“A Broken Piece of an Absent Whole”:

Experimental Video and Its Spaces of Production and Reception

by

Margot Bouman

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by

Professor Douglas Crimp

Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies

Department of Art and Art History
The College
Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester

Rochester, New York

2008
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For David and Nathaniel

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Curriculum Vitae

Margot Bouman was born in Montreal, Canada, on October 31, 1962. She

attended Concordia University from 1993 to 1997 and graduated with a Bachelor of

Fine Arts degree cum laude in 1997. She came to the University of Rochester in the

fall of 1997, beginning graduate studies in the Graduate Program in Visual and

Cultural Studies. While in residence at Rochester she received a research grant from

the Susan B. Anthony Institute of Gender and Women’s Studies. In 2001 she received

the Master of Arts degree from the University of Rochester. Bouman pursued her

research into the history and theory of experimental video and video installation art

under the direction of Professor Douglas Crimp, receiving a grant-in-aid from the

Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, New York in 2002, and a travel grant from

the College Art Association in 2004. From 1998 to 2004 she was an editor for

Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal in Visual Studies. She was an adjunct at the

University of Rochester from 1999 to 2001 and at Parsons The New School for

Design in New York City from 2001 to 2005. In 2005 she was hired as a visiting

assistant professor at Parsons. The status of her appointment was changed to assistant

professor in 2007, and she will begin a new appointment as the Director of

Undergraduate Studies for the School of Art and Design History and Theory at

Parsons in 2008.
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Acknowledgments

The research, writing, and revision of this dissertation was made possible by

the assistance of many people and institutions. I must begin by thanking my first

mentors, Jennifer Fisher, Jim Drobnick, and Catherine Mackenzie. My adviser

Douglas Crimp is my model and my goad. His sense of ethics results in the following

convictions: that political engagement necessitates the highest standards of

scholarship and writing, that fools should not be suffered, and that his students

deserve his unfailing courtesy. I am grateful to Sharon Willis for her unforgettable

seminar on French cultural studies, Rhetorics of Everyday Life, and for her editorial

comments on my draft, in which she insisted that I take television-studies scholarship

seriously. Joan Saab’s seminar, The Politics of Space, pushed me into thinking about

the ways in which experimental video interacts with spaces beyond broadcast

television and the museum. I would also like to acknowledge Jason Middleton for

agreeing to join my committee at a late date.

I benefited from extraordinary seminars given by Janet Wolff, David

Rodowick, and Michael Ann Holly. Allen Topolski taught me how to teach. While I

was doing my coursework, the brilliance and generosity of my colleagues and

professors in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies exemplified best

practices. In Rochester I particularly valued the friendship, discipline, and intellectual

engagement of Anna Williams, Tina Takemoto, Lisa Soccio, Darby English, Angela

Gibson, Elizabeth Cohen, Matt Brower, Michael Williams, Cyril Reade, Lucy
 v

Curzon, Daniela Sandler, T’ai Smith, Liz Czach, and Cat Zuromskis. The dissertation

group at the Susan B. Anthony Center for Gender and Women’s Studies provided

invaluable support and feedback when I began writing. Its members, Ed Chan, Amy

Herzog, Jennifer Hudak, Joanna Mitchell, Narin Hassan, and Kirsi Peltomäki

carefully read my preliminary drafts and asked me probing questions that clarified my

thoughts and helped me begin writing in earnest. Jonathan Massey’s friendship and

conversation has delighted me since he came to Rochester from Princeton to do

research in the summer of 1998. I will always miss the indomitable Reni Celeste and

her ferocious appetite for scholarship and life.

I researched and wrote my dissertation after moving to New York City in the

summer of 2001. Chapter 1 benefited from the Rockefeller Archive Center’s

impeccably maintained records of the Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement in the

early years of experimental video and video art and the vast holdings of early video at

Electronic Arts Intermix. The Museum of Modern Art’s archives held rare print

ephemera essential to my research for chapter 3, and, at the Celeste Bartos

International Film Study Center, I screened normally unavailable films and videos.

The archivists and librarians at all three institutions have been accessible, courteous,

and professional: in particular Charles Silver, the Associate Curator of Research and

Collections in the Department of Film and Media at MoMA. Most important, research

for this dissertation consisted of countless visits to public video art projects,

commercial art galleries, art fairs, and museums in New York City and elsewhere.
 vi

Since 2001 I have taught at Parsons The New School for Design, a division of

The New School. While at Parsons, Rosemary O’Neill, Hazel Clark, and Earl Tai

have mentored my scholarship and my professional development. I am grateful for

the friendship of my colleagues, past and present: Elizabeth Chakkappan, Noah

Chasin, Janet Kraynak, Sarah Lichstein, and Margaret Sundell. Research and

scholarship funds awarded to me by the Parson’s dean’s office made it possible to

present papers at conferences in Santa Barbara, California; Chicago, Illinois; and

Madison, Wisconsin. At the College Art Association conferences in Seattle and New

York City I met scholars and artists such as Katie Mondloch, Melissa Ragona,

Christine Ross, and Simon Leung, who shared my interest in experimental video and

video installation art. Their input carried my project forward. Members of the

NSSR/Parsons Visual Culture Working Group—Tim Pachirat, Vicky Hattam, David

Brody, and Orit Halpern—gave me stimulating and much-needed feedback on a draft

of chapter 2. I will be forever grateful to my students for teaching me the necessity of

good writing. Just as important were their questions and their pursuits, which helped

give chapter 4 its conceptual shape.

My parents Hendrik Bouman and Corrie Bouman have always supported my

projects in every way imaginable. My sisters Judith Bouman Watson, Anita Bouman

Lamoureux, and Helen Bouman Medwid, as well as their children and husbands,

remind me that worlds exist outside academia and art. I am sorry that my brother

Conrad Bouman, who died in Tanzania in 1985, no longer shares his world with me.

Finally, my partner, David Hill, was the first person to broach the possibility of
 vii

graduate study to me. His constancy, devotion, and care have brought me to its

conclusion. Our greatest project is our son, Nathaniel.

 viii

Abstract

This dissertation, “‘A Broken Piece of an Absent Whole’: Experimental Video

and its Spaces of Production and Reception” presumes that where video is found—as

the glass eye and window of broadcast network television, as an integral component

of contemporary architecture, as one more medium in the museum, and as the newly

primary visual interface of the internet—determines its form. Video also has a

formative influence on the spaces into which it is inserted. The recently expanded

field of video is divided in two: by “broken piece” the art historian Ann Wagner

refers to experimental video and video installation art; by “absent whole,” the rest of

media culture. Why this break occurs, and how it is both policed and undermined is

my dissertation’s project.

In the late 1960s, experimental or avant-garde video’s space was assumed to

be broadcast television, and secondarily the artist’s studio, the art gallery and the

movie theater. Chapter 1 looks at the avant-garde strategies for accessing and altering

broadcast television, which consisted of multipronged attacks on its complex of

industry programming, audience and technological form. Its failure to maintain a

lasting presence on television is used to support the argument that television’s

vigorous and highly militant avant-garde did not produce any lasting cultural assets. I

argue otherwise, by looking at some of the unresolved “problems” of avant-garde

television that return over the ensuing decades. Following its release from the

television set, video has appeared almost everywhere, on screens the size of buildings
 ix

that form a backdrop for people carrying screens that fit into their hands. Through a

consideration of public video art, chapter 2 analyzes how the dismissal of broadcast

television audience by the avant-garde is repeated in later responses to the newly

expanded spaces of “television.” Chapter 3 looks at the changes to video’s temporal

form that take place after its successful introduction into the museum in the 1990s.

Chapter 4 historicizes the rhetoric dividing high art from mass culture through an

analysis of attempts to split the virtual from the phenomenological in the reception of

projected video environments.

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Table of Contents

Preface …………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter 1 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-Garde: 1960s and 1970s

Experiments with Broadcast Television ……………..…………. 7
1.1 Introduction: Avant-Garde Television ………………………...... 7
1.2 The Rockefeller Foundation and the Public Broadcasting Service 33
1.3 West German Broadcast Television ……………………………. 58
1.4 Revolutionary Television in France and Mozambique …………. 69
1.5 Conclusion ……………………………………………………… 84

Chapter 2 Between Distraction and Attention: What Does It Mean for

Movement to Be Public? ………..………………………………. 89
2.1 Introduction: “Seeing-in” ……………………………………….. 89
2.2 Distraction and the Television Audience ……………………….. 97
2.3 Expanded Television ……………………………………………. 105
2.4 Stan Douglas: The Zwolle Proposal …………………………….. 119
2.5 Paul Pfeiffer: Orpheus Descending (2001) ……………………... 132
2.6 Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers (2007) .…………………………….. 154
2.7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………. 165

Chapter 3 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: The Museum and the Loop as

a Temporal Form ………………………………………………... 167
3.1 Introduction: Buildings and Routines …………………..………. 167
3.2 Video’s Entry into the Studio, Art Gallery, Art Fair, and
Museum …………………………………………………………. 174
3.3 Critical Reception of Contemporary Video Installation ………... 193
3.4 New Institutional Time: The Loop ……………………………… 205
3.4.1 Stan Douglas: Win, Place, or Show (1997) ...………….... 205
3.4.2 Marijke van Warmerdam: Sprong (1994) ………………... 208
3.4.3 Douglas Gordon: Through a Looking Glass (1999) ………. 211
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3.4.4 Doug Aitken, Electric Earth (1999) ………………………. 215

3.4.5 Pierre Huyghe: Streamside Day Follies (2004) …..………. 224
3.5 Conclusion ………………………………………………………. 230

Chapter 4 Confusions of Nearness: The Virtual and the Phenomenological

in Projected Video Environments ………………..……………... 233
4.1 Introduction: Mapping the Studio, Mapping the Museum ……… 233
4.2 Immersion and Autonomy ……………………………………… 239
4.3 The Anti-Entertainment Polemics ………………………………. 254
4.4 Sense as Carnal Matter, Sense as Conscious Meaning …….…… 268
4.5 Irit Batsry: Set (2003) ...………….……………………………… 278
4.6 Virtual Reality …………………………………………………... 281
4.7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………. 288

References …………………………………………………………………… 291

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Preface

In 2007 the media critic Martha Gever repeated an observation made in 2005 by the

video and new media scholar Michael Rush at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia.1

Rush, Gever told her Art Journal readers, had asserted that “video art has become a

historical category, no longer applicable to current practices.”2 His assessment, she

continued, “signaled the end of the decades-long struggle by many artists to achieve

acceptance of video as an art form on a par with paintings or sculpture, for example.”

For Rush (according to Gever), “The success of video art seems to have lead to its

irrelevance….”3

When Gever refers to a decades-long struggle, and Rush to the new

irrelevance of video art, their characterizations bracket the emergence and

disappearance of video art between two revolutionary moments. As this narrative

would have it, video art “begins” in the late 1960s and 1970s. That this period was

revolutionary is not up for debate. However, I would dispute Gever’s use of the

phrase “video art;” in doing so, she elides the true revolution of this earlier period. In

chapter 1 I propose the alternative descriptive “avant-garde television,” in order to

better define the struggle by artists, filmmakers and activists in the 1960s and 1970s

to overturn the then-dominant mass media institution, commercial broadcast

1
Representative publications by Michael Rush include Video Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003)
and New Media in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005).
2
Martha Gever, “Like TV: Barbara Kruger’s Twelve,” Art Journal 66, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 6.
3
Ibid., 6.
 Preface 2

television.4 Gever’s phrase is especially puzzling given her earlier publications, in

which she chronicles the transformation of television revolutionaries into successful

mainstream artists. Furthermore, in the decade immediately following this period—

the 1980s—emerging forms of video art were seen to be deserting the radical promise

that had been held out by avant-garde television.5 Indeed, by misidentifying avant-

garde television as video art, Gever and others write the historical relationship

between the avant-garde and television out of experimental video’s history. My

dissertation begins with a reconsideration of this period, and the conditions that led to

the suppression of this relationship.

As the current avalanche of publications attest, we again find ourselves in a

revolutionary moment—one that has been compared to the invention of the

Gutenberg press—the computer age, which in the past five to ten years has given rise

to new media. A cursory survey of the online MIT press catalogue turns up the

following titles under the heading “Art and New Media”: Ars Electronica: Facing the

Future: A Survey of Two Decades, ed. Timothy Druckrey (1999); Art and Innovation:

The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, ed. Craig Harris (1999); and At a

Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, ed. Annmarie Chandler and

Norie Neumark (2005). New media’s history has been carved out of territory

typically assigned to video art in books like Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media

Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990, ed. Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel (2008).

4
Also see chapter 1 for a literature review.
5
See Martha Gever “Pressure Points: Video in the Public Sphere,” Art Journal 45, no. 3 (Fall 1985):
238-243.
 Preface 3

This retroactive reassignation is especially interesting, given that Woody Vasulka and

Peter Weibel have historically been identified as video art pioneers. New media’s

new past and its present appears to displace video art. In chapter 4, I consider how an

integral component of new media, virtuality, makes its presence felt in contemporary

projected video environments. New media, I hasten to add, is the subject neither of

this dissertation nor of this preface: my subject is, rather, what has been shunted aside

by this “new” revolutionary moment, the experimental video and video installation art

that has been produced in the past decade.6 Instead of hewing to this formulation of

experimental video—two revolutions frame the maturation of a medium whose

importance has become dissipated through its institutional success—my dissertation

will propose an alternative narrative more compelling than “the death of video art.”

By the mid- to-late-1990s, film and video installation art dominated

contemporary art venues, particularly art fairs and biennials. As I show in chapter 3,

the rise of this medium was both meteoric and greeted by many within the art

community with a sense of discomfort. The residual effects of avant-garde

television’s transitory modernism, I argue, lie at the root of this unease, in that avant-

garde television’s collapse was brought about in part by a mistrust of popular culture

and commercial broadcast television’s audience. Film and video installation art’s

critics complained that its new predominance turned the museum, the art fair and the

biennial into mass media outlets, stripping them of their special status as redoubts

6
Lev Manovich, one of new media’s most influential scholars, now refers to the study of new media as
“software studies.” Missing from this new title is, of course, the hardware on which the software is
presented. Nevertheless, Manovich’s choice reflects the inevitable aging of “new” media.
 Preface 4

from an endless barrage of popular culture.7 This criticism of film and video

installation art comes from both conservative art critics and art historians drawing on

the critical theory of Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, looking at art required conscious,

intellectual engagement on the part of the individual. As I will argue in chapters 2 and

4, this tradition of criticism depends in turn on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment

philosopher Immanuel Kant, who understood that the reward for aesthetic labor was a

flowering of consciousness that prepared direct intuition for a system of pure reason.

This “consciousness through art” has come to be equated with a form of

attention that has been opposed to distraction. In chapter 2, in an analysis of

contemporary public video art, I consider at length how these historical associations

between attention and art, on the one hand, and distraction and mass or popular

culture, on the other, have become politicized. Responses similar to the champions of

avant-garde television have emerged following the changes that “television” has

undergone in the past decade. Just as the introduction of television sets altered the

domestic interior, I consider how expanded television—which forms a site of debate,

optimism and anxiety for theorists of the public sphere—has changed the very

architecture it occupies following its growth into spaces outside of the home.8

Both avant-garde television’s transitory modernism and Adorno-inspired

critical theory understand the interaction between art and mass media, attention and

distraction to be dialectical: art and attention on one side, mass media and distraction

on the other. The case against film and video art is laid out in these terms in 2000 by

7
See chapters 3 and 4.
8
For a literature review of expanded television see chapter 2.
 Preface 5

Anne Wagner, when she suggests that the new, ambitious, video installations provide

pleasures similar to the ones available to the viewer glued to his or her TV set at

home. Quoting video artist Gary Hill (who in turn paraphrased Robert Smithson),

Wagner identified video as “the non-site of t.v.,” or a “broken piece of an absent

whole”:

Television, in other words, is the site—vast, unmapped, unedited—that video

and its attendant mediated performances picture and articulate by negative
reversal, as a broken piece of an absent whole. Does this mean that when these
new media begin to offer pleasure and entertainment their critical dimension
is lost?9

In a similar vein, Hal Foster advocates the autonomy of the art object and thus its

distinction from media culture. For Foster, autonomy distinguishes art from the

distractive conditions produced by, in his words, our “media/web world.”10 As I will

explore at some length in chapter 4, Foster dismissed work such as projected video

environments, which produce immersive spaces, creating an aestheticized version of

an experience already familiar to the museum visitor through the presence of

television in and outside the home, video games, and the internet.

Broadcast television, public thruways, and the museum are all spaces where

experimental video exists as a part of the broader stream of media culture despite

repeated attempts to suppress this interrelationship. In this dissertation, finally, I

argue that the compelling aspect of historical and contemporary video is not its

beginning or its end, but rather the way in which it has refused divisions between

9
Ann M. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000): 80.
10
Hal Foster and Marquard Smith: “Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space,”
Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2004): 326.
 Preface 6

mass culture and high culture. In so doing, it pushes at the boundary of art criticism

dedicated to policing this divide.

 7

Chapter 1
Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-Garde: 1960s and 1970s
Experiments with Broadcast Television

The revolution will not be televised.

— Gil Scott-Heron

The television will not be revolutionized.

— James Surowiecki

1.1 Introduction: Avant-Garde Television

A 1978 review of the public lecture and screening given by the video artist Nam June

Paik at the Boston Film/Video Foundation situates Paik’s work in relation to the

elements of chance and failure in broadcast television. Initial attempts of artists,

filmmakers and activists to use broadcast television as a medium in the late 1960s and

the 1970s, writes Robert Stewart, signaled

the beginning of a fascination with the flaws, the glitches, the bugs in
television—unexpected moments that spring to mind more readily than the
bland preprogrammed programming….A TV newscaster who killed herself on
camera. A streaker on the Academy Awards. A cameraman in Bryan, Texas,
so startled by Harlan Ellison’s blunt rap that he nervously began to show the
TV audience a meandering shot of the ceiling….Relatives of fifty-four-year-
old Maud Walker who were given a videotape of her fatal heart attack after
winning the Big Money on Temptation, a daytime Australian game show.11

The flaws of television technology, mistakes made by the networks’ employees, and

intrusions of the real lives (and deaths) of network guests were seen by artists,

filmmakers, and activists interested in commercial broadcast television as avatars,

which signaled ruptures in television’s underlying infrastructure, thereby interrupting

11
Robert Stewart, “Paik’s Peak,” The Real Paper, October 21, 1978.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 8
Experiments with Broadcast Television

an otherwise continuous broadcast. As the film and video curator John Hanhardt

wrote, by capitalizing on these ruptures, “artists working with video in the early

1960s were engaged in a utopian impulse to refashion television into a dialogue of

visual and auditory experiences” that would allow them to bring about real social

change.12 Broadcast television’s audience members were also understood to be active

participants. Stewart relates an anecdote from the June 1972 Harpers by the journalist

Jonathan Prince: when reaching to adjust a pink and purple image of Richard Nixon

on a television set at an airport luncheonette, “a waitress smiled [at Prince] and said,

‘don’t change it; it’s better that way.’”13 The United States advertising industry,

Stewart continues, conceives of its viewers as statistics, market shares, “a Crumb

character, beer in hand, glassy-eyed before his set.” This kind of passivity, however,

was not necessarily understood by activists, artists, and filmmakers to be the

audience’s lived reality. Rather, segments of the television audience made what

Stewart describes as “DIY video art” when they watched television with the picture

on and the sound off or when they discovered “the Jungian concept of synchronicity

for themselves by combining their TV set’s image with sound from their turntable.”

The distinctive nature of television as a complex of television audience,

technological form, and industry programming (Stewart’s “bland, preprogrammed

programming”), was first identified by Raymond Williams as “flow”:

In all developed broadcasting systems the characteristic organisation, and

therefore the characteristic experience, is one of sequence or flow. This
12
John G. Hanhardt, “Dé-Collage/Collage,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art,
eds. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York and San Francisco: Aperture and Bay Area Video
Coalition, 1990), 73.
13
Quoted in Stewart.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 9
Experiments with Broadcast Television

phenomenon of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristic of

broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form.14

In this sparse definition, Williams suggests that flow organizes television as a system

that produces not only content, but also viewing and reception. Each element is in

turn associated with—but not strictly determined by—institutional prerogatives.

Conceptually, “flow” represents the circulation among television technology, the

institutional conditions of programming and content, and the viewer’s experience.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the glitches, mistakes, and multiple interpretations

that interrupted the flow of broadcast television were commonplace events in a

system that was, at the time, relatively new. Stewart contends that these interruptions

constituted minor subversions. The potential force of his interpretation, however, can

be measured through another example: Meaghan Morris describes a similar

programming interruption that took place in Australia in the 1960s similar to the one

Stewart catalogs, but more intensely realized. A cyclone had cut off communications

for thirty-six hours between Darwin, a remote city on the northern edge of the

continent, and the rest of Australia. For television viewers the disaster began (as it

does anywhere) with the following announcement: “We interrupt this transmission for

a special news flash.”15 A torrent of information would typically follow such an

interruption, but, as Morris recounts, this “occasion was alarmingly different. The

announcer’s voice actually stammered: ‘er…um…something’s happened to

Darwin’….the catastrophe was that there was no information. This was not a
14
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974, Hanover: Wesleyan
University Press, 1992), 80.
15
Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” in What is Cultural Studies? A Reader, ed. John
Storey (London: Arnold, 1996), 152.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 10
Experiments with Broadcast Television

catastrophe on TV.”16 Rather, the silence itself was “now the very definition of a

state of total emergency.…Losing control of all mechanisms of assuring credibility,

[the announcer’s] palpable, personal distress had exposed us, unbelievably, to

something like a truth.” The failure of information normally made possible by live

television functioned as an aporia in the flow. In this way television, as Morris puts it,

“generates the real to the extent that any interruption in its process of doing so is

experienced as more catastrophic in the lounge room than a ‘real’ catastrophe

elsewhere.”17 That a stammer functions as a reality effect on and for television was

also a concept used by Gilles Deleuze in his theorization of Jean-Luc Godard and

Anne-Marie Miéville’s 1976 television series Six-fois deux: Sur et sous la

communication (Six Times Two: Above and Below Communications). For Deleuze,

both Godard’s interview style and his television work functioned like a stammer, or

an inadvertent speech pattern that alienates the speaker from his or her own language

and, by extension, meaning. This formal expression of alienation was instrumental to

Godard’s refusal to be “duped by TV,” a refusal that he presumed would be

successfully transmitted to his and Miéville’s audience.18

Beginning with Le gai savoir (The Joy of Knowledge, 1968), Godard engaged

with television as a direct response to the events leading up to and ensuing from the

student revolts in France in May 1968. More broadly, utopian imaginaries compelled

the headlong rush in the 1960s and 1970s by artists, filmmakers, and activists from

16
Ibid., 152.
17
Ibid., 153.
18
Gilles Deleuze, “Three Questions on Six Times Two,” Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 38.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 11
Experiments with Broadcast Television

North America and Europe to enter the field of broadcast television and to exploit the

formal, cultural, and political possibilities opened up by the types of interruptions and

accidents Stewart, Morris, and Deleuze describe. Thanks in part to the widespread

release of one of the first portable video cameras (the Sony Portapak), from the late

1960s to the mid 1970s broadcast television became the obsessive focus of a new

utopian moment, which was understood by these artists, filmmakers, and activists—

and, crucially, the institutions that supported them—as a way to challenge the sites of

television production, the channels of delivery, and assumptions about the built-in

passivity of television’s reception. A “systematic, but also a utopian critique,” Martha

Rosler observes,

was implicit in video’s early use, for the effort was not [only] to enter the
[mass media] system but [also] to transform every aspect of it and…to
redefine [this] system out of existence by merging art with social life and [by]
making audience and producer interchangeable.19

The media scholar Deirdre Boyle writes that Sony’s mid-1960s introduction of the

Portapak to the U.S. market

was like a media version of the Land Grant Act, inspiring a heterogeneous
mass of American hippies, avant-garde artists, student-intellectuals, lost souls,
budding feminists, militant blacks, flower children, and jaded journalists to
take to the streets, if not the road, Portapak in hand, to stake out the new
territory of alternative TV.20

A similar interest emerged simultaneously in Canada and parts of Europe. The media

scholar and art historian Dieter Daniels writes

19
Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to
Video Art eds. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York and San Francisco: Aperture and Bay Area
Video Coalition, 1990), 31.
20
Deirdre Boyle, “Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited,” Art Journal 45, no. 3 (Fall
1985): 228.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 12
Experiments with Broadcast Television

Around 1968-1969 it suddenly seemed as though television could become the

art form of the future—and conversely that the Muse’s kiss could wake the
“sleeping lion” television. At almost the same time…programs started to be
made by TV stations and artists working together that were historic milestones
in the interplay between art and the mass media. In an astonishingly short
time…TV art…was overtaken by a reinvigorated utopian spirit.21

This utopian spirit was phrased in more pragmatic terms when Gene Youngblood

asked Brice Howard, the director of The National Center for Experiments in

Television (a research center affiliated with the U.S. public television station KQED)

how the center had succeeded in addressing the two questions it asked: “What is the

nature of the [television] medium? Can an artist work in it?”22

The utopian imaginaries that compelled certain forms of television production

during this period maintain important similarities to and differences from the

scattered response of artists and art collectives who first greeted television with

unalloyed pleasure. As Daniels points out, the earlier response was “unclouded by

actual experience of the medium.”23 It first took the form of a futurist manifesto for

television in 1933, “La radia.” Through its power to obliterate the distances between

spaces, Italian futurists saw television in the hands of the artist as a potential tool for

Fascist media power:

We now possess a television of fifty thousand points for every large image on
a screen. As we await the invention of teletouch, telesmell and teletaste we
Futurists are perfecting radio broadcasting which is destined to multiply a

21
Dieter Daniels, “Television—Art or Anti-Art?—Conflict and Cooperation between the Avant-garde
and the Mass Media in the 1960s and 1970s,” in Media Art Net 1: Survey of Media Art, eds. Rudolf
Frieling and Dieter Daniels (New York: SpringerWien, 2004), 70.
22
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970), 283.
23
Daniels, 59.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 13
Experiments with Broadcast Television

hundredfold the creative genius of the Italian race, to abolish the ancient
nostalgic torment of long distance.24

In 1952 the introduction of broadcast television in Italy gave the spatialists (a

movement founded by Lucio Fontana that called for art to embrace science and

technology) the opportunity to expand their ideas about space. For Fontana and his

movement (foreshadowing the later work by Gerry Schum), television offered the

potential to dematerialize art. Like the futurists—but without their Fascist cant—the

spatialists welcomed the impending arrival of television in their “Spatialist Manifesto

for Television,” read on television in an experimental transmission by RAI-TV in

Milan on May 17, 1952:

Television is an artistic device we have been awaiting for a long time, and it
will integrate our concepts. We are pleased that this manifesto, which is
intended to revivify all realms of art, will be broadcast by Italian television. It
is true that art is eternal, but it has always been bound to matter. We want to
liberate it from these shackles, we want it to last in space for a thousand
years—even if only a single minute is broadcast.25

No recording remains of this live broadcast, which was the last of the spatialist

manifestos.

The manifestos by the futurists and Fontana that predated the “landrush” in

the late 1960s took place alongside the enthusiastic and outsized claims that industry

insiders in the United States made for television, which was teetering on the edge of

commercial viability in the interwar period and around the end of World War II.

24
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Pino Masnata, “La radia (1933),” trans. Stephen Sartarelli.
Reprinted in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the
Avant-garde (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 265–266.
25
Quoted in Dieter Daniels, “Media → Art / Art → Media: Forerunners of Media Art in the First Half
of the Twentieth Century,“ in Media Art Net 1:Survey of Media Art, eds. Rudolf Frieling and Dieter
Daniels (New York: SpringerWien, 2004), 31.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 14
Experiments with Broadcast Television

Broadcast television began in the United States, the United Kingdom and (in an

experimental form) in Nazi Germany in the mid-to-late-1930s. The 1936 Berlin

Olympics was broadcast from twenty-five television studios in Berlin. The BBC

(British Broadcasting Corporation) began broadcasting November 2, 1936 in the

United Kingdom and was shut down following the Nazi invasion of Poland on

September 3, 1939. Broadcasting resumed in 1946. Television broadcasting began in

the United States in the late 1930s, but was suspended for the duration of the war

(following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941): it did not resume

until the first wave of station activations from 1946 through 1948. While this chapter

focuses on examples of broadcast television work by filmmakers and artists from both

Europe and the United States, the earlier utopian pronouncements made by U.S.

commercial broadcast industry insiders are, although they come from an unexpected

source, insightful and remarkably prescient.

In his 1946 book Here Is Television, Thomas Hutchinson, the manager of the

television department at NBC (National Broadcasting Company), in the 1930s and

later a production director with the RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Television

Corporation, wrote,

Television means the world in your home and in the homes of all the people in
the world. It is the greatest means of communication ever developed by the
mind of man. It should do more to develop friendly neighbors, and to bring
understanding and peace on earth, than any other single material force in the
world today.26

26
Thomas Hutchinson, Here Is Television: Your Window to the World (New York: Hastings House,
1946), xi. See also Robert E. Lee, Television: The Revolution (New York: Essential Books, 1944).
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 15
Experiments with Broadcast Television

David Sarnoff, the president of RCA (Radio Corporation of America) at the time, was

the primary commercial and political force behind the launch of broadcast television

in the United States. At the televised opening of the RCA Pavilion at the 1939

World’s Fair in New York, Sarnoff announced the following:

Now we add sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to

this moment of announcing the birth, in this country, of a new art so important
in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines
like a torch in a troubled world.27

At the dawn of its commercially viable life in the United States, then, broadcast

television’s utopian visionaries were network executives such as Hutchinson and

Sarnoff (and later Sylvester Weaver).

While broadcast television in the United States was (and is) overwhelmingly

commercial, at the time the government was (and remains) also instrumental to its

formation. From the beginning, the need for governmental standardization and

regulation of both radio and television broadcast bandwidth was understood. In the

United States, bandwidth frequencies are “owned” by the U.S. population and

licensed to private broadcasters.28 By renewing (or threatening to withhold) license

privileges, the government regulates radio and television. Commerce committees in

both the House and Senate are charged with overseeing six agencies, including the

Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and with ensuring their service as

27
Quoted in Henry Kressel, Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the
World (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6.
28
In addition to this system of checks and balances, ownership also expanded from radio to television-
for example, RKO and RCA. RCA was founded in 1919 out of security concerns on the part of the
U.S. government and military over the foreign ownership (by the British Marconi Corporation) of the
radio communications infrastructure. Radio provided television not only ownership but also its own
pool of entertainment talent and a programming structure. Most critically, the advertising framework
first developed in radio was transferred to television.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 16
Experiments with Broadcast Television

“arms of the Congress.”29 The language of the Communications Act of 1934, which

sets out the mandate of the FCC, is purposefully vague: The FCC is supposed to look

after “public interest, convenience and security” (language borrowed from the

Interstate Commerce Act), but, as the Kennedy-appointed chair of the FCC, Newton

Minow, pointed out, this phrase has never been explicitly defined: to a broadcaster

with a highly rated program, “public interest” could be defined as “that which

interests the public.”30 This vagueness was intentional; in the early 1930s, in order to

encourage investment in radio stations, the drafters of the Communications Act chose

not to set up broadcasting as a public utility with the same ceiling on potential profits

or governmental oversight as, say, electricity or gas.

