Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art

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)

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."

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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.

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.

Terence Koh produced a comparable theater of sunlight using similar means in 2007. His untitled work was installed in a small gallery just off the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The piece consists of a 4,000-watt HMI PAR light, used in filmmaking to simulate sunlight, mounted about five feet off the floor on a steel stand and pointed directly at the viewer. (13) The light is so intense that museum guards stationed near it wear sunglasses, and for the unprotected viewer it has a painfully blinding effect. This blinding makes it all the more difficult to see the other element of the work, a lead ball, one foot in diameter, which lies on the floor and contains what the artist describes as a secret. Though, like Diaz's piece, it employs a theatrical lighting instrument to achieve its effect, Koh's installation produces a more direct visual assault. The viewer blinks, squints, and turns her head to one side as she approaches the source of the intense light that blinds her. Because this lighting instrument is 4,000 watts, unlike the spotlight used in Diaz's piece, which is perhaps only 1,000 or 1,500 watts, it creates a great deal of inviting warmth, and simultaneously, because it is pointed directly at the viewer instead of at a wall, it produces an almost painful experience and a disorienting barrage of afterimages, what the Whitney curator Shamim Momin describes as "explosions in your retina." (14) No longer able to see the light to which I am subjected, I close my eyes and see an image, a memory, a representation of that light, which is ultimately a representation of my own seeing. It is as though, rather than stare at the sun, one were to turn to see the sun's reflection in water, except that in this instance the image of the sun is reflected in the watery chamber of the eye itself. Therefore, in an extremely clever way, Koh's conceptual installation, though it does not engage in traditional forms of depiction, returns us, just as Diaz's work did, to the image, to representation.

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In that regard, it also returns us to philosophy, to Plato's cave and the traditional philosophical belief that light represents the authentic, the good, and the true. But Koh's installation seems to view the light of the sun not only as beautiful, infinite, and cosmic, but as potentially threatening. "Using light as his primary material," Momin explains, "Koh transforms the gallery space into a seductive yet inaccessible diorama, creating a psychological interaction that evokes desire and loss, pain and hope.... As we enter the Museum lobby, we are immediately aware of the flood of light emanating from the gallery; it is so powerful that its presence in the space is almost physical. When we turn toward it, however, it is nearly impossible to look at directly. It is a harsh, painful, extremely white void closing onto a single center, like the exploded point of a star." (15) Momin's warning reminds us of Derrida's discussion of what he calls the "Platonic speleology." The inmates of Plato's cave, he remarks, "suffer from sight," both when they are imprisoned, transferred from light into darkness, and when they are freed, transferred from darkness into light. (16) On this point, Derrida quotes Socrates, who of course challenged Plato's disdain for the image that dances about in firelight, who entertained the possibility of the representation or the sign to enlighten when he said: "I decided that I must be careful not to suffer the misfortune that happens to people who look at the sun and watch it during an eclipse. For some of them ruin their eyes unless they look at its image in water or something of the sort. I thought of that danger, and I was afraid my soul would be blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with any of my senses. So I thought I must have recourse to logoi and examine in them the truth of things that are." (17)

I wish to suggest that we are like philosopher-artists installed in these works, engaged in inscribing and contemplating the line between the real and representation, the trait, which continually both "draws a boundary and withdraws from it." (18) To be this blind man means, for Derrida, to see with one's hands, and indeed when one interacts with these installations one finds oneself touching--walls, elevator doors, a door jamb or stair railing--whatever is near to hand that will steady one's balance. The blind man of necessity must also rely on memory, both the memory of objects and spaces (the configuration of the room, one's location relative to furniture) and, more important, the memory of sight itself. Deceived by shadows, blinded by sunlight, we are like Plato's cave dwellers, for, like them, the viewer of contemporary art "suffers from sight." Accustomed to a world of simulation, a world where image is reality, we are full-time skeptics for whom light and darkness, truth and falsehood, reality and representation hold equal dangers. We are left to draw blindly, again and again, the line between them.

