Installing Time

“That’s the Only Now I Get”

It is important to recognize that recent experimentation with spatializing time and duration, as well as its critical reception, has an important precedent in media installation art of the 1960s and 1970s.5 From the time-delay video and mirror installations of artists like Joan Jonas and Dan Graham to the film environments of Michael Snow and Anthony McCall, many artists working with media technologies in the 1960s and 1970s aspired to explore and disrupt the perceived temporal mandates of the era. Art historian Christine Ross explains that early video art (and video installation in particular) is best understood as a series of experiments with modes of making time; the medium of video functioned within the visual arts as a privileged means by which to “disrupt dominant conventionalities of time, notably acceleration and temporal linearity.”6 Self-conscious experimentation with the exhibition of time and the viewer’s relationship to it was also especially apparent in the work of certain structuralist filmmakers. Largely working within the visual arts, many of these media artists deconstructed the cinema’s material and ideological apparatus, which included challenging both the primacy of the image and the temporality of cinematic reception. As early as 1966, filmmaker and theorist Malcolm Le Grice perceived a widespread interest in working with duration as a part of the “‘concrete’ dimension of cinema and cinema experience.”7 Writing in 1978, film artist Paul Sharits offered a sort of manifesto for film installations (what he calls “locational” works): Film, according to Sharits, can overcome the passive spectatorship conditions of cinema and “manifest democratic ideals” if, and only if, “the form of presentation does not prescribe a definite duration of respondent’s observation (i.e., the respondent may enter and leave at any time).”8

Sharits is exemplary of the many artists working in the 1960s and 1970s who identified a progressive, disruptive potential in creating participatory film and video environments that invited spectators to reflect upon dominant modes of experiencing time-based media. On the one hand, allowing viewers to determine the length of time they spent with a film or video was related to a general impulse toward spectator participation in the 1960s and 1970s—promoting the reader over the author, among other reversals. This mode of engagement functioned even more specifically, however, as a calculated critique of conventional media forms and mainstream media viewing experiences (a project inspired in large part by the era’s decisive shift toward examining the representational codes of cinema in radical criticism of narrative film and apparatus theory in particular).9 In terms of the present-day relevance of this model, what is most important to emphasize is the continued focus on open-ended temporality in contemporary screen-reliant installations and their critical reception, in spite of significantly altered artistic, institutional, and ideological conditions.

With this historical context in mind, we can turn our attention to the various temporalities associated with more recent installations, such as Gordon’s now infamous 24 Hour Psycho (1993), that self-consciously trouble the exhibition and reception of media time. Curator and critic Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s felicitous term “time readymade” goes a long way toward describing the provocation underlying this work.10 In Gordon’s installation, archival film footage of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Psycho (1960) is projected silently at dramatically reduced speed. Snubbing film’s normal projection rate of twenty-four frames a second, Gordon extends the original recording to a Warholesque running time of approximately twenty-four hours. The sluggish narrative is visible from both sides of a modestly sized translucent screen that sits at the far end of an otherwise vacant gallery space. Psycho is nearly instantly recognizable by visitors, whether or not they have seen the original film. The extreme slowness of the eerily soundless footage permits the audience to make out new details and connections in the now slightly estranged original. Indeed, the narrative flow of Gordon’s found temporal object is stymied until viewers painstakingly stitch a particular scene together almost frame by frame.

The question of how long visitors will stick around to view this protracted projection achieves a new urgency here. As specified in the title, it is promptly apparent that viewers will not be able to view the whole film. Institutional screening time and viewing time are suddenly unhinged. With a running time of a full day or more (would it require forty-eight hours to see everything from both sides of the screen?), it is impractical for any visitor to see the entire film. “Realistically, no one can watch the whole of 24 Hour Psycho,” confirms curator Russell Ferguson. “While we can experience narrative elements in it (largely through familiarity with the original), the crushing slowness of their unfolding constantly undercuts our expectations, even as it ratchets up the idea of suspense to a level approaching absurdity.”11 The anticipation inherent in the delayed unfolding of Hitchcock’s film situates visitors in the present (what is going on now?) and the future (what is about to happen?) simultaneously. Moreover, the work’s slowness weighs so heavily on its viewers that many of them are soon preoccupied with planning their escape.

