1.
Interface Matters
Screen-Reliant Installation Art
The brain is the screen . . . that is to say ourselves.
—Gilles Deleuze, “An Interview with Gilles Deleuze”
Art critic and historian Michael Fried’s groundbreaking 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood,” is best known as a studied rejection of minimalism, or, as Fried preferred to call it, “literalist” art. Fried recognized that this new genre, inasmuch as it compelled a durational viewing experience akin to theater, undermined both the medium specificity and the presumed instantaneousness of reception foundational to the Greenbergian/Friedan account of modernism. The impact of Fried’s discerning analysis upon contemporary art history and criticism is incontestable. For the purposes of the present study, however, a little remarked upon footnote in this otherwise exhaustively analyzed article is especially revelatory. In it, Fried speculates that a close reading of the “phenomenology of the cinema” would reveal how film manages to escape the degraded relational quality that he believed was endemic to literalist art. “Exactly how the movies escape theater is a beautiful question,” Fried muses. He goes on to suggest that cinema is not in danger of theatricality because, among other reasons, “the screen is not experienced as a kind of object existing, so to speak, in a specific physical relation to us.”1
Fried’s appreciation of a divide between the cinematic experience and that of minimalist sculpture was soon to be overthrown by the expanded field of art and media practices that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. In the range of overlapping screen-reliant art practices variously known as structural film, expanded cinema, intermedia environments, moving-image or projected-image installation, and so on, the seemingly discrete boundaries between the cinematic and the sculptural were deliberately and provocatively muddied. Contesting the tenets of formalist modernism, artists as diverse as VALIE EXPORT, Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Anthony McCall, Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Nauman, Peter Campus, Paul Sharits, and Michael Snow created evocative sculptures in which cinematic and electronic screens, defying Fried’s analysis, are indeed “experienced as a kind of object existing... in a specific physical relation to us.” Even before the inception of most film and video installations, then, Fried had instinctively recognized that the screen would be a threat to stable modernist categories should its conventionally overlooked objecthood be exposed (a threat he was keen to avoid). Working in the wake of minimalism, these artists did just that: they invited viewers to understand the screen—as well as the site and experience of screen spectatorship—as material.
Media screens made initial forays into art galleries as early as the late 1950s. Film and video screens served both as constitutive elements of happenings, performances, and expanded cinema events, created by artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Alan Kaprow, John Cage, Robert Whitman, and Robert Rauschenberg, and as art materials in their own right, such as the now quaintly anachronistic television sets assembled in Wolf Vostell’s early media-critical work and in Nam June Paik’s satirical video sculptures. However, the incorporation of mass media screens into art environments or installations in the mid-1960s marked a distinct shift of emphasis. In what I call screen-reliant installations, artists were newly concerned with the viewer– screen interface itself: the multifarious physical and conceptual points at which the observing subject meets the media object. Media objects and their viewing regimes were literally and figuratively put on display in these sculptural and experiential works of art.2
I use the term “screen-reliant” as opposed to “screen-based” to signal that a screen is a performative category. Almost anything—glass, architecture, three dimensional objects, and so on—can function as a screen and thus as a connective interface to another (virtual) space.3 Projected image installations have consistently revealed this ambiguous status—from Robert Whitman’s 1964 Shower, in which a nude female bather is projected onto a real shower (complete with an actual running shower head), to, more recently, Michal Rover’s 2003 DataZone, in which diminutive dancing figures are projected inside of what look like petri dishes mounted on tabletops. The screen, then, is a curiously ambivalent object—simultaneously a material entity and a virtual window; it is altogether an object which, when deployed in spatialized sculptural configurations, resists facile categorization.
Although the term “installation” was not widely used until the late 1970s, the issues associated with the expanded practices now commonly known as installation—considerations such as space, materials, embodiment, duration, site, and participation—offer the most relevant criteria for evaluating this variant of post-1960s artistic production. In many ways, minimalism and its critical legacy set the stage for these developments. Minimalism aspired to overthrow the spatial and temporal idealism associated with modernist sculpture, replacing it with a direct experiential encounter for the spectator in the “here and now” of the gallery space. By revealing the exhibition space as material, these influential artworks cleared the way for critical reflection on the physical and ideological constraints of the art gallery by process- and concept-based sculptural practices of the 1960s and 1970s.4 In these innovative artworks, context and the contingent dynamics of spectatorship emerged as content.5
It was in this spirit that artists first created experiential works centered on media screens and sited within the specific institutional context of the visual arts. These hybrid artworks—positioned as they are midway between the cinematic and the sculptural—deliberately engaged the spatial parameters of the gallery, even as they rejected its typical spatial and representational modes. Regardless of the particular approach employed in a given work, these variegated screen-reliant environments are unified by the way in which they foreground the usually overlooked embodied interface between the viewing subject and the technological object.
