Body and Screen

Made You Look

The prevailing trends of media installation art criticism that seek to account for the role of the viewer can be divided essentially into two groups. On the one hand, critics celebrate the supposed spectatorial empowerment and liberation associated with audience participation (more recently described as “interactivity”). On the other hand, in an apparent contradiction, scholars condemn the observer’s allegedly passive and uncritical experience observing mass media screens as reflective of the technological structures and control mechanisms of late capitalism.3 It is not so much the active participation and/or passive viewing associated with these works that requires critical exploration, however, but rather the multifaceted and ambivalent relationship between a self-consciously embodied spectatorship and the disciplinary aspects of screen-based visuality. While critical accounts written since 2005 or so have developed more nuanced theories of attentive regulation and control as potential sites of cultural contestation,4 the majority of these critiques also fundamentally fail to appreciate what one might call media installation’s “architecture of spectatorship”: the defining role of the screen apparatus in managing the interactions between viewing subjects and media objects.5

Any artwork proffering the seductive glow of an illuminated screen is reasonably entitled to the schoolyard taunt “made you look.” Closed-circuit video installations such as Wipe Cycle, however, make you look even closer—because you are literally in the picture. “The most important function of Wipe Cycle,” recalls Schneider, “was to integrate the audience into the information.”6 For Schneider, the work’s live feedback system disrupts normative television viewing by integrating the viewer’s image into what is typically considered to be a one-way flow of information. Art historian David Joselit observes how works such as Wipe Cycle, although sited in the relatively controlled environment of the gallery, proved generative for other forms of video activism in the 1970s; guerrilla television’s production of politically engaged documentaries on cable, for example, shared the aspiration for what Gillette describes as “a symbiotic feedback between receiving and broadcasting.”7 While Joselit’s larger argument about video experimentation will be taken up in what follows, for now it suffices to note that these influential early video installations also offer a particularly useful way to understand the disciplinary and attention aspects of screen-based art spectatorship. By focusing on these pioneering examples, in which viewers’ bodies are unambiguously implicated in the work via feedback, one can extrapolate the ways in which media art environments impose particular physical arrangements upon their audiences in less obvious cases. Thus, while the early video installations of the late 1960s and early 1970s offer the best examples, the mode of spectatorship they promote persists in much current media art production as well.

Through case studies of seminal video art projects, including Bruce Nauman’s corridor pieces created between 1969 and 1972, and Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), this chapter scrutinizes not only the ways in which media objects and their customary viewing regimes actively define the relationship between bodies and screens, but also how certain closed-circuit video works intentionally underscore the coercive nature of screen-based viewing. That is, through an assortment of techniques, such as varying the arrangement of cameras and monitors, combining live and prerecorded feedback, inverting viewers’ images, divorcing cameras from their monitors, and introducing time delays, these artworks demonstrate how the viewing regimes associated with technological apparatuses assert precise kinesthetic and psychic effects upon their audiences. This chapter proposes that certain video installations can generate critical moments of rupture from within established forms and techniques of screen-based control: while these screen-reliant works oblige attention and discipline viewers’ bodies, the subjective effects of those requirements are remarkably unfixed.

Get in Line: Bruce Nauman’s Video Corridors

Considerations of “active” or participatory spectatorship have been intimately related to the discourse surrounding installation art since its inception. Indeed, the viewer’s involvement with the work is often taken to be the defining feature of the art form. In her 2000 monograph on installation art, art historian and curator Julie Reiss emphasizes that “the spectator is in some way regarded as integral to the completion of the work” and goes so far as to propose that “the essence of installation art is spectator participation.”8 Contemporary art practice and criticism, profoundly influenced by Marxist critiques of alienation, phenomenological critiques of Cartesianism, and poststructuralist critiques of authorship, conventionally understands the spectator’s active participation to be progressive for purportedly engendering an empowered, critically aware viewing subject. Installation artworks are thus habitually positioned alongside radical politics and progressive aesthetics for the way in which they are thought to counteract passive, resigned viewing by providing an experiential encounter for the spectator. In sum, the critical discourse surrounding this art form pits active, open-ended reception (especially associated with Brecht’s materialist and collectivist notion of aesthetic reception) against passive consumption.

The automatic praise of audience participation obscures an inconsistency, however.9 While installation art’s bid for the spectator’s involvement is routinely understood to constitute an open-ended invitation that constructs a critically aware viewer, the “invitation” runs the risk of demanding a predetermined and even compulsory response.10 Put differently, the viewer’s presumably open-ended participatory experience with a given work is instead imposed by the very art form of installation; by necessitating active spectator involvement, whether implicitly or explicitly, installation artworks may simultaneously constitute environments of controlled passive response. While the way in which viewer participation emerges as a form of submission has recently begun to be addressed in regard to installation in general, works made with screen-based technologies have received less scrutiny.

