Eleanor MacFarlane: visual enquiry

November 2011 2200 words

I am a Moving Image artist, and I have never sold a piece of Moving Image.

This statement may be surprising, startling, and perhaps a little embarrassing. Yet amongst such artists this is not a minority phenomenon, but the experience of most. Sixty six percent of Moving Image artists have never sold work (LUX, 2010). What to sell, where, and to whom –not such self evident transactions as selling a painting or sculpture, or rights to an illustration. The contemporary Moving Image artist finds themself somewhat immobilised in unintended complexities regarding copyright, installation and redundant generations of technology. Trial and error has not yet produced a workable, repeatable model of distribution in the century or so during which the art form has developed.

Selling and distributing Moving Image has largely comprised series of glorious failures and enterprising ventures which have not gained momentum (LUX, 2011). After years of investigating distribution and publishing avenues, and of feeling rather excluded and clueless, I realise that no one else really knows how to sell Moving Image, that there is no actual way of doing it, and everyone is also making it up as they go along. There is no magic number for limited editions, no recommended retail price for art DVDs, and no standard format expected by the Moving Image buying public. There is no secret everyone else knows. The possibilities for creating a successful model of Moving Image distribution is a challenge and subject for creativity just as much as art practice itself.

The history of selling and distributing Moving Image, Video Art and experimental cinema is still being compiled and indeed created. The straightforward transaction of exchanging Video Art for resources is an area of the art world particular to itself, trailing behind other practices, even allowing for notable exceptions.

There are anomalies of values concerning Moving Image – where it lies in the hierarchy of artistic merit as defined by art institutions, and its currency as a medium of exchange. Moving Image is searching for a definition, an audience and a market. Everyone knows what it is, but few can define its value.

Moving Image may be described as Video Art, terms overlapping into narrative areas, and into documentation of studio practices and events. Video Art may encompass experimental happenings and ephemeral events captured on video. The Moving Image also suggests Cinema, with its larger scale of filmic and collaborative concerns. Moving Image can comprise everything that moves in a film-type medium, including animation, home movies, historical street scenes, vintage broadcasts, early shorts, use of found footage, and more.

Moving Image artists themselves borrow and use any and all of the media mentioned, and define themselves variously. The definition of Moving Image becomes more than a semantic issue. While not in any way wishing for some standard definition, the truth is that often galleries are not really sure what is meant by Moving Image, the public is not sure, and neither are artists.

Despite the vast diversity of practice and the redefinition of subject matter and techniques over the past century, people know what is meant by being a painter. In contrast, the multiplicity of approaches by artists to Moving Image, and the cross references to other media, has lead to a discontinuum in the narrative of its history, the criteria by which art institutions often judge the value, merit and importance of art.

When a living artist sells work to a gallery or museum, a contract is made, determining conditions of use, especially in the case of installation works, or those dependent upon technology, such as Moving Image. There is no standard contract, each made up according to negotiations between the gallery curator and the artist or artist’s agent. This is a mysterious process for those outside such transactions. Anecdotes abound amongst artists, from naive exploitation to vast sums exchanged for concepts.

The contract might include specifications about equipment that may be used, whether the copy held is a master or small edition, whether it may be reproduced or replaced by the artist, the number of times it may be shown, whether reproductions can be made, and other details of use, archiving and rights. While clarity in such matters potentially benefits all parties, the outcome is that galleries and museums already have works in their collections they cannot show because, for example, they own the work on videotape or celluloid, but not the rights to digitally remaster it for their current equipment, or to preserve it. To show the work again may mean entirely reinvesting in it or renegotiating with the artist or their estate. These elements are obstacles to Moving Image works being regularly reshown within galleries when they rearrange their collections, and becoming permanent links in a perceived linear history of art.

Current publishers and distributors of Moving Image are too many to list. A brief survey of available Moving Image DVDs includes LUX and the British Film Institute collections.

