In their film Guernica of 1950, Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens re-work the genre of the documentary film about art to develop a powerful and expressive address to both historical and contemporary political events, in what becomes an extraordinary anticipatory register. Re-examining the film's imagery, this article proposes that it should be understood not only in relation to the bombing of 1937 which it depicts, but also in relation to contemporary Cold War anxieties. Furthermore, it argues that the purchase on reality which the film begins to construct with its departure from a purportedly documentary genre helps to deepen and extend our understanding of Andr & eacute; Bazin's theory of cinematic realism in ways which may be situated in relation to wider period debates between social realism and more expressive forms, and which offer new potential today.

Abstract “Creation and Decreation in Tacita Dean's Antigone” explores Dean's major film of 2018, Antigone, in relation to themes of world-making and “decreation.” Situating Antigone as a companion piece to Dean's Event for a Stage (2015), the essay also examines the theme of solar eclipse in the work in relation to the artist's wider oeuvre in terms of a career-long pursuit of the sun and her development of a photological aesthetics. Through examination of treatments of the Antigone material in the work of authors including George Steiner, Anne Carson, Judith Butler, and Virginia Woolf, the essay explores the political significance of the Antigone myth in terms of the individual's relationship to others and to the state, as well as to arguments concerning queer kinship structures, and shows the ways in which Dean develops these implications in her film.

The videos of the Turner Prize-winning British artist Elizabeth Price explore the libidinal surges and collapses of our attachments to objects in ways that conjure a history of artists' exploration of consumer objects and commodity fetishism stretching from dada, surrealism and the negative anthropology of Georges Bataille, through post-war art and theory, including the work of Dara Birnbaum, Gretchen Bender, and Jean Baudrillard. This essay argues that Price's work provides the means to contextualize and challenge some of the assumptions of more recent object-theory, as these have been taken up within the art world. Instead, a distinctive strategy is identified, termed 'empathy with the commodity', linking the work of artists and theorists from the 1930s, through the 1970s and 1980s, to Price's work in the present. The ambivalence of this formation describes simultaneously a sympathetic longing to make the object 'live', with a search for escape from the bind of object-identification in spectacular destruction and waste.

(2010). Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarization in Art, Film and Photography (exhibition catalog): Dawn Ades and Simon Baker “Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarization in Art, Film and Photography”. Photography and Culture: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 250-253.

What are we to make of the return of the 'picture' in photography after conceptual art? In this article I engage directly with the lineage provided by Jeff Wall for his own brand of 'pictorialist' photography, and his surprising appropriation of Sherrie Levine to this end. I suggest that Wall's gesture of appropriation and the structure of his own works reveal a more irrational sense of the 'picture' as a force of deformation which may usefully be extended to the work of Thomas Demand. I argue that Demand's work does not support the terms of modernist aesthetics, and in particular, cannot be credibly interpreted as founding photography as a 'medium', as Michael Fried has suggested. Instead I argue that Demand's work presents photography as parasitic and bound in an irrational relationship to sculpture. Neither medium is self-supporting and each is instead 'propped' on the other, forced to cohere by the deforming operations of the 'picture'.

In this paper I examine the continuing legacies of the ‘sculptural film’ for contemporary projected‐image work, and consider what is at stake in the shift to which it bears witness, from the material object as model for film, to an explicit – if frequently ruined and derelict – space of projection. The importance of this history is examined through discussion of recent projected‐image work by Tacita Dean, notable because in almost every case it is explicitly structured around the camera's exploration of some found physical structure. Modernist uses of the sculptural film – represented, in different ways, in works by László Moholy‐Nagy and Richard Serra – are importantly transformed in Dean's work, which draws also on Robert Smithson's earlier reconfiguration of the sculptural and the filmic.

