Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art

6. See Derrida, 34-35 and 44-51.

7. Derrida remarks that "Every time a draftsman lets himself be fascinated by the blind, every time he makes the blind a theme of his drawing, he projects, dreams, or hallucinates a figure of the draftsman, or sometimes, more precisely some draftswoman.... The subtitle of all these scenes of the blind is thus: the origin of drawing. Or, if you prefer, the thought of drawing, a certain pensive pose, a memory of the trait that speculates, as in a dream, about its own possibility." Ibid., 2-3.

8. "As I told you, this must not be read as the journal of an exhibition ... what would a journal of the blind be like?" Ibid., 33.

9. This text is very similar to the quote from Novalis that Diaz uses in his 1999 work Al color del pensamiento, which was also displayed at Documenta 12. "WIR SUCHEN UBERALL DAS UNBEDINGTE UND FINDEN IMMER NUR DINGE" (We seek everywhere the absolute and always find only things).

10. Derrida, 88.

11. Gonzalo Diaz, "Exponer en el extranjero es siempre un cacho," interview for the website of the University of Chile, available online at www.artes.uchile.cl/uchile.portal?_nfpb+true&pageLabel= (consulted July 3, 2007; my translation).

12. Ibid.

13. A PAR light uses a parabolic aluminized reflector. HMI refers to "mercury medium-art iodide," a type of gas-discharge bulb, which is enormously efficient, much more so than a tungsten bulb, producing 90 lumens per watt. See Harry C. Box, Set Lighting Technician's Handbook: Film Lighting Equipment, Practice, and Electrical Distribution, 2nd ed. (Boston: Focal Press, 1997), 54-56 and 410.

14. Shamim M. Momin, "The Infinite Tear," Terence Koh, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), n. p.

15. Ibid.

16. Derrida, 13, 15.

17. Quoted in Derrida, 15 n. 7.

18. Ibid., 53.

19. Momin.

20. Quoted in Momin.

21. Bruce Nauman in an interview with Michele De Angelus, in Nauman, 258.

22. Ibid.

23. See, for example, Lorraine Sciarra, interview manuscript, Pomona College, Claremont, California, 1972, first pub. in Nauman, 167; Willoughby Sharp, "Nauman Interview," Arts Magazine 44 (March 1970): 22-27; Willoughby Sharp, "Interview with Bruce Nauman," Avalanche 2 (Winter 1971): 22-31; Jan Butterfield, "Bruce Nauman: The Center of Yourself," Arts Magazine 49 (February 1975): 53-55; Michele De Angelus, "Interview with Bruce Nauman" (1980), unpublished manuscript from the California Oral History Project, Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. For more on the viewer's role in Nauman's installations, see Janet Kraynak, "Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman's Environments," Grey Room 10 (Winter 2003): 22-45.

24. Bruce Nauman in Willoughby Sharp, "Nauman Interview," in Nauman, 112.

25. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2-3.