Sarnoff’s and Hutchinson’s characterizations of television as a new delivery

system for art that is instrumental to achieving world peace stand alongside the vision

of Minow, who understood the mandate of television to be the creation of an

informed public. Minow wrote:

29
The Communications Act of 1934 http://www.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf The Radio Act of 1927
provided regulation in response to entrepreneurs who were interested in operating broadcasting stations
and manufacturing broadcasting equipment. Prior to the Radio Act, weak regulations resulted in
broadband piracy. If a particular frequency became popular, multiple station operators would squat on
the frequency, sometimes drowning out the original station. The Radio Act guaranteed radio
monopolies in a given geographical area. See http://showcase.netins.net/web/akline/pdf/1927act.pdf
This system of geographical monopolies, as well as a more general need for government oversight
carried over from radio to television. In Europe as well as Canada, the allocation and regulation of
bandwidth use was originally established through a state-run broadcasting system. For example,
fearing cultural annexation into the U.S. radio system, in 1928 a Royal Commission was appointed "to
examine the broadcasting situation in the Dominion of Canada and to make recommendations to the
Government as to the future administration thereof.” The Aird Commission Report recommended that
a national company be founded to own and operate all radio stations in Canada. The Canadian
Broadcasting Act of 1936 established the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a crown corporation
(or a state-controlled company with an arm’s-length relation to the government), that was charged with
carrying on a national broadcasting service within the country. In the United Kingdom, the BBC was
financed through direct taxation of the listening and viewing audience.
30
Newton Minow, Equal Time: The Private Broadcaster and the Public Interest, ed. Lawrence
Laurent (New York: Atheneum, 1964), viii.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 17
Experiments with Broadcast Television

I believe that the future of this nation—of the democratic ideal—and the
world depends on an enlightened electorate, on an informed citizenry. And I
believe that nothing in the history of man approaches the potential of
television for information and misinformation, for enlightenment and
obfuscation, for sheer reach and sheer impact.31

Minow was not alone in his belief that television had a duty to create an informed

public, nor were Sarnoff and Hutchinson in their conviction that the arts would

function as the gateway to democracy.

As Brian Rose explains in his book on the performing arts and television, the

early history of U.S. television is marked by a struggle between highbrow and

lowbrow programming.32 Given the prohibitive cost of television sets, in the latter

half of the 1940s television consumption was restricted either to the affluent or to

public spaces such as taverns. Thus the broadcasting of highbrow culture such as

ballet and opera on the one hand, and fiddlers and folk dancers on the other provided

cheap access to entertainment. ABC (American Broadcasting Company) broadcast

performances by the Metropolitan Opera, and CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System)

Broadway plays. NBC went one step further and created its own opera company.

Local stations in Minneapolis and Chicago presented weekly programs of their

symphony orchestras. The theater, radio, and television director Robert E. Lee

projected that television would give rise to a language of operatic performance by

providing new opportunities to composers and librettists to write operas specifically

31
Minow, viii.
32
Brian Rose, Television and the Performing Arts: A Handbook and Reference Guide to American
Cultural Programming (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 1.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 18
Experiments with Broadcast Television

for television. Furthermore, NBC’s Hutchinson predicted that “television would do

for dance what radio has done for speech.”33

As sales of television sets increased exponentially (tripling from the late

1940s to the early 1950s), networks adjusted their programming to a more populist

fare.34 Given the high cost of television programming, “cultural programming”—as

performing-arts programming came to be defined—was particularly vulnerable to

budget cuts. Nevertheless, the impulse to include high culture in the broadcast day as

a form of public service continues. In 1952 the NBC executive Sylvester Weaver

launched Operation Frontal Lobe, a widely publicized plan to integrate “the cultural,

informative, expository and inspirational into existing entertainment patterns.”35

Weaver hoped that a policy of “enlightenment through exposure” that introduced

“some element of culture or information in nearly every program in our schedule”

would lead to a new era of responsible programming:36

I believe that we must open it [the window of television] so that the greatest
numbers of people can look out and see the best, the most rewarding views.
We must expose all of our people to the thrilling rewards that come from an
understanding of fine music, ballet, the literary classics, science, art,
everything. We could, of course, present cultural events to smaller audiences
who are already mentally attuned to them. But to program for the intellectual
alone is easy and duplicates other media. To make us all into intellectuals—
there is the challenge of television.37

Repeatedly, in the texts and policies links are drawn by these early advocates of

television’s utopian possibilities between the intellectual evolution of the viewing

33
Quoted in Rose, 1.
34
Rose, 2.
35
Sylvester Weaver, “Enlightenment Through Exposure,” Television Magazine (January 1952): 31.
36
Sylvester Weaver, “Enlightenment Through Exposure is NBC Technique,” Musical America
(February 15, 1952): 25.
37
Weaver, “Enlightenment Through Exposure is NBC Technique,” 25.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 19
Experiments with Broadcast Television

public, the conception of television as an unparalleled communications tool, art with a

capital A, and the flourishing of democracy. Culture maintains Matthew Arnold’s

nineteenth-century definition, as “the best which has been thought and said in the

world.”38 The arts conceived for television, however (an exception is Lee’s vision of

the evolution of opera into a form written for television), were formed and developed

apart from television. Television was understood by corporate and government

executives in this period as the window through which viewers could access culture

or as a neutral delivery system to the masses, rather than as a system of technology,

content production, and reception, whose multifold aspects could in turn be

experimented with and manipulated.

By the early 1960s, television had become a vehicle for mass media. In 1961

Minow, then newly appointed as chair of the FCC, gave a now infamous speech, the

“Vast Wasteland,” to the National Association of Broadcasters. Minow was

extremely critical of television broadcasters for not, in his view, doing more to fulfill

the charge to serve the public interest set out in the Communications Act of 1934:

When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of
your television set when your station goes on the air.…I can assure you that
you will observe a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation

shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and
thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good
men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And, endlessly,
commercials-many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all,
boredom.39

38
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (1869, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994), 5.
39
Minow, 52.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 20
Experiments with Broadcast Television

It was to Minow’s despair that, thanks to television’s predominance and to its easy

accessibility as a form of entertainment—from westerns such as Gunsmoke, sitcoms

such as I Love Lucy, variety shows such as The Milton Berle Show, and quiz shows

such as Twenty-One and Dotto—television had become synonymous with kitsch. This

betrayed the implicit promise of broadcast television as a force for world peace and

progress through an educated public. Kitsch is also the opposite of the avant-garde.

Because of its pleasant, easy quality it glosses over the fundamentally broken nature

of modern life. In this way, kitsch maintains an illusion of wholeness, through which

individuals can painlessly forget their inner conflicts. At the same time kitsch is

mechanical, cold, and cliché-ridden.

Thus industry executives and government officials “inside” television (or

Hutchinson, Lee, Weaver, and then Minow) understood high art—opera, ballet, and

the theater—as cultural forms that served the public interest, and, by extension,

democracy, while they saw mass media as fundamentally undemocratic. One result of

this worldview was the Public Broadcasting System of 1969, brought about by the

Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. In the act, Congress declared that it is a matter of

public interest to “encourage the growth and development of public radio and

television broadcasting, including the use of such media for instructional, educational,

and cultural purposes;” that “public telecommunications and the diversity of its

programming depend on freedom, imagination, and initiative on both local and

national levels;” and furthermore that it was important to support the “development of

programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 21
Experiments with Broadcast Television

and underserved audiences.”40 The unintended consequences of this were twofold:

any effort to promote high culture as an emissary of democracy was thereafter largely

restricted to broadcasts on the Public Broadcasting System, and consequently the

commercial broadcast network audience was seen as outside, or beyond, democracy.

Before the late 1960s, a sense of resignation about television, considered to be

a lost cause for both culture and democracy, was felt not only by broadcast executives

and civil servants like Weaver and Minow but also by artists and their supporters.

Already by the time the decade began, broadcast television was perceived from

without to be a monolithic institution, desperately in need of being dismantled and

rebuilt from the ground up. Individual artists were working on alternative models to

win the medium back, at least symbolically, with no hope of lasting effect. Examples

include Wolf Vostell’s Television Décollage for Millions (1959)—a (rejected)

proposal that WDR (West German Radio and Television Broadcasting) III, Cologne,

air three minutes of blurred television programming—Tom Wesselman’s

incorporation of working television sets into his paintings such as Great American

Nude #39 (1962), and Günther Uecker’s TV 1963, a television set studded with nails

and painted white. With the introduction of the portable video camera, artists,

filmmakers, and activists believed they possessed a technological advantage over the

broadcast television institutions, giving them a new route to power, that stood in

40
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a non profit public broadcasting television service with
member television stations across the United States (354 as of 2007). It is owned collectively by its
member stations, and its operations are partly funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a
separate entity funded in turn by the U.S. federal government. PBS started broadcasting on Monday
October 5, 1970. Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, as amended Subpart D—Corporation for Public
Broadcasting Sec. 396. [47 U.S.C. 396] Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 22
Experiments with Broadcast Television

opposition to mass media: as Daniels put it, “all media art [had become] anti-media

art.”41

In so doing, these activists, artists, and filmmakers carried forward the project

begun by the artistic avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century: to work at

the ruptures created by the accelerated changes to living conditions precipitated by

modernity, and to respond to the rise of kitsch. In reaction to the false values of

wholeness and continuity promoted by kitsch, the avant-garde extolled purity and

authenticity. In the early twentieth century Adolf Loos and Adolphe Behne, among

others, asserted that it was the task of the intellectual both to address these ruptures

and to develop a new basis for culture, given that culture could no longer be

established on a self-evident continuum of tradition.42 Refusing to deny modernity’s

ruptures—rather, as the examples I provided at the beginning of the chapter

demonstrate, it exacerbates them—the strategy of broadcast television’s avant-garde

consisted of a direct attack, constantly engaging in an iconoclastic struggle. The

avant-garde regarded itself in the 1920s and in the 1960s, in Clement Greenberg’s

words, as the only “living culture we have right now.”43 In “becoming kitsch,”

television not only fell short of the early promise heralded by Weaver, Hutchinson,

and Lee, it also formed the natural target and opposite term for the modernist avant-

41
Daniels, 29.
42
For example Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897-1900, ed. Aldo Rossi, trans.
Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982); Adolphe Behne, “Art, Craft,
Technology,” in Figures of Architecture and Thought: German Architectural Culture 1880–1920, ed.
Francesco Dal Co (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 324–338.
43
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1:
Perceptions and Judgements 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986),
22.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 23
Experiments with Broadcast Television

garde active in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, even as Daniels points out that all media

art became antimedia art, or a form placed in opposition to mass media, he ends by

arguing that since the “high-low distinction never took hold [in television] in the way

that it did in film,” therefore there is “no form of high television culture that could be

seen as a lasting cultural asset to be preserved for future generations.”44

Notwithstanding this failure to provide a “lasting cultural asset to be preserved

for future generations,” the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the emergence of a vigorous

and highly militant form of avant-garde television. This avant-garde is clearly

distinguished from earlier attempts by Hutchinson, Sarnoff, Weaver and Minow to

reform or introduce democracy through the arts: first, by the drive to make television

itself into an art form, not merely a conveyance for art, and second, by the desire to

dismantle and rebuild television technology; the institutions of programming and

content; and most important, the viewer’s experience. This chapter focuses on the

utopian imaginaries of the producers of avant-garde television, which in turn fall

under Renato Poggioli’s four characteristics of the avant-garde: activism, antagonism,

nihilism, and agonism.45

For Poggioli, the activist moment at times becomes an urge to action, which

can be (but is not necessarily) linked to a positive goal. The manifestos and

commentary by the critics, theorists, art collectives, foundation supporters, and

community activists in Europe and North America that were caught up in the early

44
Daniels, 59.
45
Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (1962, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1968). For his discussion of activism, see 27–30; of antagonism, 25–26; of
nihilism, 61–65; of agonism, 65–66.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 24
Experiments with Broadcast Television

video movement of the 1960s and the early 1970s reflect an optimistic commitment

to cultural change that verges on the ecstatic. In the United States collectives such as

Global Village (which, founded by John Reilley and Julie Gustaffson in 1969, still

produces independent video documentaries, schedules workshops and seminars, has

regular screenings, and functions as a video study center), Videofreex (begun by

David Cort), The Alternative Media Center at New York University (the repository of

an important archive of documentary video, many by artists, which was started by

George Stoney and Red Burns) and the People’s Video Theater (started by the

painters Ken Marsh and Howard Gutstadt) sprang up. In Canada, eight different

federal departments (through the National Film Board of Canada) funded an

ambitious program, Challenge for Change. Designed to popularize film and video

production, the program’s guiding principle was that film and video were

instrumental to social change and the eventual eradication of poverty. In Germany,

the video collective Telewissen (a play on words that translates as both “tele-

knowledge” and “tele-vision”) was founded in 1969 in Darmstadt by Herbert

Schuhmacher. In Austria, Kontakt, a magazine-format television program, focused on

the “alternative” movement in the early 1970s. One episode presented an interview

with Frank Zappa consisting of uninterrupted laughter by Zappa and the interviewer.

Another presented the first video works of Austrian video artists. Peter Wiebel,

borrowing from Adolf Loos’s dictum that “ornament is a crime” titled a work

Picturing Is a Crime. And a television action by Valie Export, Facing a Family,

placed a family in the television studio, where they sat staring into the camera, staring
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 25
Experiments with Broadcast Television

back at all the families in their living rooms.46 In 1972 Douglas Davis wrote in

Artforum: “The video structure is now open to change. For a scant minute in the

history of the medium the situation is existentialist.”47 When the art historian Robert

Pincus-Witten questioned the video artist Frank Gillette about broadcast television’s

institutional impenetrability at a conference held at MoMA on the new television,

Gillette responded that “the ubiquity [of television] plus a redefined world view”

would redirect the “informational process…toward universal accessibility.”48

The antagonistic character of the avant-garde refers to the struggle it

perpetually wages against the public, tradition and institutions. For Poggioli, this

becomes manifest through a systemic revolt against every institution, and an aversion

to all rules and norms that borders on anarchy. In Radical Software (a magazine

dedicated to new video that was published from 1970–1974), Paul Ryan (a founder of

the video collective Raindance Corporation) announced that the concerns of portable

video were comparable to those of guerrilla warfare, in which the guerrilla fighter

generally moves invisibly, attacking by surprise and in unexpected places, because he

knows the terrain:

Traditional guerrilla warfare is concerned with climate and weather. We must

concern ourselves with decoding the information contours of the culture. How
does power function here? How is this system of communications and control
maintained? What information is habitually withheld and how? Ought it to be
jammed? How do we jam it? How do we keep the action small enough so it
is relevant to real people? How do we build up an indigenous data base?
Where do we rove and strike next?...The traditional tricks of guerrilla warfare
46
Heidi Grundmann, “Television in Austria, 1955-1987,” in Revision: Art Programmes of European
Television Stations, ed. Dorinne Mignot (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Art Museum, 1987), 11.
47
Douglas Davis, “Video Obscura,” Artforum 10, no. 8 (April 1972): 65–66.
48
Douglas Davis and Alison Simmons, eds. The New Television: A Public/Private Art (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1978), 68.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 26
Experiments with Broadcast Television

are remarkably suited for cybernetic action in an information environment. To

scan briefly.
Mix “straight” moves with “freak” moves. using straight moves to engage the
enemy, freak moves to beat him and not letting the enemy know which is
which.
Running away when it’s just too heavy. Leave the enemy’s strong place and
seek the weak. Go where you can make a difference.49

An unattributed quotation (probably from Ryan) begins Chloe Aaron’s 1971 “The

Video Underground:” “I am a cybernetic guerilla fighting perceptual

imperialism….Video tape is TV flipped into itself….Tape is metatheater….Tape is

feedback.”50 The German media theorist Götz Dahlmüller described a minimal

agenda for an emancipatory television as follows:

The conscious tearing apart of the different areas of articulation (music,

gesture, word, action, etc.), the pointing out of ruptures and contradictions
between the images and what attaches itself to them and is superimposed upon
them, which first makes possible the transparency and possibility for
scrutinizing the reality mediated by the media.51

The pursuit of activism and antagonism is absolutist; an avant-garde movement self-

immolates in an uninterrupted search for purity that finally dissolves into nihilism.

The Situationist International member Raoul Vaneigem embodies this in his

description of the impulse to interrupt the televisual flow when he asked, “Haven’t

you ever felt like…putting your foot through the television?”52 Just as the utopian

promise partly triggered by the new access to video technology produced a surge of

49
Paul Ryan, “Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare,” Radical Software I, no. 3 (Spring 1971): 1.
50
Chloe Aaron, “The Video Underground,” Art in America 54, no. 3 (May 1971): 74.
51
Quoted in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of
the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Forward by Miriam Hansen, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie
Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (1972, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 99.
52
Raoul Vaneigem, Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle, Intended to Be Discussed, Corrected,
and Principally, Put into Practice without Delay, trans. Paul Sharkey Ratgeb,
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/en/display/121 (accessed May 8, 2006).
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 27
Experiments with Broadcast Television

radicalized optimism about the artist’s, filmmaker’s, and activist’s ability to disrupt

and tear apart the institutional structures of mass media, so too did it inevitably

produce its critics, and in their criticism emerges the agonism described by Poggioli.

The avant-garde will pay the ultimate price in the service of the greater good of

cultural progress—if the cost of influencing the future is one’s own destruction, the

avant-garde is fully prepared to pay it. This masochistic impulse informs what

Poggioli calls the agonistic phase: an avant-garde movement will wallow in the muck

of its own downfall, morbidly convinced that this act defines its supreme fulfillment.

Daniels’ argument that the high-low distinction never took hold in television echoes

the view that emerged following the disappointments experienced by the failures to

change broadcast television. Pincus-Witten voiced his frustration with “certain

assumptions of the founding figures of the video movement, the most dangerous of

which, either stated or unstated, is the utopian myth of the Future….”53 In 1970 the

German artist Wolf Vostell observed that:

[i]t would be important to be able to use the media—television, for example—

for this might lead to us having a larger audience today. However to date it
has been impossible to get a program slot, for example, to create a TV
happening; that is, not to show something that is already happening on
television, but to work with the medium of electronic television signals with
millions of people. We don’t need program time to show our works, we want
to do something with the medium of electronics, with the channels of
information.54

Ten years after the period I am interested in, in 1988, Raymond Bellour and Anne-

Marie Duguet write that video art has become: “the accomplice, negative, and
53
Quoted in Simmon and Davis, 69.
54
Quoted in Wulf Herzogenrath, “Video Art and Institutions: The First Fifteen Years,” in 40
yearsvideoart.de—Part 1 Digital Heritage: Video Art in Germany from 1963 Until the Present, eds.
Rudolf Frieling and Wulf Herzogenrath (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006), 25.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 28
Experiments with Broadcast Television

obverse side of television: both its echo chamber and its challenge” (my

translation).55 And in 1992 Bill Viola begins a statement with the following assertion:

I do not accept the category of “television art.”…To say that it has a special
case called “television art” is to accept the political consequences of
commercial television’s present hegemony (particularly in America) over the
full spectrum of imagery representing…the full range of human experience on
this planet.56

An artist who first emerged in the late 1970s, Viola illustrates in his essays the

trajectory from activism to agonism that describes efforts to make “television art.”

In their failure to “provide a lasting cultural asset to be preserved for future

generations,” avant-garde experiments with broadcast television in the 1960s and

1970s embody a transitory concept of modernity. Furthermore, while avant-garde

television emerged for only a brief period of time, its influence on the underlying

principles of later forms of moving-image art has been considerable. Even while

bemoaning its failure, the history of these attempts to establish avant-garde television

has been well documented in the United States as well as Europe. Seminal

compilations such as Video: The New Wave (1973) provide overviews of the then-

emerging field of experiments with television broadcasting, including examples of

guerrilla television and “television verité” documentaries and early explorations with

broadcast image-processing and synthesis, as well as experimental performance

television. Michael Shamberg (a founder of the video collectives Raindance

55
“L’art vidéo poursuit de toute façon un débat interminable et fondamental avec la television….Il
devient ainsi l’accomplissement, le négatif et le revers de la television: à la fois sa chambre d’échos et
sa mise en question.” Raymond Bellour and Anne-Marie Duguet, “La Question Vidéo,”
Communications no. 48 (1988): 5.
56
Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, ed. Robert Violette,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 211.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 29
Experiments with Broadcast Television

Corporation and then Top Value Television) published Guerrilla Television. A

booklength manifesto, it outlined a technological radicalism, claiming that through its

mass audience, commercial television had become a conditioning agent rather than a

source of enlightenment.57 For Shamberg, video offered the means to “decentralize”

television so that a Whitmanesque democracy of ideas, opinions, and cultural

expressions could be made both by and for the people, and then “narrowcast” on

cable television.58 Gene Youngblood’s 1970 Expanded Cinema is a prescient study

of the evolution of cinematic language through new technological extensions. He

concentrates on the advanced image-making technologies of computer films,

experimental television, laser movies, and multiple-projection environments. Of

special interest is the section “Television as a Creative Medium,” where Youngblood

discusses the revolutionary implications of then-ongoing experiments with television.

The proceedings of “Open Circuits: The First International Conference on the Future

of Television” at the Museum of Modern Art (1974) were published as The New

Television: A Public/Private Art in 1977. A definitive moment for both avant-garde

television and video art in the United States, these proceedings brought together the

most important players trying to enter broadcast television. The problem of

independent videomakers was a primary topic at this conference. In The Five Myths

of Television Power; Or Why the Medium Is Not the Message, Douglas Davis, one of

57
Shamberg went on to establish a successful career in mainstream media, first as a Time-Life
correspondent, then as a film producer. His credits include Garden State (2004), Erin Brockovich
(2000), Pulp Fiction (1994), and A Fish Called Wanda (1988).
58
The introduction of cable television, while an important second act in the relationships between
institutions, the avant-garde and broadcast television, will not be considered in this chapter for the
purposes of brevity.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 30
Experiments with Broadcast Television

the period’s more important figures in the United States, sets out the love hate

relationship toward television. Deirdre Boyle’s Subject to Change: Guerrilla

Television Revisited charts the history of the new forms of documentary that

developed out that period. Finally, in publications such as Afterimage and other

similar publications artists such as Martha Rosler, video critics such as Martha Gever

and scholars such as Marita Sturken published extensively on avant-garde television.

Numerous exhibitions also mark this period: of note is the 1987 Revision: Art

Programmes of European Television organized by the Stedelijk Museum in

Amsterdam. It provides invaluable summaries and programming information on

experimental television in European countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and

the United Kingdom, as well as West Germany and France. Recent publications such

as Rudolf Frieling and Dieter Daniels’ Media Art Net 1: Survey of Media Art, as well

as Rudolf Frieling and Wulf Herzogenrath’s 40Yearsvideoart.de Digital Heritage:

Video Art in Germany from 1963 to the Present, provide a sorely needed, albeit

partial, look at West German avant-garde television. As part of a longer trajectory,

they provide a fuller, more coherent account than previously available in English of

West German television’s brief relation with artists and filmmakers. Gareth James

and Florian Zeyfang’s anthology I Said I Love. That is the Promise: The TVideo

Politics of Jean-Luc Godard looks at Godard’s television and video. A significant

body of work, his television and video projects have historically been ignored, to

avoid threatening Godard’s position as a cineaste. Both the book and the exhibition it

grew out of distinguish three ways in which Godard has negotiated his relation to
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 31
Experiments with Broadcast Television

television and video: by anticipating the potential of video technology and the

broadcast image, by participating in in the development of a utopian-reformist way,

and by imploding the reformist drive from a postreformist perspective. Finally David

Joselit’s Feedback: Television Against Democracy looks at the lost future imagined

by the 1960s and 1970s radical programming, which was aimed at broadcast

television by a burgeoning counterculture of experimental video. The “feedback” of

his book’s title refers, in part, to the distortion that renders inoperative electronic

communications technology, such as the television monitor, when it is turned to face

its brother, the video camera. When Joselit writes about a never-to-be-realized future,

he is also proposing an alternative history of television networking, commoditization,

and spectatorship. This alternative history acts as feedback to our present moment.

This chapter contributes the following. First, it focuses on the utopianism that

made imagining such a lost, parallel future possible by underwriting the critical,

sporadic steps taken by institutions to support and facilitate the entry of the avant-

garde into television. As Joselit stresses in his book, efforts to effect significant

change to television as an institution were finite in terms of duration and success, and

stories of these failures describe a revolutionary—or oppositional—structure of

idealism. By examining 1960s and 1970s institutional infiltrations in three different

countries, this chapter privileges the ideological formations underwriting these

attempts. It also emphasizes how such infiltrations of these institutions, or the

commercial broadcast networks and the public broadcasting systems in the United

States, West Germany, and France. The central paradox it explores is the following:
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 32
Experiments with Broadcast Television

in order to reproduce the formal failures, or audiovisual stammers brought about by

inadvertent or catastrophic interruptions on and for television described at the outset

of this chapter, artists, filmmakers, and activists required a substantial degree of

cooperation and support from the mass-media institutions they were setting out to

overturn. By foregrounding this paradox this chapter demonstrates the gap between

what these individuals and institutions were and what they might have been.

Furthermore, it contends that the outburst of transitory modernism that emerges at

this critical juncture inadvertently continues the project of television executives from

the 1940s and the 1950s into the avant-garde world: separating mass media from

democracy, the audience from the masses. This has consequences for the later

emergence of video art, as I demonstrate in subsequent chapters of this dissertation.

The types of institutional support emanating from government, private, and

educational interests, as well as resistance to these interests, are central to the

formation of avant-garde television. That institutions were primed to support certain

forms of avant-garde television is evident not only through the earlier accounts I have

referred to but also through the writings of another former FCC chair, Nicholas

Johnson. In the introduction to How to Talk Back to Your Television Set, Johnson

wrote, “Television is one of the most powerful forces man has ever unleashed upon

himself. The quality of human life may depend enormously upon our efforts to

comprehend and control that force.”59 For Johnson, however, “most significant of all,

citizens of all ages, in all corners of this country, have begun to grasp the absolutely

59
Nicholas Johnson, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), 3.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 33
Experiments with Broadcast Television

crucial need to reform television if any progress is to be made on the rest of our

national agenda.”60 Unexpected reformers join forces through desires, orientations,

ideologies, and historical events as diverse as the May 1968 student uprisings in

France, the mix of private and public institutional infrastructures for broadcast

television established by individual nation-states, the New Left, a McLuhanesque

faith in the progressive power of technology, and conceptualism’s interest in the

dematerialization of the art object. In particular, this chapter looks at the role played

by the Rockefeller Foundation in establishing video art as a medium in the United

States; the consequences for avant-garde broadcast television of the electronic music

studio that was sponsored by WDR III Cologne, West Germany; and Godard’s place

at the nexus of film, television, and the May 1968 revolution in France.

1.2 The Rockefeller Foundation and the Public Broadcasting Service

To make sense of the relation between the Rockefeller Foundation and PBS requires a

close look at the early phase of Nam June Paik’s career. Paik’s path leads from

studying classical music in Korea and Japan to discovering Arnold Schoenberg,

Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage, to developing through these composers an

interest in electronic music, to working with electronic images. In the early 1960s

Paik was based in Cologne. At the time, one of the cultural epicenters of artistic

experimentation near Cologne was Wuppertal. Beginning in 1949, the art patrons

Anneliese Jährling and Rolf Jährling regularly invited artists to their nineteenth-

century villa in Wuppertal, otherwise known as the Parnass Gallery. In 1963, they

60
Johnson, 5.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 34
Experiments with Broadcast Television

extended an invitation to Paik. Between March 11 and 20, he converted the entire

house from attic to basement, from bathroom to garden, into an installation. Four

prepared pianos, several disc and tape installations, mechanical sound objects, and a

freshly slaughtered ox’s head hung above the entrance all formed part of the

exhibition, which was only open for two hours a day from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m.