Gordon shared his thoughts about 24 Hour Psycho’s ideal spectator with his brother, David, who recalls the conversation thusly: “He [Douglas Gordon] went on to imagine that this ‘someone’ might suddenly remember what they had seen earlier that day, later that night; perhaps at around 10 o’clock, ordering drinks in a crowded bar with friends, or somewhere else in the city, perhaps very late at night, just as the ‘someone’ is undressing to go to bed, they may turn their head to the pillow and start to think about what they had seen that day. He said he thought it would be interesting for that ‘someone’ to imagine what was happening in the gallery right then, at that moment in time when they have no access to the work.”12 In the artist’s mind, the precise duration of one’s experience in the here and now of the gallery space is subservient to the eventual remembering of the work in another time and place13—as if, well after all of the visitors have left and the doors are securely locked, the gallery remains strangely animated by illuminated images. Somewhere out there, maybe even now, Janet Leigh is ruthlessly attacked in the shower—but this fanciful recollection unfolds in super slow motion, like a plodding nightmare. The duration of the actual film footage is thus related to the duration of the ideal viewer’s experience generically, but not specifically. One doesn’t have to see Gordon’s film all the way through in the museum to be mnemonically engaged with it later, for maybe even more than twent-four hours. Spectators are invited to engage Gordon’s work on their own timelines and for the duration of their choosing.

If twenty-four hours seems an utterly impractical viewing time, one guaranteed to disrupt cinematic patterns of watching a film or video all the way through, Nauman’s seven-channel digital video work Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001) (hereafter referred to as Mapping the Studio) arguably eliminates the prospect of a “complete” viewing altogether.14 According to critic Peter Schjeldahl, it would take roughly forty hours and fifteen minutes to miss nothing in any of Mapping the Studio’s seven projections.15 The piece is composed of four nearly wall-sized and semitransparent screens positioned next to one another on the floor so as to make a large, roomlike enclosure.16 Seven large digital projectors simultaneously emit enormous (twelve feet high by fifteen feet across) gray-green projections spaced at regular intervals across the four walls/screens.

Spectators enter Mapping the Studio from an opening where two of the four partitions meet. Once inside the dimly lit space, viewers find that Nauman’s work, true to its title, “maps” the environmental goings-on in the artist’s New Mexico workplace.17 The seven projections that surround the viewer each represent a different section of Nauman’s studio that the artist—working with hour-long videotapes and only one infrared camera—painstakingly recorded over forty-two nights in a four-month period.18 Fleeting, ambient nighttime noises (trains, coyotes, wind, rain, and so on) intermittently enliven the imagery, allowing spectators an almost panoramic view of the nocturnal sights and sounds in Nauman’s work site. (Each of the seven projectors in the installation is carefully arranged to reconstruct the original camera position as recorded in the artist’s studio, but the images are spaced at even intervals and not directly adjacent to one another as they would be in a true panorama.)

As in Gordon’s absurdly lethargic movie, very little action is visible on Mapping the Studio’s various wall screens, regardless of the position from which viewers observe the moving images and regardless of the point in the narrative at which they happen to encounter the work. Because the documentary images were shot at night in a relatively quiet and empty room, the artist’s cat and a handful of field-cum-studio mice are the sole actors who periodically interrupt the static silence of what is otherwise a rather uneventful record of Nauman’s mute past creations and works in progress.19 “It ends pretty much how it starts. It begins with a title and a few credits, and then basically it just starts, and then it ends. The image goes blank. No crescendo, no fade, no ‘The End.’ It just stops, like a long slice of time, just time in the studio.”20 While the nearly six-hour video has a linear trajectory, it is carefully structured to downplay those bookends. While the images move, they do not appear to do so with storytelling intent.

Given that Mapping the Studio is made up of seven simultaneously projected videos that are each five hours and forty-five minutes long, the artwork’s duration could convincingly be described as approximately six hours. The duration of the spectator’s experience, though, appears to be variable and is instead based on his or her independent actions. Nauman echoes Gordon’s desire to fashion an “ongoing object”—a media work that is present even in its very absence: “It just felt like it needed to be so long that you wouldn’t necessarily sit down and watch the whole thing but could come and go.... I wanted that feeling that the piece was just there, almost like an object, just there, ongoing, being itself.”21 In this description, Nauman notes the anticipated duration of the spectator’s experience with the installation (“it needed to be so long that you wouldn’t necessarily sit down and watch the whole thing but could come and go”), the duration of the videotape itself, and finally the audience’s (potentially divergent) idea of the work’s duration (“I wanted that feeling [for the viewer] that the piece was just there ... ongoing being itself”). While the footage will eventually conclude, Nauman predicts that viewers will understand the video-based work as something closer to sculpture, something that could be described as perpetually taking place.

