ONE OF the new developments in the art world which ART NOW :VOL: 2 delivers is the prevalence of artists using still photography, video and short films to make creative statements about themselves , their ethnic or national culture, their society, or some peculiar observation about living in today’s world.
There are over a dozen such artists in the book, excluding Doug Aitken, spoken about in Part IV, and who we will return to briefly at the end of this essay. Some of these artists are not only from Europe or the USA, but from China, Egypt, Iran, and Canada. The use of a technical medium like still and motion pictures in developing nations beyond the first technically modernized societies of North America and Europe, provokes questions of the effect of modern technological lifestyles on societies in transition between old traditional cultural expressions, and new forms of art capable of capturing and visualizing aspects of this transition.
The artists of these nascent modernizing societies who are using photography and video/film are important players in clarifying transitional problems their nations are experiencing, while those who maintain only a habitual expression of traditional culture may remain longer in a fragmented state of identity because they lack art forms and styles exploring the local experience of their evolving larger national identity.
On the other hand, for the North American and European photo/video/film artists of today, another type of problem develops, often to do with their mediums’ position as the protégé of an already highly developed and accomplished cinematic art.
The relationship of the new photographic/video artists to the avant-garde, yet highly interesting and even quite popular cinematic art of film directors like Antonioni, Fellini, Godard, Lelouch , Kazan, Negulesco, Huston, Wilder, Cassavetes etc, is like the journalist who writes his column on a Tuesday to be published in the weekend paper, but whose ideas are exposed by what in journalism is called a ‘scoop’ to an aspiring new journalist of another paper, and whose article with ‘scooped’ ideas appears during the week ahead of the weekend, but using the Tuesday journalist’s ideas, thus reversing the true sequence of productivity, where the one writer in front now appears to be the one behind, and the one behind seems to be the one in front, like some abnormal vulgar paradigm.
The works of the new photo/video artists in Europe and North America in many ways would appear today to be new only to novices of cinematic art, such as other artists and even young curators unacquainted with the original films of these earlier outstanding avant-garde cinematic directors mentioned above.

Contemporary Chinese art

Yang Fudong, born in 1971 in Beijing but living and working in Shangai, is probably one of the best of contemporary China’s artists, who, with his photographs, videos and short films, shows how traditional Chinese culture is inevitably affected by the natural modern desire to consume or incorporate products and cultural items from other parts of the world into their own.
This affectation is not lost in Fudong’s works, because he is acquainted with, and utilizes, the best structural, poetic, and erotic aspects of traditional antique Chinese culture, so that these aspects are evident in the clear beautiful scenes of his superb 35mm black & white film, ‘Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest’ of 46 minutes, made in 2003/4.
Another is his refreshing sexually uninhibited video installation, ‘Moon Tonight’, in which heterosexual erotic outdoor scenes with young adult Chinese is a welcome and rare topic.
But is such a topic just an example of imitation of American and European permissiveness by a new generation of Chinese, as overt and covert anti-American and anti-white critics like to always have us believe?
Nonsense! Highly erotic Chinese prints or graphics, as well as explicit erotic outdoor Indian Oriental sculpture, existed centuries before Northern Europeans and Americans picked up visual erotic art, significantly in rebellion against their civilization’s increasingly repressed and antipathic direction. No wonder the populations of these two non-Western nations are so huge! 
Another one of Fudong’s welcome photographic skills is his keen eye, which isolates a brilliantly definitive moment, as in the beautiful coloured photograph, ‘Honey’, of a chic ‘new-wave’ intellectual type Chinese girl with a cigarette and henna-red hair.
The ability of numerous contemporary Chinese/Japanese/Hong Kong/South Korean photo/video/film artists to deliver such modernized equivalents of their traditional culture today, whereas the opposite exists for various ethnicities transferred by colonialism to places like the Anglo-Caribbean and Guyana, is based on the fact that these Asian generations in their homeland have no chip on their shoulder, which makes them want to blind themselves to the knowledge and incorporation of other benign cultural values from outside their race; whereas it seems a parochial Anglo-Caribbean mentality wants to steadfastly reassert racial/ethnic cultural values, based only on an historical evaluation of themselves as the ‘colonised’, involuntarily taken away from their original parental cultures, whose traditional customs they now feel compelled to reassert in a self-conscious, post-colonial present.
No doubt, the absence of such psychological reins helped new generations in China, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Brazil, and most Latin American nations to accept as theirs other benign international cultural values on their horizon, helping them to sprint towards the progressions evident in their nations today, while Anglo Caribbean nations are largely still myopically reminiscing at the starting line, and licking old historical wounds.
One of the qualities of the video medium is that unlike commercial film production, a rich financier, or cultural State sponsor, is unnecessary, so video artists can turn their attention to realities where the environment of their nation, and participation of citizens and individuals, are featured in an imaginative style or documentary manner.
But this has nothing to do with anyone pretending to be an artist, as the increasing cell-phone market encourages with its visual texting, etc. Everyone is not an artist, and cannot be one, but new communication technology has become a threat to the importance and seriousness of art by giving a new generation small audio-visual tools with which to play with themselves, creating the illusion of being creative by shortcuts which exclude true in-depth knowledge and the pursuit of creative skills culled from the international history of art, especially cinematic art.