“Prepared” television sets with variously distorted images were scattered around one

room on the ground floor. A detailed account of the television installation comes from

Fluxus artist Tomas Schmidt, who helped set it up, explained that there were

eleven televisions in the room between the hall and the garden; arranged—like
the pianos—at random; one TV set is on top of another, the others are on the
floor. The starting material is supplied by the normal TV programmes, but
they are scarcely recognizable on most of the sets….one of the TV sets shows
a negative picture overlaid with a different one. The picture on another has
been rolled up, so to speak, into a cylinder round the vertical centre axis of the
screen. In what Paik calls the most complicated case there are three
independent sinusoidal oscillations attacking the image parameters. The group
of two: the lower one has horizontal stripes, the upper one vertical stripes (the
upper one actually shows the same picture as the bottom one, but is on its side
as opposed to its feet). A single, vertical, white line runs through the middle of
the screen of the “zen tv.” One set lies down and shows its picture to the
parquet floor (Paik said today: “that one was broken”). In the top eight TV
sets the picture composition (in television, the term picture also includes a
temporal dimension) is derived from the more-or-less predefined manipulation
of the set’s electronics, in the four bottom sets the manipulation is such that
external influences determine the picture: one of the four is connected to a
pedal switch in front of it; if you press the switch, the short-circuits of the
contact procedure brings about a fireworks of instantly disappearing points of
light on the screen. Another set is hooked up to a microphone; anyone who
speaks into the mike sees an explosion of dots similar to the other set, but a
continuous one this time. The “kuba tv” is the most extreme; it is connected to
a tape recorder that feeds music to the TV (and to us): parameters of the music
determine parameters of the picture. Finally (on the top storey) you have the
“one point TV” that is connected to a radio; in the middle of the screen is a
bright point whose size is governed by the current volume of the radio; the
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 35
Experiments with Broadcast Television

louder the radio, the larger the point, the quieter the radio, the smaller the
point becomes.61

The rich detail in this description of Paik’s television laboratory demonstrates the

possible manipulations of the broadcast image open to a home audience, albeit one

with the necessary technical knowledge.62

Daniels points out that the short evening hours of the exhibition were timed to

coincide with the brief, two-hour broadcast day of the only German television

channel operating at the time.63 That was the only time a (modified) image, could be

seen on Paik’s television sets, demonstrating how important these experiments with

television—scarcely acknowledged at the time by visitors and the press—were to

Paik.64 At this early stage, Paik explicitly links broadcasting to his prepared

televisions, which were intended to give back to the broadcast audience a measure of

control over the images they received. His work on audience-driven “interference”

continued to evolve: in a letter to the New School for Social Research written in

1965, Paik envisioned a synthesizer as an intermediary instrument “which anyone

61
Quoted in Daniels, “Television—Art or Anti-art?” 63.
62
Like radio, analog television and video produces sound, as well as images, through a series of
changing electrical modulations. In a black-and-white television, an electron beam maps an image onto
a phosphor-coated screen by scanning across the phosphor one line at a time. To produce an image that
fills the entire screen, the electron beam produces a raster scan pattern: a line scans across the screen
from left to right, moves back to the left side, down slightly and across another horizontal line, and so
on down the screen. When the beam reaches the right side of the bottom line, it moves back to the
upper left corner of the screen. As the beam of light moves from left to right, its intensity is modulated
into shades of black, gray, and white. Because the lines are spaced very closely together, they are
perceived as a single image. These electronic frequencies, in turn, are broadcast over long distances on
frequencies along a bandwidth (the range of frequencies occupied by a modulated carrier wave), which
is measured in megahertz. A typical black and white television signal requires 6 MHz of bandwidth.
63
Coincidentally, shortly after the exhibition closed, or on April 1, 1963, the second German television
station—ZDF—began broadcasting, thus allowing viewers a choice for the first time. Until that
moment, the only alternative open to German viewers for interacting with their televisions was the on-
off switch.
64
Daniels, “Television—Art or Anti-art?” 62–63.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 36
Experiments with Broadcast Television

could use in his own home, using his increased leisure to transform his television set

from a passive pastime [sic] to active creation.”65 “Communication,” writes Paik

elsewhere,

means the two-way communications. One-way communication is simply a

notification ...like a draft call. TV has been a typical case of this non
communication and [the] mass audience had only one freedom, that is to turn
on or off the TV.... My obsession with TV for the past 10 years has been, if I
look back and think clearly, a steady progression towards more differentiated
participation by viewers.66

Paik’s vision of “differentiated participation” becomes more clearly defined later in

the decade, after he started to receive sustained technical and funding support from

the Rockefeller Foundation.

The mandate of the Rockefeller Foundation was in part an outcome of the

ideals established in the 1930s at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research.

Founded in 1901, the Rockefeller Institute brought together scientists to intensively

research ways to combat diseases such as malaria, scarlet fever, and to promote the

Green Revolution (in which high-yield crops were cultivated through advances in

chemistry). The formalization of an arts program did not take place until 1963, and

the Rockefeller Foundation began funding film, and then experimental television, in

the mid-1960s. In the 1960s, the Director of Arts was Norman Lloyd, followed by

Howard Klein, who served as Director from 1973-83. Lloyd and Klein explicitly

modeled their arts funding on the history and philosophy of the Rockefeller

Foundation. As Klein stated in an interview with Sturken, “What I did was come to
65
Paik to the New School for Social Research, no date (year indicated in a textual annotation),
“Projects for Electronic Television,” in Videa ‘n’ Videology, ed. Judson Rosebush, (Syracuse: Everson
Museum of Art, 1974).
66
Sonsbeek catalog, 1971, in Rosebush.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 37
Experiments with Broadcast Television

the organization, get the feeling of it, the spirit and the history, and say, “Okay, how

do you think that way in the arts?”67

Klein’s and Lloyd’s decisions to support Paik were based on his experiments

with television, rather than his more firmly established reputation as an avant-garde

musician. In a report of an interview with Allan Kaprow and Paik, Klein wrote,

NJP is obviously brilliant. He is artistically sensitive and may be years ahead

of his generation. He is John-Cage inspired but seems more concerned with
the product than the method. He said, “Why must we have more electronic
music studios like Stockhausen’s of twenty years ago and not have even one
electronic painting studio?” I can’t assess his potential value to art—who
can? But here is a dedicated pioneer caught in the usual economic squeeze
and made to suffer because of his daring originality. I would recommend we
find some way of supporting his work.68

Paik’s reference to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s electronic music studio, which was set

up in WDR III Cologne, describes the model that producers of avant-garde broadcast

television grew to aspire to in the United States and West Germany. Stockhausen was

a German composer, considered to be one of the most important and controversial of

the twentieth century. Robin Maconie’s account of the studio’s founding draws out

the institutional links that emerged among scientific research, cold war politics, and a

new creative center for avant-garde music. As Maconie writes, in the early 1950s

Werner Meyer-Eppler and Robert Beyer of Bonn University’s Institute of Information

Science were part of an international team of researchers studying speech recognition

and automatic translation. Their research continued wartime code-breaking into the

67
Quoted in Marita Sturken, “Private Money and Personal Influence: Howard Klein and the
Rockefeller Foundation’s Funding of the Media Arts,” Afterimage 14, no. 6 (January 1987): 9.
68
Report of interview between Howard Klein, Allan Kaprow and Nam June Paik, August 10, 1967
“SUNY—Stony Brook, Nam June (Video Artist), 1967-68,” box 423, series 200R, Record Group 1.2,
Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, New York (hereafter
designated RAC).
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 38
Experiments with Broadcast Television

cold war: making it possible for new electronic and computing technologies to

intercept and translate radio and telephone voice messages automatically. It also

developed real-time speech recognition and translation hardware and substitution

software instrumental to the deliberations of the newly founded United Nations.69

Like many information scientists, Meyer-Eppler and Beyer used tone and melody

analysis and synthesis as an entry into the more complex problems of speech

recognition. Their initial experiments attracted the attention of Herbert Eimert at

WDR Cologne Radio, who then collaborated with them to establish an electronic

music studio. Its mission was to develop and put into practice complex tone analysis

and synthesis that might also contribute to the emergence of new arts for radio.

Stockhausen’s 1971 account of the studio’s establishment describes a series of

collaborative relationships among academic researchers, radio programmers,

technicians, and station executives:

We were intimately acquainted with…the first sound experiments at Bonn

University in 1951 of Dr. Meyer-Eppler, the phoneticist and expert in
communications. He had made contact with Dr. Herbert Eimert (who was then
in charge of the late evening New Music programme of the Cologne Radio…)
and his friend Robert Beyer (reader of new music at WDR Cologne).…In
1952 Dr. Eimert persuaded Hanns Hartmann, then head of WDR, to make a
normal music studio available for two hours, twice weekly, together with a
technician (first Bierhals, then Heinz Schiitz), so that Eimert and Beyer could
conduct acoustic experiments.…I was engaged as the first regular assistant at
the newly-founded “electronic music studio” of WDR, Beyer withdrew, and
Eimert became director of the studio..…great credit in the evolution of
electronic music is due to Herr Enkel, a technical director of WDR in
Cologne….he succeeded in making available the money for setting up the

69
Robin Maconie, “Stockhausen at 70: Through the Looking Glass,” The Musical Times, 139, no.
1863 (Summer 1998): 6.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 39
Experiments with Broadcast Television

world’s first electronic studio out of WDR’s technical budget. (The sum was
enormous at the time-I heard a figure of 120,000DM mentioned).70

This relationship between WDR Cologne Radio and Stockhausen formed a precedent

for the Rockefeller-Paik relationship that developed after Paik came to the United

States and was under the wing of the Rockefeller Foundation.

With little or no support from the art market, the Rockefeller Foundation was

instrumental in forging the direction taken by the U.S. experimental-video

community. As Sturken observed, Klein’s decision to “look at public television and

the role it could play in support of the arts…” was a response to lobbying efforts by

Paik and others, or artists “who were clamoring to get on the airwaves.”71 The

Rockefeller Foundation funded Paik with small and timely grants: first with a

$550.00 allocation for living expenses in August 1967, and then with a more

substantial grant of $13,750 made out to SUNY Stony Brook and meant to pay Paik’s

salary for a residency at the Institute for Experimentation in the Arts for 1967–68.

This residency was made possible through the recommendation of Allan Kaprow,

who was at the time a professor at Stony Brook. The mission of the institute was to

bring professional artists together with scientists, as well as experts from other fields,

in order to provide primary and secondary school students with a holistic education.

As the Consultant for Experimental Art at the new Instructional Resources

Center at Stony Brook, Paik proposed the Utopian Laser TV Station: “Very, very,

very high-frequency oscillation of lasers will enable us to afford thousands of large

70
Karlheinz Stockhausen, “The Origins of Electronic Music,” The Musical Times, 112, no. 1541. (July
1971): 649–650.
71
Sturken, “Private Money and Personal Influence,” 9.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 40
Experiments with Broadcast Television

and small TV stations. This will free us from the monopoly of a few commercial TV

channels.”72 A sample program schedule includes the following:

7am: Chess lesson by Marcel Duchamp

8am: Meet the Press. Guest, John Cage
9am: Morning gymnastics, Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown, etc.73

In his first report to the Rockefeller Foundation, “Expanded Education for a Paperless

Society,” Paik proposed that the new television station function as a global university.

To this end, he envisioned that it would operate as a central clearing house for

unpublished musical scores and unpublished electronic music. Moreover, he

recommended that visual and aural records made of living artists and philosophers

such as Marcel Duchamp, Martin Heidegger, and Bertrand Russell, and that, in

making these records, “[t]he interviewer should be a qualified philosopher himself

and the camera crew as minimal as possible, so that Jaspers [sic] or Heidegger can

talk as naturally as Chelsea Girls.” This station would thus operate as a “video

ersatz,” designed for instructional purposes.74

Global Groove was to be the pilot program for the Utopian Laser TV Station.

Befitting the utopianism implied in the station’s title, its planned launch date was set

for March 1, 1996. The similarity between the title and contents of the pilot and

Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” is not coincidental. Paik not only echoed

McLuhan’s pronouncement that the artist prophesizes the “message of cultural and

72
Quoted in Jud Yalkut’s “Electronic Zen: The Underground TV Generation,” Westside News, August
10, 1967, “SUNY—Stony Brook, Nam June (Video Artist), 1967-68,” box 423, series 200R, Record
Group 1.2, RAC.
73
Nam June Paik, “Utopian Laser TV Station,” Radical Software 1, No. 1, Spring 1970: 14.
74
Nam June Paik, “Expanded Education for the Paperless Society,” Radical Software 1, No. 1, Spring
1970: 7.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 41
Experiments with Broadcast Television

technological challenges decades before the transformational effect occurs” but also

extended it: “We [artists] also have output capacity.…My job is to see how the

establishment is working and to look for holes where I can get my fingers in and tear

away walls.”75 In this characterization the television artist becomes a subversive

agent, a social critic, and a visionary. The pilot opens with a typically euphoric

quotation by Paik over a shot of a TV Guide: “This is a glimpse of a video landscape

of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on earth, and TV

guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.” Paik’s introductory statement

establishes the pilot’s compositional principle and its message: global channel

surfing:

If we could compile a weekly TV festival made up of music and dance from

every county, and distribute it free-of-charge round the world via the proposed
common video market, it would have a phenomenal effect on education and
entertainment.76

As the anonymous author catalogue entry for Global Groove in the Electronic Arts

Intermix catalogue observes, Paik

subjects the transcultural, intertextual content to an exuberant, stream-of-

consciousness onslaught of disruptive editing and technological devices,
including audio and video synthesis, colorization, ironic juxtapositions,
temporal shifts, and layering.77

The pilot’s narrative is held together by recurring clips of dancers performing across a

synthesized, colorized space to Mitch Ryder’s Devil with a Blue Dress On. The clips

75
Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “Profiles: Video Visionary,” The New Yorker 51, no. 11 (May 5, 1975):
79.
76
Nam June Paik, “Global Groove and Video Common Market,” in Nam June Paik: Videa ‘n’
Videology, 1959-1973, ed. Judson Rosebush (Syracuse: Emerson Museum of Art, 1974).
77
Anonymous, “Global Groove,” Artists’ Video: An International Guide. Lori Zippay, ed. (New York:
Electronic Arts Intermix, 1991), 157.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 42
Experiments with Broadcast Television

are intercut with traditional Korean dancers. Both dance sequences are intermittently

superimposed over densely layered collages of television programs. The dance

sequences are in turn interleaved with fragments of performances by The Living

Theater (Paradise Now), John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, and Stockhausen (Kontakte).

Also featured are fan dances; Pepsi commercials appropriated from Japanese

television; recycled excerpts of earlier works by Paik including Ginsberg Audrich,

Tribute to Anonymous Beauty, Meta-Media; and work by other video artists such as

Jud Yalkut and Robert Breer (Fist Fight). Paik’s frequent collaborator, the cellist

Charlotte Moorman, her image wildly synthesized, performs TV Cello; Paik and

Moorman perform TV Bra for Living Sculpture; Richard Nixon’s face is distorted by

a magnetically altered television (Electronic Opera #1). Paik concludes Global

Groove with the segment “Participation TV,” in which he instructs viewers to open or

close their eyes, continuing the ideas developed in his earlier installation at the

Parnass Gallery, as well as in the letter to the New School.

Paik and Klein saw not only television as a monolithic institution in need of

change but also the role of the artist as individual creator as the one with the potential

to carry this out. And the place where they envisioned this happening was the newly

formed public television network. Klein’s application to television and the arts of the

broader Rockefeller vision of philanthropy through research and development is

summarized in a report presented before the Subcommittee on Foundations of the

State Finance Committee. In it, Klein characterizes the Rockefeller Foundation’s

decision to actively support “the artistic uses of public television” as a strategic

 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 43
Experiments with Broadcast Television

expenditure of their limited funds: “The rationale is simple: television is a medium of

communication natural to artistic expression, but which, because of the vast expenses

of programming, effectively limits artists access to its studios.”78 Drawing in part on

the model of scientific research developed earlier in the history of the Rockefeller

Foundation, as well as the precedent of the electronic music studio at WDR Cologne

Radio, Klein and the Rockefeller Foundation conceived of experimental centers

attached to specific public stations, which would act as research and development

branches for television: “It was discovered in 1967 that there existed at that time no

facility where experimentation could be carried on. Programming demands made it

virtually impossible for producers to try and find out ideas which were, because

experimental, risky in terms of finding future funding.”79 To that end, Klein and the

Rockefeller Foundation provided the seed money for three major experimental

television centers—the National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET) at

KQED in San Francisco, the Television Laboratory at WNET in New York City, and

the New Television Workshop at WGBH in Boston—that would allow artists to work

in television stations, with the station technicians. Although Paik proposed Global

Groove in 1967, it was not produced until 1973 at The Television Laboratory; and it

was broadcast on WNET on January 30, 1974.

At NCET, artists and technicians were brought together for a year, after which

time they were replaced by another team. Emphasis was placed on pure

78
Howard Klein, “Testimony of Howard Klein, Director for the Arts for the Rockefeller Foundation.
Prepared for the Subcommittee on Foundations of the Senate Finance Committee,” 4 “Bay Area
Feasibility Study, 1975 box R1501, series 200R, Record Group A79, RAC.
79
Klein, “Testimony of Howard Klein,” 4.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 44
Experiments with Broadcast Television

experimentation geared to advancing technology. The center provided equipment

access to a cross-disciplinary group of artists so that they could explore new modes of

expression and develop alternative visual languages. Its director, Brice Howard,

observed in 1972:

A medium is available. A very sophisticated, complex technology which

human beings invested is available to us. It is dumb, inarticulate, contains no
magic. It is available and manageable and probably stunningly beautiful when
managed by graceful people who are bent on acts of expression ... This newer
medium is swift in nature. It demands a new kind of perception. It moves like
light sparked into life as through a nervous prism. It is another paint, another
dance, another music of sound. Another message meant to catch the quick
vision of the inner eye.80

A representative example of the work produced at NCET was Thomas Tadlock’s

Archetron (1969). Archetron consisted of a complex device that scrambled live,

streaming television images, creating a series of constantly changing visual effects

similar to those made with a kaleidoscope. “It’s a special way of looking at TV.…It

shows what you watch on the home screen in a new way. I am concerned with the

patterns, rhythms and timing cycles that make people watch TV,” Tadlock wrote, “the

same concerns advertising people have. The Archetron gives you an image without

the message,” a reference to the famous phrase coined by McLuhan.81 The work

carried out at NCET also included innovations in video and audio synthesizers by

artists such as Stephen Beck and Warner Jepson, who experimented with the reversals

and inversions that occur in musical analogs. A series of thirteen programs was

80
Brice Howard, quoted in “National Center for Experiments in Television at KQED-TV 1967–1975
San Francisco, CA.” Video History Project
http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/groups/gtext.php3?id=55 (accessed July 16, 2008).
81
Quoted in John Margolies, “TV: The Next Medium,” Art in America, 57, no. 5 (September–October
1969): 52.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 45
Experiments with Broadcast Television

organized in a partnership between KQED and the Dilexi Foundation in which artists,

including Yvonne Rainer, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Walter de Maria and Frank

Zappa, were invited to work on and with television.

The Television Laboratory at WNET in New York City received grants from

the Rockefeller Foundation in 1971 ($150,000) and 1972 ($400,000) toward the costs

of establishing an experimental television laboratory. The Rockefeller Foundation

provided core support from 1972 to 1976, totaling $1.1 million, in addition to smaller

artist-in-residence grants. The Rockefeller Foundation’s flagship center, The

Television Laboratory remained open from 1972 to 1984. It administered a wide-

ranging artists-in-residence program as well as the Independent Documentary Fund of

the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and produced several

series for broadcast such as Artist’s Showcase (1974–1982). A roster of artists—Paik,

TVTV, Ed Emshwiller, John Sanborn and Kit Fitzgerald, Bill Viola, Mitchell

Kriegman, Skip Blumberg—produced works at the lab and came back many times as

artists in residence. Works produced during these residencies included Suite 212 by

Paik (1975, re-edited 1977), Viola’s Four Songs (1977), Richard Meyers’ 37/73

(1974), and a number of videos by William Wegman from 1973-1974.

The New Television Workshop at WGBH in Boston received a $300,000,

three-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to bring artists together from a

variety of fields such as dance, music, art, and drama in order to expand on the

possibilities inherent in television. As Fred Barzyk recounts, working from Cagean

theories of chance, artists, actors, technicians, crewmen, directors, and engineers were
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 46
Experiments with Broadcast Television

all asked to step out of their normal functions and to assume whatever role struck

them at the time: “The point was to expand the role of accidental possibilities in the

act of creating for television.”82 An experimental television program called “Video

Variations” was produced by WGBH in association with the Boston Symphony

Orchestra. The filmmakers Stan VanDerBeek and Jackie Cassen, kinetic sculptor

James Seawright, and cybernetic sculptor Tsai Wen-Ying were invited to visually

interpret music from the orchestra’s recordings. At WGBH Paik’s attempt to give

control of television to the audience reached the next step with his Paik-Abe video

synthesizer. Paik, with Shuya Abe, developed the synthesizer so artists could have

access to the processes previously available only in large production studios. In

addition, Paik imagined that the video synthesizer could be made available to

individuals to use “like watercolor sets [are used in their own home as a participation-

creation instrument] today”.83 The synthesizer made possible the creation of colors,

images—as the images recorded by the camera take place or are created—and video

effects that could be manipulated and changed in “real” time. The synthesizer made

its broadcast debut on August 1, 1970, with a four-hour marathon, Video Commune.

Subtitled Beatles from Beginning to End, it was aired live on WGBX, channel 44,

WGBH’s second channel. The images were generated directly from the Paik-Abe

Video Synthesizer and mixed with prerecorded Japanese television commercials. The

Beatles’ music was played chronologically, or “from beginning to end,” with live

vocal inserts. During the course of the program, Paik invited people on the street to

82
Fred Barzyk, “TV as Art as TV,” Print, 26 (January 1972): 21.
83
Douglas Davis, Art and the Future (New York: Dutton, 1973), 152.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 47
Experiments with Broadcast Television

come into the studio and manipulate the synthesizer to create “not cybernated art...

but art for cybernated life.”84 Another example of “live” television, Violence Sonata

by Stan VanDerBeek, consisted of a live performance broadcast on WGBH with

videotape, film, and views solicited from the studio and phone-in audience on the

theme of violence.

Alongside the Rockefeller Foundation, early supporters, artists, and activists

who were engaged in avant-garde television viewed their work as acts of profound

social criticism that were directed at the domination of groups and individuals

epitomized by broadcast television. A notable example is Michael Asher’s The

Occurrence of Rolling the Television Program the Tenth of January 1976, broadcast

on the local PBS station on January 18, 1976, as part of the group show Via Los

Angeles at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Oregon. A camera was set up and

locked into place in the master control room, generating an image of the control

panels and screen. Also on screen was one of the technicians required to run the

master control monitors and cue up promotions for public-service announcements.

The literal superimposition by Asher of the spaces of production and transmission

gave rise to some interesting responses by the television producers as well as, of

course, the audience. In his notebook from January 11, 1976, Asher observed that the

technician “keys down his usual verbal activity due to his self-consciousness of being

on TV.”85 Toning down speech was not the only self-censorship carried out by the

84
Ibid., 152.
85
Michael Asher, “Excerpts of a description from Notebook 1/11/76 describing the first run through of
a television broadcast delivered 1/18 as a work for the groupshow ‘Via Los Angeles’ at Portland
Center for the Visual Arts, Portland (Oregon) 1/9/76-2/8/76,” in Dan Graham et al, Video-
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 48
Experiments with Broadcast Television

station personnel. Further on in his notebook, Asher comments that the right-hand

monitor, which brought in a constant flow of network television, also brought in

commercials that the panel operator tried to block from Asher’s camera in order to

stay compliant with FCC regulations, with limited success: “This could not be

controlled….” The program planner’s discomfort with the possible outcomes of

Asher’s work also lead him to bar extraneous personnel from the studio and to set up

the trial at a late hour, when only one technician needed to be in the master control

room. Asher took phone calls during and after the broadcast to answer any questions

from an undoubtedly perplexed audience, as any producer would ordinarily do.

As a consequence of the lobbying efforts by Paik and his supporters, and with

the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation, in the late 1970s the struggle for

access to U.S. broadcast television by the public was fought, and for a short time

won, in the public broadcasting system. As I state above, public television in the

United States had been conceived as a showcase for the arts on broadcast television,

as executives and government officials such as Hutchinson, Lee, Weaver, and then

Minow understood the arts: symphonic concerts, opera, ballet, Broadway theatrical

productions. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 extended this understanding of the

arts when it asserted that television would serve the public interest by developing

programming that involved taking creative risks and by addressing “the needs of

Architecture-Television: Writing on Video and Video Works, ed. Benjamin Buchloh (Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canada: The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York: New York University
Press, 1979), 56.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 49
Experiments with Broadcast Television

unserved and underserved audiences.”86 Notwithstanding this ambition, the

institutional relationship between avant-garde broadcast aspirants and PBS was an

awkward one. Its fragility emerges in the internal communications between the

Rockefeller Foundation and PBS. In late 1979 and early 1980, a terse exchange of

letters and phone calls took place between Howard Klein and Chloe Aaron, who was

the vice president of Broadcasting at PBS, which had refused to air four out of six

episodes of Western Exposure, a series devoted to work by independent videomakers

affiliated with the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).87 Klein accused PBS of using

the term “quality” as a euphemism to reject controversial programming:

When I was told that these programs would not be recommended for hard
scheduling, I was told that there was a problem of “quality,” to which I must
frankly say, balderdash. If I were being told the programs were vulgar,
obscene, politically sensitive, bizarre, grotesque or too strong for PBS
endorsement, I could go along with it, for I understand an organization’s
reluctance to back programs whose content may be “controversial.”…Since
only two programs are considered “quality” enough for PBS, which I interpret
as meaning “safe,” I foresee a negative reaction on the part of funders of
BAVC to commit future monies to independently produced programming.88

In a followup letter to Aaron, Klein threw his support behind a proposal that was

being floated at PBS for the creation of a “red, blue, and green,” network system.

Klein hoped that it would

find a way of loosening up even more the restrictions on programming that

limit the non-linear works access while favoring the more linear
documentaries. It would seem that the Red network could, in Nam June Paik’s

86
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, as amended Subpart D —
Corporation for Public Broadcasting Sec. 396. [47 U.S.C. 396]
87
At the time a post-production editing facility that also produced limited programming aimed at
public television, BAVC was founded with seed money and organizational support from the
Rockefeller Foundation.
88
Howard Klein to Chloe Aaron, October 31, 1979, “Bay Area Video Coalition, 1977–79: Western
Exposure Series” Box R2055 Series 200R, Record Group A83, RAC.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 50
Experiments with Broadcast Television

words, be the off-off-off Broadway of public television and be a place

hospitable to artistic work.

Klein saw this as a sheltered environment, ideal for more radical experiments with the

public airwaves:

There does need to be a place in national programming for budding artists and
geniuses. They need protection and promotion. As a specialist in the arts, I do
urge agencies like PBS to provide such protection for them….89

The Western Exposure series eventually aired in its entirety on KQED.

The placement of avant-garde programming on U.S. public television created

a series of unintended outcomes. Since critiques of avant-garde television located the

arts inside a protected environment, they were effectively neutralized. Precisely

because public television was used as a springboard to launch avant-garde

programming into the broadcast universe, these efforts failed to rupture the

established relation between mass culture and its producers and consumers.

Consequently, utopian hopes for reform by the Rockefeller Foundation and the artists

it supported were relegated to the promise held out by technology. As Benjamin

Buchloh points out about Paik in particular, the promise of video contained

the legacy of modernism’s attachment to technology as an inevitably

liberating force, [and maintains] the naïvely optimistic assumption…that
media technology could induce changes inside a sociopolitical framework
without addressing the specific interests and conditions of the individuals
within the political and economic ordering system.90

For Buchloh, Paik’s assessment of the interdependence of the institutions of

television and the avant-garde never “addressed the political implications of the

89
Howard Klein to Chloe Aaron, January 10, 1980, “Bay Area Video Coalition, 1980–81: Western
Exposure Series” Box R2055 Series 200R, Record Group A83, RAC.
90
Benjamin Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Works,” Art
Journal 4, no. 45 (Fall 1985): 217.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 51
Experiments with Broadcast Television

ideological apparatus of television.” Consequently, “his ideas concerning resistance

and subversion remained on the level of the anarchic, playful opposition, countering

the totalitarianism of the consciousness industry with the transformation of its

technology into the gadget.”91 The McLuhanesque thrust to Paik’s work for television

and his lobbying efforts with the Rockefeller Foundation support Buchloh’s

contemptuous dismissal, in that they both privileged technological intervention over

institutional critique. Nevertheless what Buchloh fails to acknowledge are the

contributions of the distinctive structure of the U.S. government-corporate

relationship in television and radio and of the avant-garde’s historical mistrust of

mass media to the marginalization of avant-garde television.

By being placed on public television, avant-garde broadcast television became

part of the broader vision of PBS, which, as the media scholar Laurie Ouellette points

out, was “envisioned as a corrective cultural supplement [to commercial broadcast

television in the U.S.], and its marginalized role was both legitimated and

compounded by its comparative prestige.”92 In choosing PBS, avant-garde producers

embodied the New Left’s broader mistrust of both the masses and mass media. For

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “In the New Left’s opposition to the media, old

bourgeois fears such as the fear of ‘the masses’ seem to be reappearing….”93 Every

attempt to enter mass media, Enzensberger suggested, came to be regarded “with

91
Ibid., 218.
92
Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), 25.
93
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” in The Consciousness
Industry: On Literature, Politics and Media, ed. Michael Roloff, trans. Stuart Hood (New York:
Seabury Press, 1974), 102.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 52
Experiments with Broadcast Television

suspicion as a step towards integration,” toward being swallowed up by the capitalist

system. Without underestimating the difficulties involved in directly engaging with

mass media, this assumption presumes that capitalism could overcome any

contradiction that opposes its dominance or close any rupture that threatens its fabric.

Exemplary of this mistrust is Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman’s 1973 video

Television Delivers People, which focuses on the political import of the corporate

monopolies of broadcasting and the imperialism of the airwaves. Muzak plays while a

text scrolls over a blue background in white lettering.94 A fragment of the transcript

follows:

The Product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience.

Television delivers people to an advertiser.

There is no such thing as mass media in the United States except for
television.

Mass media means that a medium can deliver masses of people….

In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having

himself sold.

It is the consumer who is consumed.

You are the product of TV.95

The message criticizes the medium while remaining within it by using the seductive

tools of advertising. Arguments like Serra’s may be persuasive, but this conviction,

94
According to The Kitchen website, Serra excerpted this text from television conference transcripts
http://www.thekitchen.org/MovieCatalog/Titles/TelvisionDelivers.html (accessed May 30, 2007). The
Kitchen is a nonprofit, interdisciplinary organization in New York City that provides artists working in
the media, literary, and performing arts with exhibition and performance opportunities to create and
present new work. Founded as an artist collective in 1971 by the artists Woody Vasulka and Steina
Vasulka and incorporated as a nonprofit two years later, The Kitchen began as a space where video
artists and experimental composers and performers could share their ideas.
95
Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, Television Delivers People, 1973.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 53
Experiments with Broadcast Television

Enzensberger insists, “could easily be refuted historically and is theoretically

untenable.” In other words, the question is not whether the masses are complicit in

their manipulation but how this form of manipulation represents a certain power

structure, as well as how it can be modified.

The distinctions drawn between the “public” and the “masses”—with the

attendant implications for each group’s ability to participate effectively in a

democracy—were reinforced by avant-garde television and its supporters, as a 1977

petition addressed to the Congressional Hearings on the Telecommunications

Financing Act by the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF)

demonstrates.96 AIVF advocacy was two-pronged: “to meet the needs of

independents and to represent what we believe to be in the interests of the American

Public.…”97 Their various petitions to Congress describe a desire to change the

structures of mass media to allow new and politically radical forms of video to enter

into and change the airwaves. They used “public” to describe the systems of

government, foundation, corporate, and audience support that makes possible public,

or noncommercial broadcast television. They also defined “public” to refer to the

U.S. population, which is organized into categories of public and audience, or, in

other words, political force and commodity. Using language similar to Serra’s

Television Delivers People, representatives of the AIVF argued that

96
The AIVF was another grantee of the Rockefeller Foundation.
97
“Testimony for Presentation to: The Subcommittee on Communications House Interstate and
Foreign Commerce Committee. For Submission to the Record of the Panel Discussions on Public
Telecommunications, September 7, 8, 9, 1977,” Foundation for Independent Video and Film
[Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers], Conference: 1978-80 Box: R1863 Series: 200R
Record Group: A82, RAC.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 54
Experiments with Broadcast Television

[i]n television…the product is not the programs. It is not even the products
being advertised. The product is the audience [emphasis in original]. The
market is the selling of the audience.…In contrast to the 1934 Act, there is no
longer a reference to the “interest, convenience and necessity of the public.”
The current bill, in fact, refers to the public as a market. This may have the
virtue of honesty. Communications in this country has unhappily become
province of a small number of corporate interests….Are we giving up entirely
on the public’s role as a participant in the communication process. Of course,
there is public television. But whatever happened to public airwaves
[emphasis in original]?98

As Ouellette contends, avant-garde television defined itself in relation to “the

presumed mediocrity of the ‘vast wasteland’ and its lowest-common-denominator

audience.”99 In this rhetoric, the Congress, commercial broadcast television, and the

AIVF exclude sizable segments of “the public” from the democratic process when, as

an audience (or market share), the public collectively makes a choice to watch

commercial broadcast television. One outcome of this rhetorical turn is on one hand

that, government- or foundation-funded institutions are considered open to criticism

for their successes and failures in serving the public, and on the other, that

commercial, or private, interests are inadvertently marginalized from these critiques,

even though they serve most of “the public.” Consequently these institutions’

constituency, the mass media audience, does not enter into the debate.

