Art vs. Cinema / Art with Cinema

At the very end of the chapter Michael Rush writes "it is likely... that film will supersede video as the choice for artists. Single-channel videos and multi-channel installations may well become artifacts of history. In order to remain viable, video artists will have to maintain their unique connection to video as an art of 'real time,' and not try to mimic the illusion of cinema" (165). I found this statement interesting, mostly considering that Rush had mentioned a few artists who had work that was in response to, and in conversation with, cinema. Is their work allowed to distort and critique and pull apart pieces of cinema, but not actually become them?

The first artist who plays around with films a lot is Douglas Gordon. His installation piece cited in the chapter, through the looking glass (1999), appropriates the most well-known, and by that time iconic, scene from the 1976 film Taxi Driver. He doesn't change the scene at all, but places it on both sides of the viewer so they feel that they are on the other side of Travis Bickle's gun and practice-menace in the mirror (the "looking glass"). [what would be played around you]
 
He's done countless other "experiments" with iconic film images: his In Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) comments on William Blake's opposing songs of innocence and experience; and the general, perennial conflict between absolute good and evil by superimposing the films The Song of Bernadette and The Exorcist over each other to give the viewers a disorienting experience.

His 24 Hour Psycho slowed down Alfred Hitchcock's classic film so it lasted 24 hours. He's never changing the films themselves that much, so those works on their own have a power that comes with them. He just adjusts the presentation a bit and he has an installation piece. If an artist's original work to be more like "cinema," I don't see what would be so detrimental, or inartistic, about that.

Another artist Rush mentions briefly is Steve McQueen. In one of his most famous installations, Deadpan, he modifies the image from silent film star Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. - that of the frame of a house falling down on a person, missing them by having the person stand inside the space of a window. Here he's playing with the recognized imagery that comes with that house falling down, and using it for his own artistic purposes.

To say anything along the lines of art or video art/installations must be completely separate and unique from cinema, or full-length films, is kind of closed-minded. Steve McQueen has even branched out recently, creating two full-length films (Hunger and Shame), even winning several awards at film festivals. To say that anything in those films isn't similar at all to his earlier "art" work, because now it's cinema, is kind of absurd. The "art world" should stop this whole idea of being better than or more artistic than cinema; that might have been true at one point, in some ways, but now the two are blending together so easily and so frequently that there's no more reason to create distinctive borderlines.