On Documentary Sounds and Images in the Gallery

Cinema and broadcast television are no longer preeminent as modes of exhibition and consumption of moving-image and time-based works, while the gallery has long ceased to be the preserve of the still and silent image. Instead, other new forms have emerged along with the digital, such as YouTube and podcasts, while the mobile phone with its still and video camera creates audiovisual connectivity and interaction anytime and anywhere. Time-based works have become multiplatform, as filmmakers produce works for the gallery and web, and visual artists make works for the cinema, such as Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen's film Hunger, awarded the 2008 Cannes Caméra d'Or. The emergence in the 1960s of the term ‘time-based art’ itself marked the advent of moving images and sounds in the gallery as video art and distinct from avant-garde film. This incursion into the gallery brought the audiovisual into the place and space of ‘art’, thereby questioning the extent to which the experience of art arises not only in relation to the specificity of the medium of representation but also in relation to the site, the space and the duration of its presentation and viewing. The digital has transformed the medium specificity which had been central to video art as videotape viewable on a small monitor. But in its gallery exhibition the digital remains specific: for each place of viewing a time-based installation is not only a context – geographical and social, public or private – but also an architectural space, organizing the spectator's access to mobility and stillness.