James Day, another figure closely associated with the Rockefeller Foundation,

reinforced Serra, Schoolman, and the AIVF’s position that U.S. commercial broadcast

98
“Hearings on Public Television, September 27, 1978. Testimony for Presentation to: The
Subcommittee on Communications, House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee on the
Provisions of HR 13015, The Communication Act of 1978,” Foundation for Independent Video and
Film [Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers], Conference: 1978-80 Box: R1863 Series:
200R Record Group: A82, RAC.
99
Ouellette, 25.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 55
Experiments with Broadcast Television

television audience is incapable of participating in the democratic process.100 In a

paper given at an international conference on television, Day focused on the quality

of attention that was shaped by the market pressures of commercial broadcast

television. Here, the commodification of attention was defined by Day as a national

phenomenon. While watching television is critical to democracy, U.S. television

audiences, Day argued, are incapable of watching (presumably better quality)

television produced in other countries because they have been blinded by “the

American system of broadcasting and the purpose it serves.”101 For Day, the public as

audience was disenfranchised from meaningful participation in the formation of

democracy because its consciousness had been reduced to a widget in the commodity

exchange:

Television has become the national narcotic. So unaware are we of our

lowered expectations that we may even sense slight feelings of resentment on
those rare occasions when the tube warrants or demands our full
engagement—not fully understanding why the resentment is there.

Day’s intransigent and shallowly reasoned consideration of the kinds of attention

shaped by the demands of U.S. television producers presumes an unbridgeable divide

between public and audience, citizen and commodity, cutting off the U.S. audience

from the democratic process. For Day, the solution could be found in the institutional

structures of European television: “Even in Great Britain, where commercial ITV

competes with the BBC for audience, the firm hand of the government minimized

100
Day went on to become the president of KQED, and then a professor of television and media
studies at Brooklyn College.
101
James Day, “Visual Grammar as a Barrier to International Program Exchange,” in “Television
Programming: International Exchange Conference (1978),” Box: R1657 Series: 200R Record Group:
A81, RAC, 4.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 56
Experiments with Broadcast Television

these effects on programming purposes.” In other words, programming influenced by

government control is not driven to attract the largest audience possible. Thus, Day

assumes that the quality of day-to-day television programming is innately superior.

Consequently, European audiences do not watch (according to Day) television in a

“semi-conscious state of receptivity.” Therefore, the audience is better primed for a

Brechtian “coming to awareness” of the structures of alienation that are usually

glossed over by kitsch. That is, for Day the utopian imaginary so ardently desired by

producers of avant-garde broadcast television in the United States was already taking

place in Europe, a happy land where benign government oversight presides over mass

media, resulting in an actively engaged public.

As Ouellette points out, public television was belatedly conceived in the

United States as a corrective to commercial television—thus its history brings

different tensions and outcomes to the debate over public service versus market. The

distinction between Western European and U.S. audiences, as well as Day’s

assumption that European television shapes a form of attention that leads in turn to a

more meaningful participation in democracy, is organized around a difference that

Day naively assumes is based on the nature of the primary institutional support

received by the commercial broadcast television stations these audiences watch.

Media scholar Ien Ang has argued, in contrast, that public broadcasting is not

necessarily more democratic when it is (relatively) free from market pressures.

Public-service philosophy is different from the impetus to win an audience for

 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 57
Experiments with Broadcast Television

advertisers or corporate underwriters but not necessarily less controlling.102 German

and French television stations such as WDR III, Cologne and France 2 are rooted in

what Raymond Williams calls a paternal logic, committed to transmitting “values,

habits and taste” so as to uplift the populace according to standards determined by the

“ruling majority.”103

In the early 1970s, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge characterized European

television as a series of national institutions caught in a transitional phase between an

“exclusively capitalist mechanism” and “effective new forms of public control.” This

describes a more complex, unstable set of relationships between government,

audience, producer, and commercial forces than imagined by Day. In Negt and

Kluge’s analysis, public television embodies a compromise, which initially promised

to prevent the assimilation of the viewer into the production logic of television.

Ultimately, however, public television stymies the needs and interests of viewers to

be directed toward emancipation.104 Consequently, the avant-garde broadcast

television in Europe was unable to fully develop its potential for revolutionary

communication. This flies in the face of the rhetoric formed in the U.S. context. For

Negt and Kluge, this failure comes about because public television is “confined to the

transmission of generalized program material,” or programming intended to appeal to

102
Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (New York: Routledge, 1991), 103.
103
Quoted in Ang, 28.
104
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the
Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, ed. Miriam Hansen, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen
Daniel and Assenka Oksiloff (1972, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 100.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 58
Experiments with Broadcast Television

the broadest possible audience.105 As a result of this emphasis on limited expression

and balanced programming, public television was for Negt and Kluge an institution

incapable of supporting the kind of transformative formal, cultural and political

interruptions and accidents that were conceptualized by the producers of avant-garde

television.

1.3 West German Broadcast Television

Given WDR III Cologne’s status as the birthplace of electronic music, there was

every reason to believe that a partnership between artists and television studios would

result in a similarly groundbreaking exploration of the possibilities of broadcast

television. WDR III’s new Electronic Studio was established to replicate the

relationship between radio station and composer by encouraging a new collaboration

between television studio and artist. WDR III, Cologne, however, did not build on the

precedent established by the Studio for Electronic Music. As Christiane Fricke writes,

the relationship was strained from the outset, and initial experiments did not result in

sustained collaborations.106

The two models of avant-garde broadcast television that were developed at

WDR III, Cologne’s Electronic Studio—the multimedia spectacle put on by Otto

Piene and Aldo Tambelloni and Gerry Schum’s “television exhibition”—drew on

existing art movements such as intermedia, expanded cinema, land art and

105
Ironically, this was exactly the same criticism made about the “big three” network stations in the
United States.
106
Christiane Fricke, “1968/1969 | Black Gate Cologne: Otto Piene/Aldo Tambellini,” in 40
Yearsvideoart.de—Part 1 Digital Heritage: Video Art in Germany from 1963 Until the Present, eds.
Rudolf Frieling and Wulf Herzogenrath (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006), 98.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 59
Experiments with Broadcast Television

conceptualism. One of first broadcast “television artworks” (predating the work done

at the avant-garde television centers created by the Rockefeller Foundation), Piene

and Tambellini’s Black Gate Cologne: Ein Lichtspiel (the subtitle translates as either

“cinema film” or literally “light play”) produced for WDR III, Cologne by Wibke von

Bonin in the new Electronic Studio. Nevertheless, Black Gate Cologne: Ein

Lichtspiel’s concept was originally developed not as a televised event, but rather as a

multimedia live action event, BLACK Air that had been staged by Piene and

Tambellini in May 1967 in a theater called The Black Gate in New York City. The

Black Gate Theater was an extension of The Gate Theater, which had been opened by

Piene and Tambellini in 1965 to show underground experimental film twelve hours a

day, seven days a week. The Black Gate Theater showcased live environmental

multimedia performances and experimentation.107 A typical live action event by

Piene and Tambellini would involve a vortex of audiovisual stimuli, from which a

single image gradually emerged. Black Zero (1965) began when a giant black balloon

appeared out of nowhere, expanded, and then exploded a crescendo of light and

sound. A progression like this involved the use of hundreds of hand-painted film cells

and slides, which in the case of Black Zero were projected over a live cello recital and

its audience.

Recreated in a television studio, Black Gate Cologne: Ein Lichtspiel set out to

reproduce the energy of theatrically staged live actions, using films, slides, inflatable

107
Aldo Tambellini, interview by Barbara Buckner, Video History Project, May 10-June 5, June 14-
August 14, 1983, http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/people/pview.php3?id=25 (accessed
May 20, 2007).
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 60
Experiments with Broadcast Television

sculptures, and the participation of a studio audience. Two light sculptures by Piene

were used: the audience moved under and around an illuminated ball and an inflatable

flower called Power Flower, which consisted of more than eight hundred feet of

transparent plastic hose and compressed air. Tambellini introduced numerous slide

transparencies, as well as seven films lasting from fifteen to thirty minutes and half-

inch open-spool videos (which had to be transferred to two-inch television format).

Two consecutive forty-five minute broadcasts with different audiences were recorded

in the studio on August 30, 1968. The length of the broadcast was criticized “despite,

or indeed perhaps because of, its confusing wealth of material”: WDR III, Cologne

then cut it to twenty-three minutes.108 For Black Gate Cologne: Eine Lichtspiel, Piene

and Tambellini also worked with the technical and electronic possibilities opened up

by television. According to Fricke the forty-seven-minute “director’s cut” had some

rhythm: it followed a dramatic line, and, if some passages were “image information

overkill,” the possibility remained that this was intentional.109 The narrative flow was

created by mixing multiple video sources distinguished by superimposing and

interlocking shots from different distances, tracking shots, and zooms; the rhythmic

acceleration and deceleration of images and sounds; and the blurring of image

information through flickering, exaggerated contrast, solarization, image reversal, or

lack of contrast.

108
Fricke, 100.
109
Fricke, 100.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 61
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The broadcast began with an almost static series of images of Piene’s

illuminated ball in a darkened space.110 A barely discernable buzzing sound rose and

fell. Piene’s Pneumatic Flower appeared and was audibly inflated. Studio guests were

grouped around the sculpture, which began to unfold and float as they and the camera

followed it. The superimposed images of this movement created waves of people

surrounding Piene’s inflatables, which repeatedly threatened to dissolve into

illegibility. Overlaying the images the buzz continued, joining ambient sounds of the

audience. An electronic rhythm was then introduced. With the crescendo of sound

and activity, Black Gate Cologne: Ein Lichtspiel reached its first climax. The second

sequence started with atmospheric sound and Tambellini’s slide show, which began

slowly and gradually accelerated. Over approximately twenty minutes, sequences of

the guests interacting with the inflatables were intercut with the slides, which layered

over a sound that was a cross between an aircraft engine and machine-gun fire. The

final image-and-sound sequence consisted of projections on the walls, which showed

film and television footage of boxing, news, and police actions. These dissolved into

and emerged out of close-ups of individual studio guests, and alternated with

Tambellini’s slides. The found footage culminated in long shots of the CBS coverage

of the horrified reactions that immediately followed Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

A cameraman in the Cologne studio could be glimpsed for brief moments, zooming in

and out with rapid, rhythmic movements. Scenes from Coney Island and an address

by Martin Luther King Jr., as well as reaction shots from the studio audience marked

110
I am drawing my description of this work from Fricke’s account.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 62
Experiments with Broadcast Television

the concluding sequence of Black Gate Cologne: Ein Lichtspiel. The tape ended with

shots of Piene’s illuminated ball.111

The main problem attributed to Black Gate Cologne: Ein Lichtspiel is its

failure to engage with and break down the existing conventions of television. Fricke

describes the twenty-three-minute version of the work that aired on January 26, 1969,

as an “accelerating bombardment of seemingly chaotic images,” which were in turn

described by one viewer as “electronic games without a specifically aesthetic

principle.”112 Daniels also found the broadcast to be a disappointment. For Daniels,

“it remains difficult to decide whether the electronic manipulation synthesizes with

the intermedia art action, or whether both compete to make the most powerful

effect.”113 Rudolf Frieling had similar reservations about the suitability of recording a

happening for broadcast television, given the fact that spontaneity was intrinsic to

happenings or actions. Furthermore, when a happening or an intermedia action such

as Black Gate was transferred to television, its content was understood to be “part of a

process-based situation that demonstrated the media conditions under which

television operates.” In other words, just as theatrically staged actions or happenings

were sensitive to and dependent on both their immediate environment (the stage, the

audience, the interaction between audience and performance) and their institutional

setting, Black Gate Cologne: Ein Lichtspiel needed to disrupt “television-as-usual.”

The most important aspect of this was “continuing to serve mere consumers on the

111
Fricke, 101–102.
112
Fricke, 100.
113
Daniels, 72.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 63
Experiments with Broadcast Television

(other) side,” a requirement that would be “thwarted [by] the actions in the television

studio involving audience and artists in front of and behind the camera as both art and

technical directors.”114 For Frieling, as a happening transferred from the stage to the

studio, the work’s success (or failure) was to be measured by viewer “participation,”

documented through protest letters and phone calls. Therefore, an action would be

“lost,” or disappear, in the broadcast through its inability to “ruffle the monotonous

harmony of television consumption.”115 Thus, for Frieling, Black Gate Cologne: Ein

Lichtspiel failed because the response of the broadcast television audience was

passive.

Gene Youngblood observes that “[t]he psychological effect of television’s

totally immaterial nature may be largely responsible for the contemporary artist’s

awareness of concept over icon.”116 One of the more singular avant-garde enterprises

in broadcast television was organized by the German filmmaker Gerry Schum. Schum

saw the immateriality of television described by Youngblood (and earlier by the

spatialists) as a new way to convey artistic processes and concepts that went beyond

the object, a conceptual purism that stands in stark contrast to Piene and Tambellini’s

“everything but the kitchen sink” experiments. Schum’s collaboration with the

institution of television was restricted to broadcasting, financing, and staging

something like a gallery opening at the stations. In so doing, he acted as an

114
Frieling, 148.
115
Ibid., 148.
116
Youngblood, 292.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 64
Experiments with Broadcast Television

impresario, embodying the roles of mediator between the television institution and the

artists and of program curator and producer. “In art,” Schum explained,

there is a general change from the possession of objects to the publication of

projects or ideas. This of course demands a fundamental change in artistic
commerce. One of the results of this change is the TV gallery, more or less a
conceptual institution which comes into existence only in the moment of
transmission. After the broadcast there is…no object that can be seen “in
reality” or be sold as an object.117

Schum wanted to use broadcast television as a medium: the broadcasts themselves

were to be works of art, as opposed to reports on art. He was first commissioned by

West German television to produce a film report Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum

(Consumer Art—Art Consumption). The program aired on WDR III on October 17,

1968, and was timed to coincide with the second art fair in Cologne.

Beginning in December 1968, Schum launched Fernsehgalerie Schum Berlin

or TV Gallery, which brought the avant-garde into the heart of mass media. The first

project, Land Art, was developed with Ursula Wever. The works exhibited on the

program were to be shown exclusively to a television audience and would not be

available anywhere else. The original recording of the event took place three weeks

before. It “opened” on late-night television on April 15, 1969 in Berlin and

Düsseldorf, as a production commissioned by Sender Freies Berlin for ARD’s

channel 1, produced by filmkunstfilm gerry schum. It showed short 16 millimeter

films by European and American artists such as Richard Long (Walking a Straight 10

Mile Line Forward and Back Shooting Every Half Mile), Barry Flanagan (A Hole in

the Sea), Dennis Oppenheim (Timetrack, Following the Timeborder Between Canada

117
Quoted in Youngblood, 292.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 65
Experiments with Broadcast Television

and U.S.A), Robert Smithson (Fossil Quarry Mirror with Four Mirror

Displacements), Marinus Boezem (Sand Fountain), Jan Dibbets (16 mm 12 Hours

Tide Object with Correction of Perspective), Walter de Maria (Two Lines Three

Circles on the Desert), and Michael Heizer (Coyote). The works produced with

Schum were, for many of these artists, their first forays into filming for television;

few of them continued to work in film or video after the premature death of Schum,

who committed suicide in 1973. For Fricke, the aesthetic consistency that marks the

work has been “attributed to Schum’s ability to emphathize with the artists’ ideas.”

For example, Dibbets’ film, which was shot on the coast of the Netherlands, tracked

the progress of a furrow being plowed in the sand: first it was parallel to the left edge

of the film screen, then to the right, bottom, and top edges, until the picture frame

appears doubled by the quadratic line on the beach. The simplicity and clarity of

Dibbets’ film was typical of the films shown on TV Gallery, since the film featured

“reticent but precise camera work and carefully considered use of the image material”

as well as “no shot or camera operations that did not stem logically from the

concept…the same [held] true for the sound.”118 The program aired for thirty-eight

minutes, during which time not a word was spoken.

With the support of Wibke von Bonin, Schum succeeded in introducing two

additional interruptions into the WDR III, Cologne programming: From October 11 to

18, 1969, the British artist Keith Arnatt, in a work titled TV Project Self-Burial,

showed a photograph of himself for two seconds, either just after the news or during

118
Fricke, 109.
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Experiments with Broadcast Television

the prime time broadcast. On each day of the week’s broadcast, the artist was shown

sinking further and further into the ground. And during the week between Christmas

and New Years Eve, 1969, Jan Dibbets’ TV as a Fireplace showed the slow end of a

hearth fire in three-minute segments at the end of the evening’s programming.119

One other television exhibition curated by Schum was broadcast,

Identifications, or II. Fernsehausstellung (TV Exhibition II), was screened by the

television station SWF/ARD (Südwestfunk Baden-Baden) at 10:50 p.m. on

November 30, 1970. In contrast to the less formal atmosphere of Land Art,

Identifications opened with a six-minute address by Schum that included the

following segment:

The art object is losing its autonomy, is no longer separable from the
producer, i.e. the artist....We no longer experience the art object as a painting
or sculpture with no contact to the artist. In the TV object the artist can reduce
his object to the attitude, to the mere gesture, as a reference to his conception.
The art object displays itself as the union of idea, visualization, and the artist
as demonstrator.120

As its title suggests, the program showcased artists investigating or identifying with a

chosen object or material. Actions by twenty artists, including Joseph Beuys, Gilbert

& George, Mario Merz, Klaus Rinke, Ulrike Ruckriem, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier,

and Lawrence Weiner were shown. In his segment Beuys sits in front of a television

set. A piece of felt covers the television’s screen. The sounds of a news broadcast are

119
Of all the formats introduced at the time, the idea of the brief interruption of daily programming has
maintained the greatest longevity. Artists like Chris Burden (Chris Burden Promo, 1976, in which the
artist bought twenty-four thirty-second commercial spots on two New York television channels,
channel 4 and channel 9, and twenty-one spots on three Los Angeles channels, Channel 5, Channel 11
and Channel 13), Bill Viola (Reverse Television: Portraits of Viewers, 1982), and Stan Douglas
(Monodramas, 1991), have worked with this form.
120
Quoted in Gerry Schum, “Identifications,” http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/identifications/
(accessed May 20, 2007).
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 67
Experiments with Broadcast Television

audible, gesturing to the content that is obscured by the felt; Beuys lifts a corner of it,

interrupting the illusion by showing the viewer of the performance a blank screen.

Then he puts on boxing gloves and repeatedly punches himself in the face. The

television sequence cuts to a second shot at closer range in which Beuys cuts a

sausage in half. He then runs the two halves over the screen, similar to a doctor

listening to a patient’s lungs using a stethoscope. He then cuts one piece of the

sausage into a point, and presses the pointed sausage against a wall. Beuys ends his

segment by wheeling the television set to the wall and turning it so that the felt-

covered screen faces the wall. In Gilbert & George’s segment, the two artists are

filmed sitting, motionless, under a tree beside a pond in a pastoral landscape. The

cinematography follows the pictorial conventions of landscape painting. The short

segment consists of a single shot, whose action is restricted to the figure on the left

“breaking” into action by drawing on his lit cigarette.121 Ulrike Ruckriem’s segment

begins with a tight shot of a sculpture with clearly visible cracks that divide the

image. To the left stands Ruckriem, half in and half out of the shot. Over the fifty-five

minutes of the sequence, Ruckriem breaks the sculpture apart along cracks prepared

ahead of time.

Schum’s program both attracted widespread public interest and was doomed

from the start, precisely because of the revolutionary qualities of the unresolved

contradictions central to his concept: in the crucible of mass media, itself

121
I have not seen these films. My descriptions are based on the summaries of some of the films
included in the television exhibition Identifications that can be found at:
http://www.essogallery.com/Schum.html (accessed May 20, 2007). These descriptions were posted to
coincide with a group show: The Theater of Exhibitions (One Work a Day), February 26–March 14,
1998, at the Esso Gallery in New York City.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 68
Experiments with Broadcast Television

synonymous with consumer culture, Schum and Wever dematerialized art,

withdrawing its viability as a consumable product. Tensions between impresario and

station came to a head when Schum refused to allow WDR III, Cologne to insert its

own introduction or soundtrack over his (silent) broadcast. Schum defended his

decision on the grounds that TV Gallery was itself a work of art, not a documentation

of works of art. Accordingly, its internal integrity needed to be respected. For Wulf

Herzogenrath, the questions raised by Schum’s project continue to remain relevant:

for example, what is the political responsibility of public, or government-run

television? Schum answered this question in part when he reinforced public

television’s status as a one-dimensional receiver of broadcast by using television

strictly as a distribution network for his TV Gallery.122 Television stations that chose

to broadcast avant-garde television were not, as they were in the United States,

marginalized from most members of the population who turned the television on

every day. However from the start both U.S. and West German models were

institutionally irrelevant, and eventually disappeared. Not until Kluge’s partnership

with the newly formed private television channels SAT1 and RTL in the 1980s made

Kluge a pivotal figure in German media politics—and the producer of three weekly

television shows sandwiched between commercials, heavy metal shows, and soft-core

porn—would such an incisive institutional critique emerge from the avant-garde.123 In

France, as part of the broader revolt against the government that took place in May
122
Wulf Herzogenrath, “Video Art and Institutions: The First Fifteen Years,” in 40 Yearsvideoart.de—
Part 1 Digital Heritage: Video Art in Germany from 1963 until the Present, eds. Rudolf Frieling and
Wulf Herzogenrath (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006), 25.
123
For a summary of this partnership see Peter C. Lutze, “Alexander Kluge’s ‘Cultural Window’ in
Private Television,” New German Critique, no. 80 (Spring-Summer, 2000): 171–190.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 69
Experiments with Broadcast Television

1968, filmmakers adopted a very different model of radical engagement with

television.

1.4 Revolutionary Television in France and Mozambique

France’s broadcasting systems were unified under Vichy government control during

the Nazi occupation. After the war, this unified system was reshaped into a

mouthpiece for Charles de Gaulle. In the face of an openly hostile print media, and

finally embarrassed by broadcast television and radio’s fawning support of Gaullist

policies, in May 1964 de Gaulle’s government founded the ORTF (Office de Radio

Télévision Française). An organization modeled after the BBC, it was designed to

establish objectivity and distance between the government and the media. This fragile

neutrality disappeared, however, shortly after the first student, and later student-

worker, strikes, riots and demonstrations that exploded across France in May 1968.

Beginning on the evening of Friday May 3 when the rector of the University of Paris

called in the police to break up a student meeting in the Sorbonne, by May 24 the

strikes had swelled to approximately ten million workers and students across France.

While the initial altercations between students and police were reported by the

electronic media, throughout the crisis the government-controlled radio and television

network offered little and very biased coverage of the riots, strikes, and student

demands. On May 25, however, the ORTF journalists joined the general strike.

The massive revolt unleashed against the Gaullist government—and

technocratic capitalism in general—did not finally result in permanent change but

instead dwindled away into negotiations on the part of labor and the Communist party
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 70
Experiments with Broadcast Television

for cosmetic reforms such as better pay and working conditions for the various

unions. In July 1968 de Gaulle returned to power with a sweeping majority, bringing

to a decisive end this revolutionary moment. As Sylvia Harvey observes, the strengths

and weaknesses of the May student movement were found in “both its search for a

more adequate and more radical analysis of daily life…and its idealistic, often

anarchic utopianism.”124 Despite the defeat, the student-led movement generated a

broader reexamination of public and private life. This included the blatantly

progovernment bias of the television and radio networks during the first few weeks of

May, which backfired, creating a reactionary, and then a revolutionary, response from

filmmakers, artists, and activists who started to make their own television. The

inflexibility of the government response helped produce a highly motivated and

multifaceted attempt to wrest control of the media production away from the

government stranglehold. Harvey writes that the “inflexible system of control within

the ORTF made any struggle within the institution, around the point of

production…impossible,” forcing debate about the principles of uncensored

information to take place from outside.125 The censorship of information forced a

sudden and substantial increase in independent and commercial alternative sources of

news and information. It also resulted in the establishment of alternative video and

television infrastructures.

In post–1968 France, filmmakers and film collectives were ideologically and

institutionally well positioned to develop avant-garde forms of television. As in West

124
Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 12.
125
Harvey, 8–9.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 71
Experiments with Broadcast Television

Germany and the United States, portable video held out the promise of a

participatory, antiestablishment medium and, in this way, became a weapon for

political activists intent on presenting alternatives to Gaullist television and radio.

Among the film collectives that emerged at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s,

Cinéthique, Chris Marker’s Slon/Iskra, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group

were undoubtedly the best-organized and most diverse. Part of a collective that

included the eponymous magazine published from 1969 to 1985, Cinéthique

embodied the 1970s ideals, or theoretical reflections on the role of cinema in the

revolutionary effort. The Dziga Vertov Group, which also included Jean-Pierre Gorin,

Gérard Martin, Nathalie Billard, and Armand Marco, grew out of the shared belief in

the necessity of “setting up a new unit that would not make political film but try to

make political film politically.”126 The revolutionary Russian filmmaker Dziga

Vertov became an avatar for a kind of filmmaking that would reveal the world in the

name of the proletariat. Adopting his name, the group’s focus was on production,

which would determine distribution and consumption. Convinced that political films

preached to the converted, members of the Dziga Vertov Group did not attempt to

enter the parallel distribution circuits that existed for them but sought new

relationships. Video and television were seen by these collectives as essential

revolutionary tools, especially in response to and revolt against the overbearing nature

of the government mouthpiece, the ORTF. Television was understood as a medium

with a completely different formal and ideological structure from film. Portable video

126
Jean-Luc Godard, quoted in New Media Encyclopedia http://www.newmedia-
art.org/english/glossaire/d.htm (accessed May 25, 2007).
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 72
Experiments with Broadcast Television

made media criticism possible for these cinema clubs, which recorded television

programs to analyze them and reveal their ideological content. A parallel ideological

reading of telecommunications is epitomized by a poster, produced by the students of

the Atelier Populaire (attached to the École des Beaux-Arts), showing barbed wire

cutting across a television screen and a helmeted policeman speaking into an ORTF

microphone with the caption “la police vous parle” (“the police are speaking to you”),

referring to the nightly news broadcasts on the state-owned television.

The lessons of May pointed in two directions: toward the individuals and

collectives that rose up in response to the oppressive government control of the media

and toward the government itself. For the government, it became clear that social and

cultural control would be exerted more effectively if some limited support was given

to oppositional voices. In 1969, Alain Jacquier, representing the ORTF’s research

department, provided equipment for improved taping and editing at the University of

Paris 8-Vincennes and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Jacquier also placed video equipment borrowed from Godard at the disposal of the

Cinéthique group. The work that emerged from the universities included a video

designed as a form of countertelevision, produced in 1970 at the École des Beaux-

Arts in Paris by Vidéo-Out, featuring Jean Genet discussing Angela Davis.127 The

very government organizations that provided these technical and institutional

facilities also met with resistance. In 1970 direct action on the part of students from

127
Information in this section is drawn from New Media Encyclopedia, “Chronological Landmarks:
The 1960s.” An online publication of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée nationale d’art moderne,
Paris; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Centre pour l’image contemporaine Saint-Gervais,
Geneva. http://www.newmedia-arts.org/english/reperes-h/70.htm (accessed February 27, 2003).
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 73
Experiments with Broadcast Television

the École des Beaux-Arts, broadcasting from a Montparnasse apartment with two

video cameras and a control panel, took the form of guerrilla television against the

ORTF monopoly. But more often these experiments took place with tacit or overt

government support. The Ligue Française de l’Enseignement taped a neighborhood

news program in Bourges with a video camera, and twenty minutes of news were

broadcast daily on a “mininetwork.” In January 1972 the conceptual artist Fred

Forest carried out a limited broadcasting of “one minute of white” on France 2,

interrupting the middle of the news on Télé-Midi.

With the necessary intellectual, political and financial resources and at a

historically propitious moment, Godard’s television work in France and Mozambique,

alone and in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, shows the limits of institutional

support as well as the restrictions of the utopian visions of the radical artists and

filmmakers turned television producers. The first published indication of Godard’s

interest in television predates the widespread distribution of portable video

equipment. In the May 1967 issue of L’avant scène du cinéma, he disclosed:

Actually, if I have a secret ambition, it is to be put in charge of the French

newsreel services. All my films have been reports on the state of the nation;
they are newsreel documents, treated in a personal manner perhaps, but in
terms of contemporary actuality.128

Later, in a 1968 interview in The Listener, Godard asserted, “If I’m making movies

it’s only because it’s impossible to make TV, because it’s ruled by governments

128
Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard. Eds. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, trans. Martin Secker and
Warburg Ltd. (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 239.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 74
Experiments with Broadcast Television

everywhere,” an acknowledgment of a barrier unnoticed by Day.129 While the events

of May 1968 contributed to Godard’s “disappearance” from film and his

“reappearence” on television, he only fully committed to television after he left Paris

in 1972 and set up a production company called Sonimage with Miéville in Grenoble,

Switzerland. In a 1975 interview in Pariscope, he told his interviewers, “My ideas

only get through on television.”130

Given the ambitious sweep of his and the Dziga Vertov Group’s agenda,

Godard’s failed projects, alone and in collaboration with the group and then with

Miéville, provide as much information as the television work that was completed and

distributed more or less as intended. In 1967 the ORTF commissioned Godard to film

an adaptation of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel

Émile—a treatise on education—to be shown on television. The work that resulted,

Le gai savoir, is an essay on the literal and conceptual need to “break down”

education. After seeing the raw footage, the ORTF pulled out of the project, and

Godard finished it with his own resources. The essay format used by Godard was

designed for the intimacy of the television screen. Additionally, by structuring the

film’s narrative over seven nights, Godard introduced the pacing of a recurring

television series. Filmed in an empty television studio in December 1967, Le gai

savoir was edited after May 1968 and released in movie theaters in 1969. It consists

of a series of dialogues between two characters, Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto) and

129
Quoted in Colin MacCabe, with Mick Eaton and Laura Mulvey, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 137.
130
Quoted in MacCabe, 137.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 75
Experiments with Broadcast Television

Émile Rousseau (Jean-Pierre Leaud), in which they set out to develop a rigorous

understanding of the relation between politics and film. Patricia is identified as the

Third World delegate to the Citroën plant in the North Atlantic, the daughter of

Patrice Emery Lumumba and a daughter of the Cultural Revolution.131 Émile is

identified as the great-great-grandson of Rousseau.