Cinematic influence

This brings us to the issue of cinematic art’s influence on the photographic and video artists featured in ART NOW: VOL: 2. Significantly, such artists with non-Western roots, like 35-year-old Hassan Khan, born in London but working in Cairo, delivers video images and texts where both young and old Egyptians, and their social and civic environment, show us that ambiguous look of a society that is no longer its traditional self, yet neither is it genuinely modern.
Khan could have avoided showing such sensitive video imagery, showing instead some pocket where a typical traditional example of Egyptian culture obviously still exists; but for the genuine artist, such an easy repetitive choice would evade everyday contemporary social or national truths.
The 53-year-old Iranian photo/video artist, Shirin Neshat, on the other hand, delivers far more imaginative, yet relevant cinematic work, reminiscent of scenes from films by the Russian modernist master, Andrei Tarkovsky.
In fact, Iran is one of the countries with a vibrant new cinematic culture which is clearly aware of the world’s great cinematic works. Neshat is concerned with the tyranny of a male-controlled culture in which women’s role is permanently defined, unchanging, and steeped in unquestionable cultural conformity. This she demonstrates with brilliant creative symbolism in her 2004 cinematic work, ‘Women Without Men’, where one print shows an Iranian woman (herself?) sitting and knitting robotically from large balls of yellow yarn covering the floor of an entire forest around her, and in which other women, in identical yellow gowns, are seen running towards her.
Another photographic artist, like the 55-year-old German, Andreas Gursky, is uniquely interesting because his large, kinetically beautiful colour prints capture modern mass activities, like seats in an auditorium, or workers, shown with optical giddiness, making cane chairs in a factory.
Gursky’s superb large colour photos reveal imbalances and inequalities, called entropy, which drive production in an industrial age. Vera Lutter, another German photographic artist, born in 1960, uses all sorts of techniques for photographs and their development, but the end result is quite similar to scenes from masterpiece modern films like Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s stunning ‘Last Year At Marienbad’, or Godard’s ‘Alphaville’, or American Film Noirs like John Farrow’s ‘His Kind Of Woman’, Robert Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’, and Ed Marin’s ‘Nocturne’, etc.
Because many of these new artists are not filmmakers, their works end up being mainly technical demonstrations. The 44-year-old Scottish video artist, Douglas Gordon, for instance, adjusts the film speed of real films to show some sort of theoretical deduction of what films do to the viewer’s time-span.
In one of Gordon’s famous shows, called ‘Play Dead. Real Time’, an elephant is  shown  in large and small scenes in an urban New York gallery, and this juxtaposition is supposed to startle us. But the whole premise is intellectually late, because the same supposedly disconcerting ratio of small to large photos of the same subject was seen every day when classic cinemas reined, and one entered cinema lobbies and saw small still photos of scenes that were also on the huge screen. That was when cinemas were also art and photographic galleries for everyone, the masses.
There are other photographic artists we can mention in ART NOW; VOL: 2, but the point that motion pictures, or filmmaking, haunt their fragmented experiments is valid. Jeff Wall, the 64-year-old Canadian photo/film artist from Vancouver, who, despite his original fusion of photo and film with painting, and, if I remember correctly, made those brilliant transparent photographic suitcases revealing offensive weapons and other personal data, also makes photographic projections of serene or grimy human locations quite reminiscent of similar but more profound scenes in cinematic masterpieces like Kurosawa’s ‘The Lower Depths’, Wajda’s ‘Ashes and Diamonds’, Antonioni’s ‘Red Desert’, or Tarkovsky’s ‘Nostalgia’.

