Erika Balsom revisits the beginnings of contemporary art’s engagement with cinema and its mode of display through the lens of the landmark exhibition Passages de l’image, held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 1990.

Installation view of the exhibition “Passages de l’image” held at Centre Pompidou, Galeries contemporaines (19 september – 18 november 1990). Inv.: MUS199006;EX341. Photographer: Konstantinos Ignatiadis. Paris, Musee National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou. © 2022. RMN-Grand Palais /Dist. Foto SCALA, Florence

In the 1990s, cinema—its history, visual language, and mode of display—became an artistic preoccupation as never before. With the newly widespread availability of video projection and amid fears that cinema was facing yet another death, the moving image was subject to an unprecedented institutional endorsement within the spaces of art. Artists remade and recycled the products of film history, while photochemical film was deemed an obsolescent medium tied to spectrality and pastness. Immersive installations recruiting spectacle and scale proliferated, documentary practices surged, and major institutions staged cinema-themed exhibitions. A new relationship between art and film took shape, as the moving image transformed from a marginal medium of artistic practice to a ubiquitous presence in galleries and museums.

Thirty years later, it is safe to say that this period is now definitively over. Large-scale projection and cinematic tropes remain an important presence in contemporary art, but the time of incessantly thematizing the status of cinema in curatorial and artistic practice has passed. The ‘love affair’ between art and film followed a trajectory typical of romance: the early days of infatuation are passionate and confusing, marked by obsession and unending reflection; then, after a while, things stabilize into something more routine, more predictable.

From the perspective of a relatively settled present, it can be useful to remember the tumult of the start, to find the roots of the current conjuncture and recall paths not taken. It is in this spirit that this text goes back to the beginning—or at least a beginning—of the love affair between art and cinema, to an exhibition positioned at the inauguration of the cinephilic moment of contemporary art: Passages de l’image, held at the Centre Pompidou in 1990. Curated by film theorist Raymond Bellour and Pompidou curators Catherine David and Christine van Assche, Passages de l’image marked the first time that the institution had devoted an exhibition entirely to mechanically and electronically reproducible images. According to the curators, it was a response to “the desire to understand what started happening in and among images when it became clear that we could no longer simply speak of the cinema, photography, and painting, since we had reached a point of no return in a crisis of the image, when the very nature of images was brought into question.”¹ Working across the spaces of the cinema and the gallery, and engaging with new technologies, Passages charted key concerns that would preoccupy artists, curators, and scholars in the decades that followed: the increased presence of intermedial forms, the crisis of lens-based referentiality, and, perhaps most centrally, the shifting relationship between the moving image and its architectures of display in the informatic age.

WORKING ACROSS THE SPACES OF THE CINEMA AND THE GALLERY, AND ENGAGING WITH NEW TECHNOLOGIES, PASSAGES CHARTED KEY CONCERNS THAT WOULD PREOCCUPY ARTISTS, CURATORS, AND SCHOLARS IN THE DECADES THAT FOLLOWED: THE INCREASED PRESENCE OF INTERMEDIAL FORMS, THE CRISIS OF LENS-BASED REFERENTIALITY, AND, PERHAPS MOST CENTRALLY, THE SHIFTING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MOVING IMAGE AND ITS ARCHITECTURES OF DISPLAY IN THE INFORMATIC AGE.

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Initially planned for 1989 but pushed forward because of financial concerns, Passages de l’image opened in autumn 1990. The exhibition drew extensively on Bellour’s research into the concept of the entre-image, or between-image, which names the intermedial contamination that results when two image-regimes meet and hybridize, be it photography and film, or film and video.² Passages presented an overview of how exploring the ‘passages’ between discrete media had become a central part of the work of sixteen contemporary artists including Geneviève Cadieux, Gary Hill, Suzanne Lafont, Thierry Kuntzel, Chris Marker, and Jeff Wall. Most works included were produced between 1987 and 1990, with many of them newly commissioned for the occasion. A number reflect on the relationship between the moving image and its display context, such as Dan Graham’s Cinema (1981), a model for an unbuilt cinema (the earliest artwork included in the exhibition), and Bill Viola’s Passage (1987), a video projection of a child’s birthday party shown in slow motion, positioned at the end of a long, narrow corridor. Painting was excluded on principle, owing to the way it “dominates the hierarchy of cultural objects.”³ Large-scale photography and video installation took center stage, but there were also experiments with new media, such as Michael Snow’s Still Life in 8 Calls (1985), a holographic work, and Grahame Weinbren and Roberta Friedman, The Erl King (1986), an interactive videodisc narrative that uses a touch screen. The curators named two major themes—two forms of ‘passage’—as central to the exhibition: the passage between “immobility and movement,” and the passage between “analogical representation and what suspends, destroys, or corrupts it.”⁴ Both are at play in the medium of film, and both are dramatically transformed by the appearance of video and, later, the computer-generated image, which introduce new forms of image generation and manipulation. The exhibition sought to stage the manifold manifestations of these passages, triangulating the museum, the cinema, and the digital as no show before it had.

