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The City of Man (Die Stadt des Menschen) (Viola, Bill), 1989Cremaster 1 (Barney, Matthew), 1995
 
 
 

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projection even for narrative single-channel works raises the question of the weight ascribed to technological arrangements. Have our perceptions shifted, or is a projection simply easier to sell today than presentation on a monitor?[32] Or is this all about the triumphant progress of «expanded cinema» and the need for immersion?[33] Is the victory of the large-format projected image partly the result of the constantly criticized closeness to a television image if it is shown on a monitor, and on the other hand the consequence of an unduly powerful iconographic tradition? The extent to which museum showings promote the acceptance of technological resources can be seen from the triumphant progress of ‹art photography› as a technical medium since the 1980s just as much as in the unquestioning acceptance of a television or newspaper image in the medium of painting, as the most expensive contemporary artist, Gerhard Richter, has proved over and over again.[34]

Collectors' and buyers' lack of faith in the contractual conditions of a video edition were among the reasons why Gerry Schum's video gallery failed at the time, but space-related video installations can be

 

marketed successfully, even when they are reduced to a simple one-channel projection. The aura acquired from museum presentation and the increase in market value this causes reduces prejudice against the medium. Three artistic positions demonstrate the bandwidth of successful commercial presentation: from fine art and its concrete relationship with space and material to the projected videotape (Rosemarie Trockel), from narrative tape production to the art-historically charged museum panel picture (Bill Viola, «The City of Man», 1989) and now also–after the video sculpture–from the eccentric film to involvement with classical sculpture and marketable exploitation (Matthew Barney, «Cremaster Cycle», 1994­2002). The triumphant progress of video as a medium, also perceptible across a broad variety of uses, in the 1990s exhibition world came about because of a changed technological basis. Artists and museum technicians were benefiting from the new, cheaper and simpler technical apparatus, which made them increasingly independent of the media expert's and the electronics industry's know-how. Nowadays almost anyone can afford a small data projector.

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