While I have focused thus far on these artificial suns, I want now to consider their relation to time. Obviously, given the attempts of these artists to depict sunlight and the solar eclipse, they make reference to cosmic temporalities and their measurement, not only the daily circuit of the earth around its star, but the months, years, or centuries marked by lunar and solar eclipses, the eons that it takes for a planet to go dead like Koh's lead sphere fallen to the floor. The brilliant light suggests, as Momin puts it, "a byproduct of cosmic creation--like the creation of dark matter, the dying explosion of a supernova, or the collapsing center of a black hole that theoretically produces a new universe." (19) In contemplating his work's relation to these galactic forces, Koh describes his efforts as an attempt at "crossing time with light." (20) In addition to their external references to time, to the "rhythm of the days and nights," these installations are fundamentally constituted by a more human form of temporality. Not only are the works time-based, not only do they invite participants to perform within their confines (to play the part of the moon, for example), they also make specific reference to and may be said to be about performance--the theatrical spotlight, the cameraman's lighting equipment, the stage, and the set. To the degree that they employ these two categories of time--the cosmic and the performative--and to the extent that they install their viewers, it might be said that they owe a debt to the work of Nauman.

In 1968 Nauman built the first of what was to become a series of corridor installations. Made of wallboard affixed to freestanding two-by-four studs, the corridors varied in dimension (width, height, and length), in their use of lighting (some later versions included green or yellow fluorescent lights), and in some instances the use of closed-circuit video. The first corridor was made as a prop and theatrical setting for his videotaped performance Walk with Contrapposto. The videotape shows Nauman walking down the narrow corridor, away from the camera, in an exaggerated manner, swinging his hips in a series of contrapposto poses. Rather than taking down the set, as Nauman explains it, he left the corridor up in his studio for a year before deciding that it could stand on its own as a work of art, which he then included in a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969. (21) Walk with Contrapposto is just one of several video performances Nauman made in this period, performances that involved simple repeated movements he did alone in his studio in front of a black-and-white video camera often set at odd angles relative to the action.

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As might be said of all of these works, this piece involved the examination of the boundary between sculpture and theater, art and time. As though engaged in one of Eadweard Muybridge's time-motion studies or in a philosophical dialogue with Gotthold Lessing, Nauman imitates the iconic pose of classical sculpture, but sets it in motion down a narrow hallway, the very form of which suggests a linear and temporal progression from one end to the other. Once this stage set was displayed as a sculpture itself, however, seemingly affirming the more static features of that medium, it had the ironic effect of installing the viewer as a surrogate performer. Instead of Nauman entering the narrow opening and traversing the cramped hallway, the viewer found himself squeezed between its featureless walls. What is interesting about this transition from prop to sculpture and from Nauman to the viewer is the artist's specific understanding of the viewer's role and his careful attempts to constrain that role. His comments about these early forays into installation remind us that he was working in a historical moment in which the rules and conventions of the medium were still being worked out. "It was just two parallel walls," Nauman remarks,

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  that stuck straight out from the studio wall about twenty feet and
  about twenty inches apart. I remember it wasn't very big--I can
  remember some bigger ones. I finally just decided it was fine the way
  it was, it didn't need the performance. I think it was very hard for
  me to present it without any particular instructions, because I felt I
  didn't want people to make their own performance. I wanted to control
  the situation, and I felt that by giving something as simple and
  uninflected as that corridor, that I was allowing people a lot more
  latitude than I was used to. (22)

The corridor-as-installation seemed to invite the viewer's direct participation, indeed to be meaningful only with that participation, so it was troubling to an artist famously involved in solitary, conceptual experimentation. To say that the viewer's body was installed in this work is to recognize that while that body became an unpredictable element in the piece, it was at the same time disciplined by the limits and rectitude of the walls by which it was surrounded. Nauman has stressed in several interviews, both from the early 1970s and more recently, that he wanted to control the behavior of his audience. (23) In a sense, what he describes is a desire to install an ideal participant in the work, to set the participant up as one would a work of art and manage its parameters. The corridors thus become metaphors for the exhibition space itself, the white unadorned walls of a gallery. Just as installation art is by definition produced in response to and is contained within the site where it is erected, so the audience member responds to, plays within, and is enclosed by Nauman's claustrophobic space.

