Screen Subjects

As they have mediated our engagement with the world, with others, and with ourselves, cinematic and electronic technologies have transformed us so that we currently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before them.

—Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen”

Media screens—film screens, video screens, computer screens, and the like—pervade contemporary life, characterizing both work and leisure moments. If in earlier times our sense of self was constructed through language, discourse, or a print based culture, the screen based interfaces that define countless forms of communication between subjects have made us, as the epigraph by Vivian Sobchack suggests, “quite other than we were before.”1 The film scholar’s influential work exemplifies the mounting interest in theorizing the impact of media technologies on modes of vision and, indeed, on contemporary subjectivity. While there is a growing body of literature on screen mediated visuality and its consequences in relationship to everyday media culture, relatively little has been written from the perspective of art and its history, even as screens and their technological apparatuses have become ever more prevalent in artistic production since the 1960s.2 Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art contributes to existing theories of art, film, and media spectatorship by analyzing the particular relevance of screen-based viewing within the institutional context of the visual arts, specifically as revealed in installations made with media screens.

As in everyday life, screens are increasingly ubiquitous in art institutions worldwide. From historical survey shows dedicated to the seminal projected image works created in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Chrissie Iles’s Into the Light (Whitney Museum, 2001) or Matthias Michalka’s X-Screen (Museum Moderner Kunst, 2003), to wide-ranging reviews of more recent art, such as Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta XI (2002), Peter Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw’s Future Cinema (ZKM, 2003) or Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez’s 51st Venice Biennale (2005), art exhibitions now habitually reconfigure so-called white cube gallery spaces into “black boxes” for viewing screen-based art.3 In part, the institutional recognition of projected and moving image installations, and artistic experimentation with the genre itself, reflects concurrent changes in dominant commercial screen-based technologies.4 Media installation’s early years were largely characterized by modest 16 mm films displayed across one or more surfaces and ungainly video monitors featuring blurry black-and-white imagery. Nearly fifty years later, sleek, high-definition digital projections and architectural-scale screens have colonized gallery spaces and exhibitions across the globe.

Screens themselves, however, are decidedly ambivalent objects—illusionist windows and physical, material entities at the same time. “A screen is a barrier,” wrote philosopher Stanley Cavell in 1971. “It screens me from the world it holds—that is, screens its existence from me.”5 Cavell was writing of the cinema, but his words are incisive for contemporary art criticism, too, particularly in an era in which artworks incorporating screens of all kinds permeate galleries and museums. Embellished with luminous images dancing across any number of surfaces, screens beckon, provoke, separate, and seduce. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made with these technological interfaces, along with their important subjective effects, remains largely unexplored.

One might begin such a critical project, as this book does, by closely examining the modes of spectatorship proposed in artworks that have incorporated viewer—screen interfaces over the past forty years. Screens focuses on European and North American installations made with cinematic and electronic screens from the late 1960s to the present, concentrating on case studies of particularly instructive pieces by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, VALIE EXPORT, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, Michael Snow, and others. The book’s ambition is twofold: it looks at the use of film, video, and computer screens as actual art objects, but it also builds on this to take into account the ways in which contemporary viewing subjects are themselves defined by interactions with screens. As such, Screens is not an encyclopedic history of media installation. Rather, through close study of exemplary artworks, the book introduces a theoretical model for thinking about this pervasive mode of contemporary artistic production: what I call screen-reliant installation art.6 By investigating how art-works made with screen-based imaging and projection technologies stage vision and create distinctive experiences of sight, communication, and knowledge, the book also examines what artistic experimentation with screens might reveal about the changing relationship between contemporary viewers and their media technologies.

