Be here now: the spatial dynamics of screen-reliant installation art

"A screen is a barrier," wrote the philosopher Stanley Cavell in 1971. "What does the silver screen screen? It screens me from the world it holds--that is, screens its existence from me." (1) Cavell was writing of the cinema, but his words are historically piquant for art criticism. Indeed, many critics have pointed to a "filmic turn" in recent artistic production, some going so far as to portray this as a 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." (2) At the same time, film history and theory have proven inadequate to understanding media installations. These gallery-based works are not so much a wholesale defection from the concerns and institutions specific to visual art as they are a provocative fusion of filmic-cinematic and sculptural concerns.

From Chrissie Iles's 2001 exhibition Into the Light, showcasing seminal projected-image works created between 1964 and 1977 (Whitney Museum, New York), to exhibitions featuring more recent media art, such as Peter Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw's Future Cinema (Karlsruhe, 2003) and Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez's Fifty-first Venice Biennale (2005), contemporary art shows worldwide now habitually reconfigure their "white-cube" gallery spaces as black boxes for viewing screen-based art. In recent years, scholars in art history and film and media studies have devoted considerable attention to contextualizing and historicizing these artworks. The momentous changes to art spectatorship inaugurated by the deployment of media screens in art galleries, however, remain largely unexplored. As screens continue to proliferate in contemporary artistic production, it is imperative to recognize the ways in which they beckon, provoke, separate, and seduce, in the process radically altering the way we view and experience art.

As in everyday life, media screens in gallery-based installations consistently draw our attention, however fleetingly, to the light-based imagery presented on their surfaces. (3) Our cultural habit of immediately looking at media screens and our propensity to view them as windows onto other representational or informational spaces--concentrating on the spaces depicted "on" or "inside" the media screen--has special consequences for the complex spatial dynamics of screen-reliant installation art spectatorship. (4) Media screens--film screens, video screens, computer screens, and the like--made initial forays into art galleries as early as the late 1950s, both as constitutive elements of Happenings, performances, and expanded-cinema events created by artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Alan Kaprow, John Cage, Robert Whitman, and Robert Rauschenberg, and as art materials in their own right, such as the now quaintly anachronistic television sets assembled in Wolf Vostell's early media-critical work and in Nam June Paik's satirical video sculptures. This essay is concerned with environmental and experiential artworks that flourished in the midst of widespread artistic experimentation with spatial and temporal phenomena in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Minimalism had aspired to overthrow the spatial and temporal idealism associated with modernist sculpture, replacing it with a direct, experiential encounter for the spectator in the "here and now" of the exhibition space. These artworks revealed the exhibition space as material and actual, thereby clearing the way for critical reflection on the physical and ideological constraints of the art gallery. Advanced sculptural practice in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired in part by Minimalism's reductivist and phenomenological approach (and including practices enfolded in the categories of postminimalism and institutional critique), was concerned with investigating both physical and psychic-conceptual spatial phenomena in relationship to the viewing subject. (5) As artists sought to rupture the boundaries of the gallery both literally and figuratively in process-and concept-based work, space and the spatial dynamics of spectatorship emerged as content. (6)

It was in this spirit that artists such as Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits, Bruce Nauman, Michael Snow, Valie Export, and Peter Campus created what I call screen-reliant media installations: experiential artworks that use media screens within the specific institutional context of the visual arts to explore a multiplicity of virtual and actual spaces. (7) These works deliberately engage the spatial parameters of the gallery, even as they reject typical spatial and representational modes. Although the term "installation" was not widely used until the late 1970s, the issues associated with the expanded practices now commonly known as installation--considerations such as space, materials, embodiment, duration, site, participation, and so on--offer the most relevant criteria for evaluating them. Yet while 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 and the conceptual and phenomenological spaces peculiar to its spectatorship, media installation's particular concerns have largely been overlooked. (8)