In practice, the extremely long (effectively unwatchable) duration of Nauman’s Mapping the Studio—with its almost infinite possible points of entry and exit and views from which the six hours of multiscreen projections could be watched—highlights the necessarily and even obligatory exploratory duration of the viewer’s encounter. As with 24 Hour Psycho, both the extraordinarily long duration of the footage and the fact that the multiple-screen projections have no obvious beginning or ending point to guide the length of one’s visit encourage visitors to realize that their experiences will be inevitably partial and incomplete. At the same time, these pieces appear to invite the observer to enter the artwork at any point in the cycle of projections and to explore the environment for the length of time each individual spectator deems appropriate. A viewer may elect to stay inside these installations for six seconds, six minutes, or even six hours, but what is most crucial is that the choice typically is understood to be one that the spectator, not the artist, artwork, or institution, will make.

Much like Mapping the Studio’s room fabricated from projection screens, the various projection surfaces that comprise Aitken’s electric earth (1999) merge with the exhibition space’s architecture, engulfing several rooms in the case of the latter. electric earth presents a fictional narrative about the nocturnal journey of a young black man (dancer Giggy Johnson) moving through an uncannily deserted Los Angeles landscape punctuated by bursting 99-cent stores and barren parking lots. The piece is made up of eight short loops projected onto an equivalent number of opposing screens that spill across three or four conjoined rooms. (Most installations of the work employ three rooms, bifurcating the center room.) The activity of the twitching protagonist, moving between the screens as his twilight voyage progresses through an increasingly fast-paced environment, binds the divergent times and places together in a jerking, stuttered cycle. The inanimate things around Johnson gradually get faster and take on a frantic pace of their own: a Coke machine refuses a dollar bill offering, shopping carts rule a deserted big box parking lot, an electric car window spastically rises and falls of its own accord, and so on. A pulsating sound track of electronic music and industrial sounds seemingly reinforces the frenzied dancing of the protagonist and the curiously animate mediascape that envelops him. The lone character narrates his sudden move from dreamy lounging on a hotel bed, armed with a remote, to energetic meanderings throughout the non descript urban sprawl: “A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what’s around me. It’s like food for me. I, like, absorb that energy, the information. It’s like I eat it. That’s the only now I get.”22 Information sustains but also consumes him. The screen-based media environment nourishes Aitken’s anonymous roving urban wanderer even as it threatens to ingest him.

The video’s dialogue—“That’s the only now I get”—might well describe the gallerygoer’s experience. Indeed, it is almost nonsensical to ask how long this video work lasts. Viewers walk at their own pace through the tunnel of rooms, pushed along by the corridorlike arrangement of the gallery spaces as much as by the ostensible progression in the eight short loops that constitute the quasinarrative (the final screen in the last room shows the actor entering a tunnel, which offers a strong sense of closure). Detached from any specific obligation to view all of the imagery and instead compelled to walk amid a barrage of looped images from one side of the media passageway to the other, viewers are rather unsettlingly remade into the protagonist himself, an experience dramatically opposed to the almost meditative stillness embedded in the first two works.

Aitken’s stated goal is to employ film and video to contest the linearity seemingly intrinsic to these media technologies. He wants nothing less than to render the question of the media work’s duration irrelevant. “Film and video structure our experience in a linear way simply because they’re moving images on a strip of emulsion or tape. They create a story out of everything because it’s inherent to the medium and to the structure of montage. But, of course, we experience time in a much more complex way,” observes Aitken. “The question for me is, How can I break through this idea, which is reinforced constantly? How can I make time somehow collapse or expand so it no longer unfolds in this one narrow form?”23 Inasmuch as electric earth’s narrative corridor defeats conventional linear storytelling, however, it does so by making a pact with the overstimulated peripatetic spectator, granting him or her the privilege of autonomously crafting electric earth’s narrative in exchange for submission to the multiple flows of sounds and images.

