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

4. Of course, media screens have not always functioned exclusively or even primarily as thresholds onto virtual worlds. Tom Gunning's classic study. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde," for example, suggests how early cinema (pre-1906) enjoyed a different relation to its spectator, emphasizing the exhibitionist, vaudeville-like "cinema of attractions" that accentuated the new cinema technology itself. Gunning's essay appears in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute. 1990).

5. This concern is famously articulated by Hal Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism," in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

6. The critic and artist Brian O'Doherty famously identified a shift in art spectatorship associated with the turn toward "context as content" as early as 1976. See his Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986).

7. I will use the term "screen-reliant" as opposed to "screen-based" to signal that a screen is a performative category and that "screenic" viewing is not limited to conventional, flat, rectangular surfaces.

8. Michael Archer. "Installation Art." in Installation Art. ed. Nicolas De Oliveira, Andrew Benjamin, Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1994); Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005); Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); and Julie Reiss. From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Krauss's Voyage on the North Sea, a work largely concerned with disengaging certain screen-based artistic practices from what she theorizes to be the inherently complicit genre of installation art, presents a curious exception; although she rigorously examines artworks contingent on the viewer's experience with various media screens, she studiously refuses to consider them in relation to the "international fashion of installation and intermedia work." Krauss, 56.

9. Some exceptions are works by Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits, Fabio Mauri, Joan Jonas, Michael Snow, and Robert Whitman, among others.

10. The filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal proposed the term "structural-materialist" film in 1975 to distinguish Conceptual and materialist works that seek to expose their own ideological operations from the variant of structural film, famously identified in P. Adams Sitney's 1969 landmark essay on the genre, whose primary concern was the largely formalist, modernist project of investigating the "filmic" qualities of film. Key practitioners associated with structural-materialist film include Hollis Frampton, Kurt Kren. Peter Kubelka, Malcolm LeGrice, William Raban, Paul Sharits, and Michael Snow. See Gidal, Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute. 1976), and Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).