Nowhere are the disciplinary aspects of viewing screens more apparent than in Nauman’s video corridor installations. These celebrated sculptures are part of the artist’s larger collection of corridor works—which incorporated materials as diverse as neon, mirrors, fans, and so on—primarily created between 1969 and 1972. Regardless of the various media introduced in each work, all of the sculptures feature a corridor or corridorlike structure whose domineering spatial presence closely restricts the audience’s viewing experience.11 The series began with Performance Corridor (1969), a repurposed studio prop that consists simply of two wallboard dividers mounted parallel to each other to form a long, twenty-inch-wide passageway. Confronted by this almost impossibly narrow shaft, museum visitors must enter the makeshift corridor’s dim, claustrophobic space to take in the piece. In this case, the physical architecture (the wallboard panels) sharply directs the spectators’ bodies. In Nauman’s corridors made with video, however, the bullying of built structures takes a backseat to screen-based manipulation.12

Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970), like the original Performance Corridor, features a long and narrow wallboard construction. It is distinguished from the first work by the inclusion of a camera (inconspicuously mounted at the top of the corridor near its entrance) and two monitors stacked one on top of the other on the floor in front of the far wall. The piggybacked screens bar viewers from exiting on the opposite side, while their glowing monitors beckon from inside the shadowy enclosure. Viewers, eager to decipher the indistinct black-and-white images emanating from the electronic surfaces, are obliged to step in for a closer look. Both screens depict videotaped images of the interior—that is, both show the space where the spectator stands. Different scenes appear on each of the two surfaces, however: the bottom screen runs footage of the empty corridor while the top monitor offers an unexpected, real-time view of the spectator’s body.

The viewer’s image is unexpected, not only because it appears in the work at all (as in the earlier Wipe Cycle) but because of the distorted fashion in which it appears. Because the camera is positioned at the top of the structure, just inside the corridor entrance, viewers appear to move disconcertingly farther away and get smaller as they approach the screen (reflecting their actual movement away from the camera). In other words, as viewers move toward the monitors expecting to see a close-up mirror view of themselves at the end of the corridor, they are instead confronted with a disquieting representation of themselves depicted from behind and as moving away from the screen (that is, they see images of their backs retreating from the corridor and away from their own physical bodies). Decidedly uncomfortable with the “critical distance” literally figured on Nauman’s media screens, museumgoers are unsettled by the fact that their bodies are never satisfactorily represented on either display. What is rather perverse, of course, is that Nauman’s camera and monitor setup ensures that spectators will never achieve the mirrorlike proximity between bodily experience and its representation that they struggle to attain. Participants are obligated to see themselves in an unfamiliar way or, more precisely, to see themselves from the position from which others might see them.

Jacques Lacan’s theorization of the gaze captures this psychic effect. Spectators perceive the effects of the gaze because their estranged screen representations allow them to momentarily see themselves as objects.13 In this sense, closed-circuit video works that incorporate the viewer’s image make visible the inaccessible: spectators see themselves through the eyes of another viewer (that is, from the position from which the Other sees the subject). Significantly, this mediated view does not seamlessly match up with the spectator’s own perceptual expectations. For Lacan, this is emblematic of the contemporary subject’s radically contingent condition: the gaze does not “see” the subject and yet is integrally related to the subject’s desire. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this disconnect ultimately produces a split subject. In the case of Live-Taped Video Corridor, however, an additional operation is at work, something closer to what the art historian Parveen Adams classifies as the feeling of being “split by the screen.”14

However perplexing the representations on the top monitor may be for Nauman’s audience, Live-Taped Video Corridor’s bottom monitor is potentially even more unsettling. Critical theorist Samuel Weber’s effort to define the ontology of television borrows in part from Lacan’s model of vision and offers another way to decipher the viewer’s discomfort when faced with their not-quite-right mediated images. “What we see on the television screen is not so much ‘images’ but another kind of vision, a vision of the other (to be understood as both an objective and subjective genitive).... What we see, above and beyond the content of the images, is someone or something seeing.”15 While the top monitor offers the spectator unexpected (but nonetheless identifiable) real-time self images, the monitor underneath effectively “screens out” the spectator altogether. If, following Weber, we conceive of video screens as “someone or something seeing,” the bottom monitor’s playback is especially disturbing because it distressingly fails to “see” the spectator at all.

