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Be here now: the spatial dynamics of screen-reliant installation art
Art Journal, Fall, 2007 by Kate Mondloch
Faced with the contemporary preponderance of influential installations made with film, video, and computer screens--works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Gary Hill, Pierre Huyghe, Isaac Julien, Shirin Neshat, Sam Taylor-Wood, and others come to mind--we might begin the pressing task of assessing them by posing a similar inquiry into the spatial dynamics of spectatorship. Such a project would involve asking how these current media-art works negotiate spectatorial "doubleness" and to what critical effect. Are we, as spectators of these present-day, screen-reliant installations, 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 screen interfaces while never being fully present in the experiential material world, thereby contributing to our contemporary condition of spatial dislocated-ness identified by cultural critics from Frederic Jameson to Paul Virilio? 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. But for this very reason, questions about location and interface are crucial to the production of a truly critical screen-reliant installation-art practice.
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Kate Mondloch is assistant professor of contemporary art and theory in the department of art history at the University of Oregon. She is currently completing a book entitled Screen Subjects: Media Art and Screen Spectatorship.
I would like to thank Miwon Kwon, Liz Kotz, Jenn Marshall, and the anonymous reviewers at Art Journal for their input on early versions of the essay. I am grateful to Chon Noriega and Colin Ives for inviting me to present aspects of this material at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Oregon respectively. My thanks also to Marichris Ty of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York, and Agnes Falkner of the Generali Foundation for their assistance in securing artwork reproduction rights. Finally, I extend my appreciation to the University of California Humanities Research Institute for funding a pivotal stage of this research.
1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1971), 24.
2. George Baker, summarizing the comments of Malcolm Turvey, George Baker, Matthew Buckingham, Hal Foster, Chrissie Iles, and Anthony McCall, "Roundtable: The Projected Image," October 104 (Spring 2003): 94.
3. While this essay emphasizes the cultural foundations for this predisposition, it is also important to note potential physiological explanations for this behavior. In an important neuroscientific study on attention and consciousness, the neurobiologist Christof Koch explains how the viewer's focus on screens is essentially involuntary: "Some things don't need focal attention to be noticed. They are conspicuous by virtue of intrinsic attributes relative to their surroundings.... These salient objects rapidly, transiently, and automatically attract attention (it takes willful effort to avoid glancing at the moving images on the TV placed above the bar in a saloon)." Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Englewood, CO: Roberts and Company, 2004), 161 (emphasis added).
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