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The new wave: Artists as movie directors

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Norwegian artist Knut Åsdam will have his own exibition at Tate Modern in London. He will be featuring two films.

He works with sound, film, video, foto and architechtural installations.

Artists are moving into moviemaking. The resources of a studio- and production company are thus made available for art projects. The borderline between independent art and commercial moviemaking is in this way being traversed – with interesting consequences for us all.

Examples are Bill Viola (blockbuster videoproductions), Julian Schnabel, Larry Clark, Pierre Bismuth, Piotr Uklanski, Miranda July, Philippe Pareno, Douglas Gordon.

Andy Warhol is said to be the first artist emerging from the underground scene to enter commercial film production. The Warhol heritage can be described as a willingness to use the distribution and production models of mass culture. We see a fusion between many artforms, collective forms of production and the logic of the mass market.

Moviemaking  entails specialised functions like sound, lighting, picture, narrative etc. You can thus foresee a complete work of art with many dimensions.

Richard Wagner had ideas about a “Gesamtkunstwerk” carrying within itself all forms of art. Will we be achieving his visions now?

(REF. DN-Susanne Østby Sæther – UiO – Preus Museum)