapters. [...] Connolly's arguments force us to think of 'artists' cinema' as a form or practice that raises interesting questions, for example, about the nature of 'place', about the 'market' or 'post-Fordist capital', about the notion of the 'public space', about the status and scope of 'events" Robert Porter, Variant 36, Winter 2009. http://www.variant.org.uk/36texts/ArtistsCinema.html 'Focusing on developments since the mid 1990s, Connolly [...] examines the various ways in which contemporary art practitioners have claimed the narrative techniques and modes of production associated with cinema as a cultural form. She notes that the explicit commercialisation of film and television production over the past decade, especially within the UK context, is likely to have impelled certain practitioners towards the gallery. [...] Thus The Place of Artists' Cinema [...] opens up a new set of questions about cinema and the place of artists within the public sphere.' Bethsheba Achitsa, Artmatters.info: Flaunting Arts and Culture in Africa, September 2009 http://artmatters.info/?p=1648