ESSAY IN ENGLISH

Documentary in contemporary art has a dual nature: on the one hand, it is considered central to artistic practice in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; on the other, documentary has for a long time been perceived as peripheral in the art context.1 Critics such as the modernist art historian Clement Greenberg famously challenged documentary’s status as art. For example, in a review of a photography exhibition he describes the inability of the photograph to “transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well”.2 Document and art are thus divided into two separate entities. Throughout the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, a period during which modernism and the structural film movement dominated, documentary was less prominent. Moving image artists were producing conceptual and abstract film, moving away from a documentary style that was regarded as strongly associated with narrative conventions. Throughout the eighties and in particular the nineties, such movements as the collapse of socialism, feminism, gay rights and black liberation increasingly informed the practice of video artists, who embraced documentary as a means to articulat