By viewer-screen interface, I mean that which connects the viewer and the mechanisms for screening, including, at the most basic level, the film, camera, projector, and screen. Film apparatus theory in the 1970s marked the first rigorous attempt to combine an analysis of the materiality of cinema with its architectonic and ideological effects. Writers such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen conceptualized cinema’s institutional apparatus as a fixed relation between the film, projector, screen, and viewer.6 Of equal importance, these critics and filmmakers, drawing heavily on psychoanalytic theory, offered the first theorization of the screen as both material surface and site for psychic projection.7 Building from these concepts, while troubling the assumption of the viewing subject’s enforced passivity vis-à-vis the apparatus, I consider this connective interface to be inclusive not only of the objects that make cinema possible, but also the psychological, phenomenological, and indeed ideological relationships between viewing subjects and media screens.8 The viewer–screen connection is a site of radical interimplication: it includes the projection screen and other material conditions of screening, but also encompasses sentient bodies and psychic desires, institutional codes, and discursive constructs.
Screens themselves have the curious status of functioning simultaneously as immaterial thresholds onto another space and time and as solid, material entities. The screen’s objecthood, however, is typically overlooked in daily life: the conventional propensity is to look through media screens and not at them.9 Although the screen is a notoriously slippery and ambivalent object, one that seems to outrun its shadow of materiality at every turn, its physical form shapes both its immediate space and its relationship to viewing subjects. In environmental media artworks, the screen object and the viewer’s active, bodily experience with it can achieve a new centrality: the interface “matters” for media installation art. It matters in the sense that it constitutes an essential component of the artwork (the various dealings between spectators and the screen are structural to the work), but also because the body-screen interface is a phenomenal form in itself as well as a constitutive part of an embodied visual field.
That the relationship between the viewing subject and the screen “matters” is more than a perfunctory observation. It is a proposal for a theoretical model for assessing contemporary artistic production made with cinematic and electronic screens. Media installations, inasmuch as they are conceived and experienced as hybrid spatial and temporal art objects made with mass media screens, clearly exceed critical models that exclusively rely on outmoded theorizations of material specificity or of a single medium. Instead, these works necessitate detailed consideration of their institutional and discursive contexts. Even so, taking the screen and its connections to the viewer as an object of study is more fraught than it might sound. It has proved extremely intoxicating for critical theorists from Fredric Jameson to Paul Virilio to speculate about the screen’s remarkable capacity to reorganize space and time.10 Yet, in their preoccupation with the screen’s more spectacular effects, these thinkers have taken little notice of the ways in which the screen’s material configurations actively define its relationship to its site and to subjects.11 A theory of screen-reliant art spectatorship should involve looking at what is depicted on the screen’s surface and theorizing the media screen’s time- and space-shifting effects to be sure, but it must also examine what these ambivalent material objects do and the various networks within which they do it.12
The operative conditions of screen-reliant art spectatorship will be carefully assessed in the chapters that follow. The task of the present chapter is to establish a working definition of screen-reliant installation (especially as distinct from other forms of experimental media production) and to theorize the critical relevance of these evocative art objects. Two early film environments that arguably take the relationship between viewers and screens as their very subject matter—Paul Sharits’s Soundstrip/Filmstrip (1971–72) and Michael Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story (1974)—are the principal case studies. Sharits and Snow are emblematic of a number of artists who began to mine the rich terrain between art and cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. While Fried’s formalist modernism censured the deployment of the cinema screen as a literalist object, these artists created novel screen-reliant works that denied the terms of this criticism by holding objecthood and illusionism in tandem. Sharits and Snow merit special attention for the way they have self-consciously transgressed the boundaries between art and cinema and carefully distinguished among various filmic and artistic genres in both their writing and practice.
