Abstract (eng)
Austrian avantgarde filmmaker and artist Martin Arnold creates dynamic audiovisual palimpsests through citation and appropriation of found footage, often materials extracted from films associated with the ‘golden era’ of Hollywood cinema. Comprised of a multitude of traces and cinematic tropes, these fragments are heavily inscribed with cultural meanings from their original context, resurrected and re-interpreted and overwritten in the creation of the artist’s new micro and meta-narratives. The original archive film and newly created filmic bodies converse/co-exist in a potent and at times paradoxical relation, correlating in a productive exchange.
Arnold’s cinematic re-reading and assemblage juxtaposes these elements in a continuous process of simultaneous affirmation and deconstruction, where found-footage film manifests as self-reflective mediation, re-constituted as a multi-dimensional palimpsest of history-in-progress, of rampant meaning and aesthetic cerebration.
His artistic practice visually interrogates film as medium, and considers its myriad intrinsic dispositions: deconstructing cinematic language, Arnold destabilizes Hollywood’s narrative conventions and visual hierarchies - conjuring a spectral landscape of what is visible, and what remains hidden. Here archive film not only revives cinema’s past, it actively probes the different cultural trajectories and partial failures inherent in classic cinema’s structural frameworks: new film works emerge –palimpsests of the genre’s own history, oscillating between presence and absence, form and meaning – further illuminated through the crossover of film into the gallery space.