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

18. The artist's creation of an alternate version of Ping Pong using a television screen later the same year suggests that Export's principal interest was in challenging the viewer's experience with media screens in general, as opposed to cinema in particular. In the spirit of Marcel Duchamp and Fluxus, Export even advertised a do-it-yourself, readymade version of the installation in Film magazine in 1969. Entitled Ping Pong Kassette, the work included a ball, paddle, and 8mm film, whereas the consumer presumably supplied his or her own projector, table, and screen (see p. 25).

19. The screen is an extremely ambivalent material object, functioning simultaneously as a material surface and as an immaterial or conceptual threshold to imagery or other information. I have written about the screen's hybrid status elsewhere. See Kate Mondloch, "Not Just a Window: Reflections on the Media Screen," Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Spring 2006, available online at www.vectorsjournal.net/index.php?page=8%7C5&projectld=65.

20. Valie Export quoted in Wien: Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film, ed. Peter Weibel (Frankfurt-am-Main: Kohlkunstverlag, 1970), 262.

21. The desired creation of a progressive, "democratic," and presumably critical spectatorship via obligatory participation is a paradox of much installation art. For two interesting accounts of how art historians are beginning to rethink the critical discourse of spectator participation in relationship to installation art, see Janet Kraynak, "Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman's Environments." Grey Room 10 (2003): 22-45; and Judith Rodenbeck, "Madness and Method: Before Theatricality," Grey Room 13 (2003): 54-79.

22. See especially Brecht's "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre" and "A Short Organum for the Theater," in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 33-42 and 179-205. See also Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 254-69. Brecht's alienation effect and theorization of the apparatus were deeply influential for film and media artists and critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

23. David Joselit, "The Video Public Sphere," Art Journal 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 48.

24. The evident and compelling formal and conceptual similarities between Campus's Interface and Marcel Duchamp's pivotal works composed on and in glass sheets have been pointed out by several critics. Bruce Kurtz, in "Fields," Arts Magazine, May-June 1973, first related Interface to Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass (1915-23). David Joselit linked Campus's work to Duchamp's suggestively subtitled Small Glass (To Be Looked At [from the Other Side of the Glass] with One Eye, Close To, for Almost an Hour) (1918). See Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).