Film as Locational
“Cinema is occurring when one looks at screens, not through them,” Paul Sharits proclaimed in 1974. “The space between screens is filled with actuality without recourse to phony densities.”13 Sharits was writing in reference to his art gallery–based film works that he called “locational,” but what could a “cinema” of looking at screens be? In a 1976 essay, art historian Rosalind Krauss argues that works such as Sharits’s locational pieces mark a turning point in filmic production because they incorporate the “real, physical environment” and “the viewer’s actual experience between the parallel planes of screen and projector” into the work itself.14 Whereas film’s deep, illusionistic space had previously reigned supreme, commanding the viewer’s undivided attention, in media installations such as Sharits’s, multiple spaces began to compete for focal significance. As references to real world “actualities” supplanted film’s alleged “phony densities,” both the conditions of cinematic viewing and the screen itself suddenly became central to the artwork’s meaning.
Sharits is best known as a leading figure in American structural film, a genre of experimental film that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s and whose primary interest was in documenting film’s internal codes.15 The film-maker–artist turned toward making multiscreen locational environments/installations in the early 1970s. In a 1974 manifesto, Sharits singled out four main imperatives for the development of the locational film works: (1) they must exist “in an open, free, public location”; (2) the form of presentation must not “prescribe a definite duration of respondent’s observation (i.e., the respondent may enter and leave at any time)”; (3) the very structure of the composition must be “non-developmental” and offer “an immediately apprehensible system of elements”; and, finally, (4) the content of the work must “not disguise itself but rather make ... a specimen of itself.”16 Examining how Sharits’s prescriptions were emblematic of the era’s optimism about the ostensibly progressive potential of gallery-based media work will be taken up in subsequent chapters. For the present argument, I’d like to draw attention only to this: in theorizing his locational installations as categorically distinct from his other filmic production (including structural film), Sharits went beyond formal attributes, concentrating instead on the new and oppositional viewing conditions presumably generated by the gallery-based works.
Given that experimental film and film installation share the same medium, how might we understand the nature of this alleged spectatorial transformation? Following Sharits’s lead, one might begin by considering T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), one of his best-known structural films, side by side with Soundstrip/Filmstrip (1971–72), a nearly contemporaneous multiscreen installation.
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G is a twelve-minute, 16 mm film composed of pure color shots and still images arranged into all sorts of configurations that pulsate at irregular, spastic intervals when projected.17 The film is dedicated to and stars the poet David Franks. Interspersed throughout the film’s discordant flashing color frames, Franks appears poised to cut off his own tongue with scissors while he obsessively repeats the word “destroy” in an urgent rhythmic stutter. Compounding the overall perceptual overload generated by the alternating color and achromatic flashes, the sound also “flickers”: Franks’s on/off pulsing voice renders his recurring pronouncement extremely indistinct as his meditative repetition of “destroy” causes it to fold back onto itself, generating alternate words (“history”/“the story”/“this story”/“this drawing,” etc.). Nonetheless, the optical dimension of the audience’s experience with T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G remains primary. To use Sharits’s words, so-called flicker films constitute a form of “neural transmission” in which “the retina screen is a target.”18 When viewed in a darkened theater, the intensity of the projected color bursts seems to emanate aggressively from the screen itself, pushing the limits of the viewer’s perceptual capabilities and generating hallucinatory after-images (what P. Adams Sitney has memorably referred to as the “basic apocalypse of the flicker”).19 Like many flicker films, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G constitutes an aggressive opticality, a sort of retina-searing op art whose lingering visual effects momentarily prohibit viewers from resting their weary eyes even when closed. Captive in their theater seats, audience members must brace themselves for the film’s twelve-minute-long visual assault.20
Paul Sharits, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, 1968. Film still from 12 minute, 16 mm “flicker film” composed of pure color shots and still images arranged into varied configurations that pulsate at irregular, spastic intervals when projected. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives. All rights reserved. Copyright Christopher Sharits.
Created three years later, Soundstrip/Filmstrip is made up of four film projectors encased within large boxes positioned side by side in the middle of a partially illuminated gallery space measuring approximately 30 by 36 feet. Each of the four machines simultaneously projects an abstract color film of parallel stripes onto the opposite wall, which serves as a Cinemascope-esque screen. The four films are projected sideways and abutting one another in a continuous horizontal band, which has the effect of giving viewers the immediate (but mistaken) impression that they are seeing a single film projected sideways (four frames of which are visible to the viewer at any one time). A sound track of a dispassionate male voice stammering nearly indecipherable word fragments accompanies each film: a cacophony of what initially seems to be whispered, disjunctive nonsense. While the film technically has a fixed length, both the visual and auditory elements are played on a continuous loop so that the work has no evident beginning or end.
