Artists’ Moving Image: Cinema as Archive

Artists have long been fascinated by film, but recent decades have seen an explosion in direct artistic engagements with mainstream cinema, particularly from the classical and post-classical eras of Hollywood filmmaking.Ranging from directly sampling film clips to imitating aspects of films, these engagements deploy highly recognisable examples of cinema to activate collective cultural memory.Artists’ Moving Image presents a diverse and wide-ranging body of works, from established artists such as Steve McQueen and Douglas Gordon to mid-career artists like Jesse Jones and Rachel Maclean, reinvigorating the existing ‘canon’ of cinematic artists’ films. Beyond discussing individual works, Sarah Smith categorizes and analyzes the trends in this expanding area of art practice, arguing that the point of interest is not cinema (and its history) per se, but what its evocation as cultural archive can illuminate about the legacies of the past in the present.Examining subjects such as found foota