Between the Black Box and the White Cube ─ Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art

In postwar America, visual artists started expanding the use of cinema beyond its traditional narrative role (as in ?movies”). The late 1950s and early 1960s constituted a seminal moment when, all over the world, artists started to become filmmakers and filmmakers, artists. The time marked a dramatic moment in the life of the moving image: as broadcast television surged forward and the film industry was in precipitous decline. The old glamour of the ?silver screen” was diminishing, and cheapening, as films came to be shown on TV, between commercials. When it came to movie theaters, a slew of B-grade films and gimmicks (like 3-D glasses, drive-ins, stereo earphones) signaled desperate attempts to lure back a theatrical audience.
Yet the generation of artists who first experienced this decline in the theatrical cinema turned out also to be the first to grasp the possibility for its radical reinvention. With inexpensive, small-gauge film becoming widely available and video technology just around the corner, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, and Stan VanDerBeek suddenly became filmmakers. These ?amateurs” developed a compelling body of work that has until recently been overlooked. In their efforts to explore a radically new way of experiencing the moving-image, these artists helped develop a novel space between the ?white cube” of the art gallery and the ?black box” of the cinematic theater.

Andrew V. Uroskie is associate professor and graduate director of the MA/PhD Graduate Program in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University, SUNY. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.