Dr Clodagh Brook is delivering the Friday Keynote at the ASMI Postgraduate Conference in Royal Holloway on 23rd July. Her talk focuses on the concept of “expansion†of the arts, a concept which was coined by Stan VanDer Beek (1927-1984) in the 1960s. She and Dr Emanuela Patti are currently working together on this concept in order to construct a frame for better understanding the relations between arts often seen to be rivals, such as video art and cinema. These arts are seen here not as opposed, but instead as extension. The questions which her talk presents are: can we meaningfully use the concept of expansion to talk about the relations between the arts in Italy? How can expansion be applied to the work of video artists (Studio Azzurro)? Does this change how we conceive of cinema’s identity? Does our own critical work needs to change as a result of thinking of cinema – and the arts more generally – as fluid rather than static and as expanded rather than oppositional?