Media scholar Margaret Morse echoes this interpretation and speculates that the viewer’s experience with the disobedient twin monitors in Live-Taped Video Corridor cannily demonstrates the role of media technologies in actively defining contemporary visuality. Schooled to expect one’s own reflection in encounters with video feedback systems, the blank corridor footage on the lower monitor abruptly unsettles the viewing subject. After all, “there is a human need for and pleasure in being recognized as a partner in discourse,” postulates Morse, “even when the relation is based on a simulation that is mediated by or exchanged with machines.”16 Not surprisingly then, contemporary media subjects experience a disarming sense of loss of self in the face of their screen-based annihilation.

The expectations and conditioned habits associated with viewing video screens in everyday life therefore influence how spectators interact with media technologies in an art context.17 Beyond the basic requirement that viewers enter and explore the sculpture’s oppressively narrow passageway, Nauman purposely structures the viewer’s physical and psychic experience with the work by playing on the learned conventions of screen-mediated communication. Among these cultural habits are the generalized tendency of viewers to turn their attention toward video monitors, their desire to see comprehensible screen-mediated representations (or, perhaps more accurately, “confirmations”) of themselves, and, finally, the presumption of video’s “liveness.”18 Conditioned by network television to understand news coverage as “live,” spectators assume that the feedback on both of the artwork’s monitors displays real-time images of the corridor and should therefore confirm their presence within the space. The empty corridor imagery that appears on the bottom screen upsets this conventional assumption; like so much presumably live television footage, the shots of this vacant space were prerecorded. The illuminated screens and live moving images in closed-circuit video environments such as Nauman’s coax museumgoers to carefully structure their viewing and deftly arrange their bodies in specific ways. In this sense, the viewer’s experience with the corridor works is less about built architecture than an architecture of media screen spectatorship—a mutually informing and psychically charged phenomenal connection between the viewing body and the display screen.

Video Corridor for San Francisco (Come Piece) (1969), Nauman’s earliest closed-circuit video piece, is an especially instructive example of screen-based manipulation in that, despite its name, the installation does not employ a physical corridor. Instead it is composed of an empty room inhabited by two closed-circuit video cameras and their displays. The cameras are mounted across from each other on opposite walls of the gallery and paired with mismatching monitors on the gallery floor below. That is, each monitor and camera pair is arranged so that the display depicts live images of the space in front of the camera on the opposite side of the room, as opposed to representing the space in front of “their” camera. Upon entering the gallery, viewers traverse from one side of the room to the other to check out the flickering screens in the otherwise deserted space. In so doing they unavoidably walk between the two wall-mounted cameras, subjecting themselves, as in the earlier corridor piece, to the work’s cunning, if somewhat playful, surveillance.

Viewers quickly realize that they can see their own images represented on the screens if they carefully adjust their bodies and stand “just so”—stationed directly in line with one of the cameras, eyes trained steadily on the monitor opposite. And yet, this is not as easy to achieve as it may sound. The camera does not always point at the monitor and the lenses are turned from time to time, making it extremely trying to line things up satisfactorily. “It’s hard to stay in the picture,” Nauman admits. “You have to watch the monitor to stay in the picture and at the same time stay in the line of the camera.”19 One’s sought-after screen representations are both challenging to achieve and, like Live-Taped Video Corridor, profoundly disorienting. Because the screen directly in front of the viewer depicts a view taken by the camera located on the opposite wall (as opposed to depicting a view from the camera directly in front of the viewer as expected), Nauman’s spectators again find themselves in the curious situation of seeing themselves getting smaller as they draw closer to the screen’s electronic imagery.20

The artist’s calculated use of the video apparatus severely restricts the precise spatial boundaries in which the spectator’s participatory experience may occur; as Nauman puts it, this installation is “like the corridor pieces only without the corridors.”21 In attempting to keep themselves visible in the work’s representational screen space, to keep themselves “in frame,” so to speak, spectators instinctively fashion a carceral space every bit as effective and restrictive as actual walls. Viewers implement self-policing boundaries to keep themselves visible on the screen.