The formal strategies used by Godard to stammer, or interrupt television’s

flow, were first systematically used in Le gai savoir: extradiegetic inserts such as

interpolated video text, black leader, filmed televisions, slide viewers, slide

projections, and sound mixers are all used. As a structuring mechanism of style and

rhetoric, this visual and aural stammer destabilized the formal conventions of

broadcast television, as well as Godard’s and his characters’ positions as “invisible”

authors. Nondiegetic sound fragments such as radio static and a narration counting off

units of measurement (“8,247 frames, 22,243, 72,000, 125,000 ... about 7,500 feet.

127,000 feet”) interrupt the television studio scenes on the “first night.” Patricia

enters, dressed in red and blue, carrying a clear umbrella with yellow stripes. It is her

“antinuclear umbrella,” she explains. In the dark of the unlit studio, she trips over

Émile. He tells the broadcast audience about her, she about him. Patricia announces,

“I want to learn, to teach myself, to teach everyone that we must turn back against the

enemy that weapon with which he attacks us: Language.” “We are on TV,” Émile

replies. “Then let’s go into people’s homes and ask them what we want to know,” she

131
Patrice Emery Lumumba was the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, who was deposed, arrested, and, with the help of Western intelligence services,
later murdered by Colonel Joseph Mobutu in 1962.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 76
Experiments with Broadcast Television

replies. The camera cuts to a frame with the text in capital letters, “SAVOIR” (“to

know”), and then pans to black. A montage of street scenes and pictures ends with a

cartoon, which “identifies” Godard mathematically with zero.

Le gai savoir is Godard’s “semioclastic” effort, to adopt the term Roland

Barthes applied to the necessary job of breaking down the signs of the languages we

take for granted in order to rebuild them on stronger foundations. The film returns to

Patricia and Émile. “Let’s start from zero,” he says. Patricia points out why this is

impossible: “it is necessary to return to zero first.” “Returning to zero” involves

beginning with a rigorous interrogation of all images and sounds, in order to come up

with a new cinema that does not use the language of the old. “Images” Patricia

continues, “we meet them by chance, we don’t choose them. Knowledge will lead us

to the rules for the production of images.” The program laid out by the film becomes

the program for Godard’s subsequent productions: “The first year we collect images

and sounds and experiment. The second year we criticize all that: decompose,

recompose. The third year we attempt some small models of reborn film.”

Beginning with Le gai savoir, Godard took it as axiomatic that entry into

television was only possible within a broader consideration of the economic and

ideological divisions of labor. The project was abandoned. The Dziga Vertov Group’s

approach to filmmaking was equally, as the following excerpt of a page published in

the radical magazine Politique hebdo suggests:

During the projection of an imperialist film, the screen sells viewers the voice
of the Owner-State. This voice caresses you, puts you to sleep, or beats you
over the head. During the projection of a revisionist film, the screen is a
loudspeaker projecting a voice that had once been delegated by the people but
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 77
Experiments with Broadcast Television

which is no longer their voice. The people look silently at their own deformed
faces. During the projection of a political film, the screen is simply a
blackboard inscribed with the images and sounds produced by the concrete
analysis of a concrete situation, namely the class struggle. In front of this
screen, the population thinks, learns, struggles, criticizes, and transforms
itself.132

Through Godard’s reputation, the collective secured commissions from the television

networks, although these were often later canceled, as was the case with the BBC and

RAI.133 The Marxist polemic British Sounds (1969) was commissioned from the

Dziga Vertov Group by London Weekend Television (LWT). An audio-visual

barrage on the senses, it combined excerpts of Maoist tracts, songs by the Beatles,

excerpts from the Communist Manifesto, speeches by Richard Nixon, and Georges

Pompidou.134 In this period, Godard set out to rigorously and self-reflexively

interrogates the primary characteristics of his film and television work, trying to

begin from “point zero.” This took the shape of an onslaught of questions launched at

the film or television audience by the onscreen characters, or of interruptions to the

film or television that throws its illusionistic space into doubt. LWT canceled its

contract, and, like Le gai savoir, Godard recycled The Dziga Vertov Group’s

television program into a film that was distributed through universities, art-house

cinemas, and film festivals.

132
Quoted in “Dziga Vertov Group.” http://newmedia-arts.net/english/glossaire/d.htm (accessed June
5, 2008).
133
In December 1968, Godard was commissioned to develop a project for Radio-Nord in Québec
entitled Communications. Several programs, recorded on video, were to be transferred to film for the
broadcast; the quality of the result was “deemed inadequate” by Radio-Nord, and it never aired. I have
come across as-of-yet unverified references to commissions by German television that were also aired.
134
From 1968 onward London Weekend Television (LWT) was the British ITV television network
franchise holder for London and the South East on weekends, broadcasting from Fridays at 5:15 p.m.
(prior to 1982 at 7:00 p.m.) to Monday mornings at 5:59 a.m.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 78
Experiments with Broadcast Television

For Godard and Miéville, Sonimage “does not claim to be anything more than

a workshop in which one can pose to oneself these problems in a practical

fashion.”135 With this production company, they set out to become producers of both

television programs and television programming. They understood Sonimage to be

the first component of a new and different distribution system, in which television

programs would no longer come from a producer and go to a government- or

corporate-controlled television broadcaster. Rather, the television infrastructure

would follow a cooperative model, and programming would be available through a

horizontal network of producers. Furthermore, they set out to alter the relation

between spectator and spectacle, which would be premised on new ways of thinking

about the interaction between representation and reality.

In 1975, Godard and Miéville shot Six fois deux: Sur et sous la

communication, a series of twelve programs for France 2 totaling about one-hundred

minutes. Coproduced by the Institut National d’Audiovisuel and Sonimage, it aired in

July and August 1976. Its subject was the professional production of television

images and how these images influence the way the audience sees the world and their

place within it. Two themes that grew out of this subject were the process of

communication and labor. The title referred to the primary organization of the

series—six sets of two complementary broadcasts. Within each set of two, one show

was referred to as a “night” show, the other “day.” In the first show of the first set

(1a), Y’a personne (Nobody’s There), Godard interviewed unemployed workers who

135
Quoted in MacCabe, 139.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 79
Experiments with Broadcast Television

had responded to a help-wanted ad placed by Sonimage, advertising a job in a private

television and film production company. Y’a personne focused on the job search

process and the notions of employment and of work, or use of time—that is time lost

or found or earned—that disappears into daily time.

In an interview with Cahiers du cinéma Gilles Deleuze said:

In the TV programs, Godard’s questions always engage people directly. They

disorient us, the viewers, but not whoever he’s talking to….He talks with
workers not as a boss, or another worker, or an intellectual, or a director
talking with actors. It’s nothing to do with adopting their tone, in a wily sort
of way.…It’s as though, in a way, he’s always stammering. Not stammering in
this words, but stammering in language itself.136

The two main interviewees were an unemployed housekeeper and a welder. Godard

barraged them with seemingly obvious questions: what were they prepared to sell and

buy? The welder was prepared to sell his work as a welder, but not his sexuality as

an older woman’s lover. The cleaning lady was prepared to sell her time spent

cleaning, but wouldn’t sell a moment spent singing a fragment of “L’internationale.”

“Why?” Godard presses. Because she cannot sing? But what if someone were to pay

her for talking about not being able to sing? Questions about the artificial divisions

between labor and leisure defined another episode, Marcil (3b). Marcil, a clock

maker, wanted to be paid for his efforts as a clock maker but refused to be paid for his

work as an amateur filmmaker, which he called a “hobby.” The footage shot by

Sonimage showed, however, that the movements he made in performing the two

activities, evident first in the clock making sequence and then in the film-editing

sequence, were so similar that one could be mistaken for the other. As Deleuze

136
Deleuze, 37–38.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 80
Experiments with Broadcast Television

remarks, “[h]e [Godard] doesn’t say we should give true information, nor that labor

should be well paid….He says these notions are very suspect. He writes FALSE

beside them.”137

“On television, the audience has been invented before the program.”138 For

Colin MacCabe, the central question regarding Godard and Sonimage’s television

work is its watchability: in unmaking the “snares of identification operated by

systems of signification in which production and consumption are rigorously

divorced,” Godard and Sonimage raise the problem of the audience’s pleasure.139

This conundrum surfaces in response to film, television, and institutions that, because

they “[entertain] by erasing, give pleasure in exchange for being [and] hide their own

work so the spectator can relax.” Thus, it is difficult “to argue for Godard’s work in

film and television, for the knowledge and desire that they incite…is to ignore the

problem, less banal than it might appear, of boredom.”140 Here MacCabe addresses,

but from a different perspective, the same issue inadvertently raised by Day’s more

simplistic and vicious attack on the U.S. television audience. Instead of dismissing

the audience as willingly narcotized automatons, MacCabe interrogates the avant-

garde’s refusal of pleasure.

In a very real sense, French national television failed to distribute both Six fois

deux and another series commissioned from Sonimage, France/tour/détour/deux

137
Ibid., 41.
138
“A la television, on a inventé le téléspectateur avant les programmes.” Jean-Luc Godard, “Les
années video (1975 à 1980),” Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard Édition établi par Alain Bergala
(Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma-Éditions de L’Étoile, 1985), 406.
139
MacCabe, 146.
140
MacCabe, 147.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 81
Experiments with Broadcast Television

enfants: neither were programmed as their producers intended, in half-hour slots on

“regular,” or mainstream television.141 Six fois deux was broadcast on the

“alternative” third channel in July and August, when much of the population of

France was on vacation and presumably away from their televisions. Similarly,

France/tour/detour/deux/enfants did not receive its half-hour slot; instead, it was set

off from the rest of the broadcast day as the work of a famous film director and was

scheduled in the late night (11 p.m.) “art cinema” spot, with the three programs every

week on consecutive Fridays.142 Ironically, much of the labor that went into

Sonimage’s television refused the authority of authorship. The “we” of collective

authorship remained not a silent force whose decision-making processes remained

invisible but became part of the critique. The programming gets to the heart of the

problems of Sonimage’s television work and its attempts to bring about structural

change to the system of media production and distribution.

In 1977–78 the newly installed revolutionary Marxist government of

Mozambique granted Sonimage a two-year contract to study, on video, the television

needs of the country. With a national television broadcasting system coming in a year

or two, the filmmaker Ruy Guerra—recently returned from Brazil to assume the

directorship of the new national film institute—approached both Godard and the

141
Six fois deux was followed by a second television series commissioned by the French government,
France/tour/détour/deux enfants, another twelve-part series. In this series, Godard followed two
children, siblings, over the course of their day-to-day lives while relentlessly interrogating both their
actions and their context.
142
David Levi Strauss, “‘Oh, Socrates’: Visible Crisis in the Video and Television Work of Jean-Luc
Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville,” Artscribe International, no. 74 (March, April 1989): 62.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 82
Experiments with Broadcast Television

filmmaker Jean Rouch on behalf of the government.143 Their mandate was twofold: to

help Mozambique avoid the technological and ideological traps of dependency on

television coming out of Western countries and to demonstrate the full potential of

television to a new nation.144 As the minister of information remarked in presenting

plans for the first phase of experimentation:

We know from the experience of other countries that television determines

very high indexes of dependence; technological dependence and political
dependence. For this reason, our fundamental preoccupation is to carry out
this experimental phase to be able to evaluate to what extent technological and
political dependence makes itself felt in a project of this nature.145

Mozambique appeared to be an opportunity to develop a broadcasting system from

the ground up, with the support of a revolutionary Marxist government. It seemed to

offer Sonimage the chance to implement what they understood to be primary

questions, such as What image? or An image of what? To prepare the ground for the

radical television, Sonimage interrogated what kinds of images would be reflective of

the nascent African nation. Their findings would be incorporated into the new,

national television system. Working with Carlos Gambo, the official in charge of

television at Mozambique’s ministry of information, Sonimage was contracted to

develop five studies, which were to be shot in video. The first and last were slated to

be narrated from the combined viewpoints of Godard as producer and Miéville as

143
Ruy Guerra is primarily known for his innovative work in Brazil’s cinema novo movement during
the 1960s and early 1970s. Born in Mozambique (a Portuguese colony at the time), Guerra became a
left-wing political activist, taking part in antiracist and proindependence demonstrations. After leaving
Mozambique in 1951, he studied filmmaking at the IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes
Cinematographiques) in Paris. He made his directorial debut with The Unscrupulous Ones (1962), one
of cinema novo’s few mainstream successes.
144
Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992), 99.
145
Quoted in Michèle Mattelart and Armand Mattelart, “‘Small’ Technologies: The Case of
Mozambique,” Journal of Communication, 32 Issue 2 (June 1982): 76.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 83
Experiments with Broadcast Television

commentator. The third, fourth, and fifth were scheduled to be shot from the

perspectives of the producer, commentator, and businessman. Godard and Miéville

“wanted the viewer to participate in the production of images, instead of being a mere

recipient of messages sent by the producer.”146 With this series, they wanted the

citizens of Mozambique to profit from an audio-visual context that predated

television, even if only for a period of twenty years, before being inundated by

images.147

As Manthia Diawara suggests, “maybe Godard wasn’t even interested in

producing these images…but what people were expecting…was at least some

examples of these images.”148 In a journal entry in September 1978, following his

second stay, Godard described his project:

Sonimage’s proposal to Mozambique is to make use of its audiovisual

situation to study television before it even exists, before it begins to invade
(even if it takes twenty years) the entire social and geographical makeup of
the country…By studying the desire for images and their distribution by
waves (or cables). By studying, once and for all, the production, before the
distribution takes over. By studying the programs before they become a mould
in which the spectators are caught, no longer aware that they are behind the
television (being trailed behind) and not in front of it as they thought…149

Ultimately, Sonimage was unable to produce the images they were looking for in

Mozambique. Godard and Miéville were criticized for the prohibitive cost of the

project, which was shelved before year’s end. They produced nothing.

146
Diawara, African Cinema, 100.
147
Jean-Luc Godard, “Le dernier rêve d’un producteur,” Cahiers du cinema, no. 300 (May 1979): 73.
148
Manthia Diawara, “Sonimage in Mozambique,” in I Said I Love. That is the Promise: The TVideo
Politics of Jean-Luc Godard, eds. Gareth James and Florian Zeyfang (Berlin: oe + b books, 2003),
111.
149
Michèle Mattelart and Armand Mattelart, “‘Small’ Technologies: The Case of Mozambique,”
Journal of Communication, Vol. 32 Issue 2 (June 1982): 78–79.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 84
Experiments with Broadcast Television

In an interview with MacCabe, Godard’s responses to questions regarding the

failure of the Mozambique project do not pinpoint the precise moment of the project’s

failure. Rather, they comment on the unattainable nature of a utopian imaginary:

Is there a chance of setting up a different kind of television in

Mozambique?
There was a chance. A chance. It’s over.
Could you explain that?
It’s too far away and the chance is over because it’s a country….It’s
like a possibility. It’s rather well-defined in the beginning and then afterwards
when you say it’s not possible, it was not possible to go on then it becomes
difficult to say….TV is too big.

As Godard puts it, the chance for a “different kind of television” may have existed at

one time, and it may exist in the future, but it cannot exist in the present moment.

While Godard’s different kind of television is an ideal state, its failure is nevertheless

grounded in concrete conditions. Sonimage was invited to come to Mozambique to

help conceive of a television that was based, in part, in a new, Marxist, African

nation-state. For Godard, the failure of such a project was the result of Mozambique’s

status as a nation-state, as well as of the enormity of television as an institutional

form.

1.5 Conclusion

As Jacques Derrida observes, technology is not merely an instrument for engaging in

politics. Rather, without it, the political and the futures it claims to bring forth would

simply never emerge.150 In the mid- to late-1960s, filmmakers, video artists, and

activists saw the Sony Portapak as a new form of technology whose development

150
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, trans. Samuel Weber (New York: Routledge,
2002), 56–57.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 85
Experiments with Broadcast Television

held out potentially revolutionary possibilities. Around the time of its release, they set

out to establish an avant-garde counterpart to an institution that had become

synonymous with mass media, broadcast television. The goals for this new avant-

garde were no less than utopian: to rip through the tissue of broadcast television’s

programming, to expose its audience to the ideological contradictions that lay at its

institutional base, and to renew democratic expression. Mass-culture institutions such

as public television in the United States and government-run television in West

Germany, France, and Mozambique temporarily made an opening for those

attempting such an endeavor. The emergence and explosive growth of avant-garde

television was shaped in the United States by the priorities of supporters such as the

Rockefeller Foundation and artists such as Paik; in West Germany through the

precedent established by the successful collaboration between avant-garde musicians

and government-run radio; in France through the radicalization brought about in part

by the complete failure of the ORTF to adequately represent the events of May 1968;

and in Mozambique through the unique opportunity presented to Sonimage by the

new Marxist government to imagine television at “point zero.” Fredric Jameson

describes utopia as both a failure of imagination and as something that is intrinsically

unimaginable, an “allegorical structure [that] is built into the very forward movement

of the Utopian impulse itself, which always points to something other…which always

calls out structurally for completion and exegesis.”151 Utopia is no place, and as such

is always not only impossible to grasp but also longed for in hindsight. In this

151
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 142.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 86
Experiments with Broadcast Television

chapter, I have focused on the failed efforts by individuals and groups to imagine and

then realize new relations between the political and artistic avant-garde and broadcast

television. Their utopias failed on multiple levels.

One critical failing was Paik’s idealization of technology as an element that

trumped all others, as a guiding force for positive, transformative change. Negt and

Kluge point out that an effective critique of television must “elucidate the connection

between television production and the laws that govern production as a whole.”

Moreover, neither written nor oral criticism is enough: “Products can be attacked only

with counterproducts.”152 As Negt and Kluge understood very well, the

government’s stake in media does not automatically coincide with the imperatives of

democracy. In the struggle for control of television, when competing ideological

interests emerged between the government and the governed, it did so either as a

direct conflict or through the more indirect refusal to let the avant-garde stray outside

the confines of “art” and into the mass-media stream. The avant-garde, for its part,

maintained an intrinsic distrust of the mass media, the constituency it served—the

masses—and the manner in which the mass media provided the pleasures of

identification. This mistrust ended up supporting the perception of the mass audience

as dupes. Furthermore, instead of producing lasting revolutionary change, it

reinforced the unfortunate perception of commercial broadcast television’s audience

as a body that lies outside of the democratic process, as a “focus group” whose

influence on policy decisions is nil.

152
Negt and Kluge, 103.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 87
Experiments with Broadcast Television

Finally, this failure emerges in the reception of avant-garde television after the

fact. The difficulty of telling its history becomes, in turn, an account in which the

disciplines of art history, television studies, and film studies inadvertently suppress

avant-garde television in order to remain intact. Art history maintains the dominance

of the museum as the primary institution for the avant-garde. As Martha Rosler

remarks, “the ‘museumization’ of video has meant the consistent neglect by art-world

writers…of the relation between ‘video art’ and broadcasting.”153 And video critic

Martha Gever observes that the disavowal of “the specter of mass media” in art

history proves the “inadequacy of video history conceived as art history.”154 Art

history is not alone in its failure to acknowledge the complexity of avant-garde

television’s brief emergence and subsequent disappearance: years later Lynn Spigel

notes the silence of television studies when it comes to video art as a category when

she writes: “It seems particularly important for popular television (and television

studies) to engage more with the work being done in video and to think about why

video and television (both the producers and the critics) have remained so completely

detached from one another.”155 Constance Penley’s dismissal of art video’s attempt to

interrupt television’s “seemingly univocal truth about the world” as a “minor

exception” is representative of this failure.156 “Oddly enough,” Spigel continues, “in

the late 1960s art was simply assigned a new word—video—that made it distinct

153
Rosler, 33.
154
Martha Gever, “Pressure Points: Video in the Public Sphere,” Art Journal 45, no. 3 (1985): 240.
155
Lynn Spigel, “High Culture in Low Places: Television and Modern Art, 1950-1970,” in
Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, eds. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 341.
156
Constance Penley, “Les Enfants de la Patrie,” Camera Obscura nos. 8, 9, 10 (Fall 1982), 54.
 Utopian Imaginaries of the Avant-garde: 1960s and 1970s 88
Experiments with Broadcast Television

from television.…” Consequently, “in critical circles, the logic of the high and low

distinction became wedded to medium specificity arguments….”157 And film studies

retains the place of the auteur by claiming that Godard disappeared when he strayed

outside the bounds of film and authorship with Sonimage.

These failures would seem to support Daniels’ assertion that television’s

vigorous and highly militant avant-garde failed to provide a “lasting cultural asset to

be preserved for future generations.” As Spigel, Gever, Rosler, and Sturken

contends, avant-garde television mutates into video art, and video art becomes the

property of the museum. However, Daniel’s observation could be rephrased, more

productively. Instead of saying that avant-garde television produced “no lasting

cultural asset,” I would continue by asking, What are the consequences of this failure

for its descendent, video art? In the following chapters, I consider some of the

unresolved “problems” of avant-garde television: the television audience, the shift in

institutional context, and virtuality.

157
Spigel, 341.
 89

Chapter 2
Between Distraction and Attention:
What Does It Mean for Movement to Be Public?

What does it mean for space to be public?

— Rosalyn Deutsche

2.1 Introduction: “Seeing-In”1

In 2003, the art critic David Beech identified a handicap suffered by Jean-Luc

Godard’s work, following Godard’s decision to enter television in the late 1960s:

[Culturally,] TV is the poor cousin of the cinema.…Movies may have once

been an exemplary form of mass culture, but TV broadcasting cemented mass
culture to daily routines of everyday life. Leaving the cinema for TV involves
adjusting to the pervasively domestic.…In short, you can’t make TV without
acknowledging…the infelicitous condition of its reception. Cinemagoers are
concentrated viewers who volunteer their time, whereas TV viewers are often
distracted onlookers whose time you are sharing. Typical forms of attention of
the TV viewer, then, will almost be the exact inverse of the ideal art lover
(that instructive figment of the imagination who [the philosopher] Richard
Wollheim has accurately summed up as an “adequately informed and sensitive
spectator”).2

Richard Wollheim’s study of the spectator’s experience of painting turned on what he

describes as the innate psychological capacity of “seeing-in,” or of perceiving in a

painted surface the represented subject, which the surface was understood to be

distinct from but to which it could be related. Wollheim accounts for the

expressiveness of painting’s depiction with the concept of projection, where the

viewer comes to see a piece of the external world as corresponding to an inward state

of mind. By referring to Wollheim’s work on the relation between painting and its

1
A phrase used by Richard Wollheim to describe looking at paintings.
2
David Beech, “Is Godard a Philistine?,” in I Said I Love. That is the Promise: The TVideo Politics of
Jean-Luc Godard, eds. Gareth James and Florian Zeyfang (Berlin: oe + b books, 2003), 31–32.
 Between Distraction and Attention: 90
What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

audience, Beech equates the cinematic experience with a form of attention typically

reserved for a work of art, or what Wollheim’s “suitably informed and sensitive

spectator can be expected to have on looking at the artist’s picture.”3 Earlier on, Max

Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno described this active engagement as art’s

redemptive power, which was instrumental to the construction of consciousness.4 For

Horkheimer and Adorno, looking at art required work from the individual. The

reward for this labor was a flowering of consciousness: “[Immanuel] Kant’s

formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate

the varied experiences of the senses to fundamental concepts….”5 Thus, in bestowing

the compliment of this kind of attention on cinema, Beech transfers cinema from the

category of mass media to high art. This categorization reinforces Godard’s position

as an “auteur” director of arthouse cinema, notwithstanding his work in television. It

also points to a key element used to distinguish high culture from mass culture,

namely the well-informed and attentive audience of high culture.

For Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry, as an arm of predatory

capitalism, robbed the distracted masses of the secret Kantian “mechanism in the soul

which prepared direct intuition in such a way that they could be fitted into a system of

pure reason.”6 Beech’s characterization of the television audience as distracted

onlookers also echoes Walter Benjamin’s reference to the commonplace and ancient

3
Richard Wollheim, “What the Spectator Sees,” in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, eds.
Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 103.
4
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1947,
New York: Continuum, 1997), 124.
5
Horkheimer and Adorno, 124–125.
6
Horkheimer and Adorno, 124.
 Between Distraction and Attention: 91
What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

lament that “the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the

spectator.”7 Exemplary of this lament, for Benjamin, was the writer and critic

Georges Duhamel’s outrage over moviegoing, a “pastime for helots, a diversion for

uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures…a spectacle which requires no

concentration and presupposes no intelligence, which kindles no light in the heart and

awakens no hope….”8 Duhamel was railing against the Hollywood cinema audience

in the early twentieth century, whereas Beech, as I point out earlier, was writing about

television audiences. Nevertheless, these writers’ consistent pairing of attention with

art and distraction with mass culture across multiple historical moments and three

distinct media (painting, film, and television) is instructive. Furthermore, these

correlations between mass culture and its distracted audience precede and follow film.

In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Kant defines distraction as

follows: “Distraction…is the state of diverting attention…from certain ruling ideas by

means of shifting to other dissimilar ideas. If the distraction is intentional, it is called

dissipation; if it is called involuntary it is absentmindedness [absentia]….”9 In

discussing distraction, Kant remarks that “the reading of novels, in addition to

causing many other mental discords, has also the consequence that it makes

distraction habitual.”10 Not only did novel reading make distraction a habit, it created

what Kant described as a “lack of attention to the present,” bereaving (in Gasché’s

7
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed,
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken Books 1973), 239.
8
Quoted in Benjamin, 239.
9
Quoted in Rodolfe Gasché, “Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin’s ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction
and Experience, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994), 199.
10
Quoted in Gasché, 199.
 Between Distraction and Attention: 92
What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

words) the subject of “self-presence.”11 Elsewhere, the television scholar Margaret

Morse binds attention or its lack to specific spatial and temporal contexts when she

defines distraction as a state of mind that results from an incomplete process of spatial

and temporal separation and interiorization.12

Beech’s summation of the broadcast television audience and its daily routine

draws on the tradition of critical theory that reaches back to an Enlightenment

philosophy of aesthetics. In the light of the work done on television audiences by

scholars from cultural studies and television studies, his methodology is also, to put it

politely, regressive. Furthermore, it carries forward the one-dimensional caricature of

this audience as a semiconscious corporate product that was formed by makers of

avant-garde television and their supporters in the agonistic phase of the movement in

the mid- to late-1970s.13 At the time, avant-garde television’s producers and

supporters were not alone in their dismissal of the mass audience. Hans Magnus

Enzensberger observed that by the 1960s the New Left had reduced the emergence of

electronic media to one concept: manipulation.14 This was ultimately a defensive

strategy—behind which lay a sense of impotence—that created no incentive to go

beyond attacking existing property relations. As Martha Rosler points out in her

11
Rodolfe Gasché, “Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and
Experience, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994), 199.
12
Margaret Morse, “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, The Mall and Television,”
Logics of Television, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 202.
13
Godard’s television work comes from this period, although its response to the television audience is
much more complex than Beech’s analysis would lead its reader to suppose. See Colin MacCabe, with
Mick Eaton and Laura Mulvey. Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1980).
14
See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” in The Consciousness
Industry: On Literature, Politics and Media, ed. Michael Roloff, trans. Stuart Hood (New York:
Seabury Press, 1974), 95–128.
 Between Distraction and Attention: 93
What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

review of experimental video from this period, proponents rarely explained the

defense of creating truly separate spheres for art and commercial culture, which

would share only a technological bond: instead, they flatly asserted the escape from

commercial broadcast television and its “passive” audience through video art.15 These

assumptions shored up the avant-garde position while cultivating a form of learned

helplessness. The remainder of this dissertation addresses some of the consequences

that result from the collapse of avant-garde television. As I note at the conclusion of

the last chapter, assertions such as Dieter Daniels’—that avant-garde television

produced “no lasting cultural asset”—lack heuristic value. By continuing to ask the

same sets of questions—How does mass media manipulate its audience? How can art

pull the television audience out of the state of stupor it has been lulled into by

capitalist programming?—critics of expanded television continue to arrive at the

same answers as earlier critics of broadcast television: watching television is escape

from labor rather than an integral part of labor. The audience is a commodity.

Televisions found in public spaces are contaminants, destroying the pristine spaces of

the public sphere. The slack-jawed consumer of expanded television cannot be a full

participant in the democratic process. In so doing these critics shore up a position that

had already been established.

More recently, David Joselit included avant-garde television in a broader

analysis of the art and activism produced on and for network television in the 1960s

and 1970s. Joselit turns in part to Fredric Jameson’s model of cognitive mapping for

15
Rosler, 49.
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his methodology.16 For Jameson, cultural objects are the sites of political possibility,

or the sites of potential cognitive maps. His political project shows how cognitive

mapping provides an escape from the debilitating logic of late capitalism, or

postmodernism: “Cognitive mapping [is] the invention of ways of using one object

and one reality to get a mental grasp of something else which one cannot represent or

imagine.”17 Joselit set out to map the “differential capitalization” of network

television, art, and activism, as well as the “benefits and perils of entering [network

television’s] integrated ecology from different points (as artist, activist and

guerrilla).”18 Taking it as axiomatic that there is no longer a position outside

capitalism in the United States, Joselit returns to certain events in video at mid-

century that ruptured network television and launched counterpublics from within: the

artist Nam June Paik’s experiments, alongside televised disturbances by the militant

African American organization the Black Panthers, the acid guru Timothy Leary, the

yippie collective the Diggers, and the actor and director Melvin van Peebles. Joselit’s

analysis of this constellation of counterpublics challenges “current [art historical]

methodologies…that…continue to be guided by fantasies of revolution and

subversion whose blatant impracticality renders them either cynically opportunistic or

childishly naïve.”19 These methodologies produced the regressive analysis of

16
Jameson asserts that multinational capitalism has created such a complex web of
telecommunications, telemarketing and mobile services that the subject becomes mesmerized within
the network of the image. This system is so large that the only way to become oriented, to find our
social position and class relations in this spatial and social confusion, is to rely on cognitive mapping.
17
Anders Stephanson, “Regarding Postmodernism: A Conversation with Fredric Jameson,” in Social
Text, No. 21, “Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism” (1989): 20.
18
David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), xii.
19
Joselit, xii.
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audiences that I refer to above—in the 1960s and 1970s as well as in the twenty-first

century. They are instrumental to the relation that has been consistently established

between the attentive audience and high culture and between the distracted audience

and mass culture.

