Stuart Comer Livres

Film and Video Art is an exciting, comprehensive volume that traces the history of artists’ involvement with the moving image from the earliest experiments with film to the latest digital and video streaming techniques on the Internet. Accompanied by striking imagery, leading international critics discuss major developments in the unfolding dialogue between artists and moving image media. Starting with the work of the Lumiere brothers in the late 19th century and progressing through the Surrealist, Dadaist, Russian Constructivist, and Pop Art movements to the prominence of documentary in recent contemporary art and the advent of big-budget art films, this engrossing and thorough survey is an invaluable resource. Major artists featured include Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Douglas Gordon, Bruce Nauman, Sam Taylor-Wood, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol.

The photographs of Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989) are steeped in fragility, both as material objects scored and pockmarked by the vicissitudes of time, and as forlorn commemorations of brief moments in all too brief lives. In this sense, the photographs are also objects of ephemera, of a piece with Morrisroe's equally fragile magazines, collages and drawings, which this volume compiles for the first time. Containing much previously unpublished work, Mark Dirt includes spreads from Morrisroe's punk zine Dirt ("he sort of invented the Boston punk scene," Jack Pierson later recalled of his former lover), as well as correspondence and notes by the artist, sketches and even his last will and testament. All of these documents have been assembled by Morrisroe's longtime partner Ramsey McPhillips, and represent the most complete survey of the artist's non-photographic works.

Having become widely accessible as a consumer technology in the 1960s, video is ever-present today-on our phones and our screens, defining new spaces and experiences, shaping our ideas and politics, and spreading disinformation, documentation, evidence, fervor. Signals: The Politics of Video charts the ways in which artists have both championed and questioned the promise of video, revealing a history that has been planetary, critical, and activist from its very beginnings. The Museum of Modern Art has been at the forefront of bringing video into museums-pioneering the collection, conservation, and definition of a new artistic medium. Signals aims to renew and revise our understanding of art and video, both within and outside the museum. A companion to the exhibition, this catalogue-the Museum's first major publication on the subject in twenty-five years-includes an introductory essay by the curators and six thematic texts by leading scholars and artists that investigate the range of artistic engagements with video, media, and the public sphere. Here, video is posed not as a traditional medium but as a pervasive and fluid media network that is thoroughly global, social, and interactive: a means of politics.