From these abbreviated descriptions of T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G and Soundstrip/Filmstrip one might provisionally conclude that the two pieces have more in common than Sharits’s manifesto might suggest. After all, these films are clearly “artistic” experiments—(nearly) abstract, nonnarrative works that, although they use film, fall well outside the realm of what one typically thinks of as mainstream cinema. Both works unambiguously seek to trouble the perspectival illusionism that structures dominant cinematic forms, whether by emphasizing the function and materiality of film or by drawing attention to the subjective nature of perception itself. To this end, they ask their audiences to consider similar questions: What does it mean to be denied entry into the film’s illusionist space? What are the constitutive elements in how one experiences a film?
Despite the similarities between the two works, it is important to distinguish among these “alternative” uses of film. The first and most obvious difference is not formal but rather institutional: Sharits’s locational works were explicitly created for the distinctive context/site of an art gallery, not for a darkened cinema. The second (though related) difference is experiential. While unconventional in its visual content, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G is presented and experienced in a theatrical, cinematic fashion: the audience is separated from the (single) screen in a darkened enclosure in which the spectator’s physical engagement with the film and the screening space is conspicuously limited. (This despite the viewer’s apparent physiological and ocular engagement with the work due to its startlingly harsh, headache-inducing flicker effect.) Viewers come into contact with Soundstrip/Filmstrip in a dim (not dark) room in which the audience is expected to remain standing. Its mural-sized representations envelop an entire wall of the exhibition space and require spectators to spread their attention across four separate sets of projected images to take in the work. While audience members watching T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G are expected to remain stationary, viewers of Soundstrip/Filmstrip—whether they try to inch inconspicuously behind the illuminated imagery or fumble their way through the obstacle course of life-size projector boxes whirring like so many kinetic sculptures—are encouraged, and in fact required, to move physically through the exhibition space.
Paul Sharits, Soundstrip/Filmstrip, 1971–72. Installation view from “Paul Sharits: Figment” exhibition at Espace Gantner, France, 2007. Four projectors on black pedestals simultaneously emit four separate but related films onto a single wall/screen in what the artist refers to as a “locational” exhibition. Copyright Christopher Sharits.
Sharits’s structural film lasts for twelve (sometimes excruciating) minutes, whereas the locational installation is screened, as Sharits puts it, in an “ongoing, no beginning or ending, constantly variational form.”21 The viewer’s experience with Soundstrip/Filmstrip is of an open-ended, exploratory duration: the peripatetic viewer is allowed to determine the length of his or her encounter with the work. Though the time committed to observing the installation will naturally vary from person to person, the viewer’s experience with Soundstrip/Filmstrip, like the work itself, is meant to unfold in time and space. As spectators progress through the room, taking in the piece from various sites (and only if they do so), they eventually are able to decipher the relationships between the disparate moving image and sound fragments.
Sharits’s viewer’s initial confusion when confronted with Soundstrip/Filmstrip’s seemingly random sound track is rectified once he or she explores the work from various spatial points. Slowly negotiating their way through the film as an entire spatial environment, spectators figure out that the sound snakes from right to left and that the ostensibly indecipherable word fragments are in fact each constituent parts of a single word: “miscellaneous” (a word evocative of the work’s outwardly unrelated elements that collectively generate the piece’s meaning). Likewise, close scrutiny of the relationship between the projectors, images, and the wall-cum-screen reveals that each of the slightly overlapping moving film frames is a separate projection.22 In this way, the viewer’s active participation in the exhibition space serves to underscore the embodied and material conditions of film viewing.
Screen-reliant installation artworks such as Filmstrip/Soundstrip self-reflexively foreground the viewer-screen interface in a way that tends not to occur in mainstream narrative cinema or even in experimental film.23 Film in Sharits’s locational environments/installations is exposed as a material process and presented as an environment: film is considered to be a space. This space is made up of immaterial projected images but also the physical media apparatus; the screen, film, and projectors emerge as sculptural objects in their own right. Moreover, contrary to conventional cinematic viewing configurations, this filmic space is open to, even contingent upon, the mobile viewer’s active phenomenological engagement in space and time, firmly situating Sharits’s work within the critical ambitions of contemporary art discourse and in relationship to minimalism’s critical lineage in particular.
