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

Export's imaginary yet actual ping-pong game insistently tests the normative spatiality of screen spectatorship, conceptually and literally fusing the spectator and the spectacle. In the single screen of Export's work, conflicting spaces are mobilized and experienced simultaneously: the spectator's opponent is imagined "inside" the illusionary screen space and yet the game actually takes place in real space and depends on the recognition and use of the screen as a real, material object. The immaterial dots of projected light that the participant gamely endeavors to hit look like targets emerging from inside or beyond the screen (the projected image of the ball must be imagined as a quasi-real object in order for the game to work). At the same time, the actual ball's automatic return, bouncing off the screen and back to the spectator, confirms both the screen's material flatness (rivaling the screen's other, generally starring role as a window onto a space of illusionist representation) and the actuality of the viewer's embodied experience in the gallery space.

In this manner, Ping Pong exploits the screen's duality as material and immaterial to draw attention to the typically neglected space in front of the screen, that is to say, the space between the screen object and its viewer. (19) Put another way, Ping Pong proposes an oppositional viewing-space-within-a-space. The movement of the real ping-pong ball--its route from the viewer's space to the screen space and back again--materializes the neglected circuit between body and screen. In this way it serves as a metaphor for the intellectual work Export expects her spectator to perform. The artist has described her ambitions for this piece vis-a-vis normative film spectatorship: "Ping Pong explains the relationship of domination between the producer (the director) and the consumer (the spectator). What the eye tells the brain is the cause for motoric reflexes and reactions. Spectators and screen are the screen for a game with rules that are dictated by the director. Attempt to emancipate the audience!" (20)

At first read--"Attempt to emancipate the audience!"--it would seem that the artist hopes to free spectators from the constraints of passive media viewing by insisting that they, as ping-pong players, become active viewers and participants--a somewhat paradoxical ambition that was nonetheless inspirational for many artists at the time. (21) Indeed, a Brechtian influence is unmistakable in Export's rallying cry. Bertolt Brecht considered the "apparatus" to be a field of signification including the technical tools, cultural institutions, and parties in control of those institutions; providing a foundation for subsequent developments in film theory, he contended that disruption of the unitary field presented by the apparatus would make spectators inherently self-aware. (22) Export's Ping Pong changes this relationship slightly. As the artist explains, spectators and screen "are the screen" for an additional "game"--the viewers and screen in Export's game are the site of a further strategic intervention--one whose rules are, tellingly, "dictated by the director." If the first game is the table-tennis match between the viewer and the screen-cum-opponent, the second game is one staged between the omnipotent director and the active-yet-passive viewer whose "participation" is entirely prescripted. What would otherwise seem to be the straightforward emancipatory potential of Export's invitation for viewers to become active participants with her film is thus corrupted from the outset. The organizing logic of Ping Pong is not so much the liberatory potential of revealing the apparatus, as it is a pointed critique of film spectatorship via the multiplication and complication of the spatial conditions for viewing media screens.