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

The main proponent of apparatus theory, Jean-Louis Baudry, like Gidal promoted a critical media practice and a distanced, critical mode of viewing that would demonstrate film's typically concealed ideological effects.11 Apparatus theory marked the first rigorous attempt to combine an analysis of the materiality of cinema with its architectonic and ideological effect. Writers such as Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen conceptualized cinema's "institutional apparatus" as a fixed relation between the film, projector, screen, and viewer; of equal importance, these critics and filmmakers, drawing heavily on psychoanalytic theory, offered the first theorization of the screen as both material surface and site for psychic projection. (12) For these writers, the choice tended to be black and white. Spectatorship was either complicit and immersed in the dominant ideology or, through critical and formal distance, was aware of and participating in an ideological critique formally and conceptually internal to the media work itself.

In the case of classic Hollywood cinema, apparatus theory provided a clear lens through which to conceptualize viewership and its ideological ramifications. That the case is not so cut-and-dried for screen-reliant media installation has posed difficulties for art criticism. On the one hand, the introduction of media screens into sculptural installations in the late 1960s implicitly reintroduced illusionistic and virtual space into a type of art practice that, drawing on the critical ambitions of Minimalism, had aimed to eliminate modernist transcendentalism in favor of a present-tense perceptual encounter between the spectator and the art object. On the other hand, in investigating the screen's material apparatus--even while incorporating virtual spaces into the work--certain projects produced a critical spectatorship characterized by a doubleness that built on yet differed from that presented by Minimalism. This mode of viewing was arguably characterized by theatricality (Michael Fried), but only in part. (13) By dispersing focus across screen spaces that coexist and indeed sometimes compete with the actual exhibition space, certain screen-reliant installations generate a forceful critical effect that hinges precisely on this tension between virtual screen space and actual space. In a curious amalgamation of gallery-based spatial experimentation and political aesthetics, this model of spectatorship proposes that viewers be both "here" (embodied subjects in the material exhibition space) and "there" (observers looking onto screen spaces) now. This new double spatial dynamic radically reinterprets the conventional ways that screen-reliant spaces have been described and experienced.

What a Difference a Screen Makes

Evaluating theories of screen spectatorship seems a logical starting point in assessing the influence of screens on the spatial dynamics of viewing media art. Media scholars Anne Friedberg and Lev Manovich (both working outside the boundaries of a strictly art-historical context) offer the two most compelling accounts. Specifically focusing on the continuities and distortions enabled by film, video, and computer screens, both writers emphasize our cultural tendency to view flat pictorial surfaces, from canvases to computer screens, as "windows onto other worlds" and note how the Renaissance model of perspectival illusionism (outlined in Leon Battista Alberti's 1435 treatise De Pictura) has conditioned Western perceptions of spaces on flat surfaces ever since.