Hitchcock and Contemporary Art PDF
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Hitchcock and Contemporary Art Hitchcock and Contemporary Art Christine Sprengler hitchcock and contemporary art Copyright © Christine Sprengler, 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-0-230-39215-1 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35185-5 ISBN 978-0-230-39216-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230392168 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sprengler, Christine. Hitchcock and contemporary art / by Christine Sprengler. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899–1980—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Art, Modern—21st century. I. Title. PN1998.3.H58S69 2014 791.4302933092—dc23 2013040053 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my mother Ursula and my daughter Evelyn Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction Alfred and the Art World 1 1 Cinephilic Pilgrimages and the Reification of Profilmic Space 25 2 Activating Memories and Museums through the Expanded Essay Film 45 3 Remediation and Intermediality: From Moving to (Film) Still 67 4 Spatial Montage, Temporal Collage, and the Art(ifice) of Rear Projection 91 5 The Acoustics of Vertigo: Soundtracks, Soundscapes, and Scores 119 Conclusion Repossessing Cinema 141 Appendix: List of Hitchcock Artworks Cited 155 Notes 159 Works Cited 183 Index 193 Figures 1.1 C indy Bernard, Ask the Dust: Vertigo 1958/1990, 1990, photograph 28 1.2 Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust: North by Northwest 1959/1990, 1990, photograph 28 1.3 David Reed, Scottie’s Bedroom, 1994, installation view 32 1.4 David Reed, Judy’s Bedroom, 1994, installation view 32 2.1 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix Tapes, 1999, film still from Rutland 57 2.2 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix Tapes, 1999, film still from Burden of Proof 60 2.3 Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, The Phoenix Tapes, 1999, film still from Burden of Proof 60 3.1 Isabelle Inghilleri, Theme Park: Distracted for a Moment, Words and Thoughts of No Importance Got Caught Midair. Are You Still There?, 2007, painting 72 3.2 Cindy Bernard, Location Proposal #2: Shot 17, 1997, installation view 77 4.1 J. Tobias Anderson, Nine Piece Rope, 2002, film still 92 4.2 Les LeVeque, 2 Spellbound, 1999, film still 94 4.3 Les LeVeque, 4 Vertigo, 2000, film still 95 4.4 Mark Lewis, Rear Projection (Molly Parker), 2006, film still 106 4.5 Mark Lewis, Nathan Phillips Square, A Winters Night, Skating, 2009, film still 113 C.1 RePlayed, 2005 147 C.2 ReVisited, 2005 150 C.3 ReVisited, 2005 150 Acknowledgments M y interest in art and my appreciation for Hitchcock began so long ago that I can hardly recollect that moment of initial contact with either. The former likely involved a particularly messy and vigorous bout of finger painting while the latter would have been encountered not long after on TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies with Elwy Yost, a weekly film program, which since 1974 has broadcast mainly classical Hollywood films, or at least did so during the 1980s when I tuned in religiously. These interests merged much more recently and first took shape as a talk, “Hitchcock and Contemporary Art,” presented to the tour guides of Museum London in 2007. While I saw this as an opportunity to indulge my interests, the discussion afterward showed me the way to turn what I thought was an idiosyn- cratic pleasure into a research project. For although my intent was to introduce the many, varied, and sometimes novel ways in which artists engaged with Hitchcock and his films, it quickly became apparent that these artworks offered us important insights into Hitchcock and the cinema itself—its past, present, and future, as well as its realities and myths. That art teaches us is an obvious fact long acknowledged. But I didn’t realize just how precise and nuanced this knowledge could be even when borne out of a practice driven by a simple love for film. Of course, I soon realized that this love was often charged by a desire to learn, to know more about the object of affection. As the discussion at Museum London continued, we all became acutely aware of the many sophisticated ways in which these artworks opened up meaning- ful discussions about time, space, history, memory, fact, fiction, affect, ontology, and phenomenology. Love and knowledge—cinephilia and epistemophilia—kept cropping up in relation to these works at every turn and, as motivating factors or facets inscribed in the works them- selves, they became impossible to ignore. As such, over the next few years, I road tested some thoughts on the issue in several lectures and conference papers including “From Cinephilia to Epistemophilia: Fan Practices, Art Practices and Classical Hollywood Film” at the Film and xii Acknowledgments History conference in 2010 and “The Vestiges of Vertigo: Re-Staging and Remembering Hitchcock” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) meeting in 2011. This latter paper was then gra- ciously invited by Douglas Cunningham to be part of his excellent collection of essays on Vertigo. Along the way, conversations with friends and colleagues played an important role in advancing this research. I must especially thank Laura Mulvey for her support over the years, our chats on this topic, and for pressing me on “why Hitchcock” during a long drive from the airport. As the pages that follow reveal, I am also deeply indebted to her very influential recent work on spectatorship as well as her essays on rear projection and the films of Mark Lewis. It is to this groundbreak- ing scholarship that effectively rethinks our relation to the cinema that my study here hopes to make a very modest contribution. I am also grateful to Mark Cheetham and Andy Patton for our short but lively discussions in preparation for our exhibition Conspiracies of Illusion, for thinking through the vagaries of time and space in relation to the work of David Reed. Many members of SCMS’s CinemArts Special Interest group, in particular my cochair Susan Felleman, have been wonderful sounding boards and active audiences at a series of great panels over the last several years. I’m particularly indebted to Steven Jacobs for the wealth of material he sent me on exhibitions and artist practices that fall under the purview of this project. His own research has also been extremely influential for the ways in which it poses some fundamental questions about the relationship between art and film. Nicholas Haeffner has been a tremendous help in this respect too, by sharing his thoughts on Hitchcock and pedagogy and by shipping me an incredible package of materials on the exhibitions RePossessed and Shadows of a Doubt. And, finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Daniel Morgan for his many astute insights and comments on parts of this manuscript at both its most nascent and final stages. This project certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the generosity of artists who allowed me to interview them or provided me with crucial information about their works: Gail Albert Halaban, Isabelle Inghilleri, Mark Lewis, Matthias Müller, Les LeVeque, and David Reed. These artists were also kind enough to provide me with images, as were J. Tobias Anderson and Cindy Bernard. A particu- larly huge thanks is in order for the assistance, encouragement and, of course, patience of Samantha Hasey, Robyn Curtis, and Erica Buchman at Palgrave Macmillan. This endeavor would not have been possible without the mul- tiple forms of support that come from friends, family, and a truly
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