Citation

Trodd TAMARA. Art Hist. 2008; 31(3): 368-386.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Association of Art Historians of Great Britain, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00611.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

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.