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Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art
Art Journal, Winter, 2007 by Jane Blocker
In describing Green Light Corridor, Nauman remarks: "The Green was a very strong piece, but I had some people go in and find it very relaxing and other people find it very intense. I found it fairly tense myself. And then the yellow rooms that I made--I could never stay in them." (29) To the extent that it offers its participants a "fairly tense" experience of blinding color, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's work Radio (2007) seems to be the direct inheritor of Nauman's efforts. Manglano-Ovalle's work, displayed at the Documenta-Halle in Kassel, is installed in a room with a high ceiling and a bank of windows on one wall, which face the wooded area behind the building. The glass curtain wall is covered with red anodized aluminum foil, which casts everything and everyone in the space in an intense red-orange glow. On the floor lies a life-sized sculpture of a radio in cast aluminum that is painted black, and speakers mounted on the walls occasionally broadcast the sound of radio static. In the context of Ovalle's body of work and his interest in exploring our relation to technology, the radio reads as outmoded and forlorn, a once-revolutionary device now frozen into an image. Like the word "art" in Diaz's installation, neither the sculpted radio (the representation of a radio) nor the sounds broadcast in the room (the imitation of radio sounds) are in themselves art, but are rather like names or delineations that prepare us for an experience that lies elsewhere. Consistent with Ovalle's interest in human perception, the room is the site of a biological experiment in which the viewer's body becomes the scene of art. The viewer's eyes experience such fatigue, growing so insensitive to the red spectrum of light that when she blinks, the color seems to change as though someone had superimposed a series of colored slides--first an intense orange, then apricot or peach, then yellow. Looking out the window, the trees and grass are no longer green; the sky is not blue but a disturbing postapocalyptic shade of sulfur. If she looks from the room out one of the two doorways, the adjacent rooms, lit with incandescent light, appear to be bathed in a green-blue tone. And as was the case with Nauman's Green Light Corridor, when she exits the piece she experiences an intense afterimage, a representation that colors everything she perceives and casts doubt on her conception of the real. Like Plato's cave-dweller, the viewer who is installed here suffers from sight.
When Derrida asked what the day could mean to a blind man, he was not thinking of Radio and its participants stumbling blindly out of the room, their eyes burning with the color red as though touched by the sun itself. If he had seen this work, he might have thought about the way that, with its reference to the radio, it introduces the experience of sound precisely where blindness occurs. Indeed, for Derrida, this is the only place it can occur since sound, in his view, is antithetical to vision. It is the medium of the blind. "Taking up time rather than space in us," he remarks; the spoken word or sound more generally "is addressed not only from the blind to the blind, like a code for the nonseeing, but speaks to us, in truth, all the time of the blindness that constitutes it." (30)