As Walter Benjamin has shown, architecture is “received” by its habitual user

in a state of distraction. Recent scholarship in television studies and architectural

theory has focused on both the presence of television in certain forms of transitional

public spaces and the way in which television has informed the form and reception of

architecture; urban planning; and the networks of community, transportation, and

commerce from suburbs and exurbs to highways and commercial strips. The

ubiquitous presence of television and the changes to architecture and civic planning

are among the more recent hybrids between electronic media and architecture that I

characterize as expanded television. Just as Gene Youngblood described new forms

of expanded cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the term expanded

television I refer to the way in which television has now literally, as well as

theoretically, entered into and shaped our public realms as well as our domestic

spaces. Some theorists and critics who consider the users of expanded television

repeat the spectacular analytic failure of supporters and producers of avant-garde

television. They continue to bemoan what they describe as expanded television’s

inhibiting role in the formation of democracy, as well as the diminished cognitive

capacity of its public. As I show, these analyses are transferred from descriptions of
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audiences watching television to the “bad temporality” produced by a distracted

public in motion.

Public video art takes place within this new, expanded field of television. In

this new television architecture, notwithstanding (or maybe because of) its status as

bad public space, lies the unfinished business of avant-garde television. In

contemporary public video art made in and for public spaces the divide between good

(attentive) and bad (distracted) audiences is renewed.20 Rosalyn Deutsche challenged

received ideas concerning the formation of the public sphere when she asked, “what

does it mean for space to be public?”21 I take up Joselit’s argument that a formal

analysis has political ramifications by rephrasing Deutsche’s question—What does it

mean for movement to be public? A reading of the public temporality of public video

art and its relation to movement turns up the following: First, readings of both

modern and contemporary temporalities of the public characterize public movement

as both repressive and antidemocratic. What forms of temporality govern this

movement? Second, given the intent of high culture to command conscious

attention—or, as Rodolfe Gasché puts it, the “self-consciousness of the (bourgeois)

individual”—public art has historically turned away from its built-in audience (the

distracted passerby) in favor of making an appeal to the more traditional art audience

(Wollheim’s adequately informed and sensitive spectator).22 How would public video

art address or incorporate an audience that receives a work of art in a state of

20
By public video art I refer to any video art that is not intended for the museum.
21
Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 269.
22
Gasché, 198.
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distraction, the “infelicitous condition of its reception” described by Beech? This

chapter considers how the structure of public video artworks such as Stan Douglas’s

1997 proposal for an outdoor installation in Zwolle, the Netherlands, or Paul

Pfeiffer’s Orpheus Descending (2001), a work that was set in the transitional spaces

of the World Trade Center and the World Financial Center in New York City, take

into consideration the distracted passerby. It will contrast them with examples of

public video art that take the museum audience outside and onto the street, such as

Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers (2007). How do these works consider the mobile subject

that does not stop to look at a work of art? Finally, what insight do these works

provide about the conditions of labor and leisure, production and consumption that

come together to organize the time forms created?

2.2 Distraction and the Television Audience

The presumed failure of supporters and producers of avant-garde television in the

1960s and 1970s—and supporters and producers of video art from the 1980s

onward—to address the relation between broadcast television and its audience

becomes more serious with the realization that cultural studies (in the United States

and the United Kingdom), as well as television studies, had been hard at work

redefining established ideas about mass media’s relation to its public before, during,

and after avant-garde television’s emergence. This work begins with Raymond

Williams, who points out that in the nineteenth century the phrase “the masses”

evolved into the new equivalent of “the mob,” inheriting all of its negative

characteristics: “gullibility, fickleness, herd-prejudice, lowness of taste and habit. The

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masses, on this evidence, formed the perpetual threat to culture.”23 James Carey

elaborates on Williams’ rejection of the term “mass” as it informed the mass

communications paradigm. Carey suggests that Williams thought the label “mass

culture” was disastrous, for three reasons:

First, it limits study to a few specialized areas such as broadcasting and film
and what is miscalled “popular literature”.…Second, the term “mass” has
become lodged in our language in its weakest sense—the mass
audience.…Third, because the audience was conceived as a mass, the only
question worth asking was how, and then whether, film, television, or books
influenced or corrupted people.24

In other words, because of a failure in heuristics, the only question asked of popular

media became how it manipulates audiences, as my histories of avant-garde television

in chapter 1 conclusively demonstrate. Beginning with Williams, this heuristics of

manipulation begins to lose its aura of inevitability.

Williams considered the description of these new forms of social

communication, “mass media,” to be not only classist and theoretically limited but

inaccurate, since it was “an abstraction to its most general characteristic, that is went

to many people, ‘the masses.’ This obscured the fact that the means chosen was

radios and television sets placed in individual homes, a method much better described

by the earlier word ‘broadcasting.’”25 Williams called for alternative ways of

speaking and writing about communications media that would allow for their

democratic potential. Along with Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall did not

23
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 17801950 (1958, New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 298.
24
James W. Carey, Communications as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1989), 40–41.
25
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974, Hanover: Wesleyan
University Press, 1992), 16–17.
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think of television as an ultimate power source that manipulated a faceless mob’s

collective behavior and consciousness. Instead, they insisted on looking at what

audiences did with broadcast television and how broadcast television formed the

means through which people expressed their culture. Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy

(1957) and William’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) demonstrate

that industrially produced media are not simply forced on the “masses” but are used

by people as a material source for communication and the creation of communities.

Hall’s influential essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973)

provides a theory of circuits and reciprocal relations between media and their

audiences.26 Hall argues that media are hegemonic institutions that work to arrive at

an essentially conservative social consensus by absorbing dissent and conflict.

Audiences do not all respond to and interpret media texts in the same way. Instead of

simply being affected or persuaded by media messages, they “decode” media

according to their own social backgrounds and identities. Because of this, audiences

do not necessarily accept the dominant ideologies offered in mainstream media.27

In No Respect (1989), the cultural studies scholar Andrew Ross counters the

more well-known, conspiratorial view of mass, or popular, culture with a version of

26
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson,
Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128–38: an edited extract from Stuart
Hall, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” CCCS stencilled occasional paper no. 7
(Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973).
27
Following Williams, Hoggart, and Hall, many television scholars in the humanities steadfastly
refused ideas of the “mass” audience, or an anonymous collective with statistically predictable
responses and behaviors. Rather, they took an anthropological approach to evaluate ideas about the
audience, culture, and their interrelationships. In 1986 David Morley wrote Family Television:
Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, which demonstrated the value of studying television audiences
in the home, in order to understand the way family dynamics can influence the experience of watching
television.
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Hall’s theory of circuits and reciprocal relations.28 Instead of understanding popular

culture as either “imposed on a passive populace like so much standardized fodder”

or as “an authentic expression of the interests of the people,” Ross pointed out that

ambivalence about intellectuals and the role of the expert permeates popular culture.29

Artifacts of popular culture (his examples include the stand-up comedy of Bill Cosby

and the films of Rodney Dangerfield) contain narratives that disrespect and oppose

authority, even while providing common-sense “explanations” for the status quo,

ultimately, such narratives thus maintain respect for authority. In other words, popular

culture neither provides a unified perspective nor, Ross argues, tells its audience what

to think. Popular culture, in other words, makes a dialectical appeal to its audience for

both self-respect and support for authority. To make sense of this dialectic, the

intellectual or high culture must necessarily be involved in any study of mass culture.

In the 1980s, feminist cultural studies influenced the direction of qualitative as

well as ethnographic audience-based research on television.30 By the early 1990s, the

major preoccupation of television scholarship was the analysis of audience culture(s),

not only within the context of hegemony but also in relation to theories of everyday

28
Because of the U.S. adaptation of German critical theory’s Kulturpessemismus, Ross decides to use
the term popular instead of mass culture in order to distance himself from, for example, Stuart Ewen
and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1982) and Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass
Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). While Ross understood the
need to challenge the general use of mass culture as part of a struggle against cultural pessimism, he
also argued that this usage, along with pop and popular culture often had (and still has), specific or
local meanings in relation to production, consumption, philosophy and so forth.
29
Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 4.
30
For example: Angela McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique,” Screen
Education 34 (1980): 37–49; Janice Radway Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular
Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas: Soap
Operas and the Melodramatic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1985).
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life. Michel de Certeau’s Practices of Everyday Life (1984) provided fertile ground

for media scholars interested in assessing how people actually used the goods of late

capitalism to make their own culture.31 With the work of Patrice Petro, Lynn Spigel,

and Tania Modleski, binaries of the “right” and “wrong” forms of art and mass

culture audience as well as leisure (domestic) and labor (public) break down. In a

1986 article considering the disciplinary tensions between film and television studies,

Petro writes, “The difference between art and mass culture—understood by means of

a ‘natural’ opposition between activity and passivity—has long been assumed in our

theories of culture.”32 Petro denaturalizes these categories by pointing out that

theoretical discussions of art and mass culture are almost always accompanied
by gendered metaphors which link “masculine” values of production, activity,
and attention with art, and “feminine” values of consumption, passivity, and
distraction with mass culture.

Published in 1992, Spigel’s Make Room for TV works at the binaries of leisure and

labor, domestic and public, by following the spatial changes that took place in the

1950s, when television replaced the fireplace and the piano as the central focus of

family entertainment. Spigel uses Benjamin’s formulation of distraction to help

account for the reconfigured patterns of leisure and labor that were produced in the

home, in part, by television’s programming structure. According to Spigel, television

networks worked with the semiconscious state of receptivity, or with the “distracted

onlooker,” when they promoted “a state of ‘utopian forgetfulness’” through which the

31
John Fiske’s Television Culture (1988), Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers: Television Fans and
Participatory Culture (1992), David Morley’s Television Audiences and Cultural Studies (1992) and
Roger Silverstone’s Television and Everyday Life (1994) as well as edited collections such as Spigel
and Denise Mann’s Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (1992).
32
Patrice Petro, “Mass Culture and the Feminine: The ‘Place’ of Television in Film Studies,” Cinema
Journal 25, no. 3 (Spring, 1986): 6.
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housewife could move “freely between her work and the act of watching

television.”33 “Where did the morning go?” became advertising headlines, spoken by

an ad agency’s version of the distracted housewife and mother who is unable to

account for the passage of her work day.34

As Modleski writes, both watching television and working at home could only

be accomplished in a state of distraction: “a distracted or distractable state of mind is

crucial to the housewife’s efficient function in her real situation, and at this level

television and its so-called distractions, along with the particular forms they take, are

intimately bound up with women’s work.”35 This more nuanced analysis of the

fragmented and interdependent relation between labor and leisure within domestic

space takes the distracted reception of television to be an integral component of the

rhythm of work, rather than a retreat from it. The responsibility of the housewife to

the emotional and material needs of her family, Modleski continues required that

she must be prepared to drop what she is doing in order to cope with various
conflicts and problems the moment they arise. Unlike most workers in the
labor force, the housewife must beware of concentrating her energies
exclusively on any one task—otherwise, the dinner could burn or the baby
could crack its skull.…Daytime television plays a part in habituating women
to distraction, interruption, and spasmodic toil….Indeed, I would argue that
the flow of daytime television reinforces the very principle of interruptability
crucial to the proper functioning of women in the home.36

33
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 85–86.
34
The ad copy went on to list all the TV shows that organized a housewife’s day from breakfast to bed.
Spigel, 87.
35
Tania Modleski, “The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work,” in
Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, The American Film
Institute Monograph Series, Vol. 2 (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1984), 74.
36
Modleski, 70–71.
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Modleski, like Spigel, stresses that reception in a state of distraction marks both the

experience of domestic labor as a productive force and the consumption of mass

culture. She elaborates on this connection between television programming,

distraction, and labor by maintaining that the discontinuous, often fragmented nature

of daytime soap operas is organized around the rhythm of women’s domestic labor.

By formalizing this process of distracted reception, television programming’s pattern

of flow and interruption both trained and reconciled housewives to the conditions of

their labor.

Having conclusively established the home as a site of production and

consumption, Modleski further develops her analysis. She describes the form of labor

that takes place in the distracted state by drawing an analogy between this distracted

state and Benjamin’s “art of being off center:” “The housewife, of course, is in one

sense, like the little man at the Fun Fair [described in Benjamin’s essay on

Baudelaire], unemployed, but in another sense she is perpetually employed—her

work, like a soap opera, is never done.”37 Moreover, the housewife’s television

programs involve her “in the pleasures of a fragmented life.” Here Modleski draws

links between distraction, forms of perpetual time, and labor. No sooner are the dishes

washed, the laundry hung up to dry, and the floor mopped than another meal is eaten

(more dirty dishes), the toddler has a potty-training accident (urine and fecal matter to

be cleaned), and the cat spits up a hairball (dirty carpet). The demand for labor is

renewed. Thus housework and childcare not only must be carried out in a state of

37
Modleski, 71.
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distraction but also are never completed. Here, the temporal form of the working day

operates on a twenty-four hour clock—as dictated by broadcast television and

domestic labor—and is cyclical rather than progressive. Some of these cycles take

place within a day, some stretch out over weeks, months, or years. As Morse

observes:

It also adjusts, or changes the quality of temporality. With these new

experiences, the temporal world is “lifted out of history in favor of cyclical
repetitions less determined by than modeled after daily or seasonal
cycles…sun, life, generation.” The new cycles of commuting, shopping and
viewing are detached, mutable. 38

The form television programs take and the kind of attention they require facilitate,

rather than distract from, these cycles of labor.

This analysis of the relation between broadcast television and the mass-culture

audience is quite different from the received view produced by the heuristics of

manipulation. As Modleski writes,

Ironically, critics of television untiringly accuse its viewers of indulging in

escapism. In other words, both high art critics and politically oriented critics,
though motivated by vastly different concerns, unite in condemning daytime
television for distracting the housewife from her real situation.39

As Ross, Petro, Spigel, and Modleski forcefully demonstrate, the links between a

passive audience and television are not quite as natural as they are made to appear.

Ross’ dialectical tension between self-respect and the expert, Spigel’s work on the

spatial changes to the home, and Spigel’s and Modleski’s analyses of domestic labor

and leisure move conceptualizations of broadcast television’s distracted audience

38
Morse, 202.
39
Modleski, 74.
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away from avant-garde television’s characterization of this audience as a commodity.

Whereas Ross conclusively demonstrates an interrelation between mass culture and

the intellectual, Spigel shows how the interior design of the home is altered by the

introduction of television. With their analyses of the domestic space, where network

television is watched, Spigel and Modleski overturn the conventional wisdom of

home as a refuge from labor. And Morse, as I show below, draws out links between

the cyclical, dreamlike experience of watching television, commuting, or going to the

mall. In this way, cultural studies and television studies break up the monolithic

correlations assumed by supporters and producers of avant-garde television when

they remind their readers that the domestic sphere is also a site of labor and

production. Key aspects of this analysis include the time forms of fragmentation and

repeatability, cycles produced by and for the distracted audience.

2.3 Expanded Television

In the 1920s, Benjamin established links between mass, or popular, culture’s

distracted audience and the reception of architecture. For Benjamin, architecture has

always represented the prototype of a work of art that is absorbed by a collective in a

state of distraction. Distraction is a translation of the German term used by Benjamin,

zerstreuung. In addition to “distraction,” equivalent English terms are scattering,

dispersal, and dispersion. Most important, he stresses that this form of reception is

embedded in a routine: “Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the

attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building” but instead must be

understood as acquired by a person who becomes familiarized with the individual

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work of architecture, through the force of habit. Such an individual thus gains “the

ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction.”40 This state of distraction is

semiconscious, its temporality is nonlinear, and its context is the everyday and thus

shared by leisure and labor. In other words, the reception of architecture parallels the

reception of mass culture in general and of television in particular.

Beatriz Colomina expands on Benjamin’s observation when she identifies

modernism as the moment when mass culture and architecture merge:

The conventional view portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice

established in opposition to mass culture and to everyday life…In doing so, it
has neglected the overwhelming historical evidence of modern architecture’s
continuous involvement with mass culture.41

When writing about the transformations brought about by modernist architecture,

Colomina proposes that architecture be thought of as a form of mass media: “It is

actually the emerging systems of communication that came to define twentieth

century culture—the mass media—that are the true site within which modern

architecture is produced and with which it directly engages.”42 That modern

architecture is an extension of electronic media and vice versa, she argues, is a

consequence of key structural changes made to domestic and institutional spaces: the

picture window (opening up the home) and the curtain wall (opening up the office

tower). These changes produce architectural spaces whose exterior and interior, or

whose definitions as “public” or “private,” are defined more by electronic media such

as television and the publicity it produces than by concrete and glass. As Colomina
40
Benjamin, 240.
41
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994), 14.
42
Ibid., 14.
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puts it, public and private develop into an image: “To be ‘inside’ this space [or in

private] is only to see. To be ‘outside’ [or in public] is to be in the image, to be seen,

whether in a press photograph, a magazine, a movie, on television, or at your

window.”43 Most important, Colomina’s argument moves definitions of public and

private away from the agora, or the city square:

It no longer has so much to with a public space, in the traditional sense of the
public forum, a square, or the crowd that gathers around a speaker in such a
place, but with the audience that each medium of publication reaches,
independent of the place this audience might actually be occupying.44

Colomina displaces the concept of the public sphere away from physical space and

toward a public that forms when it becomes visible.

Two distinct historical moments are at work here: one that is primarily reliant

on architecture to establish the paradigms of visibility and invisibility that Colomina

refers to and another, more recent, that is saturated by television. Benjamin’s and

Colomina’s discussions draw out the defining features of mass media as the state of

distraction in which it is received and the way mass media organizes public and

private spheres. Together, they corroborate Williams’ warning that the term mass

media falsely limits the study of popular culture to a few specialized areas such as

electronic media and popular literature. As Gasché explains, Benjamin’s description

of architecture’s audience implies that “the kind of relation to art that becomes

dominant with film is in truth a liberation of the modes of perceptions of buildings by

43
Ibid., 7.
44
Ibid., 7–8.
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the masses since time immemorial, modes repressed by auratic art.”45 The

architecture described by Colomina and the expanded presence of television noted by

Anna McCarthy (to whom I will turn momentarily) and Spigel come together to

describe the parameters of expanded television. The expanded presence of television

does not therefore represent a foreign element invading and despoiling a pristine site

(architecture); rather, what transforms is the interchange between two mass media

that address a distracted audience. In other words, distraction’s association with

television is not only predated by other forms of popular culture such as novels (Kant)

and film (Duhamel) but also paralleled by the reception of architecture.

This interrelation between repetition and distraction was discerned by Spigel

and Modleski in the home, but similar patterns emerge elsewhere. The time spent

watching television, going to the mall, or commuting, has been understood as time

spent in a vast wasteland. Mental life that occurs while driving on the freeway,

shopping in the contemporary marketplace, and working at home requires vigilance

and promotes a form of automatism, or “spacing out.” All three activities share the

incomplete attachment to their spatial and temporal present described by Morse,

producing Gasché’s lack of self-presence, or “the [distracted] state of

mind…characterized by absentmindedness, habitual modes of thinking and

unfocused, incidental relations to its surroundings.”46

In 1981 Peter Gibian’s analysis of the evolution of shopping-center design and

its influence on shopping in the mall drew the experience of watching television

45
Gasché, 199–200.
46
Ibid., 198.
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outside the home.47 As Gibian contends, the mall designer’s goal was to “dissolve the

static sense of the building frame, making it serve simply as the site for perception of

changes in visual effects.”48 The ultimate goal for the mall designer was to create an

architectural “inner realm” similar to the experience of the diorama, the cinema, and

the fun fair, which would encourage the (typically female) shopper, to take leave of

her rational, everyday self and consume goods she would otherwise have left on the

shelf. In the 1950s mall designers such as Richard Bennett intended to channel the act

of looking through architectural structure:

[S]o the mall is seen as a sort of “moving picture,” with a coyly erotic plot of
Girl Meets Goods.…If a mall is a successful movie, its shopper will lose
herself (Bennett’s 1950s customer is always female), forget that building
frame, suspend disbelief, and consummate “the experience.”49

Coney Island represented the ideal of amusement in enclosure, where shoppers get

lost in an involuntary repetition within the oneiric circles of visual attractions: “a

meandering closed ring which returns on itself so that one starts a second circuit

before one realizes it.”50 Here architecture reproduces the partial disconnect from

“real” time experienced by the housewife in her working day. Her measurement of

time as a series of cycles is also repeated in the closed rings of visual attractions,

47
See also Sharon Zukin, Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture (New York:
Routledge, 2003); Mark Paterson, Consumption and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 2005);
James J. Farrell, One Nation under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003); M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen,
Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
48
Peter Gibian, “The Art of Being Off-Center: Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles,” Tabloid 5
(1981): 50.
49
Ibid., 50.
50
Ibid., 50.
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What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

which in this context are conceived to keep her moving through a cycle of

consumption.

From the late 1950s to the present, the broadcast television audience watches

has changed, even as cultural studies and television studies established more subtle

analyses of this audience. It is by now a commonplace that television has been

transformed radically since the demise of the three-network system in the United

States. This begins with the introduction of cable television in the mid-1970s and

continues from the 1980s onward with the increasing commercialization of state-run

systems in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere. As Spigel claims in her introduction to

Television after TV, the transformation continues with

the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, multinational

conglomerates, Internet convergence, changes in regulation policies and
ownership, the advent of HDTV, technological changes in screen design, the
innovation of digital television systems like TiVo, and new forms of media
competition [that] all contribute to transformations in the practice of what we
call watching TV.51

In the light of these changes, television’s audience also needs to be reassessed.

Just as broadcast television has changed, so too have its sites of reception

shifted significantly. As Anna McCarthy points out, television has never just been

found in the home, despite being identified almost exclusively with it. While studies

linking television to the experiences of commuting and the mall have appeared since

the 1980s onward, in the last ten years especially television sets have saturated

transitional public spaces—transportation hubs such as airports and bus terminals,

51
Lynn Spigel, “Introduction,” in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, eds. Lynn
Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.
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waiting rooms in hospitals and other health care facilities, hotel lobbies,

Laundromats, and theme restaurants, as well as more traditional venues such as the

tavern and its descendent, the sports bar.52 McCarthy’s authoritative study establishes

links between the presence of television sets in these transitional spaces and work on

the public sphere. Her study also reaches beyond recent work on the shopping mall

and the freeway when it shows how electronic news tickers and billboard-sized

television screens in turn form billboard and information displays. The history of the

news ticker provides an instructive example of the fluidity as well as the historic

nature of the exchange between public spaces and broadcast space. A news ticker (or

a “crawler”) refers in the first instance to a long, thin display that wraps around the

facades of offices or public buildings.53 In 1928 the New York Times corporation first

put up a news ticker outside its headquarters in Times Square. Current versions are

made using LED screens that contain textual information scrolling horizontally. A

news ticker also refers to a similarly horizontal band of textual information that

scrolls across the bottom of television screens, and which is dedicated to presenting

either headlines or secondary news items. After the September 11 attacks of 2001, the

ticker became an omnipresent part of televised news in the United States. Fox News,

CNN, and MSNBC placed news tickers at the bottom of the television screen on the
52
See Anna McCarthy, “TV, Class and Social Control in the 1940s Neighborhood Tavern,” Ambient
Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 29–62.
53
A news ticker known as “the zipper” wraps around 1 Times Square in New York City. Another
ticker, displaying the latest stock prices, is also located in Times Square. Several buildings in midtown
Manhattan feature news tickers: for example, the exterior of the Fox News/News Corporation
headquarters on the west side of Rockefeller Center, and the ABC news outpost in Times Square.
When NBC renovated 10 Rockefeller Center to accommodate The Today Show in 1994, a red LED
ticker was added to the perimeter of the building at the juncture of the first and second floors. The
ticker updates continuously, even when the show is off the air. In London, England, the Reuters
building has a news ticker and stock ticker for the NYSE, NASDAQ, and the LSE.
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day of the attacks, in order to provide a constant stream of necessary but repetitive

emergency-related information. Although the need for attack-related tickers lasted

only a few weeks, the news ticker has become a permanent feature on all three

channels.54

The fluidity of this exchange describes an interchange between broadcast

television and public spaces that goes beyond the mere placement of television sets

and plasma screens in new locations, spaces beyond the enclosure of the mall and the

freeway. Rather, just as the introduction of television sets alters the domestic interior,

as Spigel observes, expanded television changes the very architecture of the space it

occupies, as well as the way that space is used. Robert Venturi is unabashedly

optimistic about what he sees as the liberating potential of the relatively recent

marriage between new electronic technologies and architecture, which he believes is

capable of infusing public space with a renewed vigor equal to the glory of Byzantine

architecture. He hails the advent of this electronic age: “when computerized images

can change over time, information can be infinitely varied rather than dogmatically

universal, and communication can accommodate diversities of cultures and

54
While news tickers were not widespread on broadcast television until September 11, 2001, the first
record of a regularly used news ticker dates from NBC’s Today show on January 14, 1952. At the
time, the Today ticker consisted of a long strip of paper with typewritten headlines that was
superimposed on the lower third of the screen. It was quickly dropped. In the 1980s, local television
stations used a ticker placed over local morning newscasts to pass along information on school
closings made necessary by, for example, severe weather. The start of the ticker's cycle was often
accompanied by a signal designed to attract the audience’s attention, usually the station's channel
number in Morse code. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, CNN Headline News and CNBC and
ESPN introduced tickers that featured stock prices and sports scores. In 1996, the spin-off network
ESPN2 debuted a ticker, the “BottomLine,” which provided sports scores and news nearly twenty-four
hours a day.
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vocabularies, vulgar and tasteful, Pop and highfaluting….”55 These innovations result

in “grand advertising Jumbotrons” that straddle buildings in Tokyo and Osaka as well

as New York and London. These advertisements, in Venturi’s mind, rival temple

hieroglyphics and mosaic iconography: “the sparkle of pixels can parallel the sparkle

of tesserae and LED can become the mosaics of today. What S. Apollinare Nuovo

does inside we can do inside and/or outside.”56 This vision of a Ravenna basilica

turned inside out expands on the earlier premise developed in Learning from Las

Vegas (1972), in which Venturi, together with Denise Scott Brown and Charles

Izenour, analyze the “electronic shed,” or generic structures overlaid with signage

worthy of the Las Vegas strip.57 Venturi’s, Scott Brown’s and Izenour’s earlier study

and Venturi’s more recent essay stress the existence of codependent, yet distinct

systems of communications: one two-dimensional (the signage in the earlier study,

the Jumbotrons in the article on iconography and electronics), the other three-

dimensional (the buildings that these signage and video systems are layered over).

At the heart of McCarthy’s study is an insistence that we think of “the practice

we call watching TV” as a dialectic between “the placeless generality of the image,

[and] the specificity of its terminal forms as they appear on screens of all sizes and in

all sorts of spaces.” Negotiating this dialectic involves understanding that television’s

place in an environment is located on multiple levels,

55
Robert Venturi, Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View From the
Drafting Room (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 4.
56
Venturi, 5.
57
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten
Symbolism of Architectural Form, Revised edition (1977, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 17.
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from the quantum social forces that give certain places their particularity—
even “nonspaces” like airports—to the top-down institutional systems that
attempt to impose models of spectatorship on them….Television is caught in
[the movement between the theoretical and the concrete], not easily mapped
onto an opposition between the individual and the institutional, the local vs
the mass, “place” vs. “space.” Rather, time and again environmental
discourses and practices of the public screen show these apparent opposites
crossing one another and indeed serving as vehicles for each environment’s
grammar of social space.58

Drawing on art history, McCarthy advocates a site-specific approach to this network

of social, cultural, and technological forces, which would be finely attuned to the

complex scale in which actions, gestures, and acts are formed through television’s

presence within particular environments. McCarthy’s study acknowledges

television’s role in forming spaces and places away from the home. Its stated

objective—to maintain the specificity of each location where television is found—

also requires a review of the conditions of labor and leisure that inform the states of

distraction in which television is received in these spaces.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the public found in the new spaces of expanded

television also receives a hostile reception. McCarthy notes that in the transitional

public contexts she identifies, television “is very frequently characterized by

journalists and academics alike…as a contaminant polluting the polis [because of its

role in privatizing public space], bombarding us with images, destroying the pristine

space of the public sphere.”59 These observations blithely ignore the links so

persuasively drawn out by Colomina and Benjamin between architecture and mass

media. These journalists and academics treat audiences of television in public spaces

58
McCarthy, 11.
59
Ibid., 4.
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no better than the many champions and producers of avant-garde television in the

1960s and 1970s treated this audience’s domestic counterparts. An analogous

conflation of theoretical investment and class hostility results in “flattened

caricatures,” created out of the “mobile modern subjects who move, create, and work

in the ephemeral and transitory spaces that television occupies outside of the home.”60

McCarthy cites an example of this contempt from a review of the theme restaurant

Planet Hollywood by a Times of London reporter:

[The review] describes the space as a chaotic postmodern jumble, its TVs
showing “montage with no regard for narrative, meaning or even
cinematographic style. They are pointless pictures [for the reviewer],
evidently silent; they are wallpaper, moving posters. But they are watched.”
The viewers, however, are apparently the most revolting thing about the
place….They watch…”with open-mouthed attention so that you can watch
their masticatory kit. They watch because this is what they do at home.” The
article bestows a metonymic nickname on Planet Hollywood’s viewer-diners,
one drenched in class hatred, calling them simply “tracksuit bottoms”
(sweatpants, to an American).61

Watching television in an American theme restaurant is the justification used by this

British journalist for his excoriation of the viewer-diner.

Recent scholarship such as McCarthy’s builds on feminist television

scholarship’s reappraisal of the (domestic) television audience. Even as it uncouples

television from the domestic sphere, the conservative wing of architectural theory

unwittingly mimics the arguments of television’s agonistic avant-garde. It criticizes

contemporary public space—the new commercial strip, the shopping mall, and the

franchise hotel—precisely because that space reproduces television’s illusionistic

60
Ibid., 5.
61
Ibid., 5–6.
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production and modular structure. Like Colomina, theorists and historians adhering to

this conservatism argue that broadcasting television’s advertisement and

programming structure had a formidable influence on modern and contemporary

architecture: urban, suburban and ex-urban. Unlike Colomina, they see it as an

innovation that spells doom for the public sphere. These broader failures in analysis

emerge in the work of Michael Sorkin, Kent MacDonald, Ada Louis Huxtable, and

Neal Leach. MacDonald wrote,

We experience McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Exxon, both out on the road and in
the transient images of television, and the mutual dependency of the road and
television has changed our architecture. The strip has become the Television
Road.…which is the city for millions of Americans…a preconfronted
landscape, bereft of local meaning both because of its subordination to a
national network of identical places, and because of its dependence, via
television, on a national “programmed” experience.62

“Television Road,” concluded MacDonald, was—paraphrasing Newton Minow’s

famous speech, cited in chapter 1—a reflection of the “cultural wasteland” on which

it was dependent.63 With this reflexive aping of the criticisms levied against

commercial broadcast television in the 1960s and 1970s, MacDonald reinforces the

assertion that architecture is a form of high art rather than—as Colomina argues—

mass media.

