The film artist Annabel Nicolson’s 1972 article ‘The Artist as Filmmaker,’ written for a special artist film themed issue of Art and Artists, pinpoints in hindsight attitudes and approaches to the use of the film medium potentially shared between two artistic, and contemporaneous, movements in 1970s Britain who held themselves apart: conceptual artists and artist filmmakers. This essay considers the reasons for this disconnect, finding them in Britain’s wider cultural policies towards emergent art practices such as performance and film. Could, as Nicolson’s article intimates, there be much common ground – little acknowledged then, or in historical accounts since? Discussions of the film actions of Nicolson and the film installations of David Dye in relation to conceptual counterparts such as John Hilliard and Dan Graham, make the case that they were closer in method and medium than they thought.
John C. Welchman. Review of "Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on his Art" by Dan Graham and Alexander Alberro.