Paul Sharits, Soundstrip/Filmstrip, 1971–72. Artist’s diagram indicating the artist’s conception of how to install the work’s sound, image, and object elements in relationship to the gallery space. Copyright Christopher Sharits.
Image Description
A diagram with the space area of 36 feet high and 30 feet wide. The height is divided into 2 segments of 17 feet each. The first represents the beam space and the bottom one represents the external speed distance from projectors. The sound space has sun symbols at a 10 feet gap. From the top for every 7 feet are inverted dashed triangles drawn with a 2 feet square at the peak point. Below the block are stretched words written showing the simultaneous linearity with speed change.
More Than Meets the Eye
How the viewer experiences the spectator-screen interface in screen-reliant installations like Soundstrip/Filmstrip is just as meaningful as the imagery the screens depict. Equally important, however, these works are perhaps uniquely positioned to enable us to consider our contemporary screen-mediated communications critically: they can serve as heuristic devices that allow us to better understand the electronic mediations that inform contemporary subjectivity (or, perhaps more accurately, postsubjectivity). Theorist John Rajchman looks to Gilles Deleuze’s provocative theorizing in Cinema 2 as a model for thinking about the larger history of image installation. “In making such invention possible, dispositifs like the cinematic are distinguished as something more than ‘media’ or technical supports, more than means of transmitting and receiving information,” Rajchman explains. “They are, rather, ways of disposing of our senses in such a way as to enable thinking, to make ideas possible.”24 Michael Snow’s seminal film installation Two Sides to Every Story (1974), which self-consciously scrutinizes modes of screen-mediated vision inside and outside the gallery’s “white cube,” is exemplary in this regard: it proposes new ways to inhabit screen interfaces and, in so doing, “makes new ideas possible.” Examining this multifaceted work in detail will establish a critical lexicon for analyzing the points of overlap in post-1960s art and film and media production and will provide an introduction to the salient issues pertaining to screen-based spectatorship that structure the rest of this book.
Two Sides to Every Story consists of two analogous 16 mm color films projected synchronously onto both sides of a smooth, rectangular aluminum screen suspended in mid-air at the center of a dimly lit room. Two film projectors are mounted on top of black pedestals and positioned approximately forty feet apart at opposite ends of the otherwise empty space. Although the films are each eight minutes long, they are, like Soundstrip/Filmstrip, projected in a continuous loop, effectively granting viewers the privilege to enter or leave the gallery at any point in the screening cycle. The sound track features ambient noise from the filming process—footsteps, equipment movements, gentle rain—as well as Snow’s voice directing the action, which, depending on which side the viewer is focusing on, may or may not reconcile with what is depicted on the screen. That is, one is either positioned as a cinematic viewer, looking into the screen’s deep space to see the story illustrated within, or is displaced, afforded an unexpected “behind the scenes” view of the filming process, comparable to that of the director himself. (Viewers will in fact have both experiences at some point, although never both at once.)
Michael Snow, Two Sides to Every Story, 1974. Installation view from “Projected Images” exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1974. This complex 8-minute work consists of two synchronized 16 mm films, color, and sound, projected continuously on two sides of an aluminum screen. Copyright Michael Snow.
What is not immediately obvious is that the projection situation discloses the way in which the work was originally shot. The two projectors stand forty feet apart from each other in the gallery, duplicating the way in which the two cameras were set up on either side of the original filming location. For the gallery installation, Snow substitutes the cameras with the projectors, neatly transposing the entire shooting/production space into the viewing/installation space. Furthermore, because the cameras captured the action at the center of the room from opposing corners, each film also records the camera, tripod, and camera operator stationed opposite. In this way, the two films jointly chronicle their own production. Throughout their experience with Two Sides to Every Story, spectators continually see (and hear) the undisguised list of ingredients required for staging the film’s artifice, including the artist/director himself, who appears seated next to one of the camera operators.
The spectator’s perambulation between both sides of the (literally) silver screen allows him or her to ascertain that although there are two separate films being projected, they represent dual, nonhierarchical perspectives of a single, seemingly mundane event. The subject matter is outwardly un inspiring—a young, casually dressed woman makes a series of movements while repeatedly walking between one camera operator and another situated at opposite sides of a room, presumably the artist’s studio. Within moments, however, this deceptively simple narrative quickly draws the viewer into numerous conceptual conundrums. Following Snow’s audible directions, the protagonist demonstrates that there is some kind of object in the center of the shooting space. She does this by pressing her hands against a nearly invisible, thin, transparent plastic sheet and subsequently coating its see-though surface with green spray paint.
