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On the peers and predecessors who most closely influenced her life and art
Larry Bell discusses his practice, his teachers, and his relationship to art
From the archive
May 2011
“Throughout his career, trauma has been a primary generator of Ken Jacobs’s imagination,†wrote P. Adams Sitney in “The Ultimate Ken Jacobs,†a feature essay surveying the avant-garde filmmaker’s work, published in the May 2011 issue of Artforum. “In Jacobs’s hands, a 1905 filmâ€â€” Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, reputed to have been made by the legendary cameraman Billy Bitzer and preserved in the Library of Congress’s Paper Print Collection—“opens into an exploration of film grain, projector stutterings, the ghostly vestiges of anonymous actors, the elemental syntax of cinematic narrative—in essence, an ontology of cinema itself.â€Â
Jacobs died in October 2025 at the age of ninety-two. This week, as we reflect on Jacobs’s life and work through the remembrance authored by J. Hoberman in Artforum’s current issue, we revisit Sitney’s 2011 essay on the artist who, “in every phase of his career . . . retained an eye for elegant and intricate compositions.â€
—The editors
Jacobs died in October 2025 at the age of ninety-two. This week, as we reflect on Jacobs’s life and work through the remembrance authored by J. Hoberman in Artforum’s current issue, we revisit Sitney’s 2011 essay on the artist who, “in every phase of his career . . . retained an eye for elegant and intricate compositions.â€
—The editors
Dossier
“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.â€
—Tina Rivers Ryan
—Tina Rivers Ryan