In his introduction to Variations on a Theme Park, Sorkin describes a new

type of ex-urban environment, which features “hermetically sealed atrium hotels

cloned from coast to coast” and the “disaggregated sprawl of endless new suburbs

62
Kent MacDonald, “The Commercial Strip: From Main Street to Television Road,” Landscape 28,
no. 2, (1985): 12–13.
63
Ibid., 19.
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without cities.” Both share the structural forms of television—the modular

interchangeability of its commercial programming—as well as what Sorkin identifies

as television’s placelessness:

The “design” of television is all about erasing difference [between the

components of the broadcast day], about asserting equal value for all the
elements in the net, so that any of the infinite components that the broadcast
day produces can make “sense.” The new city likewise eradicates genuine
particularity in favor of a continuous urban field, a conceptual grid of
boundless reach.64

For Sorkin, in this new “continuous urban field” that stretches beyond the traditional

city limits to enfold other transient or marginalized spaces such as highways,

commercial strips, and the suburbs is missing the agora, the public square, and the

downtown center—in other words, spaces that are vital, for Sorkin, to the formation

of the public sphere.65

As this brief review demonstrates, television, the dominant mass medium of

the 20th century formed a site of debate, optimism, and anxiety for later theorists of

the public sphere when it expanded into spaces outside of the home. The two major

subcategories of expanded television are television in public spaces and “television

architecture” such as shopping malls. The more conservative champions of the public

sphere fall into the trap of condemning television as an enemy of democracy. This

view is a consequence of the continued reliance on a model of enlightenment in

which rational thought is used to vilify the expansion of television into architecture.

The zoned-out viewer, trapped in a landscape of generic, modular consumption—be it

64
Michael Sorkin, "Introduction," in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the
End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), xi–xii.
65
Sorkin, xv.
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film, broadcast television, modern or postmodern architecture—could not, in these

critics’ estimations, be a full participant in democracy.

MacDonald’s and Sorkin’s perspectives are borne from what McCarthy

describes as “utopian ideas attached to public space…specifically, idealistic notions

of public space as a polis under siege….”66 The urtext of these utopian ideals is, of

course, Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962).

Habermas postulated a space separate from both government and corporations, in

which individuals could come together to debate the pressing issues of the day, or a

public sphere. Habermas understood mass media to be crucial to the formation of the

public sphere. Together, for Habermas, they in turn made possible the formation of

public opinion—namely, the task of criticism and control that a body of citizens

formally and informally practiced vis-à-vis the ruling structure.67 In other words,

Habermas sees the emergence of a reasoning public, where public opinion is formed

through discourse and debate: “a portion of the public sphere comes into being in

every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body.”68

66
McCarthy, 5–6. See Ada Louis Huxtable, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (New
York: New Press, 1997), and Neil Leach’s The Anaesthetics of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1999).
67
With the new public spaces opening up to the bourgeoisie in eighteenth–century European market
cities—chocolate or coffee houses, promenades in public parks, theaters and the public square—a
liberal democratic ideal was won.
68
Jürgen Habermas, Sara Lennox, and Frank Lennox, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article”
(1964), New German Critique, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): 49. Habermas credits eighteenth and nineteenth
century bourgeois culture with the formation of the public sphere. His model, however, is an
ahistorical and idealized account of the Enlightenment period. Thomas McCarthy, a longtime scholar
and critic of Habermas, charges that Habermas’ treatment of historical fact is scant and incomplete.
Peter Hohendahl and Marc Silberman note that ahistorical models have two functions. The first is to
provide a paradigm for analyzing historical changes, and the other to create a normative platform for
the critique of politics. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, two of Habermas’s earliest critics, redefine
the public sphere as a complex association of heterogeneous organizations in which certain social
aspects are represented and “motivation, practical actions, and mental activity converge.” This
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For conservative champions of the public sphere, the interpenetration of architecture

and mass culture, as well as of architecture and distraction—which became

unavoidable through the introduction of expanded television—shut out the

Enlightenment project of a public sphere; just as the reception of film, and after it,

television, refused the Kantian flowering of consciousness that was and continues to

be understood as integral to the art experience. The irrational public, as Sorkin,

MacDonald and others point out, replaces a rational public. Through their respective

considerations of this irrational public Stan Douglas and Paul Pfeiffer enter into

expanded television. While their work ultimately does not disturb the binaries of fine

art and attention, mass media and distraction, within expanded television they both

address the distracted audience and include it in their conceptual frame.

2.4 Stan Douglas: The Zwolle Proposal

Rethinking public video art through expanded television permits a better

understanding of the tension between dematerialization and site specificity in

contemporary art that enters expanded television’s realm. A key figure is the artist

definition of experience is shaped by labor processes, relation to production, and sociocultural factors,
which come together to form the proletarian public sphere. The proletarian public sphere served as a
conceptual place for finding common ground between various groups and affiliations, or multiple
“counterpublics,” particularly those blocked from the bourgeois public sphere. Negt and Kluge’s
proletarian public sphere also provides a means for masses of working class people to autonomously
articulate their own needs and define a new framework of experience. To this end, Kluge supported
alliances between government, the avant-garde and the “private consciousness industry” as the best
solution to changing the relation between producers and consumers of knowledge production through
television. Thomas McCarthy, preface to Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of
Enlightenment, eds. Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe and Albrecht Wellmer (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1992), ix–x.; Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Marc Silberman “Critical Theory, Public Sphere and
Culture. Jurgen Habermas and His Critics,” New German Critique, no. 16 (Winter, 1979): 89118;
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois
and Proletarian Public Sphere, ed. Miriam Hansen, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel and
Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 27.
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Stan Douglas. Over the last three decades, Douglas has produced a body of work

highly attuned to the limits and the possibilities of representation. While Douglas’s

work is always formally and thematically influenced by the specific conditions of its

given site, like expanded television it is not simply or even primarily a space. Rather,

as McCarthy observes about expanded television, it is a densely traversed intersection

of social, cultural, and intellectual histories.

Douglas’s early works carried forward avant-garde television’s practice of

disrupting network television programming by using brief (preferably unannounced)

interruptions of daily programming. Alongside Chris Burden (Chris Burden Promo,

1976, in which the artist bought twenty-four thirty-second commercial spots) and Bill

Viola (Reverse Television: Portraits of Viewers, a series of fifteen-second spots that

aired on KQED in 1982), Douglas developed Television Spots (1987–88) and then

Monodramas (1991). As its title implies, Television Spots was a series of short video

sequences (twelve of them) that were conceived of as unannounced and unintroduced

interruptions of regular broadcast television programming. A fifteen to thirty-second-

long spots was to be aired nightly. The locations in Television Spots are

interchangeable, and the actions banal: in other words, tape normally cut out of edited

shots. In this way, they take on the quality of reality captured as found footage, as

fragmentary found objects. Like the soap operas analyzed by Modleski, Television

Spots consisted of narrative fragments of waiting, misunderstandings, and the

impossibility of resolution. Unlike soap operas, however, Television Spots did not

promise a continuation of the narrative fragment into next week, or even next season.
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One of the spots, Answering Machine, begins with a woman entering her apartment.

The moment she finds her keys, the telephone rings inside. She steps inside, drops her

handbag, and sits down. She lights a cigarette. On the table beside her, the telephone

continues ringing. The spot ends with the caller leaving a message. In 1989 Television

Spots was broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa during commercial breaks in regular

programming.69

Similarly, Douglas’s Monodramas—ten thirty- to sixty-second videos—were

conceived as interruptions of the usual flow of advertising and entertainment on

commercial broadcast television, to be broadcast nightly in 1992 for three weeks in

Toronto and Vancouver. While these narratives mimicked television’s editing

techniques, like Television Spots they failed to cohere. A car and a school bus

narrowly avoid colliding at an intersection; they then continue on their way as if

nothing untoward had taken place. Two pedestrians cross paths on a street. One greets

the other, an African-Canadian, only to be told, “I’m not Gary.” According to the

Guggenheim website, when the videos were aired unannounced during commercial

breaks, viewers called the station to ask what was being advertised, which describes

how attention becomes refocused away from content to consumption during broadcast

television’s flow.70

Liminal spaces suspended precariously in time form the core of many of

Douglas’s projects: “I’m always looking for this nexus point, the middle ground of
69
Scott Watson, Diana Thater and Carol J. Clover, Stan Douglas (London: Phaidon, 1998). Yan
Stanton, “Stan Douglas,” in Seeing Time, exhibition of the Kramlich collection at the Center for Art
and Media, Karlsruhe, http://on1.zkm.de/kramlich/douglas (accessed June 18, 2007).
70
Guggenheim Collection—Artist—Douglas—Monodramas,
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_41A_4.html (accessed May 21, 2007).
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some kind of transformation,” Douglas observes, adding “I guess this accounts for the

embarrassingly consistent binary constructions in my work. Almost all of the

works…address moments when history could have gone one way or another. We live

in the residue of such moments,” he contends, “and for better or worse their potential

is not yet spent.”71 Douglas’s intricately layered installations are equally open to

psychoanalytic readings: they are “less concerned with the narration of the event than

with the space of its unfolding, like the obsessive remembrance and reconsideration

of a traumatic incident in one’s life that cannot be resolved because its true cause was

elsewhere, and remains unavailable to the space of memory.”72

In 1997–98 Douglas spent a great deal of time in Detroit working on a series,

entitled Detroit Photos. A related film installation, Le Détroit, was completed in

1999. In a synchronized two-track sixteen-millimeter black-and-white film

installation, he continuously looped the negative print of a story also set in Detroit.73

The installation adapted Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House,

and Marie Hamlin’s 1883 chronicle, Legends of Le Détroit. For this work, Douglas

invoked the horror-movie genre to explore the impact of popular culture and

technology on social imagination. It tells the short story of a woman, Eleanore, who

breaks into a deserted house in Herman’s Gardens, a housing development. The

former inhabitants have left behind a remarkable collection of domestic junk.

Douglas’ narrative techniques underscore the compulsive nature of her story: its
71
Stan Douglas, “Diana Thater in Conversation with Stan Douglas,” in Scott Watson, Diana Thater,
Carol J. Clover, Stan Douglas (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 28–29.
72
Quoted in Lynne Cooke, “Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon: Double Vision,”
http://www.diaart.org/exhibs/douglasgordon/double/essay.html (accessed May 22, 2007)
73
“Le Détroit,” or “the narrows,” is the original French name of the city.
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constant repetition is visually obscured in the muddy halftones of a film that describe

a world made purely of shadows. As Okwui Enwezor writes, “Herman’s

Gardens…comes to stand then as the symbolic unconscious of Detroit’s trauma,

while Eleanore’s presence and her search restore the black social order that

disappeared with the city’s urban decline.”74 Through the Detroit projects, Douglas

continued his interest in failed utopias, which he identified through the dysfunctional

relationships between groups of people competing over limited resources. Later

works such as Inconsolable Memories (2005) and Klatsassin (2006) continue these

themes.

Common to Douglas’s work for both network television and the museum are

cyclical, repetitive time forms and open-ended, incomplete narratives, which maintain

an uncomfortable proximity to the everyday. They also take as axiomatic the need for

the audience’s engagement to complete the work. This extends Douglas’s early

interest in Samuel Beckett’s reconceptualization of the theater as a practice in which

“both audience and author are asked early on to admit their complicity in the visibility

of the spectacle, and distanced judgment or interpretive ‘explanation’ becomes an

uneasy pretence.”75 As Douglas explains in a conversation with curator Lynne Cooke,

“if the audience has no way of finding a language of its own to understand a project,

74
Okwui Enwezor, Stan Douglas: Le Detroit at the Art Institute of Chicago (2000)
75
Quoted in Jean-Christophe Royoux, “The Conflict of Communications,” Stan Douglas exh. cat.
(Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), 63.
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then that project is unsuccessful. I may as well have just written on a piece of paper a

statement saying ‘I mean this.’”76

While he is best known for these complex, ambitious museum installations,

Douglas’s art for gallery spaces is not, as Sven Lütticken observes, “a kind of rappel

à l’ordre” that results in auratic art insulated from “the destabilizing effects of

television.”77 Indeed, Douglas never tried to distance his work from the close links

between video and television. Works such as Journey into Fear (2001) and Suspiria

(2002/2003) were broadcast on television as well as shown in galleries. Beyond such

a direct engagement with broadcast television, Douglas’s video and film installations

also address the various permutations of “television.” The 1994 video installation

Evening, which charts the arrival of “happy talk” in news bulletins, is one of many

examples of television at the core of Douglas’s work. This is also evident in his

public art. By transposing the cyclical time form, incomplete narratives, and the

centrality of the audience that emerged in his work for broadcast television and his

museum installations, Douglas’s “expanded television” points to some of the

psychosocial realities that underpin the banality of the everyday as it is experienced in

the city, at the mall, or on the freeway.

In the mid-1990s, Douglas proposed a video installation designed to be

screened from dusk until dawn atop a regional-mental-health care facility in Zwolle,

76
Stan Douglas, “In Conversation with Lynne Cooke, 1993,” in Scott Watson, Diane Thater, Carol J.
Clover, Stan Douglas (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 121.
77
Sven Lütticken, “Media Memories,” Stan Douglas, Inconsolable Memories: Stan Douglas exh. cat.
(Omaha, NB: Joslyn Art Museum, 2005), 126.
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the Netherlands.78 Two enormous screens, approximately fourteen feet wide and

eighteen-feet tall, were to be mounted on top of an elevator shaft of the RIAGG, or

the Regional Institute for Community Mental Health Care building. Sited between the

banks of the Zwarte Water—a river that girdles what remains of Zwolle’s

seventeenth-century city walls—and a highway that connects the Netherlands from

north to south, the institute is literally at the city’s margin. Integrated with the

institute’s architecture, the screens would be positioned back-to-back: one screen

would face the highway while the other would be directed toward Zwolle’s market

square, or the traditional city center.

In choosing to site his installation between the highway and the marketplace,

Douglas appropriated the commercial language of billboards. As Venturi, Scott

Brown, and Izenour observed in 1972, this language was formed in response to the

shift in the way people traveled in the postwar, post-Eisenhower era. A car-oriented

culture emerges out of the construction of the interstate highway system, resulting in

clusters of buildings adjacent to the highway, or strips. These plain boxes were

entirely dependent on signs designed to communicate their meaning at a glance to

passing motorists, whose perception had narrowed dramatically as a function of the

speed at which they traveled. The relation between the colloquial term used to define

these new forms of highway-dependent commercial sites and a filmstrip is hardly

coincidental.

78
The project was not accepted. A maquette and photographs were included in the exhibition
Skulptur. Projekte in Münster 1997, June 22-September 28, 1997.
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These codependent and distinct communications systems come together to

form a state of reception. Forms of modern architecture, and then postmodern

architecture (as Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour came to characterize it), were

defined by a certain temporal relationship between the building and its visual

consumers, which was analogous to a cinematic experience. Here, the use of space is

predicated on a temporal relationship in which the onlooker moves and the image is

fixed. Pedestrians walking through Zwolle’s city center would see one screen, which

would show a film that consisted of images of people engaged in conversation in

particular locations in Zwolle’s expanding periphery. Motorists on the highway

would see conversations taking place in the old town’s narrow intersections and cul-

de-sacs. Projected on an elevated screen near both the river and the freeway, the work

was sited between the metropolis and suburb. The “periphery” Douglas had in mind

was a reference not merely to the city’s residential suburbs, where most of those

employed within the city center reside but, just as important, to the interstitial

location between the inner and outer space of the metropolis where the daily

commute took place.

With the formal language of commercial signage and its temporal interaction

with the viewer as its structure, Douglas returned to the early history of psychiatry in

the Netherlands for his work’s subject matter. The two screens of Douglas’s

installation would show two films containing references to the relationship both

between the city and its surroundings and between the patient and his or her
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environment. As he observed in his project’s proposal, psychoanalytic concepts and

techniques are necessarily historical, and culturally specific:

The success of Behaviorism in mid-century Europe likely had more to do with

the grim prospect of postwar reconstruction than many of its adherents would
like to admit, just as Freud may not have catalogued the basic narratives of
human socialization, although he certainly did create an extremely detailed
portrait of his clientele, the Viennese bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth
century.79

In the early postwar period, an equally detailed social portrait was developed by the

Dutch therapist Arie Querido. The psychoanalytic tradition found in the Netherlands

was preoccupied not with basic structures of the individual psyche but with the

complex and contingent relationship between “a citizen and their societal Pillar.”

Querido’s key work, Introduction to Integral Medicine (1955), made the reasonable

but, until then, rare proposition that not only a patient’s interior experiences but also

his or her exterior relationships—or the totality of social, economic, and cultural

conditions to which that individual had been subjected—are the causes of psychic

crisis.80 The goal of therapy was equilibrium, which could only be achieved through a

consideration of these two spheres in an individual’s life. Querido’s first case studies

examined how respondents were recovering from more or less somatic illnesses; his

concluding studies describe recoveries that had been inhibited by extrinsic factors

such as economic problems and conflicts within families, as well as religious and

social relations.

79
Stan Douglas, “Project for the RIAGG Zwolle” (1997), http://www.lwl.org/skulptur-projekte-
download/muenster/97/dougla/k_e.htm (accessed May 30, 2007).
80
To the best of my knowledge, no translation for this book exists. I am using the English title
Douglas provided in his project proposal. The original Dutch reference is as follows: Arie Querido,
Inleiding tot een integrale geneeskunde (Leiden: Stenfert Kroese, 1955).
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Atop this mental hospital, a place where borderline subjects are prepared for

their reentry into society, the two films facing both the highway and the city center

narrated dramatic condensations of the 1,630 interviews Querido published in

Integral Medicine. These discursive fragments that questioned, affirmed, and

explained were to be performed by actors in a studio, shot individually in medium

and close-up shots, and then composited into their settings at Zwolle’s city center or

periphery. Using Querido’s work as its theoretical base, Douglas’s project both

represented and was structured by these dynamics of identity and difference,

individual and community. Thus, his choice of the liminal space between a city and

its margins points to the critical function of “the negotiation of another liminal space:

the permeable membrane that is an individual’s coincidence with their community.”

For Douglas, “a city, much like a human subject, might be best understood from the

periphery,” or the liminal moment where self leaves off and other begins: “Once the

manner in which a city or person distinguishes itself from its surroundings is

discovered, in that zone where it is no longer self-identical, one can begin to

understand how the community or individual tacitly conceives of itself.”81 In his

proposal, Douglas describes it as follows: “The montage [of interviews] on both

screens will be generated in real time by computer-controlled disc players

programmed in accordance with the so-called ‘Kuleshov Effect’—the fact that each

time the same set of cinematic materials is recombined in a different order, its

affective character changes.” Each individual sequence appearing upon the screen

81
Stan Douglas, “Project for the RIAGG Zwolle” (1997), http://www.lwl.org/skulptur-projekte-
download/muenster/97/dougla/k_e.htm (accessed May 30, 2007).
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would last only a few minutes. Yet it would be juxtaposed with other sequences in

real time, selected randomly by computer, such that the combination would produce a

different effect in each encounter between installation and commuter, installation and

pedestrian.82 The total collection of sequences would last twenty-five hours and

would be timed so that a daily commuter would only see the full range of

combinations after a period of six months.

The liminality under consideration in Douglas’s project was both spatial—its

location in the netherworld between urban density and suburban sprawl—and

temporal, since its audience encountered the project either while commuting or

meandering through the city center. Caught between work and home, commuters and

pedestrians would experience an artwork whose temporality doubled the fragmentary,

repetitive, yet continuous experience of commuting and watching commercial

broadcast television. In 1990 Morse noted that the experience of watching television

was related to the experience of driving on the freeway, as well as going to the mall.

All three composed a nexus of interdependent two- or three-dimensional forms. In

Morse’s words, these act as loci of an attenuated “fiction effect,” where the partial

loss of connection to the present is experienced.83 A precondition of distraction is the

idea of mobile privatization, which is not just the corporate privatization of public

space but also the partial disconnection of individuals from their immediate

surroundings and their attendant responsibilities through daydreams. This fiction

82
This is a very effective technique that Douglas uses in his many museum installations.
83
Margaret Morse, “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, The Mall and Television,” in
Logics of Television, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 193.
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effect involves simultaneous objects of attention: Morse uses Benjamin’s term when

she describes it as a “phantasmagoria of the interior.”84 While television epitomizes

the new ontology, in which vast realms of the somewhat less than real occupy

significant amounts of our “free” time, dreamlike displacement also occurs in the

freeway and the mall, semiautonomous zones that float over their surrounding

geography. Morse writes,

[A] freeway is not a place but a vector…largely experienced as “in-

between,”…rather than the full reality of a process or a destination….In this
intensely private space, lifted out of the social world, the driver is subject,
more real and present to him or herself than the miniatures or the patterns of
light beyond the glass…85

For Morse, this realm of fantasy is the compensation for dislocation from both work

and home. In other words, a disengagement takes place in these new spaces of the

television, the mall, and the freeway that results from an individual’s interior

narrative moving him or her away from the preexisting spatio-temporal context. Thus

Douglas proposes a work that takes the psychology of a social subject as its subject

and shows it in a context where his audience is daydreaming, where consciousness is

lowered. In this way, the work establishes two frames for its own definition. The first

frame is the work itself—or the apparatus, the content, the scale of the screens facing

the highway and the city center—and the location of the work as a community health

center at the city’s periphery. The second frame self-consciously incorporates what I

84
Morse might have been better served using Benjamin’s phrase “phantasmagoria of the marketplace,”
which he uses to describe the Paris arcades, the precursor to the shopping center. A “phantasmagoria of
the interior,” Benjamin writes, is “constituted by man’s imperious need to leave the imprint of his
private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits.” Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the
Nineteenth Century” The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (1939,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 14.
85
Morse, 199.
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think of as the work’s primary audience, the distracted motorist and the urban

pedestrian. Each, in turn, is “consumed” as part of the larger work by a third frame,

the attentive critic—that is, follower of Douglas who would read about the work after

the fact.

Douglas submitted his project proposal to SKOR, a Dutch funding

organization of public art.86 Despite an enthusiastic reception from the art world (a

maquette for the project and photographs were exhibited at Sculpture Project Münster

in 1997) and the commitment of SKOR’s director and the former Bureau for Visual

Art Assignments (Praktijkbureau Beeldende Kunstopdrachten), the project was

dropped. By proposing a work set in liminal spaces between subject and other, city

and suburb, for an audience made up of pedestrians and commuters, Douglas engages

with an audience that typically eludes the art- or high culture grasp, the mass

audience. Through these dual frames of place and subject, he also contrasts two types

of movement: the meandering stroll of the pedestrian and the directed movement of

the commuter. In contrast to Douglas’s proposed project, Paul Pfeiffer’s Orpheus

Descending fuses the pedestrian and the daily commute in its conceptual frame. In so

doing, Pfeiffer’s work became the focus of criticism typically reserved for mass

culture.

86
SKOR (Foundation Art and Public Space) was created when the Bureau for Visual Art Assignments
(Praktijkbureau Beeldende Kunstopdrachten) became independent from the Mondriaan Foundation.
The foundation is subsidized by the Ministry of Education, Cultural Affairs, and Science (OCW).
SKOR is a national organization, which develops art projects in relation to public spaces. According to
its website, SKOR “guides and advises organizations that wish to realize art in a public location, and
provides financial support where necessary.” “Foundation Art and Public Space,” SKOR,
http://www.skor.nl/article-1527-en.html (accessed June 18, 2008).
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2.5 Paul Pfeiffer: Orpheus Descending (2001)

At first, the work that Pfeiffer made for art galleries and museums—a series of tightly

edited, miniature digital videos that interrogate the formation of public personalities,

or celebrity—seem to have nothing to do with Orpheus Descending. The titles of

these videos, and a parallel series of photographs, link his image-making practice to

other historical periods and other visual media such as painting, cinema, theater, and

television, as well as literary forms such as classical mythology and biblical tracts.

Referring to his digital video installations as “video sculptures,” Pfeiffer typically

reformats videos of Hollywood movies or sporting events to catch movie stars and

sports heroes in moments of extreme emotion. His appropriation of these popular

culture artifacts is arrived at through subtraction: his found videos of basketball

players, boxers, or film stars are meticulously edited, until a central figure or pivotal

moment is isolated, locked into an ambiguous moment or pose. What never

disappears from his work is its background. Given Pfeiffer’s choice of subject matter,

this is most frequently a crowd that has been drawn to the event, which in turn

produces or is a consequence of a celebrity. The rapt attention of the crowd is

reinforced through the viewing conditions that Pfeiffer established for these works.

Shown on video monitors frequently just a few inches in length and width, Pfeiffer

forces a physical intimacy between the viewer and his video sculptures, in this way

making the viewer focus on sequences or reactions that normally go unnoticed. This

is diametrically opposed to the condition of distraction into which Pfeiffer inserted

Orpheus Descending.
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For John 3:16 (2000), Pfeiffer digitally manipulated a televised basketball

game to keep the basketball in play continuously in the center of the screen, leaving it

magically and erratically aloft in front of a sold-out NBA (National Basketball

Association) crowd. A mesmerizing work, it simultaneously evokes sensations of

motion and quiescence: the basketball floats at the center of the screen while the

court, spectators, and the hands of the players spin around its fixed center. The title

John 3:16 refers to the following passage from the New Testament: “For God so

loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him

should not perish, but have everlasting life.”87 The title anchors the work to a biblical

reference to life after death, while the cropped and spliced NBA footage refers to both

the religious quality of spectacle in professional sports and the almost magical

extension of a singular moment into a potential eternity through video editing. For his

1999 Fragment of a Crucifixion (after Francis Bacon), Pfeiffer looped a thirty-second

fragment of a moment on the basketball court. In this loop, the basketball star and

Knicks forward Larry Johnson steps backward and forward, fists clenched, face

contorted in an exultant shriek. The editing destabilizes his presumably victorious yell

into a possible scream of terror or rage, which at once reinforces and undermines

Johnson’s status as a sports superstar. Quoted in a Village Voice review, Pfeiffer

comments that in this work he was less interested in Johnson’s body language than

the formal relations between figure and ground. “In Francis Bacon’s painting [the

87
John 3:16. Authorized (King James) Version.
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original Fragment of a Crucifixion] you have human flesh dissolving back into

paint,” while in his video the image is “dissolving into a background.”88

A conversation between the visible and the unseen but understood shapes his

2000 The Long Count (I Shook Up the World). The Long Count used broadcasts of

three important fights in Muhammed Ali’s career for raw material: Cassius Clay

(Ali’s given name) versus Sonny Liston in Miami in 1964; Ali versus George

Foreman in Kinshasha in 1974, and Ali versus Joe Frazier in Manila in 1975.

Reworking the original broadcasts, Pfeiffer digitally edited the bodies of the

participants in the ring—the referee, Ali, and his opponent—out of the work. In this

work, the reading of “figure” is realized when the “ground,” or the crowd’s digital

information, splits and reassembles into a coherent image that is slightly lower or

higher than where it was previously. The tonal quality of the crowd, when

temporarily occupying the “interior” of the shadows or the silhouettes, also becomes

slightly darker than the audience on the “exterior.” The moving edges of the boxer-

referee silhouettes appear as digital ripples that fissure the watching audience behind

the ring. The camera pans from left to right and right to left, zooms in and out,

following silhouettes that bob, weave, and jab from one end of the ring to the other.

At regular intervals, flash bulbs go off. The loop ends with a long shot from above an

empty ring.

88
Quoted in C. Carr, “Icon Remix: Paul Pfeiffer Sees the Art Historical Vista from the Bates Motel,”
Village Voice, November 29December 5, 2000,
http://www1.villagevoice.com/news/0047,162203,20193,1.html (accessed June 18, 2008).
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Pfeiffer carries over this process of digital erasure into his photographs. An

ongoing series, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse started with five images that used

as raw material publicity stills of Marilyn Monroe jumping on a trampoline. Pfeiffer

digitally removed Monroe by cutting and pasting fragments of the background over

her figure. The series developed into something else after Pfeiffer started mining the

archives of the NBA for photographs to manipulate: typically, he removes a lot of

contextual detail in order to leave a solitary figure, such as the basketball star Wilt

Chamberlain, isolated against the crowd. Pfeiffer chose the publicity stills of Monroe

as the original subject for the series because, as he explains, “this has got to be one of

the most famous human bodies in the archive. It conjures up so much, it’s such a

legend.”89 What interested Pfeiffer about the project was its process, not the final

result:

It’s actually more like camouflage in the sense that you are taking pieces of
the background from around the image and very slowly applying these pieces
over the body so that in the end you’re presenting the illusion that you are
seeing through to the background. But in fact you are inventing background
material that wasn’t there before.

The title of the series, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, refers to the famous

woodcut by Albrecht Dürer. A leader of the northern Renaissance, Dürer helped

establish both the modern figure study and portraiture. Dürer’s work embodied the

apocalyptic spirit of his time, when famine, plague, and social and religious upheaval

were commonplace. The four horsemen are figures from the bible who appear at

Armageddon. Pfeiffer was drawn to a title that simultaneously referred to the

89
Art:21.Paul Pfeiffer.Interview & Videos | PBS Erasure, Camouflage, & “Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse” http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/pfeiffer/clip1.html (accessed June 18, 2007).
 Between Distraction and Attention: 136
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historical evolution of the figure study and to a larger epic sweep that culminates in a

cataclysmic ending.

For The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998), Pfeiffer looped a short clip from the

film Risky Business (1983). In the loop, the movements of its star, Tom Cruise, are

reduced to a series of mechanically repeated, pelvic thrusts as he writhes facedown on

the couch. The video transforms a brief fragment of his character’s excitement over

having his family’s house to himself for the weekend into simulated sex with

furniture. By looping this fragment, the character’s adolescent energy becomes a

disturbingly manic episode. Pfeiffer also uses the phrase “the pure products go crazy”

in an exegesis of twenty-first cenury late capitalism:

[W]e’re in a stage of capital that is no longer sustainable, yet this only

increases people’s urgency to maintain the illusion that things are going on as
they always have…obviously, it’s a sad thing to insist on repressing what’s
happening to you. It’s like not being able to accept that you’re dying.
Embodied in that condition are important possibilities that shouldn’t be
overlooked. That’s something I see when I look at images on TV and in the
movies. I feel very aware of these things as representations of an urgency to
feel like things are ok. But it’s clear that they’re not….in the logic of
capitalism, untransformed excess leads eventually to self-destruction: the pure
products go crazy.90

Pfeiffer’s gallery and museum works employ public spectacle as their subject matter.