Installation view of the exhibition “Passages de l’image” held at Centre Pompidou, Galeries contemporaines (19 september – 18 november 1990). Inv.: MUS199006;EX341. Photographer: Konstantinos Ignatiadis. Paris, Musee National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou. © 2022. RMN-Grand Palais /Dist. Foto SCALA, Florence

In addition to these contributions, the exhibition included a videotheque with a selection of one hundred artists’ tapes spanning from 1965 to 1989 and a program of computer-generated scientific test images, the latter shown in a hut-like enclosure within the galleries. The curators saw the computer animations—assembled by Jean-Louis Boissier, who had participated in Jean-François Lyotard’s influential 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux with a videodisc installation—not as artworks but rather as documentation of the new possibilities of synthetic images devoid of referentiality.⁵ Meanwhile, an extensive program of some 146 films reaching back to 1914 was shown in the Salle Garance (the Pompidou cinema), suggesting that the ‘passages’ under consideration were nothing new, but rather concerns that had marked the history of cinema throughout the twentieth century. A wide range of films were selected, clustered around the exhibition’s twin themes and spanning popular cinema, art cinema, and artists’ film: from the animation/live-action hybridity of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) to the exploration of photographic stillness in Roberto Rossellini’s The Machine That Kills Bad People (1952), from the tableaux of Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975) to the structural reflexivity of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). Selected clips from the film program were exhibited within the gallery space as part of Dennis Adams’s sculptural commission, Vortex (1990). Vortex featured a structure comprised of two screens intersecting at an acute angle, with each backed by a light box housing two copies of the same still image of a sleeping protester at Tiananmen Square. In a contemporaneous interview, Catherine David emphasized the exhibition’s interdisciplinary scope, stating that she hoped it would bridge the divide between the discourses of cinema and those of art.⁶

In its substantial engagement with cinema and embrace of video projection, Passages marks a decisive shift from established paradigms for the exhibition of video installation in the 1980s. Survey exhibitions such as The Luminous Image at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1984 and Video Skulptur at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Köln in 1989 took video as their focus, but neither explored projection, focusing instead on the sculptural possibilities of monitor-based display. Two years before the landmark use of video projection at documenta 9, Passages highlighted the scalar possibilities of this mode of display and foreshadowed the profound impact its increasing use would have on artists and institutions alike. Passages also differs notably from two significant contemporaneous exhibitions in the United States that interrogated the collapse of distinctions between high and low culture and the role of media spectacle: Image World at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and A Forest of Signs at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, both held in 1989. Image World included an accompanying film program, but perhaps surprisingly, given the subject matter of these shows, neither widely integrated moving images into the gallery. For Passages, questioning the multiple means by which this might occur was the central wager, one undertaken hand in hand with a retreat from spectacle and rejection of the postmodern sensibility that informed the US exhibitions.⁷ Instead, a form of residual modernism prevailed, as the curators selected works that reflexively interrogated their material supports and asserted an opposition to the visual vocabularies of advertising, even as they took stock of a new digital age on the horizon.

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Writing about the Centre Pompidou at the time of its construction in 1975, Annette Michelson discerned that this new institution was not cut from the same cloth as its predecessors: “Immense in scale, [it] is also immense in its aspiration; seeking to fuse conservation and creation, art and industry, and a certain pantheonization with the fugitive, transitory and immediately consumed event.”⁸ In its staging of the intersection of art and cinema at the end of the twentieth century, Passages stands as an especially acute pursuit of the conflicted mandate Michelson describes—one that belongs not only to the Pompidou but which has become, in the years since the publication of her article, characteristic of the contemporary art museum more broadly. The exhibition proposed a two-pronged art-institutionalization of the moving image, engaging in a musealization of the history of cinema and asserting the central position of the moving image within the landscape of contemporary art practices. Yet braided with this narrative of ‘pantheonization’ is a concern with disruption and dispersal—in short, with the ‘fugitive’—that sees the moving image as aligned with promiscuous circulation, technologization, and acceleration. Put differently, contained within Passages de l’image is a contradictory movement, whereby the moving image seeks entry into the museum, while simultaneously disrupting the values and categories that had historically informed its practices.