While these enterprises publish, sell and distribute Moving Image, on closer inspection their DVDs are often out of stock, are usually only available online or from very specialist retailers, and tend towards archive and retrospective material.

Another study than this could document artists collectives organising and selling work, from the 1960s to the present, referred to as glorious failures, (LUX, 2011), which folded or sold no works. These micro-economies largely depended upon artists selling works to each other, and failing to create a wider distribution network.

Contemporary galleries with bookshops tend to stock few Art DVDs. Currently, Tacita Dean’s Moving Image “Film” is playing in the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern (Tate, 2011). Tate sells an exhibition book, but no range of her works on DVDs. Often the Art Video range for sale comprises interviews with artists, videos of them working, critique or history, but rarely Moving Image work itself, and rarer still if it is contemporary.

Moving Image borrows problems from other genres of art. Where photographers tend to create numbered limited editions of their works, and painters sell their originals, Moving Image artists are both reluctant to reproduce works, wanting to maintain creative control, and unwilling to part with master copies (LUX, 2011).There are pertinent issues of copyright here, which artists approach in a spectrum of ways, from having digital signatures embedded in any online materials in to preserve copyright, to ensuring work is freely available to download, disseminate and manipulate through creative commons (Creative Commons, 2011).

There is growing recognition that often individual artists subsidise the arts, volunteering time, resources and work for no pay. This summarised view is represented in the work of Hans Abbing (Abbing, 2002) and reflected in current debates in Artists Newsletter AIR survey (Artist Newsletter 2011), and Festival of Blackboards (Cubitt, 2011). Moving Image artists, along with ephemeral and performative artists, particularly fall into this category, providing work and resources to exhibit, but tending to avoid having items available for sale, as their painter or sculptor colleagues may, because of a general lack of precedent and confidence. Eighty-one percent of Moving Image artists do not know how work is bought and sold (LUX, 2010). This lack of marketing makes such artists less of a returnable investment for commercial galleries.

The only Moving Image DVDs I have ever seen openly for sale at art fairs are from the Open Gallery. Their prices are not available online, but I remember they are between £1,000 and £3,000 for a limited edition DVD of fewer than ten copies. Theirs is a working model of selling and distributing Moving Image based on exclusivity, as if the work is as unique as a painting or as rare as a small edition of a print, rather than a more widely distributable work which could enter the public consciousness, such as a novel or film.

Stringent conditions are written in to contracts of Moving Image use to preserve exclusivity. The anecdotal reason for restrictions is so that work is not demeaned by playing as background to an aspirational cocktail party. At the top end of the art market, it matters to some who owns a piece. At the other, non-moneyed end, Moving Image has taken on concerns of exclusivity, but without the financial or reputational rewards. Specifications for where a work might be treated may be preferences, but such rights are more usually rescinded upon sale. Art dealers trading aside, the emerging Moving Image artist tends not to sell work because of such unresolved issues which have trickled down from the international art market.

The main source of funding possible for Moving Image artists are public and private commissions. Some opportunities are open to submission; more are available to and negotiated with those few artists who have passed through that invisible threshold of becoming known, verified by galleries and art institutions. Herein lie ways to have work disseminated and shown in a wide public arena, but not, as yet, as easily available and affordable as a cinematic DVD.

The reputation of an artist grows with verification amongst institutions, and references that build up, not amongst artists, but amongst curators, academics and art administrators (LUX, 2011). An artist is seen as valid, credible and worthy of being part of the history of art, by the hierarchy of acceptance into institutions, waves of retrospectives, and arrangement of permanent collections. With notable exceptions, inbuilt disadvantages written in to Moving Image contracts can preclude such artists, making their work one-off performances rather than a permanent feature. Increased use of copyright-free and less problematic archive material compared to the complexities of arranging rights and contracts with new artists makes it easier to limit dealing with contemporary Moving Image, even by those with concerns and interests in the genre.