Consolation Service, Ahtila’s two-screen film installation, takes yet another approach to the display of time-based material. The work is an elaborate fictional narrative screened synchronously on a long, blank wall at the back of a darkened rectangular gallery space. The two adjacent projections offer different perspectives of the same story, facilitating comparisons between two points of view that overlap only rarely. Whereas other artists have used this dual screen technique primarily to emphasize spatial differences (Gordon and Shirin Neshat come to mind), Ahtila’s double screens frequently deconstruct temporal as well as spatial continuity. The artist explains that one screen is primarily concerned with detail and context shots and the other with moving the narrative along, although this is not readily apparent on a first viewing.

Consolation Service presents an intricately layered story about a disenchanted young couple—new parents Anni and JP—that recently decided to divorce. “It’s a story about an ending,” the narrator confides. Pivotal events include a therapist guiding the couple through a separation ritual, a birthday celebration for JP, and the accidental drowning of the couple and their friends after having fallen through the treacherously thin ice of a frozen lake. Consolation Service weaves countless loops of pastness across and between the two projections; it is never clear what is fantastical or metaphorical and what, if anything, is “real.” For example, Anni reappears unharmed in her empty apartment just after her descent into impossibly cold waters, whereas JP apparently perished in the accident, given that he returns postdrowning as a pixilated apparition longing to achieve peace with his estranged spouse.

Unlike the artworks discussed thus far, Ahtila’s film features a lengthy and complex dialogue. A female neighbor recounts the tragic yet mundane (or, better, tragic because mundane) story of the ex-lovers in Finnish. English subtitles run across both screens so that a single narration of events accompanies what at times seem to be two opposed story lines. This is just one of the myriad ways in which Ahtila insistently casts viewers out of what might otherwise become a cozy cinematographic cocoon; other examples include having characters sporadically reveal their position as actors and speak directly to the camera, and allowing the actors’ dialogue to draw the (never pictured) narrator into the story.

In contrast to the open-ended, spectator-determined duration of Gordon’s, Nauman’s, and Aitken’s installations, there is a sense that you will miss something central to Consolation Service if you walk away before the twenty-three-minute, forty-second loop is done. To consequently describe this work as a narrative film is both correct and grossly misleading, however; the events are not linear in any traditional sense and, as stated, the work rewards viewing initiated at any point in the cycle. Although the work does not need to be experienced in a linear, start-to-finish fashion—the rich narrative is equally compelling no matter at which point one begins watching it—this piece encourages the audience to observe the imagery in its totality. Comfortable seating and clearly posted running times are among the most apparent cues. The neighbor’s impassive yet enchanting narration also contributes to the sense that there is an entire story to know, even if the “story” is multilayered, open-ended, and circular (effectively a loop within a loop). While the fragmentary events are deliberately incapable of presenting an overarching and coherent account, to witness less than twenty-four minutes of Consolation Service is, in some sense, to fail to see the work at all. Moreover, that many of Ahtila’s installations (including this one) are also conceived as single-screen 35 mm experimental films supports the notion that viewers should preferably see the entire recording.24 The artist in fact insists that the work be presented to the audience “from start to finish, as a film.”25

Lost in, but in Control of, Time

Among the critics who have explored the question of the viewer’s experience with these time-based art objects, Jean-Christophe Royoux, for one, identifies a potentially critical, even “emancipatory” spectatorship in media art environments by Gordon, Ahtila, Dean, Huyghe, and others. For the critic, these installations purportedly both deconstruct and exceed dominant forms of chronology. The “cinema of exhibition,” expounds Royoux in a catalog essay for Cinéma Cinéma, is best described as “a loop without a beginning or end, a structure in which the experience of temporality can no longer be separated from a subjective reconstruction of duration,” thereby “demonstrating the possibility of an alternative to the kind of relationship to time inherent in cinematographic sequentiality.”26 This critical operation hinges less on the viewer’s experience with moving images than it does on what he calls the phenomenon of immobile or suspended duration: film and video installations generate intensely subjective experiences of time because the viewer is obliged to create mental images and assist in generating the work’s narrative. In his framework, the images in 24 Hour Psycho or Mapping the Studio, for example, are powerful for their very immobility, since this deferral ideally encourages spectators to mentally complete the piece. This mode of display, concludes Royoux, allows audiences access to another space-time that can “disrupt the homogeneity, regularity and unremitting succession of our own.”27 Philosophy scholar Peter Osborne makes a similar argument in a 2004 essay in which he considers gallery-based film and video in Bergsonian terms: “The marked spatiality of the modes of display of film and video in art spaces ... and crucially, the movement of the viewer through gallery space, undercuts the false absolutization of time to which cinema is prone.” For Osborne, like Royoux, this is fundamentally important because it “highlights the constructed—rather than received—character of temporal continuity.”28

