Between the discrete artistic disciplines, academic fields and infrastructures of filmmaking and visual art, artists’ moving image has long occupied an interstitial and often-overlooked position. Amongst existing scholarship on the intersection of art and film in the United Kingdom, Scotland as a cultural context produced by the devolution of arts governance has suffered another kind of negligence through deference to London-centric narratives. These compound marginalisations have, I argue, led to a fragmentary awareness of the development of this hybrid artform within the country. This new body of research aims to consolidate and present, for the first time, a comprehensive survey of artists’ moving image and its antecedent forms of experimental, avant-garde and artists’ film and video practices within the frame of Scotland’s particular cultural, critical, political and economic infrastructure.
Using a methodology derived from the social history of art, this research understands formal developments in art through their conditions of production, extending this theoretical basis to encompass the newer discipline of exhibitions history which places the art object within systems of distribution, presentation and reception, mediated via a network of custodians. To recover these historical narratives, it implements a twofold approach in the use of wide-ranging archival materials and in the creation of a new dataset of fourteen oral history interviews. Drawing from these primary sources, it maps a complex lineage of overlapping communities within which artists and organisers have fostered productive conditions, against the odds, for the development of a vibrant non-commercial film and video practice.
In providing an extensive catalogue of artists, filmmakers, organisers and key moments, this research contributes a robust foundation for future enquiry. In plotting new narratives and their sources, it advances upon existing scholarship on artists’ moving image in the UK, asking to whom the available categories and theories of moving image really belong. Through its close analysis of cultural policy, networks, exhibitions and other forms of infrastructure, it also provides an evaluation of the efficacy of historic and contemporary approaches to the collecting, commissioning and supporting of artists’ moving image. Adversity notwithstanding, it finds within the Scottish context a diverse and remarkable array of work, deserving of critical attention and renewed affection.