Screen-mediated art viewing existed well before the invention of still or moving photographic media. Indeed, artistic screens have arguably had an implied theoretical or virtual component in addition to their mundane physical concreteness ever since Leon Battista Alberti’s fifteenth-century formulation of the canvas/screen as a window that opens onto a space “beyond the frame.” Camera obscura images, shadow shows, magic lantern projections, panoramas, dioramas, and a variety of peep-show-based attractions also positioned their observers in front of “screens” of various kinds.7 In this sense, contemporary forms of screen-based presentation are but the latest chapter of a long-standing practice in art production and reception. But an important shift occurs in art spectatorship when mass media screens are incorporated into environmental artworks (or “installations”) in the mid-1960s, inaugurating a far-reaching exploration of art and media technologies of visualization. While the genre of installation art will be familiar to an art historical audience, it warrants a brief description here. Installation often overlaps with other post-1960 genres, such as fluxus, land art, minimalism, video art, performance, conceptual art, and process, all of which share an interest in issues such as site specificity, participation, institutional critique, temporality, and ephemerality. Installation artworks are participatory sculptural environments in which the viewer’s spatial and temporal experience with the exhibition space and the various objects within it forms part of the work itself.8 These pieces are meant to be experienced as activated spaces rather than as discrete objects: they are designed to “unfold” during the spectator’s experience in time rather than to be known visually all at once. Installations made with media screens are especially evocative in that as environmental, experiential sculptures, they stage temporal and spatialized encounters between viewing subjects and technological objects, between bodies and screens. A potentially new mode of screen-reliant spectatorship emerges in the process.9

As a spectatorship study, the book’s conceit is that how one sees is just as important as what one sees. Theories of spectatorship argue that visual (artistic) production actively produces particular ways of seeing.10 To study spectatorship, then, is to consider how individuals look at representations as well as how they understand the setting and their experiences. In the case of film and media studies, theorizations of spectatorship recognize that neither media technologies nor the act of viewing them are unbiased. Instead, such critical methods demonstrate how viewers are rendered and regulated by institutions, technological apparatuses, and their representations. Film scholar Judith Mayne offers a concise definition of this line of inquiry in her Cinema and Spectatorship: “Spectatorship denotes a preoccupation with the various ways in which responses to films are constructed by the institutions of the cinema and with the contexts—psychic as well as cultural, individual as well as social—that give those responses particular meanings.”11 Critically assessing these conditions is especially important because how viewers are constructed generates effects even after they disengage from a specific work or representation. Hence, Sobchack’s challenging contention about cinematic and electronic viewing technologies in the epigraph—“[they] have transformed us so that we currently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before them.”

The term “spectatorship” further signals an investment in the theoretical points of overlap between Marxist, semiotic, feminist, and psychoanalytic critiques of visual culture and in apparatus and feminist film theory in particular.12 These theories define how cinema works as an institutional system and center on analyses of the ideological, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological subject positions thus produced. It is worth emphasizing that spectatorial positions are not intended to describe the experience of any single individual but to suggest that all viewers are addressed and constructed by media forms. Film theorists typically make a distinction between the “subject” (the position assigned to the observer by the film and various cinematic codes) and the “viewer” (the actual person who watches the film and his or her complex viewing responses). Following Mayne, however, I employ the term “spectator” as a way to signal the unresolved difficulty of separating the subject from actual individuals; I use the terms “spectator” and “viewer” interchangeably in the text to further reinforce this point.13 The book’s primary concern is to investigate what kind of spectatorship these works propose in their specific cultural, individual, and artistic contexts rather than to argue that a single model unfailingly “works.”14

While apparatus and feminist psychoanalytic film theory offer the most comprehensive critical approaches to the study of screen-reliant installation, inasmuch as they bring out the specific material and psychic aspects of engagement as well as the contribution of the screen object itself, these institutional models are not without their limitations.15 Sobchack pinpoints the shortcomings of recent film theory’s reliance on a trilogy of unsatisfactory metaphors—the formalist model of the picture frame, the realist model of the window, and the poststructuralist model of the mirror—for understanding the cinematic experience. The problem, as Sobchack sees it, lies in how “all three metaphors relate directly to the screen rectangle and to the film as a static viewed object, and only indirectly to the dynamic activity of viewing that is engaged in by both the film and the spectator, each as viewing subjects.”16 New phenomenological work in film and media theory by Mark B. N. Hansen, Laura Marks, and Kaja Silverman, among others, has addressed this lacuna.17 By focusing on the affective and phenomenological consequences of viewing screen-based representations, these methodologies, in conjunction with institutional models, offer the most compelling way to analyze art and media institutions alongside their possible excesses and resistances.

