After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation

Artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs online, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, including discussions of major figures such as Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos, After Uniqueness demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art.

Erika Balsom is senior lecturer in film studies and liberal arts at King’s College London. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013) and coeditor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016).