The ‘fugitive’ aspects of Passages are emphatically present in Chris Marker’s Zapping Zone (Proposals for an imaginary television) (1990), a new commission that Jean-Michel Frodon, in his review of the show in the newspaper Le Monde, deemed to be “the emblem of what the entire exhibition wanted to be.”⁹ Catherine David, meanwhile, called it a “cancerous version” of the hybrid dispositifs used by the other artists throughout Passages, a description that evokes a multiplication and exaggeration of strategies present elsewhere in the galleries.¹⁰ Zapping Zone, an assemblage of some twenty television and computer monitors, was not the first time Marker had employed multichannel installation—in 1978, he had contributed the double-channel video work Quand le siècle a pris forme (Guerre et révolution) to the Pompidou exhibition Paris–Berlin: 1900–1930—but it does stand as a significant threshold in his oeuvre, marking a definitive move beyond the single screen by someone who had previously been closely associated with it. The monitors are arranged together to form an installation with a strong spatial presence that depends on the ambulatory movement of the viewer to activate connections and juxtapositions across the various screens. The working title of the installation was Logiciel/Catacombes, or Software/Catacombs, a concatenation that brings technological novelty into proximity with notions of eternity and preservation. In an unpublished proposal written for the curators of Passages, Marker explains that he sought to chart the passage from the industrial age to the information age, a transition that moves from film to the computer.¹¹

Installation view of the exhibition “Passages de l’image” held at Centre Pompidou, Galeries contemporaines (19 september – 18 november 1990). Inv.: MUS199006;EX341. Photographer: Konstantinos Ignatiadis. Paris, Musee National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou. © 2022. RMN-Grand Palais /Dist. Foto SCALA, Florence

Marker was one of two figures—the other being Michael Snow—to appear both in the galleries and in the film program. In the introduction to the latter, the curators mention that Marker’s presence in both spaces should indicate that the spectator of the cinema is equally expected to be a visitor to the exhibition, suggesting the extent to which Passages was asserting a changed relation between the spaces of cinema and gallery.¹² To further assert the link between these spaces, the curators decided to invite filmmakers to produce installations, engaging in a practice that was novel at the time but which would be taken up repeatedly in major international exhibitions throughout the 1990s. In early discussions, there was a suggestion that Peter Greenaway might produce scenography for the entire exhibition, or perhaps exhibit video essays exploring the “games” invented for his 1988 film Drowning by Numbers, but neither came to fruition.¹³ Chantal Akerman also appears on an early draft checklist;¹⁴ although she later went on to work extensively in the gallery, beginning with a 1995 Jeu de Paume exhibition curated by Catherine David, at this point in time her practice had remained confined to the cinema. The proposal was to show her 1972 film Hotel Monterey in the gallery, but this too failed to materialize. It was in this context that Bellour extended an invitation to Marker to produce the work that would become Zapping Zone.

The installation’s title suggests that its many monitors might be seen as a spatialization of various television channels to ‘zap’ between. Critic Serge Daney used the term “zapping” to name a column about television he wrote for three months in 1987 for Libération, describing the action as both dream and nightmare: on the one hand, it was a way of setting heterogeneous materials side by side to create constellations that allow their elements to resonate in new ways; on the other hand, it was a form of mindless distraction.15 Marker’s installation embodies the same ambivalence. Zapping Zone brings together a vast assortment of materials, drawn primarily from his personal archive and spanning across media. He appropriates footage from Andrei Tarkovsky and Japanese television, setting it alongside his own films, a photographic slide show, and images created in HyperStudio using his Apple IIGS computer.¹⁶ Marker’s reuse of existing material, including excerpts from his own Sans Soleil (1983) and A Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l’air est rouge, 1977), suggests a conception of the image as mobile, untethered from any single support or exhibition architecture. In the proposal for the installation, Marker imagines a station where images of viewers would be taken live and merged with images of an owl, something he called the Owlomaton.¹⁷ He imagined that it would be possible for viewers to make a printout of this image and take it home with them as a souvenir—perhaps a clever, ironic commentary on the notion that the postmodern museum bears comparison to a theme park.

The Owlomaton never came into being, presumably due to its expense and technical requirements. Zapping Zone nonetheless succeeded in achieving Marker’s original conceptual aims. The installation accords a tremendous generative potential to new intermedial forms, seeing them as a means of reenergizing moving image practice. Through these new technologies of image production and display, Marker extends many of his longstanding interests: the mobility of images and people, the ability to work independently, and the exploration of innovative deployments of montage. Yet there is also a sense of loss: a loss of time, attention, and scale. Like Passages as a whole, Zapping Zone points to the migrations and mutations of cinema in a new media ecology, but it does so in a manner that is inextricable from the question of memorialization. In a review of the exhibition published in Cahiers du cinéma, Antoine de Baecque wrote that Passages was marked by nostalgia and proposed that the musealization of cinema might involve endowing film with the aura it had once compromised.¹⁸ The notion of cinema as an old medium in need of protection would be pursued with fervor in the years that followed by artists, scholars, and curators, as its mass cultural obsolescence eased its passage into the pantheon of the arts.