Screens is thus situated at the intersection between art history and film and media studies. It provides a much-needed reevaluation of influential yet understudied artworks created over the past forty years, works that traditionally have been situated at the periphery of both fields and seldom appear in book-length studies. Historical and theoretical treatments of installation art by Michael Archer, Claire Bishop, Rosalind Krauss, and Julie Reiss, among others, offer useful ways to think about the genre in general, as well as the conceptual and phenomenological spaces peculiar to its spectatorship.18 Scholars in art history and film and media studies recently have begun to assess the concerns particular to media installation art—including incisive critiques focused on film and video environments since the 1990s by such figures as Daniel Birnbaum, Raymond Bellour, and Dominique Païni, as well as critical histories focused on the previously neglected genres of expanded cinema and artists’ films in the 1960s and 1970s by historians and critics, including Eric de Bruyn, Branden Joseph, and Liz Kotz.19 However, as writers in both disciplines have tended to limit their investigations to works that share a single material basis or “medium,” such as works created with film or video or digital media, they have neglected the provocative links and differences between them that are among the foundational concerns of the present study.20

Faced with the current dominance of screen-based artistic production, many art critics have pointed to a “filmic turn,” some going so far as to portray this as a sort of crisis for art criticism and history. Such was the symptomatic claim of a roundtable discussion published in October magazine in Spring 2003, whose participants warned: “We are now witnessing an intense relativization of the field of the art institution, the art critics, and the art historian by film history, cinema history, film theory.”21 Yet even if film history and theory are depicted as a threat, their methods have proven inadequate to understanding gallery-based media installations. Screen-reliant installations are not so much a wholesale defection away from the concerns and institutions specific to visual art as they are a provocative fusion of filmic/cinematic (or, more broadly, moving-image media) and artistic/sculptural concerns.

The majority of recent critical accounts focus on art’s relationship to cinema, typically championing the presumed criticality of the viewer’s encounter with advanced sculptural projects while disdaining the viewer’s allegedly uncritical and passive experience with mainstream cinema. Screens eschews this dualistic thinking and examines the screen interface shared by artworks created with a range of media technologies. This approach allows the book to distinguish a generalized and momentous shift in post-1960 spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the observing subject’s field of vision. This is not to say that all screens or techniques of screening are indistinguishable. Even in the “age of (digital) convergence,” cinema, video, and the computer maintain significant differences in audiences, economics, and ideological origins.22 Nevertheless, it is pivotal to recognize that the contemporary spectator’s relationship to much visual production is indeed arbitrated by screens. To assess the viewer—screen interface as shared by environmental artworks across various genres and with a range of technologies (video, film, slide projection, and so on) is not to argue that there are no meaningful distinctions among screen-based apparatuses. Instead, Screens suggests that the particular technologies used in these pieces are less important than the kind of spectatorship proposed across a range of screen-based works and the implications of this for the spectatorial address of media installation art.

Anne Friedberg’s pioneering cultural history of screen-based information surfaces, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), serves as a primary reference point for the present study. Screens augments this research by emphasizing the unconventional uses of media screens and the curious mutations of the virtual-window paradigm in gallery-based installations. In this way, highlighting the processes and networks of screen-reliant art spectatorship provides a way to complicate dominant narratives about modes of media viewing and cultural norms.

The past several years have seen a steady rise of critical interest in both media art and so-called “screen studies.”23 The nascent field of screen studies, housed in disciplines ranging from new media studies to communications, contends with film, television, and computer screens in relationship to commercial mass media culture, but tends to overlook their highly particular uses within the institutional context of the visual arts. Operating outside this restrictive approach, Friedberg’s The Virtual Window and Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) each devote chapters to analyzing how audiences view screen-based art, and Erkki Huhtamo has written a series of foundational essays analyzing the archaeology of the screen, including its artistic contexts.24

Apart from these important exceptions, however, the central organizing role of the screen as a technical device that informs how we experience much contemporary art for the most part has remained neglected by the field to which it matters most: art history. Given that screens have been the object of rigorous material and conceptual investigation in art since the 1960s, media installations offer a privileged entry point to the study of screen-reliant visuality. Simply put, the ways in which spectators engage screen-based technologies can be bracketed out, such that the terms of this engagement themselves are put on display in the art gallery and to critical effect. Whether or not an artist consciously investigates the conditions of media screen spectatorship, screen-reliant sculptural installations draw attention to the typically overlooked viewer—screen interface—the conceptual and material point at which the observing subject meets the technological object—and thereby open a space to consider critically the nature of contemporary screen-mediated viewing.

