The art of the audiovisual

A scene from Steve McQueen’s ‘Giardini’

For lovers of the moving image, autumn is the coolest month, harvesting new life from the die-back of the silly season. Cool as in hip, hope-filled and here again. Goodbye summer; hello adventurous screen art.

At least it used to be like that. But autumn in the modern world is also the season, poised between the Venice Biennale (alternate years) and the Turner Prize (every year), when the art cinema eyeballs the art gallery and says, with fresh reproach each year: “You’ve stolen our autumn collection.” The gallery shrugs: “Video art? Avant-garde film? Moving picture experimentation? Sorry, mate. They’ve been ours for decades.”

The 2010 Turner shortlist makes the point once more. Again it features a moving-image component: the work of the Otolith Group, two artists specialising in sci-fi/surreal/apocalyptic shorts that would once have been a shoo-in at your local arthouse. Again, the message for today is that cutting-edge kinetic/audiovisual art is to be found in the temples of painting and sculpture, not in the film theatre or moviemakers’ co-op.

It’s a turnaround so complete most of us have hardly noticed it, like a revolution of the earth.

When the world was young (flash-back to the 1960s), going to see films – some sorts of films – was like being a member of the Resistance. I and friends, our collars turned up against the cold or against recognition by the SS (Sarcastic Schoolmates), felt we worked for a branch of the movie lovers’ Maquis. In cellars and dives dark with conspiracy, we watched experimental films. Back then “underground” cinema largely happened where it should: under the ground.

We watched the lot. Andy Warhol, the Mekas brothers, Jack Flaming Creatures Smith, Jean Genet, whose prison-erotica shocker Un Chant d’Amour caused police raids in some American cities; early Cassavetes, Steve Dwoskin, Michael Snow. (Snow, a structuralist, was a favourite among hardline British avant-gardists. He made films in which nothing happened for minutes or hours, except in one work a snail-paced zoom across an empty room, in another a slowly turning camera on a mountaintop.)

My generation threw out the occupation called Hollywood. And we took the credit when commercial American cinema came back, chastened and countercultural, with films such as Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970).

Easy? It almost had been. Because of those years, when seeing weird films in bunkers was as integral to life as YouTube is today, cinema had been liberated for the cinema lover.

Today no people, or few, watch celluloid or video in mouldering basements. One reason is obvious. We get our trips and brainstorms on the net. But another reason, wholly as significant, is that the experimental moving image has left the theatre (a term we’ll take to include film-club cellars and cine co-op dugouts) and gone into the art gallery. Here in the form of the film or video installation it shocks in a more upscale, less incendiary way. Here, if it fulfils the remit of opening people’s minds and eyes, it does so in a comfier ambience.

But does it fulfil the remit? I wonder if the vanished sense of a subterranean rebellion hasn’t redrawn the map of artistic awakening. Today we put radical screen art in a place where the novelty or bravery is commodified. Just as a smart restaurant offers fine dining, a smart art gallery offers fine daring. “Let’s go and see some cutting-edge art ...”

Art in these venues can outrage and provoke. Listen to the yearly yelpings, from the Daily Mail demographic, over the Turner contest. But the furores are becoming a ritual, a ceremony, even a bit of a joke. Shock merchants have a short life (of shockingness if not saleability).

What has gone missing in the world of visual arts – moving and otherwise – is that concept “movement”. People huddled together in a room, then fanning out to change the world: this once seemed an almost physical reality. Like early Christians, to analogise by hyperbole, we 1960s cinephiles hung about in caves or vaults cooking up trouble.

Some will respond that the worldwide web does this today. The intimacy of multitudes happens electronically. Possibly. Yet I still feel that there’s something missing: a stir, a fever. Historically the film/video installation – the “gallery-isation” of experimental cinema, its relocation from arthouse to house of art – is the clinching halfway moment in the process. What was once the intently studied focus of a multiple gaze, something singular yet oceanic, as if all the watchers were being rocked simultaneously in the same way, now gets a response more free-choosing and individualised, more transient and therefore fragile.

In a gallery we spy more coolly on the art. At times – the main strength of this way of viewing – the art seems to spy back. In some video works the object(s) of gaze can outnumber the viewer(s). Bruce Nauman’s famous multi-screen Clown Torture (1987), four stations of agony of a circus funnyman, is an installation designed to make the spectator feel surrounded, even ambushed. Nauman’s work, like that of his fellow pioneer in film/video art, Bill Viola, finds a way to smuggle a little passion into the exhibition space. Viola excels in a kind of hidden violence, exploiting our primal shock at the very fact of an art gallery image moving. His work is full of motifs of elemental baptism or induction. In both these artists, at their best, we can feel the excitement of a new medium breaking ground.

But coolness, enigma and at best a kind of eerie menace – the impact of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, slowing Hitchcock’s film to the pace of decelerated machinery – mark out much moving-picture art in galleries. The environment is too po-faced for a form so passionate.

There is something inhibited too, almost coy, about the attitude to narrative. “Go on, are you telling a story or not?”, I want to say to Yang Fudong’s First Spring, his lyrical/surreal figures-in-a-city piece made for Prada, or to Steve McQueen’s 2009 Venice biennale exhibit Giardini, with its fleeting moment of two men embracing.

For this work McQueen did something that betrayed the doubt at the heart of video art. He made the viewers sit down and watch. They weren’t allowed to leave. Was this because the artist had been spoiled by the concentrated gaze he got for his first theatrical feature, Hunger? Perhaps he realised the movie auditorium is the best place to see moving pictures.

No one suggests – or I don’t – that all new screen art shown in galleries today is undernourished or underpowered. The fact that experimental imagery-in-motion has left the film society and gone into Tate Modern isn’t the end of the world, just the wend of the world.

Yet when you have people pattering around cinematic-style work in an exhibition space, to linger or to flit by it as they choose, you have, it seems to me, drawn the sting of that work. The emotions the spectator might have if he were trapped with the work – whether shock or boredom or perplexity or quizzicality or slow-working fascination – are now elective. It’s too easy to pass on.

Maybe that’s it. My generation (call us masochists) thought that for the sake of art someone should lock us all together in a room and throw away the key. That someone was usually ourselves, exercising the right of self-coercion. By eschewing the liberty to move on, we didn’t move on. That way we’d see the whole of Warhol’s Sleep or Michael Snow’s Wavelength, those Calvaries of minimalism. We would know forever what we were talking about.

I’d love to believe that today, somehow and somewhere, that bloody-mindedness still exists. That determination to go the distance with art and to use communality and the club culture – in the pre-disco sense – as a club to threaten wandering attention.

But I suspect we have seen the end of the peer-pressure show. Does it matter? I think it does. Because it isn’t just artists who create an art movement, it is art’s consumers. We are its support system. When it succeeds we help it do so. We catch the pollen of excitement and spread it. That happened to a historic degree with underground cinema in the 1960s. As an optimist I must believe it will happen again. It probably is happening, somewhere, undetected: there can and must be more than one set of ideal circumstances for ideal events to happen. Long live the Nineteen Sixties. Now bring on the Twenty-Teens.

The next revolution may be the one whose fires fuse the best of both worlds: a moving-image culture in which the judicious individual gaze and the impassioned collective stare come together – or at least find a path to equal dominion.