Next, a man enters the scene, cuts the green plastic through the center, and walks through the opening to the opposite side. The woman follows him and the plastic sheet is removed. Snow then directs the woman to walk back and forth between the cameras carrying a rectangular mat board colored blue on one side and yellow on the other. Her movements with the dual-colored cards are echoed at irregular intervals by the actions of the two camera operators who Snow directs to cover the camera lenses with blue and yellow (or both) translucent plastic filters. Finally, the woman returns to the center and extends her hands as if pressing against a surface, figuratively remaking the plastic sheet qua screen, which symbolically links the immaterial image of the plastic sheet to the real aluminum film screen/projection plane in the installation.
In spite of this, it is not the projected images or the narrative alone that grabs and holds the viewer’s interest. Entering the darkened gallery, one encounters Snow’s illuminated metal screen that seems to hover in mid-air. Cheekily renouncing its role as wallflower, refusing to assume its conventional, discrete placement on or near a wall, the screen asserts itself as a sculptural object. Instead of obediently fading into the background at the moment of the viewing encounter, Snow’s dual-sided projection surface (re)materializes in the exhibition space. Despite its apparent thinness (indeed, Snow’s emaciated slice of aluminum seems almost to disappear when the spectator views it from the edges instead of head-on), the screen physically and symbolically cleaves the room in two, obliging viewers to observe the work from one side or the other if they hope to take in the projected images (which, of course, they do).
The emphatic objecthood of the screen is an indispensable foil to expose what Snow has called the radical nonmateriality of the filmic image. He writes: “Film itself—what one sees when a film is projected—is almost nonexistent matière on a flat surface. The fact that the image, which can contain such convincing representations of depth, is truly very, very thin is for me a poignant aspect of projected-light work. I believe that the actual thin, physical manifestation which is the image is as important in artworks as what the image represents.” Ultimately, however, Two Sides to Every Story necessitates a visual skepticism in its viewers as they appreciate both the “thinness” of the filmic image and the convincing illusion of depth at the same time.25 The slim two-sided projection surface is pivotal in structuring this experience: cinematic illusionism is supported or deconstructed depending on one’s physical placement and point of view.
Faced with this unusual configuration, Snow’s spectators must negotiate an improvised path between the two sides to probe the correlation between the dual views. Like Sharits’s “locational” works, the organizing logic of Snow’s installation only becomes apparent over time, through the viewer’s ambulation and observation from a range of perspectives. And yet, for all of the effort expended in the viewer’s awkward, unchoreographed dance between dueling sides of Two Sides to Every Story’s projection plane, he or she will never have the satisfaction or closure of seeing everything all at once. Mastery of the visual material remains perpetually just out of reach.
“Events take time. Events take place,” Snow observed in Artforum in 1971. “In relation to events one can only be a participant or a spectator or,” he is quick to add, “both.”26 As if offering a consolation prize to his stymied would-be film viewers as they repeatedly pace between both faces of the illuminated silver plane, Snow encourages them to conceptualize themselves in two additional roles. Having insistently established that there are indeed two sides to every screen, Snow extends the idea, exposing how there is also a duality in screen-mediated spectatorship. On the one hand, the viewer’s movements echo the protagonist’s methodical pacing, so that the spectator is symbolically remade into the film’s subject and asked to identify with the female performer, who patiently obeys the director’s rather monotonous instructions. On the other hand, the work’s visitors perform the same function as the film cameras, their role as mediators or translators of the work’s meaning echoing the camera’s mediation. While spectators are scrupulously forbidden visual mastery, they are intellectually rewarded for ruminating on the implications of their screen-mediated viewing experience, one that is understood to be both passive and active.
Michael Snow, Two Sides to Every Story, 1974. Recto and verso views of the moving imagery projected simultaneously onto both sides of the installation’s two-sided screen. Copyright Michael Snow.
Writing in 1974, critic Regina Cornwell praised Snow’s installation for the way in which its screen makes the spectator conscious of the space of the event, as opposed to its normative function as a “‘window to the world’ in order that we may lose ourselves.”27 This assessment maps neatly onto the dominant approaches to media art criticism of the period.28 Informed by a curious amalgamation of minimalism’s phenomenological legacy, postminimalism’s explorations of process and institutional critique, and the ideological critiques of film and media theory that sought to liberate the spectator-subject by revealing the media apparatus, these models rejected any use of representational illusionism and “cinematic” viewing as inherently passive and therefore uncritical. What Cornwell intuits but never fully articulates is how Two Sides to Every Story turns this equation on its head. Snow’s installation implicitly reintroduces precisely the virtual, illusionist space that these other critical models had sought to evacuate without, however, abandoning critical reflexivity.
