Miranda Wallace

My research concerns the role of photography and film in American art since about 1970, and is an integral part of a wider project to assess the significance of the American minimalists’ encounters with, and reactions to, these time-based media. It examines the way certain key artists of the period (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris et. al.) understood the aesthetic role and signifying processes of photography and film, and seeks to use the outcomes of this research to provide a new framework for interpreting photographic or film-based work made from the 1970s to the present day.

The research is aimed at producing a scholarly article based on a chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. This will focus on a number of American minimalist or post-minimalist artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, took a surprising and significant interest in the late-nineteenth-century “proto-cinematic” serial photography of Eadweard Muybridge. The holdings of the Archives of American Art include important primary materials, particularly interviews with relevant artists, which will inform and complete this research. The article will establish certain historical and conceptual principles that will inform a broader research project currently in development through the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia.

Work undertaken during the fellowship would include not only archive-, library-, and art object-based research, but also professional discussions with relevant curators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum to enhance my knowledge of, and exposure to, curatorial strategies for exhibiting film and video.