For art historian Janet Kraynak, this “simultaneous beseeching and thwarting” of the audience lies at the center of all of Nauman’s installations.22 Kraynak introduces Alain Touraine’s economic model of dependent participation to theorize the particular sort of viewer involvement engendered by these coercive art environments. Touraine’s model overturns the conventionally positive analysis of participation by arguing that the compulsory nature of participation in technocratic society leads not to subjective empowerment, but rather to the subject’s inevitable alienation. Nauman’s spectators, like technocracy’s subjects, are inescapably and uncomfortably trapped within the related conditions of compulsory input and external control. While Kraynak correctly identifies the paradox of programmed spectator participation, her argument stops short of recognizing the specifically screen-based conditions of the viewer’s controlled experience, such as the self-regulation provoked by the video corridors and other closed-circuit video works.23

For Adams, in contrast, Nauman’s video corridors offer provocative, critical explorations of precisely this issue of self-regulation. Foucault’s panopticon model of modern subjectivity famously relies upon the idea of external monitoring (by the guard hidden in the central tower) coupled with the internalization of this observation by the subject. Adams argues that Nauman’s video corridors shatter the internalization of surveillance by undermining the system of vision it relies on. The video corridors reveal the difference between watching oneself and being watched, which in turn undermines one’s perceptual expectations and opens a space to “see differently.” Adams’s psychoanalytic reading profitably theorizes the psychological impact of the video corridors: the observing subject earns a brief escape, even a sort of liberation, by becoming aware of the incongruous nature of visual surveillance. (Or, to put it in psychoanalytic terms, viewers become aware of the split between the eye and the gaze.) However, this account too leaves the viewer’s physical, bodily experience with screen-based technologies unexplored—an issue that is crucially important for closed-circuit installations. Even while aspects of external visual control are unveiled in the video corridors, it is equally significant that viewers themselves routinely and voluntarily constrain their physical placement in relationship to the cameras and screens.

To the extent that both the screen-based video apparatus and the audience’s habits and expectations for the technology literally move viewers in particular ways, the active participation element of these works clearly constitutes a constricted request or demand. In his Suspensions of Perception, Crary describes how a sustained critique of various technologies of attention unites Debord and Foucault’s otherwise divergent theorizations of contemporary social relations. If for Debord spectacle works to isolate, separate, and immobilize subjects despite their intense intercommunication, and if for Foucault docile subjects respond to internalized disciplinary initiatives, both thinkers nevertheless understand attention to be an influential, noncoercive power mechanism of late capitalism. Building from these dual models to think through the ideological function of television and the personal computer in particular, Crary contends that, in their dominant uses, these technologies produce stationary, passive, and isolated subjects. Screen-based spectatorship is thus understood as a disciplinary process that regulates viewers’ minds and bodies in specific ways geared toward docile productivity.24

It is the very limits of the preceding criticism, however, that installations such as Wipe Cycle and the video corridors put to the test. Crary himself hints at a dialectic in his acknowledgment that capitalism can never fully rationalize the exchange between the body and the screen, a circuit he compellingly identifies as “the site of a latent but potentially volatile dis-equilibrium.”25 If Crary is right, then it is reasonable to conclude that there is a prospective criticality embedded in critically reflexive artworks that explore the charged relationship between bodies and screens, even while they make use of coercive technologies of attention. In the final section of this chapter we shall see how Graham’s pivotal video work Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), like the earlier pieces by Gillette, Schneider, and Nauman, purposefully exploits this volatile relationship and assiduously negotiates the unstable equilibrium between participation and regulation intrinsic to media screen-reliant installation spectatorship.

“Moving” Images: Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Past(s)

Present Continuous Past(s) consists of a white room with mirrored walls on two adjacent sides. A monitor and camera are mounted on the third, mirrorless wall and the partial fourth wall marks the work’s entrance. The camera records everything in front of it, both the spectator’s image and the entire room reflected in the glass. This information is played back on the monitor, but with an eight-second delay that introduces a series of discontinuous body images spread out in eight-second intervals. Whereas Wipe Cycle and the video corridors present viewers with only one unruly representation at a time, Graham’s installation superimposes several moving images of its audience. This produces a peculiar, decentering effect for gallerygoers as they move cautiously throughout the space, struggling to come to terms with seeing multiple versions of themselves in “continuous pasts.” This arrangement is made increasingly complex by the fact that, as in Wipe Cycle, multiple viewers can engage Present Continuous Past(s) concurrently. Viewers are asked to consider how their bodies (virtual or otherwise) are placed in relationship to other members of the audience. While self-conscious viewers may long to step back and observe from afar, they are obliged to actively participate in the sense that competing multiple images of their bodies and those of other participants will be visible on the mirrored walls and video screen no matter what they do.26

If the mirrored walls return the viewer’s real-time image, the images on the video display follow a different logic. Graham has carefully considered the difference between the viewer’s perceptual experience with mirrors and screens: “Mirrors reflect instantaneous time without duration,” he explains in a 1975 interview with critic RoseLee Goldberg. “They totally divorce our exterior behavior from our inside consciousness, whereas video feedback does just the opposite; it relates the two in a kind of durational time flow.”27 While mirrors can be employed to produce curious spatial displacements in their viewers, video screens have the potential to generate novel spatial and temporal experiences. Indeed, Graham’s spectators find their bodies simultaneously immersed in a morass of screen-reliant temporalities: the recent past (on the monitor), the present (in the mirror), and the idea of a future time (spectators not only see the actions that they recently performed, but also know that what they do subsequently will soon become visible on the screen as what they have just done).

