Abstract

As artists’ films have become more common in museums, artists have begun to film the museum and its objects with increasing frequency. The artists’ museum film opens up a dialogue between the moving image and the museum object, in which the medium's capacity to preserve and remodel time resonates with the object's power as a repository of past time. Through two examples, Tacita Dean's Day for Night (2009) and Elizabeth Price's A Restoration (2016), this essay explores the ways that these artists’ understanding of the temporalities of analogue film and digital video underpin their poetic expression of the temporality of objects. Rather than dematerializing its objects, the museum film is rematerialized by them, through the encounter between their specific temporalities.

Keywords: Museum film, indexicality, materiality, temporality, Tacita Dean, Elizabeth Price

Malraux makes a fatal error near the end of his Museum: he admits within its pages the very thing that had constituted its homogeneity; that thing is, of course, photography. So long as photography was merely a vehicle by which art objects entered the imaginary museum, a certain coherence obtained. But once photography itself enters, an object among others, heterogeneity is reestablished at the heart of the museum; its pretentions of knowledge are doomed.