Parodies

We need only acquaint ourselves once more with the leading Underground filmmakers of the late 60s and 70s, artists like Hollis Frampton, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Peter Gidal, Ken Jacobs, David Crosswaite etc. Behind the isolated imagery of many new photo/video artists is their innocence of work already done in their field; but the succession of art-world trends tends to erase the achievements of earlier older artists, so as to promote new younger ones as original.
Some new photo/video artists, especially the 56-year-old American Cindy Sherman, achieved enormous popularity precisely because of her deliberate references to cinematic culture, and the roles of women in movies. Sherman took a somewhat feminist position, coyly acting out female scenes from classic Hollywood 1950s and 60s films, which she implied were clichés of what male viewers, and also male film directors, wanted from women (actresses).
Cindy made about six dozen of these parodies of film stills, in which she preened, posed, gazed etc, like stereotypical heroines, and sometimes looked quite her capable sexy self. But apart from evoking multiple identities, humour, and theatrical quotation, these fake ‘lobby cards’ are not really better in style or content to thousands of American and European ‘film stills’ with the same point (who knows?) made by subtle, intelligent, gorgeous actresses like Silvana Mangano, Lea Massari, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Jane Russell, Dorothy Dandridge, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Carroll Baker, Lee Remick, Susan Pleschette, Yvette Vickers, Mari Blanchard, Beverly Garland, Mara Corday, Dorothy Malone, Cyd Charisse, Catherine Deneuve, Francoise Dorleac, Anouk Aimee, Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, Beatrice Dalle, etc etc, in thousands of the best ‘A’ quality and ‘B’ movies.
The topic, or scene, of the male gaze of desire is summed up perfectly by that classic definitive ‘film still’ scene of Monica Vitti on an Italian village street being stared at by a group of men in Antonioni’s amazing screen masterpiece, ‘L’Aventura’ of 1960. Since men cannot become intimate with all women they desire, but only those that desire them, the seductive sensual cinematic images of women, including those in adult pornographic magazines and films, serve both pleasurable fantasy and biological release of quite natural overflowing libidos in both male and female.
Another photo/video artist similar to Sherman is 39-year-old Francesco Vezzoli of Italy, who is having fun juxtaposing himself in scenes from films he likes, and more original, embroidering tears on facial images of beautiful actresses, alluding to the devotional attention we give them.
Yet, Vezzoli’s images, while intellectually quirky, again do not equal the scenic and sensual vivacity of 50s and 60s classic films based on Roman and Greek narratives; films such as ‘Quo Vadis’, ‘Soloman and Sheba’, ‘Salome’, ‘Messalina’, ‘Hercules Unchained’, ‘Fellini’s Satyricon’, even the recent ‘Belly of an Architect’, or ‘The Name Of the Rose’.
The bottom-line judgment concerns the total venerable value of images as ‘film stills’ or ‘lobby cards’. By isolating the scene like a ‘lobby card’ photo from the running scene of a film, the still photo can take on extra fertile ambiguity and resonance. Most of the photo/video artists in ART NOW: VOL: 2 want to achieve this value, but only a few like Yang Fudong, or the Californian Doug Aitken achieve this, precisely because they extend the lessons of classic cinema, using and revealing offhand intuitive and ultimately ever-fresh human qualities