In his recent book Chronology, Birnbaum offers another philosophically informed theorization of the potential criticality of the ways in which time is spatialized and put on display in contemporary screen-reliant installations. Indeed, he assigns these artworks a paradigmatic status: “If cinema could produce what Deleuze called crystal-images capturing for an instant the inner workings of time itself, then the temporal possibilities of this ‘other cinema’, exploring more intricate forms of parallelism and synchronicity, are even greater.”29

Like Aitken and Royoux, Birnbaum detects a thoroughgoing critique of linearity. This is important because, by challenging the spectator’s conventional notion of linearity, these artworks inspire an awareness that the construction of subjectivity is itself an open-ended, durational process. As Husserlian phenomenology makes clear, the layered structure of subjectivity allows for many flows of awareness;30 in this regard, reminds Birnbaum, the temporal polyphony (Stan Douglas) of multiscreen installations is in fact the mental state in which we all live.31 The overlapping flows of moving imagery in works such as electric earth, for example, allow viewers to recognize the extent to which they always live in many different times simultaneously. In Consolation Service too time can “crystallize” (Deleuze) in scores of ways but will never coalesce into a coherent, stable conception of the subject. Birnbaum’s ultimate contention, then, is that the viewer’s phenomenological experience with elaborate assemblages of time-based imagery could productively reveal something about the nature of time itself (although he is quick to clarify that time-consciousness can appear only indirectly, through various forms of spatialization).

Film theorist Dominique Païni takes a slightly different approach and pinpoints a dialectic at work in the presentation of moving images to moving bodies. He proposes that “[the] installation of a projection of moving images always institutes a tension ... in a continuum of images which tends [in the cinema] to be one with the flow of consciousness.” In the case of film and video installations, the usual coincidence between the viewer’s flow of consciousness and the flow of images in a cinematic, theatrical setting “is countered,” according to Païni, by the “random wandering of the flâneur, the visitor/spectator.”32 In other words, one’s self-directed perambulations through a given installation make one conscious of film or video’s temporal flow because, in this context, the moving imagery is not necessarily in lockstep with the temporal flow of one’s own consciousness. While he concedes that it is “impossible by definition to escape this fusion of the two times”—that is, out-of-frame time will unavoidably cross-pollinate with in-frame time, just as perception and memory are always coextensive—Païni concludes that the mobile viewer nevertheless does temporarily disrupt it.33 What is remarkable for Païni about the exhibition of time in media installations—and here his critique resonates with Birnbaum’s—is the way these works can provocatively display the flow of consciousness as it is manipulated, swept up in, and captured by the flow of images. In this scheme, the temporal river that is Giggy Johnson’s electric jig through electric earth, Psycho’s pokey playback, or the flickering surveillance images of Nauman’s shadowy studio is temporarily bracketed out, suspended in parentheses alongside the current of the viewer’s consciousness.

In contrast to the other critics’ implicit optimism regarding media installation’s ability to deconstruct habitual temporal relationships to dominant mass media forms, however, Païni remains deeply skeptical about the critical potential of such works and of the move from the cinema to the gallery in general.34 The specific relevance of viewer mobility and the shifting power dynamic this activates vis-à-vis the media object is central to Païni’s larger critique.35 Discussing the work of what he calls fourth-generation video artists such as Aitken, Rist, and Taylor-Wood, he observes how nomadic viewers negotiate their own trajectory with works such as electric earth, creating meaning as they amble along. Païni is cognizant of the flip side of the cinema spectator’s alleged “dechaining” or liberation in the gallery: “This renewed physical freedom is no doubt only an illusion, since in one way it is very much of the correlative of the emphasis on the individual as consumer of advertising and art.”36 Installation visitors, declares Païni, are in effect twenty-first-century flâneurs: “Here, quite unexpectedly at this century’s end, we witness the return of Baudelaire’s flâneur and his experience of seeing time exhibited in the Tuileries by that toy known as the phenakistiscope.” These “fin-de-siècle installations” are “bringing back the window-display effect that was given architectural and scenographic form by the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century,” and creating a “paradoxical hybrid of salon- and movie-goer” in the process.37

