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Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art

Art Journal, Winter, 2007 by Jane Blocker

I blink my eyes to keep the time.
--Bruce Nauman

"And what about the day," Jacques Derrida asks, "the rhythm of the days and nights without day or light, the dates and calendars that scan memories and memoirs? How would the memoirs of the blind be written?" (1) Derrida wonders how there can be a journal of the blind, a daily accounting, when to be blind is to live in darkness, never to see the sun, that clock by which we measure the day. How, in other words, can the blind man keep time? It is important to understand that when Derrida writes of the blind man, he is not necessarily talking about people who have lost their sight to disease or injury, but rather about a dual figure: the philosopher and the artist. (2) Throughout his catalogue essay for a 1993 exhibition of drawings at the Louvre, Derrida identifies himself with the draftsman, repeatedly discussing the ways in which the philosopher delineates, draws contours and limits. (3) Thought begins, in Western metaphysics, where one draws a line, a conceptual boundary, such as that between day and night, without which there would be no categories, no taxonomy, no epistemology, no time. But the drawing of that line, the making of representation, is an act of the blind. He explains this principle by commenting on the ways in which, in order to draw a portrait, the portraitist must turn away from the sitter's face and see the lines or traits on his paper. Similarly, in order to write the word "face," one must turn away from the putative real and attend to the lines that form the word. In both instances, this turning away--from the face to the portrait, from the thing to its name--this trope, is the fundamental motion and concern of both art and philosophy.

We might illustrate this concept with one of the famous paintings of Butades's daughter, the young draftswoman who appears in Pliny's natural history in a story he tells about the origin of art. The maiden's lover was set to leave for battle. Out of fear and longing, she inscribes her lover's shadow on the wall, his silhouette becoming a remembrance of his having been with her. As can be seen in Joseph-Benoit Suvee's The Origins of Painting (1791), in order to draw his silhouette, she must turn away from him and toward the wall, from the light and toward the shadow, from the real to the representation. This parable is normally understood to illustrate the rudiments of art: it begins with the pure desire to make the absent present; it begins not with skillful or educated rendering but the simple act of fixing the indexical shadow. In that sense, the maiden's drawing might seem the product of immediate experience more than of representation, but her act of tracing, because it involves a moving toward the image, inherently marks, however nascent, the representational turn. To pursue the idea further, the line which she draws, though it can be seen on the wall or the page, is not a record of what she sees. Such lines are not mimetic, even in the most realistic of drawings. They are rather what Derrida calls thresholds, representations of the invisible, the boundaries we erect between the body and its surroundings, between subject and object, between the thing-in-itself and what surrounds it. To conceive of the real (to think about the real in philosophical terms), then, is to draw a line, a contour which contains all those things that accord with the concept of reality. Ironically, that line is always drawn by turning away from the real and toward the line as representational convention, an abstraction or artistic technique which we employ for expediency. We need the representation in order to conceive of the real, the image of the cave to imagine the sun. This is why, for Derrida, the lore of the blind man as seer has such a central place in Western culture; it is commonly understood that to know the world, that is, to think the world, is to be blind, where blindness is understood to provide ethical clarity.

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This essay is an attempt to contemplate experiences of blindness in contemporary art and to suggest, based on that contemplation, that the viewer is installed in these works as Derrida's blind man. I use "blind man" throughout this essay as shorthand for viewers of whatever gender who are subjected to or voluntarily engage in blindness, both physical and metaphorical. (4) In the most basic sense, Derrida's figure animates these works because we are quite literally, if only momentarily, blinded by them. The installations I discuss here--by Gonzalo Diaz, Terence Koh, Bruce Nauman, and Inigo Manglano-Ovalle--all involve intense lights that disorient and blind rather than bring enlightenment to their viewers. These are only the most vivid of recent examples. One could consider at some length why the 2007 Documenta and Venice Biennale are filled with works that produce blinding effects. In Kassel and Venice, in one dark room after another, the intense light of videos and films is projected onto dark walls, and viewers stumble about in disorientation, bumping into or treading on others who lean against the walls or sit on the floor. The sightless participants in all these works take on the basic characteristics described by Derrida. They are both bedazzled by light and subjected to darkness, and so become skeptics who doubt vision and see with their bodies, groping with their hands. (5) In addition, particularly in the works of Diaz, Koh, Nauman, and Ovalle, stricken audience members become people of memories and afterimages; they dwell in representations and reflections. (6)

Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art

Art Journal, Winter, 2007 by Jane Blocker

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