In later works, such as Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970), he made this correlation even more evident. He installed a closed-circuit camera at the top of the wall at one end and two video monitors on the floor at the opposite end. This produces a very odd experience in which the viewer, as she enters the corridor, sees the back of her own head and torso displayed on one of the monitors in front of her, while an image of the empty corridor remains unchanged on the other. If she turns to look at the camera, her face will appear on one of the monitors, but her back will be turned away from it so she cannot see it. Though she may act in this space, she cannot show her face to herself, cannot really see herself, and in this way is held suspended somewhere in the middle of the corridor between camera and monitor. In an interview with Willoughby Sharp, Nauman explains that the purpose for this configuration is "to make the situation sufficiently limiting, so that spectators can't display themselves very easily." When Sharp asks if the work is not "rather perverse," Nauman replies: "Well, it has more to do with my not allowing people to make their own performance out of my art." (24)

Not quite performance and not quite sculpture, Nauman's corridor pieces provoke a series of questions: What is the role of the, for lack of a better word, "viewer's" body and the effect of the constraints placed on that body? What is the place of vision in works in which there is nothing in particular to see (the blank walls), or in which seeing is frustrated (the image of the back of one's head), or in which one is blinded (the bright lights)? And what is the function of representation in works in which nothing much seems to be represented? While it seems clear that Nauman's works are performative--they involve a set ting, an actor, a simple narrative arc, a temporal framework, and what Joseph Roach has called surrogation (the viewer stands in for the artist)--they also resist the category of performance. (25) They are, at the same time, involved with seemingly more conventional artistic concerns such as vision (we are forced to contemplate our own seeing), subject-object relations (the corridor is both sculpture and stage), and representation (the viewer represents the artist). Performance and sculpture, the real and representation, vision and blindness--the corridor is an apt figure through which to contemplate the passage between conceptual categories. It functions both as a long line (Derrida's trait) that divides, and as a liminal space that connects--here and there, now and then.

Nauman's work Green Light Corridor (1970) features a narrow hallway, nearly forty feet in length, with walls that are ten feet high but only about one foot apart. So constricted is the space that the viewer may pass through it only by turning sideways and shuffling awkwardly ankle to ankle from left to right or right to left. This configuration sets up an odd scenario in which the viewer who faces forward (that is, in the direction his feet are pointed) sees only a blank wall that is so close to his face that it is difficult to focus his gaze. In order to see anything, he must turn his head at a ninety degree angle, left or right, perpendicular to his feet. In addition, the corridor is lit from above with intensely green fluorescent lights, which cause the participant to experience a magenta afterimage once he emerges from the piece into natural light. According to the artist's catalogue raisonne, when the work was first exhibited at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, "the corridor was set perpendicular to a window, which allowed viewers, on exiting the piece, to see a spectacular view of ocean and sky as if through proverbial rose-colored glasses." (26)

I think of Green Light Corridor as a space of doubt, a space through which we pass by feeling rather than seeing our way. In that sense the work, like the others discussed here, is the site of philosophy, a place in which the blind man contemplates the nature of the real and the trauma of representation, the conditions of art's possibility. Though there is virtually nothing in the way of imagery in this work, representations abound: the corridor represents the featureless interior space, the gallery itself, perhaps, or the drab and confining office cubicle; the lights represent artificiality, the dolorous workplace, the psychological mood experiment; (27) the magenta afterimage represents a rosy view of the world. In addition to these things, the work is suffused with a concern for the representation of time. Time is of course a primary concern of all "time-based" media such as this, works that have a temporal and performative component. That Nauman is concerned with time is something which many critics and historians have commented on. But the argument I'm making here is somewhat different from that usually made about Nauman's work. Paul Schimmel asserts, for example:

  Throughout his oeuvre, Nauman demonstrates an interest in using time
  to structure the way the viewer sees. We must take the time to see the
  film, video, and performance: we must spend the time to read the
  programmed sequence of words or images in the neons: we must give the
  time to enter and interact with the corridors, tunnels, and room
  constructions. The temporal and experiential engagement of the viewer
  has been the real armature on which Nauman's sculptural aspirations
  are realized. The works are often open-ended in terms of duration, but
  they are authoritarian in terms of the artist's expectations of the
  rules of the viewer's participation, if not the parameters of the
  viewer's experience. (28)

Here Schimmel considers time to be a structure into which the viewer-participant enters and by which he is controlled. In this sense, time exists prior to and exclusive of the viewer. But I am suggesting that while Nauman's work is authoritarian in some ways, strictly controlling what the participant may do within the works, time does not exist in advance of the participant but is rather represented by him, within his own body. Blinded by an intense green light, he blinks his eyes, as Nauman says, to keep the time.

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)

Radio and the other works I've discussed here vigorously challenge the time-space dichotomy by insisting on the temporality of sight, making viewers aware of the time of seeing. Manglano-Ovalle in particular draws together seeing and hearing as senses that equally take up time, that equally take up space, that equally depend on the movement of invisible waves. In his hands, the light of day (that is to say the sun), which we see out the gallery window, is made so alien that it begins to seem as though it were being broadcast around the room, like a relentless and unintelligible sound. What is more, we ourselves are the medium on which the light travels. When we exit the room, the red light is carried as an afterimage in our eyes and moves along with each of us as though carried on a wave between distant points. Like ears that cannot close to block out a loud noise, the eyes cannot block out this red that seems to seep into everything and vibrate like sound waves in some tiny bone in the skull. As with the other works of art I have discussed here, we are installed in Radio as blind men, people who ponder the conditions of possibility for art in a time of skepticism, in a time of touch-screens and picture phones, a time when we see with the tips of our fingers, when we hear with our eyes.

Jane Blocker is associate professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Where Is Ana Mendieta: Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) and What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Her current book project, Seeing Witness: Essays on Contemporary Art and Testimony, will be published in 2008.

I wash to dedicate this essay to my mother.

The epigraph is from Bruce Nauman, Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words; Writings and Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 62.

1. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 33.

2. Ibid., 2. "The operation of drawing would have something to do with blindness, would in some way regard blindness."

3. The 1993 exhibition comprised works Derrida chose from the Louvre's department of prints and drawings. Representing a variety of historical periods, the works included self-portraits and images of blindness, often blind men from Biblical or classical mythology.

4. "These blind men, notice, since the illustrious blind of our culture are almost always men, the 'great blind men,' as if women perhaps saw to it never to risk their sight. Indeed, the absence of 'great blind women' will not be without consequence for our hypotheses." Derrida, 5 and 5-6 n. l.

5. Derrida discusses the theme of hands throughout his book; see especially pages 3-9. "A hand of the blind ventures forth alone or disconnected, in a poorly delimited space; it feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes, trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight," 3. "The mise en scene of the blind is always inscribed in a theater or theory of the hands," 26.

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.

26. Bruce Nauman, ed. Joan Simon (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1994), 245.

27. Michele De Angelus suggests this last interpretation in his interview with Nauman, in Nauman, 258-59.

28. Paul Schimmel, "Pay Attention," in Bruce Nauman, 70.

29. Bruce Nauman, interview with Michele De Angelus, in Nauman, 258-59.

30. Derrida, 4.

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