Païni’s incisive assessment underlines a fundamentally important aspect of screen-reliant installation spectatorship, although perhaps one not accurately described as flânerie. As film theorist Raymond Bellour points out, today’s art galleries furnished with multiscreen moving-image environments are not the outdoor shop windows of the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades.38 However much contemporary media art viewers may indeed be “just browsing,” the fractured, split mass media subject is not Baudelaire’s disinterested dandy. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the self-directed mobile spectator is apposite and allows us to think about how certain works, such as 24 Hour Psycho, Mapping the Studio, and electric earth, induce viewers/consumers to choose their own timeline. Even while Consolation Service (as described earlier) proffers a markedly different proposition, one that asks its audience to commit to a specific temporal engagement, this proposed mode of engagement contrasts sharply, as Bellour has observed, with the viewer’s experience of this piece as presented in large exhibitions.39

Reviewing the film and video installations at the notoriously media centric 1999 Venice Biennale (where both Aitken’s electric earth and Ahtila’s Consolation Service made their debuts), art critic and historian Michael Archer offers this sobering observation: “What this mode of presentation has built into it is the inevitability that the work will not be witnessed for very long. All that seems to happen is that you wait a couple of minutes until your feet start to ache from standing still, and then push off again.”40 While the experience of viewing time-based media in large-scale international exhibitions diverges in many ways from appreciating the same pieces in a museum or gallery, both settings tend to support spectator-determined time frames. Pieces such as Consolation Service are noteworthy for the way in which they may provocatively disrupt the museum audience’s entrenched allegiance to independent roaming,41 but the alleged disconnect between a given media installation and the museological or institutional durational conventions for this art form warrant further exploration.

Even for viewers habituated to the demands of time-based arts since minimalism (performance, body art, process art, etc.), there is something slightly incongruous about viewing film and video artworks in a museum. This friction is perhaps most palpable in the case of non-installation variants of film or video. Different expectations regarding the viewer’s temporal commitment to a given genre of media art may even account for video installation’s dramatic institutional popularity compared to single-channel video works (individual videotapes)—this according to artist Doug Hall and critic Sally Jo Fifer in the introduction to their influential anthology on video art.42 The editors go so far as to diagnose a conflict seemingly inherent in the reception of noninstallation forms of video, classifying single-channel video as a medium that stages “a viewing experience that is in conflict with the temporality of the museum.”43 Curator Chrissie Iles offers a potential explanation that echoes the sentiments of Hall and Fifer: “Filmmakers in an avant-garde situation insist that you come, quite rightly, and sit in the space and watch their films from beginning to end.” Such an arrangement, she concludes, is essentially “antithetical to the art world.”44 Sculptural forms of film and video appear to have rendered these screen-based art forms more institutionally palatable, and certainly more institutionally and privately collectable, in part because of their unfixed duration. Film and video deployed in sculptural and architectural configurations accommodate the art-viewing habits of self-directing nomadic visitors who take umbrage with inflexible viewing times.

Given these conditions, it seems reasonable to ask: do viewers prefer installation variants of film and video art because, to paraphrase Jameson, one can always walk off, “without sitting through a polite social and institutional ritual”? Did the disruption of linearity and the critical potential of demystifying the media apparatus in the 1960s and 1970s find its logical counterpart in the disinterested experience-seeking contemporary museum audience? These questions are not entirely new in art historical discourse, but they represent questions underexplored in connection to time-based moving-image environments.45

Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum” (1990) offers a partial account.46 Krauss theorizes how minimalism’s originally critical phenomenological project already contained the potential to shift toward what she considers to be the contemporary condition of “degraded” participation that characterizes the subject’s experience within the late capitalist museum.47 In this model, the contemporary museum emerges as a place to experience “experience” and installation spectatorship itself appears to be closely allied with the capitalist tendency to reify individual experience and freedom.