Art HistoryVolume 31, Issue 5 p. 786-792 SCREEN BODIES by Amelia Jones Tamara Trodd, Tamara Trodd University of GlasgowSearch for more papers by this author Tamara Trodd, Tamara Trodd University of GlasgowSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 December 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00644.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume31, Issue5November 2008Pages 786-792 RelatedInformation

Timm Starl's 'Encyclopaedia' of photography in Austria follows in this tradition of idiosyncratic scholarly endeavour and as a life's work deserves to be celebrated. Starl is an amateur historian in the best sense, a relentless gatherer of photographic data and one of a handful of key figures behind the rise over the last two decades of the history of photography in Austria. He was the founder of the journal Fotogeschichte, now celebrating its twenty-fifth year, which in its drive for rigorous contextual histories briskly avoided the art historical biases that beset other emerging pillars of the discipline. (For a more sceptical assessment of Fotogeschichte's influence see Janos Frecot's commentary in the recent anniversary edition.) From the outside, at least, the scene in Austria seems impressive: the Albertina finally organized its substantial photographic holdings under Monika Faber's direction in 1999, incorporating (amongst others) the important Graphische Lehrund Versuchanstalt collection. A contemporary photography magazine, Camera Austria, flourishes, and new histories of photography are beginning to appear, most recently Faber's exhibition Stadt, Leben, Wien (2005) and its associated publications. The history of photography in Vienna draws on the generous state and municipal patronage of one of the last functioning social democracies in Europe, not to mention a local base of corporate sponsors. Its intellectual formation is shaped by a commitment to restore understanding to a rich field of cultural practice all but obliterated by Austrian and German fascism. Starl's lexicon stops in 1945 and thus in its framing reflects the violence of recent European history. It contains the best of photography from what is now Austrian territory: the vital studio and publishing culture that developed in the long shadow of the Habsburg monarchy; a legacy of scientific, perhaps especially optical, innovation; the pioneering influence of Eder and his Graphische pedagogy; the impact of modernism and its commercial proliferation in Vienna's portrait studios of the 1920s; the terrible draining away of talent over a decade of fear and emigration. The volume contains around 4,000 entries, the majority of which are biographical, followed by directories of Austrian photography schools, clubs and societies, exhibitions, magazines and newspapers. A strength of the dictionary lies in its bibliographical listings, reflecting its basis in the larger 'Biobibliografie zur Fotografie in Osterreich', a database created and maintained by Starl and hosted by the Albertina (see ). In length this bibliography is stunning (it currently holds around 83,000 entries) and is a tool of first importance for researchers. The database certainly threatens the printed volume with obsolescence, but then Star! probably deserves to soothe his mania with something paginated he can hold in his hands. It would be unfair to search out too many empirical or conceptual gaps in this most exhaustive of projects. The dearth of illustrations in both book and database is a constant irritation and suggests (whatever the practical reasons) a certain iconophobia. Neither does a dictionary offer quite the reckoning with history that Starl possibly intends; hopefully it will ignite narratives that can be more explicit. Indeed, 'photography in Austria' is an idea that itself requires definition. Much of the richness that this volume represents derived from a multiethnic empire that stretched far beyond the territorial boundaries of the Austrian Republic founded so hesitantly in 1918. There is, again, a nagging doubt that Starl's empirical effort serves to dodge more complexly contested questions. On the other hand, his work (combined with what is slowly emerging from Vienna's archives) is forging a conception of the AustroHungarian Empire as one of Europe's most vibrant photographic cultures. On a recent visit to Vienna I found in a second-hand bookshop a copy of Camille Recht's Die alte Photographie (1931), a volume which sought to establish a clear divide between the treasures of the early years and the decline ushered in by an industrialized medium. But in any number of ways the book is also evocative of interwar modernity, not least in its pointed juxtaposition of photographs from across a continent: Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Triest, Magdeburg, Edinburgh, Hamburg, London... . It was this easy cosmopolitanism that brought me up sharp and I wondered whether we have since recovered anything close to that breadth of attention. Far be it for a British specialist to accuse his Austrian counterparts of provincialism. One less noticed aspect of the crisis of photographic curatorship in Britain today is its creeping parochialism. But Recht's book did remind me that seldom is the interest of a discipline contained by national boundaries. Hopefully, Starl's gargantuan labour will help turn more heads towards 'Austria's' involute past and encourage the taxing, but rewarding toil, of historical comparison. Duncan Forbes