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Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art
Art Journal, Winter, 2007 by Jane Blocker
To the degree that these works produce blindness, they differ significantly from the artistic examples that captivate Derrida. Rather than artistic depictions of blindness or drawings of the blind, these works produce sightlessness. They install our bodies as and at the center of works of art. My body is the wall on which the text is written, the surface off which the light bounces. My retina is a tiny canvas on which light and color are painted. Thus my body is the site where the art takes place. As such, the body is a work, or rather a scene, of art. Such works do not consist, as in Derrida's examples, of the representation of something exterior to art, but rather of an experience that is immanent within art. As a result of that immanence, accepting the premise of the blind man means that these installations and the philosopher-artists who inhabit them are engaged in the task of contemplating the very conditions of art's possibility, particularly in a theoretical moment that continues to debate the nature of representation and the real and in a technological age in which such categories have been destabilized. (7)
This is precisely where we must compensate for Derrida's rather narrow focus, for although he examines some issues that are of central importance to contemporary art (such as the contemplation of theoretical categories and the conceptualization of vision), his work is silent about others. If we are to understand the specifically performative and temporal dimensions of the installations we will examine, then we must attempt to answer the question that Derrida abandons, "What about the day?" (8) We must, in other words, try to understand the peculiar relation between the blind man and the sun, between the blind man and time. When Derrida describes blindness, he tends to focus on either pure darkness or bedazzlement. I prefer Nauman's idea of blinking, a reaction to bright light that has a "pulse," so to speak, a rhythm, by which one can keep time. In what follows, I hope to show, by discussing the specific strategies employed by Nauman, an important forerunner of contemporary installation practices (and particularly those discussed here), that the task of contemplating the conditions of art's possibility today involves drawing and withdrawing a line, not only between the real and representation, but between the body and its environment, between one moment and another. These are lines drawn and withdrawn by a strobing light, set to the beat of the human eye.
Let us begin then with the sun. Diaz's installation Eclipse, which he created for this year's Documenta exhibition, installs the viewer in a scene of blindness and the revelation of blindness. The installation consists of a small, rectangular room, constructed within the Joseph Beuys Hall in the Neue Gallerie in Kassel. One enters the narrow doorway to see a brilliant white light spread across the opposite white wall. The other three walls of the room are painted charcoal gray, making the room reminiscent of a camera obscura. The light is thrown across the room by a theatrical spotlight mounted on the wall next to the entrance. As one walks toward the blinding brightness, there is nothing whatsoever to see except the black outline of a square and one's own shadow creeping up the wall as one approaches it. The light does not illuminate anything, but only bounces off the white wall at the viewer. Then a remarkable thing happens. If the viewer gets close enough to the wall, her shadow is cast on it, and within this dark shape, she sees white letters emerge on a square gray background, which the intensity of the light had previously obscured. The letters read: "DU KOMMST ZUM HERZEN/DEUTSCHLANDS/NUR UM DAS WORT/KUNST/UNTER DEINEM EIGENEN/SCHATTEN/ZU LESEN" (You come to the heart of Germany only to read the word "art" under your own shadow). (9) In this work, the viewer is blinded by an artificial sun. It is only in turning away, like the daughter of Butades, from this sun and its brilliant light and looking into the darkness of the shadow, the darkness of one's own silhouette, that representation, the word, reveals itself. Put simply, it is in a moment of blindness that we see "art."
