A Brief History of Moving Image: Part II

By the time of the Millennium, moving image art had infiltrated the art world. Artists like Pipilotti Rist and Bill Viola were becoming household names, Rist’s lavish large-scale installations and Viola’s theatrical ‘total environments’ had proven how moving image art works could create transfixing experiences that could extend beyond the screen. The digital revolution had also well and truly begun: the next two decades would see the rise of blockbuster immersive shows and the moving image art taking over public spaces, reaching audiences like never before.

A commercial milestone arrived in 2006 when Bill Viola’s ‘Eternal Return’ (2000) sold for £330,000, the highest price ever fetched at auction for a video artwork. A string of eye-stretching sales followed, indicating that a secondary market was developing for the medium. New art fairs dedicated to digital and time-based works, such as LOOP in Barcelona and Moving Image in New York, London and Istanbul, popped up accordingly. Collectors also started bringing their collections of moving image works to the public, most notably Julia Stoschek, who opened her 700-plus collection of time-based media art in Frankfurt in 2007

The mid-2000s saw moving image art emerge from the gallery and into public spaces. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno presented their film-portrait ‘Zidane’ in a football stadium during Art Basel in 2006, while in 2007 Doug Aitken took over the MoMA’s facade with his seven-screen video projection ‘sleepwalkers’. These vast spectacles were far removed from the grainy footage and bulky monitors of the 1960s.

Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ (2010) wins the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Now considered as one of the most important artworks of the decade, Marclay’s installation consisted of a 24-hour video-montage of more than 10,000 film and television clips from the last century. What was astounding was how Marclay spliced together specific moments which showed the passing of time — a clock tower in Orson Welles’s The Stranger, Big Ben in V for Vendetta — to unfold in real time. By playing out this footage across the day, Marclay suggested that each minute could be filled with cinematic wonder.