The interest of Screens is to emphasize the materiality of the experience of viewing screens in an art gallery setting and to situate it within a wider, transformational field of phenomenological, psychic, institutional, and ideological effects. Taking a cue from the artworks themselves, the book’s thematic analysis of screen-reliant spectatorship draws out the typically obscured relationship between bodies, sites, and the objecthood of the screen-based apparatus. Thus, Screens invigorates screen studies. It offers the unique critical leverage of art, and the special interpretive models of art criticism and history, as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality. This is not to suggest that the deployment of mass media screens in sculptural installations is in any way inherently oppositional or resistant. On the contrary, in what follows I have tried to acknowledge the range of ways in which art spectators both construct and are constructed by their interactions with media screens. To this end, I emphasize noteworthy conditions present in certain, but by no means all, moving-image installations to give a sense of the full range of possibilities.

The book is organized into five thematic chapters, each of which explores the operative mechanisms of screen spectatorship through two or more case studies of paradigmatic artworks. This thematic structure addresses the overall significance of the body—screen interface in media installation; the specific case studies allow a comparative analysis of individual screen-reliant artworks assessed in their material specificity. It begins by investigating the idea of the screen itself, then focuses on the qualitative, temporal, and spatial dimensions of media screen-based viewing in contemporary art.

Chapter 1, “Interface Matters,” introduces the category of screen-reliant installation art as a way both to produce and to critique gallery-based media art since the late 1960s. Artists have critically reevaluated the screen and its functions by redeploying media technologies within the institutional context of the visual arts. The chapter begins by examining two experimental film works created by Paul Sharits—T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) and Soundstrip/Filmstrip (1971–72)—and considers the diverse models of spectatorship proposed in each as emblematic of the differences between experimental film and film installation. Next, I discuss Michael Snow’s well-known film environment Two Sides to Every Story (1974). In this piece, two versions of a single film are projected onto opposite sides of a rectangular aluminum screen suspended prominently in the middle of the gallery space. The work’s projected images operate cinematically, drawing the spectator into the film’s illusionist space and theatrical mode of viewing. However, the installation’s mode of presentation—two films of the same event projected onto opposing sides of a single screen that hovers mid-air in the center of the room—works to quite different effect, complicating and confounding theatrical cinematic spectatorship. Like Soundstrip/Filmstrip, this work proposes a dynamic interaction between the place of the viewing subject, the film apparatus, and the representations on the screen. These gallery-based media works are ongoing screen-based material objects open to manifold readings, not simply at the level of the moving imagery but also in response to the real presence of the art objects in space. As such, they exemplify the strand of post-1960s media art examined in Screens.

“Body and Screen,” chapter 2, scrutinizes the screen’s decisive role in orchestrating the spectator’s physical interaction with sculptural screen-based works. How do these media objects and their customary viewing regimes actively define the relationship between bodies and screens? This chapter complicates the notion of an inherently progressive, liberatory “spectator participation” that is celebrated in many accounts of installation art by detailing the ways in which media screens are also capable of generating oppressive viewing conditions that strictly delimit the viewer’s interaction with the work. As in everyday life, screens and their illuminated moving images can offer a sort of siren song—calling spectators to largely involuntary behavior, entreating them to look and pay attention and to discipline themselves and their bodies in the process.