Krauss’s model tempers more celebratory accounts of how the viewer’s interaction with time-based installations disrupts one’s conventional understanding of (media) time. Rigorously investigating the role of the artwork, the individual, and the institution in generating particular spectatorship conditions brings the following issues to light: by creating media installations that support or even require visitors to determine the length of their experience with the work, might artists unintentionally provide for a spectatorship characterized by short attention spans? Do they reward itinerant viewers by allowing them to understand the work regardless of when they enter or how long they stay? Spectators generally assume that they are in control of the duration of their experiences with media installations, and indeed the open-ended running times of contemporary film and video environments tend to support this conception. In promoting the spectator’s peripatetic participation and specifically the exploratory duration thereof, media installations may, in actual practice, run the risk of over-privileging the viewer’s role and implying that all meaning resides in the individual spectator.

Considered this way, the temporal “flânerie” associated with installation spectatorship may, ironically, serve to reinforce an extremely conventional viewing subject. Païni comes closest to capturing the issues at stake by linking this mode of viewership to the nineteenth-century flâneur’s experience of window-shopping.48 As useful as this model is, we might profitably update it by noting the affinity to more recent modes of screen-based window (Windows?) shopping. In the case of viewing screen-reliant artworks, ambulatory art viewers unconsciously endeavor to merge museumgoing habits with those of watching film, TV, and countless other screen-based devices, from PCs to PDAs. (Indeed, Païni insinuates as much in his comment that “the contemporary art gallery and the museum have become home to the desire for screenplays... made for someone other than the captive moviegoer.”49)

Thus, although the dominant critical discourse tends to offer an affirmative view of the way that time is put on display in media installations as constituting a productive critique of the viewer’s conventional interactions with commercial media, it is equally important to recognize that the audience’s sense of autonomous temporal control may in fact be reflective of mainstream viewing experiences with screen-based mass media technologies, especially since certain technological developments in the 1990s.50 As early as 1993, scholar Anne Friedberg comments upon how the time-shifting effects of our everyday experiences with the multiplex theater, cable television, and VCR have reinforced the ways in which today’s media viewing is privately and individually controlled. She asserts: “The cinema spectator (and the armchair analog, the VCR viewer) with fast forward, fast reverse, many speeds of slow motion, easily switching between channels and tape, always able to repeat, replay, return is a spectator lost in but also in control of time.”51 Friedberg’s prescient observation—clearly it would not be a stretch to add Web browsing to Friedberg’s list of self-directed time-shifting activities—permits us to recognize how the spectator’s everyday temporal experiences with screen-reliant media both in and outside the home may inform and reflect present-day installation spectatorship. In a curious turn, the contemporary media consumer’s privately controlled temporal experiences with film and video in everyday life are unintentionally, albeit logically, reflected in the spectatorship conditions of the very art form whose early definition was founded upon its alleged difference from the conditions of mass media spectatorship.

P.S.1 curator Klaus Biesenbach hints at this problematic in the catalog for his 2001 exhibition Loop, which featured installations by Gordon and Nauman, among others. “With seemingly infinite freedom of choice, a recurring action becomes a stabilizing factor for the people of the First World,” he writes in regard to the seemingly ubiquitous loop approach for the production and exhibition of contemporary moving-image works. “Time appears to be tangible and serviceable, a phenomenon capable of being influenced, lengthened or repeated. This theme is reflected not only in the fine arts, but also in the world of media: in pop culture, in techno music, in endlessly repeated video clips, and in advertising.”52 In this way, the time-shifting mobile spectator appears to be a close relative of the contemporary media subject; both are lost in yet determinedly struggling for the control of their experiences with screen-based technologies.

As critics from Birnbaum to Païni have eloquently proposed, contemporary film and video installations, by putting time itself on display, uncover something about the nature of temporality in general. The question is what, exactly, do they reveal? In which ways does the shifting power of the mobile media spectator both incorporate and resist the contemporary media consumer’s propensity toward “window shopping”? The next two chapters build on the analysis of the subjective consequences of the exhibition of time in screen-reliant installations by investigating the spatial dynamics of viewing these works of art. Shifting our principal thematic focus from temporal to spatial conditions, we will nonetheless continue to interrogate the continuities and discrepancies between media installation spectatorship and everyday mass media viewing from the mid-1960s to the present. Chapter 4 examines the conceptual and physical spaces particular to viewing screens in early film and video environments in the 1960s and 1970s—the spaces, that is, in which media art spectators first emerged as screen subjects.