Artists' Moving Image

Cinema as Archive

By: Sarah Smith

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Paperback | 28 May 2026

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24.5 x 19.0 x 1.3

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This book analyses art which directly engages with mainstream cinema.

Artists have long been fascinated by film, but recent decades have seen an explosion in direct artistic engagements with mainstream cinema. Ranging from sampling to imitation, these engagements often also bring conventions of cinematic display into the gallery space. This book presents a diverse and wide-ranging body of works from established artists such as Steve McQueen's Deadpan and Douglas Gordon's 24-Hour Psycho, to works by emerging artists like Jesse Jones' Zarathustra, Shezad Dawood's Feature and Rachel MacLean's Over the Rainbow, reinvigorating the existing 'canon' of cinematic artists' films.

Beyond an interest in individual pieces, Sarah Smith categorises and analyses 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 footage and feminist poetics, the documentary turn in contemporary art and the unfinished film, she shows how artists' films interrogate dominant cinematic forms and their cultural meanings. For anyone interested in contemporary art, film studies or exhibition practice, this book is a much needed and defining exploration of cinema as archive in artists' moving image.

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