Gilles Deleuze’s writings on Bergson and the cinema offer a useful comparison here.28 In his profoundly influential book Matter and Memory, Bergson proposes that it is artificial to separate what happened in the past from the present or the future, since memory effectively combines them in unending, dynamic movement.29 Although Deleuze invokes the cinema as the ideal metaphor for demonstrating Bergson’s thesis that “peaks of present” and “sheets of past” meet only in the brain (or, in the case of Deleuze’s cinema example, on the screen), the superimposed time images on the screen in Present Continuous Past(s) arguably offer an even tidier example of the amalgamation between past and present, virtual and actual.30 Immersed simultaneously in (at least) three competing temporalities, Graham’s viewers experience time as a constantly shifting process.

Joselit too theorizes the relevance of the destabilizing and shifting spatiotemporal experience central to early video installations such as Graham’s. For Joselit, this is especially significant due to the way in which these artworks call attention to the subject’s relationship to dominant uses of video technology in everyday life, namely commercial television. In his recent book, Feedback: Television against Democracy, Joselit contends that by breaking open the closed system of television, video practitioners in the 1970s, such as Graham and Nauman but also Peter Campus, Joan Jonas, and Vito Acconci, were able to reveal and critique televisual discipline. Graham, he argues, “brilliantly maps commercial television in reverse by acknowledging the political atomization and impotence it masks.”31 For the art historian, this is a largely conceptual and psychological operation specifically centered on the viewer’s conventional relationship to, and identification with, television’s idealized personality types; thus, the critical efficacy of feedback images is how they “represent identity as a process, not a televisual presence.”32 Joselit argues that these art objects productively destabilize and multiply identity, bringing into being what philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to as a constructive “in-betweeness.”33

For the purposes of the present argument, what is most interesting is Joselit’s acknowledgment that the criticality of closed-circuit installations exceeds the deconstruction of fixed televisual identity. In revealing the disciplinary conditions of normative television viewing, works such as Present Continuous Past(s) also establish “a different sort of relation between a person and his image,” one “premised on proximity and touch.” He continues: “It might be tempting to call such an interaction narcissistic [Krauss], but in fact it is the contrary: instead of collapsing the viewer into her picture, the projection appears as an external object, soliciting a response.”34 Although Joselit offers single-channel works by Acconci and Jonas as exemplary of this condition, one might easily extend his argument to encompass key video installation art works as well. Present Continuous Past(s), for example, creates a distance between one’s body and screen-based images of that body, which in turn allows viewers a greater reflexivity regarding the relationship of their physical persons to the media screen apparatus. That is, the bewildering video screen representations compel the audience to make comparisons with their actual lived bodies; they must study the behavior of their corporeal selves to understand whether the times and images represented on the video screen are “accurate.” Scrutinizing the material and indeed immaterial correlation between one’s body and one’s screen representation—“Was I smiling in the past?” “Am I smiling now?”—makes it possible to decipher the existence of multiple yet divergent self-images and to figure out Graham’s time-delay system. In this way, Present Continuous Past(s) tweaks video technology’s association with discipline and attention but also, and more specifically, underlines the embodied, material relationship between the viewer and the screen-based apparatus. Like the video works by Gillette and Schneider and by Nauman, the piece obliges its audience to confront the ambiguity of media installation’s participatory requirement by drawing out the typically ignored architecture of spectatorship between viewing subjects and media art objects.

Thus, while the disciplinary aspects of screen-reliant spectatorship are undeniable, certain artworks critically contort the condition of audience participation with media environments in creative and disruptive ways. In challenging technologies of attention and control from within, as it were, these installations provocatively underscore the ways in which everyday mass media viewing conventions condition how spectators interact with screen-reliant objects inside the art gallery, even as they insist upon the centrality of the viewers’ embodied experience in generating the work’s meaning. Chapter 3 extends the analysis of the charged relationship between bodies and screens by assessing the temporal qualities of media installation’s reception in more recent artistic production. As we shift our focus to the viewer’s temporal experience with screen-based film and video environments created since the mid-1990s, we shall see how the question of just who is disciplining whom becomes ever more complex.