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Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art
Art Journal, Winter, 2007 by Jane Blocker
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
At the same time, however, Diaz's invisible message seems to be an indictment of our pursuit. It says, "You came all this way to see art, but what you found is only the word 'art' written on a wall." In this context, the word Kunst is a line, a trait drawn in blindness, which in Derrida's words, "both names and effaces." (10) A philosophical category, it is only a word, a depiction that names or represents art, but is not, in itself, art. What is more, it is not a depiction of the kind we have come to expect from works of art, but a signifier of depiction's, that is, representation's, failure. It names something the experience of which is deferred.
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Diaz has said of this work that it "formalize[s] a kind of suspicion or alienation about the effectiveness of the social function of contemporary postmodern artistic production." (11) Written in the second person--"you came to the heart of Germany"--the message seems to be directed to the art-world audience that attends the numerous international exhibitions that now dominate the globalized art market. "I suppose that the common spectators or those who might be called 'specialists,'" Diaz remarks, "artists, curators, museum directors, galleries and magazines, critics, theoreticians and art historians, intellectuals and collectors--go to Documenta with certain expectations.... That which will finally be eclipsed will be precisely these expectations." (12) Given Diaz's own commitment to social change and the political function of art, it seems clear that the expectations to which he refers involve the experience of art as a slick commodity, the seeing of art as a form of consuming within an international, postmodern art economy. But his work hopes to eclipse that expectation, to throw it into shadow by highlighting something else. I argue that the experience of art in this work and in others like it lies elsewhere; it is not in the reading of the word, the seeing of the image or the experience of "art," but in the experience of blindness itself. The viewer is startled here by a trick of visual perception, a trick that takes place in her eye: where she thought she saw nothing, there was something, and that something came into view, was perceived, only when darkness intervened. The viewer thus becomes a skeptic, a philosopher who does not believe her eyes, who is forced to consider whether and under what conditions art can exist any longer.