Significant collections of Moving Image works are held in academic libraries in universities and art schools worldwide. Some institutions have specialist collections, and have bought works from individual artists, but find similar problems to museums, in that they find their version superseded by technology upgrades. With decreasing budgets, and unwilling to invest in, upgrade and archive the same work again, university libraries are buying less individual pieces, more edited compilations, copyright-free archive material and printed publications (Cubitt, 2011).

There is a vast array of publications about Moving Image art and artists in contemporary art bookshops. The importance of the genre is increasingly recognised within Fine Art, yet, with few exceptions, it is books about Moving Image which is available, and not the Moving Image itself. Artists, agents, curators and publishers seem to avoid the risks of losing creative control and copyright infringement by not producing reproductions of Moving Image at all. In an effort to preserve exclusivity, all Moving Image somehow becomes unsellable, unbuyable and unknowable in its actual form.

The plethora of books and interest in Moving Image and Video Art belies the fact that the story of its progression is far from definitively compiled as yet, that the activities and true influence of individual artists is still being played out and is yet to be realised.

Minutiae in contractual conditions for Moving Image exhibitions create dilemmas and inabilities to anticipate conditions and equipment that may become obsolete. Emerging Moving Image artists are used to specifications being overridden or ignored, and wish for more control, yet over-specification can preclude the one thing which makes artwork continually relevant and live, which is fresh curatorial interpretation, adaptability, and entrusting creative control to others.

I aim to make art and Moving Image to disseminate like novels. When I buy a novel, I get the real thing – the original is the reproduction, and no other version gives a more direct transaction with the writer, their thoughts and the relationship with my thoughts. To enhance my experiences, I can invest in other versions, attend a writer’s talk, or buy signed editions.

Art and galleries differ by offering a more entire experience – atmosphere is context, and there is no reproduction to compare to the experience of seeing a great painting, nor can any photograph do justice to an immersive installation. However, in this age of reproduction most people have deep personal relationships with art we have never seen live. Even an image on a postcard, a version of reproduction often as far away from the artist’s true intention as may be possible, can have meaning.

I prefer to show Moving Image in galleries. I tend to make it with that in mind, and think it works best in those contexts. I also tend towards work with a slight aspect of illusion, which does not photograph as well as it is experienced, yet I still have the aim of distributing my work, so that it would sit in a household amongst the novels, the art books, the music and film collection.

I take heart from the state of Moving Image distribution, that like art, art practice, and life, I can make it up as I go along, and invent innovative enterprises. There is no precedent which acts as an obvious model to follow, and no generally accepted process. It is liberating to create a shop front for my Moving Image, and decide how I will distribute work. Both the gallery and the home are the proper place for art.

Bibliography

Abbing, Hans (2002) Why are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

Artists Newsletter (2011) Artists Interaction and Representation Survey

http://www.a-n.co.uk/air/document/1601468

(Accessed on 20/11/2011)

Creative Commons (2011) Share, Remix, Reuse – Legally

http://www.creativecommons.org.uk/

(Accessed on 20/11/2011)

Cubitt (2011) Festival of Blackboards, Creative Industry - examining issues of the creative economy http://festivalofblackboards.blogspot.com/p/wednesday-27th-july-exploring-impact-of.html
(Accessed on 20/09/2011)

LUX (2010) Moving Image Survey Summary

http://www.scribd.com/doc/33362484/LUX-moving-image-survey-summary-2010

(Accessed on 20/11/2011)

LUX (2011) Selling Artists Moving Image Seminar

http://www.lux.org.uk/news/selling-artists%E2%80%99-moving-image-seminar

(Accessed on 20/11/2011)

Tate (2011) The Unilever Series:Tactita Dean http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unilever2011/default.shtm

(Accessed on 20/11/2011)

Links

Abbing, Hans (2002) Why are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts
http://www.hansabbing.nl/DOCeconomist/SUMMARY.pdf

Artists Newsletter (2011) Artists Interaction and Representation Survey

http://www.a-n.co.uk/air/document/1601468