The chapter analyzes a series of influential closed-circuit video installations that intentionally explore the “architectures” of media spectatorship, including Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s pioneering Wipe Cycle (1969), Bruce Nauman’s video corridor works (1969–72), and Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Past(s) (1974). Considering each of the projects in turn, this chapter analyzes how these early video installations fuse two seemingly incompatible processes. Artists underscore the coercive nature of screen-based viewing by varying the arrangement of cameras and monitors, combining live and prerecorded feedback, inverting viewers’ images, divorcing cameras from their monitors, introducing time delays, and so on. Simultaneously, however, the technological apparatuses themselves arguably impose precise kinesthetic and psychic effects on their audiences.

“Installing Time,” chapter 3, assesses how time is used as a material in more recent film and video installations and to what critical end. It extends the previous chapter’s analysis of the charged relationship between bodies and screens by drawing attention to an aspect that remains undertheorized—the multiple and sometimes contradictory temporal impulses at work in the presentation of spatialized moving images to moving bodies. This section evaluates attempts to “install time” in space, and thereby put time itself on display, in influential pieces by Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Consolation Service, 1999), Doug Aitken (electric earth, 1999), Douglas Gordon (24 Hour Psycho, 1993), and Bruce Nauman [Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), 2001]. Investigating the overlapping and even conflicting durational conditions—artistic, institutional, individual—that structure the ambulatory museum visitor’s experience with these screen-reliant works, this chapter proposes that the generally individualized, exploratory duration of engaging gallery-based installations is central to the complexity of media installation both in terms of its critical leverage and its ideological function.

The final two chapters articulate the multiple spatial registers of the viewer’s experience with media art environments and consider how artists have mobilized these spaces to critical effect. Chapter 4, “Be Here (and There) Now,” analyzes the conceptual and physical spaces particular to viewing film and video screens configured as sculptural installations. Dominant theoretical models of the 1960s and 1970s tended to reject any use of representational illusionism and “cinematic” viewing as inherently uncritical—a proposition that continues to haunt current art criticism. The screens in media installations paradoxically reintroduce precisely the virtual, illusionist space that these earlier models had sought to evacuate but, crucially, without abandoning critical reflexivity. This chapter’s rereading of key projects by VALIE EXPORT (Ping Pong, 1968) and Peter Campus (Interface, 1972) seeks to recuperate the critical subtlety of screen-based artworks that activate what one might call spectatorial doubleness: these works explore the complex nature of mediated vision by asking their viewers to be present in the real gallery space and the virtual screen space simultaneously.

“What Lies Ahead,” the fifth and final chapter, analyzes transformations in the spatial conditions of viewing media art ushered in by the powerful yet amorphous networks associated with digital computer screens. Two prize-winning new media projects, Ken Goldberg’s The Telegarden (1996) and Lynn Hershman’s The Difference Engine #3 (1995–98), serve as the central case studies. While the technical details of both of these multisited and teleactive digital works are far more complex than the media environments investigated in previous chapters, their concern with the spectator’s relationship to the space(s) associated with viewing media screens is entirely consistent. This chapter concludes by posing an important question about new media installation art in general: are we, as spectators of these screen-reliant works, both here and there—or, perhaps more ominously, are we neither fully here nor there? Might the doubleness intrinsic to viewing screens in art installations not also be configured in such a way that spectators spread their attention across various technological interfaces while never being fully present in the experiential material world?

Building on the final chapter’s discussion of digital screens, the Afterword offers some projections about the future of screen studies and gestures toward the political and ethical implications of the screen-based interactions that have become ubiquitous in art practice and in everyday life. From movie screens to television sets, from video walls to PDAs, screens literally and figuratively stand between us, separating bodies and filtering communication between subjects. The Afterword restates an argument that runs throughout the text: there is a critical imperative to recognize the ways in which screens and conditions of screen-based viewing “matter” in both contemporary art and our digital everyday.

The underlying proposition of Screens is that present-day viewers are, quite literally, “screen subjects.” With this in mind, the book analyzes how certain artworks (re)materialize the neglected circuit between bodies and screens and, in so doing, posit alternate engagements with contemporary media technologies. In what is arguably our “society of the screen,” there can be no definitive external position from which to assess the conditions of media spectatorship. For this very reason questions about site and interface are crucial to the production of a truly critical practice and theory of screen-reliant installation art.