Installation view of the exhibition “Passages de l’image” held at Centre Pompidou, Galeries contemporaines (19 september – 18 november 1990). Inv.: MUS199006;EX341. Photographer: Konstantinos Ignatiadis. Paris, Musee National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou. © 2022. RMN-Grand Palais /Dist. Foto SCALA, Florence

While pantheonization is tied to an elevated cultural value, leaving behind the space of the cinema also entails relinquishing the conditions of display that have historically been important to the specificity of the cinematic experience. In many of the cinema-themed exhibitions of the 1990s and 2000s, film’s admission into the pantheon of the arts is tied not only to a discursive relocation, but an architectural relocation as well: it is brought out of the cinema and into the gallery. For instance, in Philippe-Alain Michaud’s 2006 exhibition Le Mouvement des images, also held at the Pompidou, canonical works of avant-garde cinema, made on film and intended for start-to-finish viewing in a cinema, were transferred to video and exhibited along a central corridor. In the exhibition catalogue, Michaud suggested that it is now necessary to consider cinema “no longer from the limited viewpoint of film history, but at the crossroads of live spectacle and the visual arts, from an expanded point of view that encompasses a general history of representations.”¹⁹ In asserting a bond between cinema and contemporary art, and in claiming cinema’s place within the museum, one might see Passages as foreshadowing this practice. Yet very notably, it does not display any moving image works that depend on start-to-finish viewing in the gallery, nor any works made for presentation in the movie theater in a gallery setting, both of which are common practices today.

With their decision to undertake a double presentation comprising a gallery display and separate film program, the curators embraced a practice controversially adopted during Harald Szeemann’s documenta 5 (1972) and reiterated innumerable times since, one which is sometimes construed as bestowing upon film a second-class status, as if to suggest that it possesses a lesser, ancillary role in relation to the works in the gallery. The curators of Passages intended nothing of the sort, but the press response veered toward privileging the gallery space; as Bellour remarked in 2015, “All the reviews, all the reactions, were directed to the exhibition, and the film program was not really understood as part of the show, which for us was basic. It was fundamental to have it.”²⁰

IN THIS INTERROGATION OF THE INTERMEDIAL ‘PASSAGES’ OF THE IMAGE, LOCATING THE FILM PROGRAM IN THE CINEMA WAS NOT A RELEGATION BUT RATHER A WAY OF INSISTING ON THE SPECIFICITY AND DIFFERENCE OF CINEMA VIS-À-VIS THE FINE ARTS AT THE SAME TIME AS IT STAGED THEIR CONFRONTATION.

In this interrogation of the intermedial ‘passages’ of the image, locating the film program in the cinema was not a relegation but rather a way of insisting on the specificity and difference of cinema vis-à-vis the fine arts at the same time as it staged their confrontation—a position that appears rather unorthodox in comparison with the many cinema-themed exhibitions that followed in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, which overwhelmingly preferred to opt for an assimilation that was both discursive and locational. As much as the exhibition figures as an early instantiation of the transportability of cinema that would characterize so much later curatorial practice, it equally hints at an attitude Bellour would elaborate in his 2012 book La Querelle des dispositifs, in which he describes the period of contemporary art’s cinephilia as one of “honeyed violence” and argues that cinema depends inherently on the specific exhibitions of the movie theater.²¹

Installation view of the exhibition “Passages de l’image” held at Centre Pompidou, Galeries contemporaines (19 september – 18 november 1990). Inv.: MUS199006;EX341. Photographer: Konstantinos Ignatiadis. Paris, Musee National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou. © 2022. RMN-Grand Palais /Dist. Foto SCALA, Florence

Thirty years after Passages de l’image, it has become entirely unremarkable to wander through galleries full of projections, encountering works created specifically for that space alongside works made for start-to-finish viewing that were originally intended for the cinema, the sort Passages chose to confine to the cinema space. So too is it exceedingly common to see artists and curators engaging with the ways digital culture is transforming the status of the image and the character of aesthetic experience. Yet neither phenomenon was a usual occurrence in 1990. To return to this landmark exhibition today is to return to the moment just before the conditions of display that dominate contemporary curatorial practice would become normalized. It is an exhibition marked both by a melancholic hesitation concerning the implications of the increased mobility of the moving image and by the electric charge of generative confusion concerning how these same circumstances might function as a wellspring of creativity. It rises to the challenge of new technologies while insisting on asserting some distance from a visual culture predicated on commodification and inattention; it dramatizes contamination and hybridity while also insisting on separation. As the history of the encounters between art and film is written, it is imperative that it be not only a history of artists and artworks, but a history of exhibitions as well—for it is through an examination of large-scale curatorial endeavors such as Passages de l’image that it becomes possible to limn the contours of the ever-evolving space between art and film.