Many (but by no means all) screen-reliant installations are less concerned with purely artistic/sculptural or filmic/cinematic concerns than they are with the nature of contemporary visuality as pertains to screen spectatorship and with the body-screen interface in particular. As film critic Dominique Païni astutely observes about Two Sides to Every Story, “It is the screen, essentially the screen, more than an abstract filmic material, which is Snow’s burden.”29 Submitting a film screen as part of an art gallery installation, Snow’s work effectively generates a hybrid between painting’s representational illusionism and sculpture’s three-dimensional materiality.30 Although irreducible to either role, the film screen is exposed as both a cipher—a (non)site for illusionist content—and an object to reckon with in its own right. However much Snow might be preoccupied with what Sharits would call screen-based “actualities,” Two Sides to Every Story does not eradicate the screen’s inherent “phony densities.” Instead, the work reveals an apparent paradox of media installation spectatorship: this mode of viewing is simultaneously material (the viewer’s phenomenological engagement with actual objects in real time and space) and immaterial (the viewer’s metaphorical projection into virtual times and spaces).
Snow has commented upon the nature of this doubleness. In an unpublished interview with Cornwell, Snow remarked that he wasn’t so much working against illusory deep space in film as he was using “the ‘belief’ in it along with the ‘fact of flatness’ and having it both ways.”31 Two Sides to Every Story describes an unresolved tension between the fact of the film screen’s flatness and the mass media viewer’s desire for, and habituation to, the illusory deep spaces it displays. To this end the work deconstructs filmic conventions within an art gallery setting.32 Snow appears to deliberately take aim at Hollywood-style continuity editing, for example, by exposing the way in which viewers unconsciously make up for the apparent ruptures inherent in the classic shot/reverse shot technique.33
In observing Two Sides to Every Story spectators are incontrovertibly responsive to the projection surface’s material form, inasmuch as it dictates their awkward circumnavigation. Nevertheless, audience members remain compelled by the screen’s illusory representational spaces. In watching the onscreen narrative unfold, Snow’s viewers are fully convinced of the virtual window’s “interior” space even while they are unremittingly reminded of its staged constructedness, confronted with its logical impossibility. Two Sides to Every Story, as its very title insinuates, highlights the doubleness structural both to the media screen and to the viewer’s experience with it inside the art gallery. In so doing, the artist plays with a structural characteristic of much conventional mass media spectatorship, in which viewers are habitually asked to see “into” cinematic and electronic screen spaces without paying particular attention to the media object’s material form or its relationship to its site.
Having It Both Ways
The redeployment of screens in art installations thus potentially constitutes a powerful interrogation of the ideological and phenomenological properties of media screens themselves. In bringing the screen-based apparatus to the center of attention and, in this manner, positioning the viewer– screen interface and screen spectatorship itself as content, media artworks such as Sharits’s and Snow’s reflexively explore the complex nature of screen-mediated vision. It is a truism that in everyday life we spend countless hours looking into screens and not at them. When perfectly functional in daily life, film, video, and computer screens often seem to disappear. By asking us to consider the implications of this condition, artists such as Sharits and Snow propose that screens and our relationship to them “matter.”
The interface conditions between viewers and screens always matter, of course, however much they may tend to escape notice in everyday life. In his essay “Leaving the Movie Theater,” Roland Barthes identifies a potentially productive way of experiencing mainstream cinema: “by letting oneself be fascinated twice over, by the image and its surroundings—as if I had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the obscure mass of the other bodies.”34 Screen-reliant installations are therefore exemplary to the extent that they make viewers reflexively aware of this condition, persuasively (and persistently) reminding them of the necessarily embodied and material nature of all media viewing.35 Chapter 2 will take up the peculiar model of screen-directed spectator participation proposed in a series of influential closed-circuit video installations by Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Graham. Like the works by Sharits and Snow, these projects afford us a position from which to analyze the nature of screen spectatorship. In so doing, they also put forth a rather unsettling proposition: that we are, quite literally, screen subjects—largely defined by our daily interactions mediated through a range of screen-based technological devices.