Ann-Sofi Sidén - QM, I think I´ll call her QM

Magnus Bärtås - Anna, where is Paulina today?
(real video)

Pål Hollender - Overplayed

Marit Lindberg - Four O´clock in the morning

Martin Petéus - The best a man can get
(real video)

Anna Nyberg - Yes- without No

Carl Johan Erikson - iNo Titel

The idea of giving several visual artists each a slot during the pre-movie commercials at the cinema originates from an earlier project which one of us - Martin Petèus- did at a cinema in Trondheim, Norway. The slide image advertisements for local shops and businesses which were shown before the main feature were infiltrated by two of Petéus's own slides made to look like police search posters.

During discussions with Martin after his return from Norway, we began to see the potential in the idea. What would it be like to take the idea over to Swedish cinemas on a much larger scale? The question became: how would an artist use one minute of screen time at the cinema?

We approached the Swedish Film Industry (Svensk Filmindustri) who were immediately positive towards the idea. One minute of screen time per artist during the commercials program was made available to us for every movie theater in Sweden in 1998. The films would be shown according to a rolling schedule.

The step from slide format to film turned out to be a major one. Used to doing exhibitions on measly little budgets, we were almost embarrassed over the budget required to carry out the project. On closer thought, we realized that there really is a relation between economic input and the resulting potential for communicative power, both in terms of distributing the film widely and the visual force which the medium possesses.

The method—blasting in an artistic message into a commercial context—is interesting in itself. But we thought that the specific context of pre-movie commercials was of special interest: the audience is broad and heterogeneous. In contrast to a more passive TV audience or a fully passive audience in the public sphere, the cinema audience members are active since they have paid for tickets for a movie they want to see. The attention span is high, and all eyes are simultaneously turned on one single point: the screen.

Many visual artists have been struck by film's power of attraction. References to film within art have mirrored the large-scale emergence of ideas about "the filmic" or "the essence of film." Some have been inspired by cinematography, some have turned to film's narrative and mimetic force, while others have used the language and aesthetics which have developed within specific genres. And yet many visual artists still have no practical experience of filmmaking. Even if video art has had a major break-through among artists, curators, and gallerists (in descending order), it has rarely had to confront people from outside the art world. When given the chance to work with film, we saw this invitation as an opportunity with two dimensions, both equally important: first, an encounter with a new medium for most of the invited artists, and second, a new "exhibition space." Here you suddenly come face-to-face with an enormous number of viewers‹from a visual artist's perspective, it feels justified to use the word 'mass audience.'

We thought of the encounter with a new medium as a process of translation which could turn out in different ways and which automatically posed a number of questions: How and to what extent could you transfer your 'normal' work to the medium of film? In what way could you begin to resist or move counter to this context, both as a place for chips and soft drinks commercials but also in the larger sense of the entire cinema?

Then, when inviting others to paticipate in the project, we wanted a spectrum of artists, from those who had never worked with moving images, through those who had done interesting work in video, to someone who had already worked with film. It was our own curiosity which in the end guided us. We asked ourselves "What would this artist do given this situation?" or "What message would this artist want to send out in the middle of all these commercial messages with such clearly thought-out goals?" These were the same questions we had posed ourselves at the beginning of the project.

All the participants were offered a complete film crew and 35-millimeter film. The idea was to make available the same technical resources that a low-budget commercial would have. For once art could play on the same field as advertisement, or at least on an adjoining one. The contrast with the commercials would not, if the artist did not wish it so, simply be necessitated by inferior technology.

Five of the participating artists took up the offer of working with the crew. After working out the synopses and discussing the projects with the cameraman Tommy Lundström, the films were shot at the old film studios in Solna in northern Stockholm. It was a record-setting hot week in August 1997. The experience was a tremendous one for all the artists involved.

The participating artists in ”Art at the movies” were (besides ourselves): Pål Hollender, Anna Nyberg, Carl Johan Erikson, Marit Lindberg and Ann-Sofi Sidén. The project recieved a lot of attention both from the media and the audience. But the project also caused discontent: some of the buyers of commercials complained to the Swedish Film Industry arguing that the art films ”are destroying the atmosphere” in the pre-movie section. The cinema visitors ”are surprised and puzzled”, they asserted.
A reaction as interesting as any other.