With these works, Pfeiffer invokes the definitions of public and private that were

established by the Colomina. As I summarize above, Colomina understands public

and private to be conditions that are organized around being seen and not being seen.

A quintessential moment of being seen is, of course, celebrity. In these works,

90
Jennifer Gonzalez and Paul Pfeiffer, “Paul Pfeiffer,” Bomb, no. 83 (Spring 2003): 29.
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Pfeiffer reproduces the obsessive attention that defines fandom, which is fueled by

the illusion of intimacy between the fan and the celebrity.

Pfeiffer’s choice of oblique titles, his concern for the consequences of late

capitalism’s repressions, and his interest in the formation of “public” through the

presence of a crowd of people come together in Orpheus Descending. All Pfeiffer’s

work maintains a conceptualization of public and private that is not tied to outdoor

space but is dependent on actions and states—in the case of Orpheus Descending,

movement and distraction. Orpheus Descending makes use of the viewers’ abstracted

daily habits rather than the attention of a fan. Unlike the works I have just described,

it erases nothing from the “event.” Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, Orpheus

Descending was designed for the World Trade Center and the World Financial

Center. Over the summer of 2000, Pfeiffer and his collaborators John Letourneau and

Lawrence Chua videotaped a flock of chickens on a farm in upstate New York. using

three video surveillance cameras mounted on fixed tripods, they followed the birds’

lives twenty-four hours a day, beginning with incubated eggs purchased from a local

agricultural supplier, proceeding to the eggs’ hatching at around seventeen days, then

to the flock’s move to its outdoor pen, and finally to the seventy-fifth day, when the

chickens would reach market weight and be sent to slaughter in a commercial poultry

operation. After the seventy-fifth day, the collaborators started killing and eating the

chickens. The moments of slaughter and consumption, however, were not included in

the final work, and in this way it repeats a quintessential repression in a capitalist

economy that keeps production distinct from consumption. From April 15 to June 28,
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What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

2001, Orpheus Descending—the work made from this recording—was

simultaneously shown on two of the plasma screens and video monitors providing

information in the public thoroughfares of the World Trade Center and the World

Financial Center complexes. The first, a PATHVISION information monitor wedged

between a Hudson Newsstand and a Quick Card machine, was located in the

mezzanine area at the foot of nineteen escalators leading to the New Jersey PATH

train turnstiles.91 The second was a plasma screen that placed the video between

directional signage and advertisements promoting local businesses and cultural events

on the North Bridge, a glass-enclosed pedestrian overpass connecting the World

Trade Center with the World Financial Center.

Over a seventy-five day period, the video played in both locations as though

in real time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The work was originally

intended to be presented as a satellite feed, in which the everyday lives of the

chickens would be broadcast live, but the idea was set aside by Public Art Fund, the

project’s financial and logistical underwriter, because of its prohibitive expense.92 To

emphasize the real-time conceit of the work, the video’s outdoor “time environment”

was synchronized to coincide with the environment in which it was shown. While the

first five weeks took place in an artificially lit environment, for the outdoor footage

that made up the latter half of the video, Pfeiffer timed the video sunset and sunrises

91
The Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation (PATH) was established in 1962 as a subsidiary of
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The heavily used rail transit system serves as the
primary transit link between Manhattan and neighboring New Jersey urban communities and suburban
railroads.
92
Tom Eccles, “Orpheus Descending: A Conversation,” in Orpheus Descending, Paul Pfeiffer et al.,
(New York: Public Art Fund, 2001), 15.
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What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

to coincide with the real sunsets and sunrises outside the buildings: “So you see the

outdoor light and the video [light] simultaneously.”93 Commuters daily glimpsed

fragments of the pastoral narrative during their brief journey across the mezzanine

and bridge to and from work.

In an interview with Tom Eccles (director of the Public Art Fund), Pfeiffer

stressed that Orpheus Descending was “made specifically for an audience that passes

through the World Trade Center every day,” an audience composed for the most part

of workers whose offices were located in the two complexes.94 These workers had

been passing through the center for many years, he went on to say, and would

continue to do so for many more, implying an expectation on Pfeiffer’s part of an

open-ended and cyclical return to this space. In other words, the commuters’

movements could be characterized as a loop, whose formulation was determined both

by the space and the requirements of their jobs. For Pfeiffer, Orpheus Descending’s

success was dependent on its unannounced insertion into and withdrawal from this

long, repetitious cycle of coming and going, to-ing and fro-ing: “One day the

chickens appear in their [the commuters’] path, without any explanation, and then

after you kind of get a handle on what is going on, they [the chickens] disappear

again.” The work’s unannounced appearance and disappearance formed a second

temporal frame, which Pfeiffer also characterizes as a loop: “It is in fact a very long

loop. The finished piece is a series of seventy-five tapes—Tape One says ‘001,’ Tape

93
Pfeiffer, “Orpheus Descending: A Conversation,” 23.
94
Pfeiffer, “Orpheus Descending: A Conversation,” 20.
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What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

Two says ‘002,’ and so on....On the seventy-fifth day it goes back to 001 again.”95

Pfeiffer’s decision to label the work a loop links it both to a larger body of video

installation art investigating the impact of repetitive editing, which my next chapter

considers, and to the conundrum of time tied to a per-hour paycheck. Like the daily

routine of the housewife and the cycle of the soap opera, the time of labor is

measured in a series of cycles. Parceled out in a series of seemingly endless

repetitions, time is measured by the daily arrival at and departure from work; the mid-

morning and mid-afternoon breaks; the weekly, biweekly, or monthly paycheck; and

the annual vacation.

Like Douglas, Pfeiffer drew on the communication strategies of public

commercial signage. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour describe an architecture that

is defined by commercial signs that communicate the function of various buildings,

which are in turn reduced to a series of blank boxes: “the highway signs...make verbal

and symbolic connections through space, communicating a complexity of meanings

through hundreds of associations in few seconds from far away.”96 These signs result

in a highly sophisticated tempero-spatial relation to their audience that was

incorporated by Pfeiffer. In the North Bridge overpass, the video was shown on two

plasma screens between signage directing pedestrians to the U.S. Customs House, the

World Trade Center, the subway and the PATH trains, handicap access, and

advertisements for local services such as sushi takeout—“Johnney’s takeout (Fast!

Fast! Fast! Sushi)”—and a sale at Barney’s. In the mezzanine at the foot of the

95
Pfeiffer, “Orpheus Descending: A Conversation,” 21.
96
Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, 13.
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elevators, the video was shown on the PATHVISION closed-circuit television

monitor, ordinarily used to show information about the PATH trains to New Jersey.

Below each monitor a plaque explained the work in the same vernacular as plaques

marking sites of historic interest or scenic beauty along the highway. In the World

Trade Center and the overpass to the World Financial Center, Pfeiffer, like Douglas,

borrowed from broadcast television, as well as the strip, in order to communicate with

a mobile audience for markedly different ends. Here, both the audience and the image

are moving, but in two radically different ways: the commuter is hurrying to or from

work, the virtual chickens are living out their days in virtual coops.

The title Orpheus Descending refers in the first instance to Orpheus, a figure

from Greek mythology that stood for poetry and song. Orpheus is best known for his

response to the tragic death of his wife, Eurydice. While trying to escape from

Aristaeus, the son of Apollo, Eurydice stumbled over and was fatally bitten by a

snake. Overcome with grief over her death, Orpheus played and sang so sorrowfully

that he moved the gods to tears. They advised him to plead Eurydice’s case to Hades,

the lord of the underworld. On their advice, Orpheus traveled to the underworld, and

with his music moved Hades and his wife Persephone to allow Eurydice to return

with Orpheus to earth, restored to life. Hades imposed one condition: Orpheus should

walk in front of her and not look back until they had both left his kingdom. Just as

Orpheus reached the earth’s surface he turned back to exhort her forward, and

Eurydice vanished forever from his sight.

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With this title, Pfeiffer ties a work that is located in and structured by the

temporality of everyday actions to a belief in the redemptive power of art. When

asked about the title of the work, Pfeiffer replied that he was responding to the waves

of commuters that descended and ascended the massive banks of escalators as they

made their way to and from the PATH trains. Jennifer Gonzalez indirectly referred to

the Greek myth in an interview, when she asked Pfeiffer to explain the title:

Jennifer Gonzalez: The title, Orpheus Descending.…Descending into the

subway? Into the darkness?
Paul Pfeiffer: Yes. The station is one of the southernmost links to or points of
access into Manhattan. I wanted to set up a very simple apparatus in
conjunction with the existing apparatus that would change one’s
consciousness of time.97

Pfeiffer saw this change to the commuters’ consciousness as a consequence of the

insertion of a work of art into their everyday lives, and as a political project, in that it

established “a space for a transgression or liberation” or an alteration of

consciousness: “It seems to me a different space than the one advertising makes. I am

curious about the distinction between artmaking and something like advertising,

something more associated with entertainment.” By setting up a certain construction

of time—a story whose form both parallels and mimics their commute, Orpheus

Descending presents a mystery and asks the “people who see it to grapple with what

it means.”98 In other words, Pfeiffer set out to produce a work whose goal was to

incite transgressive or liberatory thought in a moment embedded in commuters’

routines, or a moment that Morse identified as incompletely attached to the present.

97
Gonzalez and Pfeiffer, 27–28.
98
Pfeiffer, “Orpheus Descending: A Conversation,” 21.
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What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

Given the rapid ascendance of Pfeiffer’s career and the highly favorable

reception of his work, the absence of critical commentary on Orpheus Descending is

both notable and curious.99 Orpheus Descending’s failure to command attention from

the critics of mainstream art publications might in part be attributed to its very

success in inserting itself into the temporality of the public sphere, to partially

disappear from consciousness. The critical reception that emerged was outside the

mainstream art press. Class hostility masquerading as a mistrust of the mobile modern

subject’s ability to absorb or be absorbed by a work of art emerged in the critical

reception that the work did receive. The particular nature of Orpheus Descending’s

time, space, and audience—not its ostensible subject matter—were considered by

both its critics and Pfeiffer to be the factors that defined the work and governed its

success or failure.100 On the electronic discussion list of maARTe (a webzine

dedicated to issues concerning the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora),101 the

webzine’s managing editor, Erna Hernandez, posted the following to the writer

Christine Bacareza Balance:

99
John 3:16 was exhibited at PS1’s Greater New York (2000), Fragment of a Crucifixion (after
Francis Bacon), and The Pure Products Go Crazy at the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Paul Pfeiffer was the
first recipient of the Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award, an award worth $100,000. This recognition,
and a 2000–01 residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art that culminated in an exhibition of
his work from December 2001–02 were thoroughly covered by art magazines such as Artforum, Flash
Art International, ARTNews, Art Newspaper, Frieze, Artext, Art Monthly, as well as the New York
Times. A partial list of articles and reviews include David Joselit, “Terror and Form,” Artforum 43, no.
5 (January 2005): 45–46.; Alois Kölbl and Johannes Rauchenberger, “A Void that Looks Back at
You…” Kunst und Kirche pt. 2 (2004): 71–76; Paul Pfeiffer, “The Sun is God,” Tate Etc., no. 2
(Autumn 2004): 90–93; Jennifer Gonzalez, interview with Paul Pfeiffer, “Paul Pfeiffer,” Bomb, no. 83
(Spring 2003): 22–29. With the exception of brief asides, no reference to Orpheus Descending was
made in any of these publications.
100
Pfeiffer made this assertion at a public talk sponsored by MoMA at the Gramercy Theatre in May
2003.
101
Pfeiffer is Filipino.
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Pfeiffer continues to place the mundane products of our [contemporary

commodity] culture into a context which offers them great significance….The
true test of Pfeiffer’s art will be to make Wall Streeters bother to stop and
look.102

For Bacareza Balance, Pfeiffer’s work would only have succeeded if its audience had

stopped in its tracks and paid attention to the issue the commentator felt it focused on:

the life cycle of food animals usually seen as dismembered, prepackaged

commodities whose lives, and therefore deaths, are hidden from view. That this

audience would do so was considered unlikely for Hernandez, given its professional

(and implicitly its political) affiliation.

The art journalist Stephen Basilico, in a review published in Time Out New

York, made a similar observation. Pfeiffer’s work, Basilico wrote, would “never be

seen by anybody...in its entirety,” because its audience, “the shifting tide of

commuters who pass through these buildings on a daily basis” would not stop to look,

but instead walk “as quickly as their legs could carry them, away from their jobs

toward home,” and presumably in the other direction in the morning.103 The failure of

the public—or the audience—is here grounded in a distraction not produced by

flopping down in front of a television set but by not flopping down at all, or not

“stopping to look.”

Basilico’s response to the work is worth exploring at length. Unlike Pfeiffer,

Basilico tells his readers that Orpheus Descending is “linear, unedited and doesn’t run

102
“Subject: Fwd: [maARTe] Paul Pfeiffer: Orpheus Descending.” Posted on
http://pub16.ezboard.com/bmaarte to Christine Bacareza Balance on Tuesday Apr 17, 2001 2:52 p.m.
from Erna Hernandez.
103
Stefano Basilico, “Just Another Day on the Farm: Orpheus Descending Suggests That We're all
Caged in Our Hellish Routines,” Time Out New York, June 7–14, 2001, 56.
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as a loop.” Nevertheless, its linear structure calls attention to “the endlessly repeated

routine of the commuters,” a loop these people are “doomed to repeat...until they

retire.”104 For Basilico, Orpheus Descending is not just a video, but “a complex

interchange of people, technology and locale.” The commuters’ inability to absorb the

video’s true meaning was a direct consequence of their cycle of labor. Because the

commuters—the work’s intended audience—only catch glimpses of the video, little

more is revealed to them, he argued, “than some chickens milling about.” Basilico did

not think of it as a to-be-continued story (like a soap opera), producing different

effects each time it was experienced. Consequently, in Basilico’s reading, the

commuters are closed off from any insight into the work. Because, for Basilico, the

average commuter lacks a sense of Pfeiffer’s broader project, the work will remain

“elusive and confusing.” Basilico dismisses commuters as incapable of synthesizing

an aesthetic experience through the Kantian exercise of relating the various

experiences their senses receive to more fundamental concepts. Thus, Orpheus

Descending failed for Hernandez and Basilico because it did not stimulate

participation from the people who saw it. This is in part because of its viewers’

presumed sociopolitical profile, in part—and most importantly because the project

failed to elicit attention from these passersby: “Wall Streeters” did not “bother to stop

104
This implicit protest against the routines binding worker to an economy that appeared better suited
to the machines than the labor force assigned to them is epitomized in an early example, Charlie
Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times. Chaplin plays a factory worker utterly incapable of coordinating his
movements with the repetitive momentum of the post-Fordian production line. I need hardly point out
the irony of this statement, given that both commuter routine and physical route were catastrophically
and permanently interrupted by events that followed a few short months later, with the destruction of
the World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of its occupants when suicide terrorists turned the
products of industrial society on itself by hijacking two commercial airplanes and flying them into the
twin office towers that dominated the complex.
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and look,” (Hernandez) but rather walked away from the work “as quickly as their

legs could carry them” (Basilico). What neither Basilico nor Hernandez consider is

that the very form of attention they feel prevented the audience from fully engaging

with the work was built into it by Pfeiffer. Unlike his other work, Pfeiffer intended

Orpheus Descending to be received in fragments over an extended period of time. In

other words, he chose these spaces for their temporal as well as their spatial

characteristics. And because of their problems with this temporal structure,

Hernandez and Basilico failed to consider Pfeiffer’s desire to provide his audience

with a mystery, an alternative to advertisements that would reveal itself over the

repeated viewings that were made possible by the commuters’ regular movement

through the space, without ever arriving at a conclusive ending.

Hernandez’s and Basilico’s problems with Orpheus Descending do not end

with the work’s temporal structure. These critics also assume that its audience would

not absorb the aspects of the work they identify as important: respectively, an

awareness of the life cycle of meat poultry (for Hernandez), and the public’s critical

engagement with art (for Basilico). Both criticisms presume for public art a didactic

role, which transmits a particular “message” to be read by the public—its audience—

raising the audience’s consciousness by teaching it about an issue, a role made

impossible by Orpheus Descending’s submersion into the dreamlike state of

distraction. What, then to make of Pfeiffer’s implicit position that Orpheus

Descending was a political work, in that it established a space for either transgression

or liberation, resulting in the alteration of consciousness?

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According to the standards set by Hernandez and Basilico, the work was not

political. The strategy of address, and its institutional frame exposed Pfeiffer’s work

to the same pattern of criticisms as those leveled against television shows and

television architecture: all three had to contend with an audience incapable of rational

thought. Pfeiffer’s (and Douglas’) public video works eluded most of the predictable

framing devices that a spectator might rely on to locate the work as a work of art. In

particular they did not lay bare their topics, their audiences, or their sites, as would a

neo-Brechtian form of institutional critique. Rather, they produce densely layered

palimpsests, whose meaning can only partially be resolved. In this, their work

becomes an active, engaged dialogue with the commuter or the pedestrian. Rosalyn

Deutsche’s position on public art opens up a different interpretation of Orpheus

Descending, as well as of Douglas’ proposal for the psychiatric hospital in Zwolle.

Deutsche avers that there is nearly universal consensus over the idea that “supporting

things that are public promotes the survival and extension of democratic culture.”105

Arts administrators and city officials promote public art that solicits “participation”

from “the people.” Democracy is invoked in either consensual or controversial public

artworks. Neoconservatives champion the rights of “the people’s” access to public

space in their attacks on “elitist” public art. It is because public artworks have a place

in these debates, Deutsche asserts, not because they have a place in universally

accessible public sites that defines them as forms of democratic expression.Following

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Deutsche writes, “Politics…is about the

105
Deutsche, 269.
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constitution of the political community. It is about the spatializing operations that

produce a space of politics.”106 For Deutsche, political intervention makes space for

politics, or the public sphere, not the other way around: “the political sphere is not

only a site of discourse; it is also a discursively constructed site.” The logical

consequence is that “conflict, division, and instability…do not ruin the democratic

public sphere: they are the conditions of its existence.”107 This form of political

spatialization—the opening up of a space of conflict and debate—originates in a

constitutive division, or a constitutive antagonism. It is crucial to this model that the

conflictual makeup of society, politics and, ultimately, the public space, not be

suppressed, as it is in models of consensus such as Habermas’.

Orpheus Descending’s engagement with political debate and subsequent entry

into the public sphere emerges in the way that it frames movement. Like Douglas’

proposed work, Orpheus Descending was located neither in a public square nor in a

public space designed for leisurely gatherings. Instead, it was placed in two locations

that people move through quickly and repetitively. Intended to match the temporal

rhythm of the commuters, the video did not require a sustained, conscious

engagement but was seen “day after day in passing, a barely registering subliminal

image.”108 Critical to the work’s reception in a state of distraction were the two loops

identified by both Pfeiffer and Basilico: the twice-daily ebb and flow of the audience

106
Deutsche, 46.
107
Deutsche, 47.
108
“Public Art Fund presents… Artist Paul Pfeiffer's Orpheus Descending: A video installation
documenting the life-cycle of the chicken at the World Trade Center PATH Entrance,” Public Art
Fund Press Release, http://www.publicartfund.org/pafweb/release/pfeiffer_release.html (accessed June
25, 2005).
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and the seventy-five-day cycle of the work itself. By drawing the focal point of

attention toward the otherwise unremarked-on movement of the audience, these loops

foregrounded an ongoing, cyclical process, in which tens of thousands of people

moved each day through public spaces whose primary function was transit.

Precisely this primacy of transit has been criticized. Just as critics of expanded

television vilify its audience as empty-eyed consumers, incapable of the intellectual

engagement required of the democratic process, so too critics of modernist

architecture decry the erosion of democratic expression that they see taking place

therein. The disconnect between the public good and public spaces, Richard Sennett

points out, is a problem endemic to modernist urban design, which he characterizes as

pockmarked with “dead public spaces.”109 This is especially the case for International

School architecture, where purported “public spaces” built into the design of this

movement’s skyscrapers failed to continue the mandate of the public square. For

Sennett, the form of “International-type skyscraper is at odds with its function, for a

miniature public square revivified is declared in form, but the function destroys the

nature of a public square, which is to intermix persons and diverse activities.”110

Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the World Trade Center was a late-International-style

skyscraper.111 Following its destruction in September 2001, many observers from the

popular press noted that the ground-level spaces set aside in the complex design for

public gatherings had instead replaced the city grid with a desolate concrete plain

109
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 12.
110
Sennett, 12.
111
Groundbreaking for construction took place in August 1966, and the ribbon cutting in April 1973.
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whose traversal did not invite unplanned lingering above and beyond planned cultural

events. In May 2002 the journalist Adam Nagourney wrote, “Given its…windswept

isolation, the trade center had long been viewed as an obstacle.…one of the first

decisions about how to prepare the area for development was…to rectify what many

people saw as an unfortunate byproduct of constructing the towers: the elimination of

the street grid.”112 Instead, the consistent presence of foot traffic could be found in the

two spaces selected by Pfeiffer: the overpass between the World Trade Center and the

World Financial Center and the platform between the great banks of elevators

shuttling people between the PATH trains and their work destinations. Holston

associates the modernist systems of pedestrian and vehicular traffic circulation with a

greater privatization of social relations: that privatization allows greater control over

access to space, which almost invariably stratified the public that uses it. The empty

spaces and privatized interiors that result contradict modernism’s declared intentions

to revitalize the urban public and render it more egalitarian. The singularity of

function identified by Sennett in these spaces is one of uninterrupted movement:

workers, itinerant delivery and service personnel, clients and consumers entering and

exiting the skyscraper as quickly and expediently as possible. The possibility of

stopping, lingering, or straying in the overpass or the platform becomes a potentially

subversive or abject activity, to be viewed with suspicion. Holston makes a similar

observation about modernist urban space: “When we analyze it in terms of what it

112
Adam Nagourney, “Reimagining a Downtown,” The New York Times, May 10, 2002.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E2D61130F933A25756C0A9649C8B63&sec=&
spon=&pagewanted=1 (accessed September 12, 2006)
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systematically set out to eliminate—the traditional street system of public spaces and

the urban crowds and outdoor political domain of social life the street supports—its

social consequence becomes clear.”113

While Orpheus Descending was described as public art by both Pfeiffer and

the Public Art Fund, the World Trade Center and the World Financial Center were

patrolled by security guards who had the authority to control who was allowed to be

present. When I visited the two sites of Pfeiffer’s work, the dominant sound in the

North Bridge overpass was the reverberation of voices as people conversed while

walking. While some people glanced up to the monitor as they walked by—to see

what I was looking at, not out of any intrinsic curiosity about the work—I attracted

more attention than Orpheus Descending because I was out of place. Instead of

walking purposefully, I was “loitering with a purpose” (taking notes) on the edge of

the walkway. Like the overpass, the PATH train mezzanine was a transitional area.

Unlike the overpass, there were two layers of people present: commuters and

employees of the various businesses and public services such as the Hudson

Newsstand employees, the Port Authority police, and a New Jersey PATH ticket

seller. There too, because I was staying in one spot, I both felt conspicuous and drew

attention from the other occupants of the space. Indeed, I attracted the suspicion of at

least one Port Authority officer. A body at rest became a body out of place,

potentially subversive to the mix of corporate, municipal, and state interests

governing the ebb and flow of public movement in these transitional spaces.

113
James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” ed. Leonie Sandercock (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 44.
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Sennett locates the failures of the modernist public space in this combination

of surveillance and movement. “The erasure of alive public space,” he writes,

“contains an even more perverse idea—that of making space contingent upon

motion…the public space is an area to move through, not be in.”114 The consequence

of the removal of any opportunity to loiter is the loss of democratic possibility: “as

public space becomes a function of motion, it loses any independent experiential

meaning of its own.” The active suppression of the potential for direct democratic

expression is in this way built into the temporality of movement in mid-twentieth-

century public spaces. The control and surveillance of movement, or the temporary

versus the extended occupation of a given “common” space carries the latent potential

of oppression that is both internalized and implemented by pedestrian and policeman.

The force of this observation has grown in recent years through the

increasingly overt control of movement by state and corporate police forces. By

trying to visit Pfeiffer’s Orpheus Descending, one draws attention to the everyday

counterpart of the action required by the phrase, “move along folks, just move along,

nothing to see here.” This familiar suggestion has been refined by the New York

Police Deparment into a complex crowd-control system of barricaded walkways and

“stop and release” herding pens. First tested at the 1998 New Year’s Eve celebrations

in Times Square during the buildup to the millennium celebrations, they were

subsequently implemented in mass demonstrations protesting the World Trade

114
Sennett, 14.
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Organization meetings in 2002, the looming war on Iraq in 2003, and the 2004

Republican convention.

Sennett’s argument echoes Sorkin’s plea that I refer to above for a return to an

earlier, idealized moment of public spaces unpolluted by unipurpose, hermetically

sealed spaces such as strip malls. Nevertheless, as Deutsche observes, the existence of

the control over movement so aptly identified by Sennett does not necessitate his

called-for return to a kind of public sphere, which was never more than a fantasy. The

movement identified by Pfeiffer would not become public for Deutsche merely

because it occurs in a place where the public happens to find itself. From the

perspective of radical democracy, Deutsche envisions the discursive production of a

public sphere through conflict, not consensus. The stakes in this discourse are

realized, for Deutsche, in the front-cover illustration of Sorkin’s book. An out-of-

place group of Renaissance-style figures ascends an escalator in what appears to be

one of Sorkin’s “inward-looking” new television spaces that pose such a threat to

democracy. Deutsche establishes an example of discursive construction when she

talks about how the book’s reader might receive the image:

How do images of public space create the public identities they seem merely
to depict? How do they constitute the viewer into these identities? How, that
is, do they invite viewers to take up a position that then defines them as public
beings? How do these images create a “we,” a public, and who do we imagine
ourselves to be when we occupy the prescribed space?115

This image contains a critique of the present and a nostalgia for the past. Pfeiffer’s

work, on the other hand, does not shrink away from these expanded television spaces

115
Deutsche, 286.
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that promote the semidetached, dreamlike movement; rather it comes into conflict

with the more totalitarian aspects of these spaces. With his title, Pfeiffer drew

attention to multiple frames of audiences: first, he stresses the movement of the

commuter ascending and descending the escalators. Second, he emphasizes the

temporal structure that frustrates and then shuts out the fine-art audience (since the

movement the work requires makes it next to impossible for anyone but a commuter

to absorb). Finally, it makes the fine-art visitor aware of this movement, and its

potentially totalitarian implications: necessary to continuing to move is the implicit

threat of arrest.

2.6 Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers (2007)

Why is the attempt to control public movement intrinsically repressive? Democracy

was made more or less equivalent to “the people” when all sovereign power was

moved to the people—that is, within the social body. But to what does “the people”

refer? And how is this power expressed? Thomas Keenan indirectly addresses this

question when he formulates the public sphere as “structurally elsewhere, neither lost

nor in need of recovery or rebuilding but defined by its resistance to being made

present.”116 Through the rhetorical figure of the phantom, Jacques Derrida shows how

the impossibility of identifying the public makes it central to the democratic project.

Derrida demonstrates the political potential of this impossibility when answering the

116
Thomas Keenan, “Windows: Of Vulnerability” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 135.
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question, “what is public opinion?”117 The expression of will, or public opinion, so

often sought by pollsters and mass media becomes the delineation of the “silhouette

of a phantom, the haunting fear of a democratic consciousness” that paradoxically

legitimates a parliamentary democracy: “Literally ephemeral, it [public opinion] has

no status because it does not have to be stable, not even constantly unstable….”118 For

Derrida, the public’s phantasmatic form is a result of its changeability, its resistance

to governance. His questions regarding public opinion shape the indefinable nature of

the public:

Exceeding electoral representation, public opinion is de jure neither the

general will nor the nation, neither ideology nor the sum total of private
opinions analyzed through sociological techniques or modern poll-taking
institutions. One cites it, one makes it speak, ventriloquizes it…but this
“average” [moyenne] sometimes retains the power to resist the means
[moyens] “proper to guiding public opinion,” to resist this “art of changing”
public opinion that, as Rousseau again says, “neither reason, nor virtue nor
laws” have.119

Derrida considers public opinion’s fugitive nature to be a productive force rather than

the downfall of a concept. This “resistance to being made present” emerges in the

success of Pfeiffer’s piece at both addressing and drawing attention to the distracted,

mobile public, and it is intrinsic to Douglas’s proposal. In both their duration and

location Pfeiffer’s and Douglas’s public video works steadfastly inhibited Wollheim’s

assimilatory, or “mastering,” paradigm of the spectatorial encounter. In doing so, they

became attached to a form of movement in public spaces that does not permit the

usual Kantian perception of a work of art. While dream states, nonlinear stories, and
117
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, ed. Michael B. Naas, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 84.
118
Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, 84–85.
119
Derrida, 87.
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the merger of the body with larger or hidden systems are also characteristics of Doug

Aitken’s work, he does not provoke the discursive production of a public sphere.

Unlike the works of Douglas and Pfeiffer, Aitken’s spectacular installation brought

the museum audience, or Wollheim’s suitably informed and sensitive spectator, out

onto the street when he extended his work into the spaces of expanded television.

Like Douglas (and Pfeiffer to a lesser degree), Aitken has enjoyed an

extremely successful career, which has been built on a series of increasingly complex

and sophisticated multichannel video installations. One of his more ambitious

undertakings was the January 2007 installation Sleepwalkers, a work produced in

partnership with Creative Time and the Museum of Modern Art. In this first work

conceived and realized for the exterior of MoMA, gigantic images were projected

onto the museum’s south and west facades and across three of the interior walls

surrounding the sculpture garden. Multiple characters appeared on the projections,

and their interwoven stories converged and diverged like instruments in a musical

arrangement. In its narrative structure the installation set out to reproduce the

experience of urban living: “In Sleepwalkers, the city becomes a living, breathing

body merging with the diverse and constantly changing individuals who make up the

city….Sleepwalkers investigates the new and evolving relationships of contemporary

urban life.”120 It did so using a technique that Aitken calls the “broken screen,” in

which he aims to capture realities that transcend the devices of linear narrative by

using multiple screens.

120
Quoted in Klaus Biesenbach, “Building Images,” in Klaus Biesenbach et al., Doug Aitken:
Sleepwalkers (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007): 6.
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In I Am in You (2000), the video installation’s exterior walls—usually left out

of the artwork’s aesthetic experience—became integral to its story. Five screens were

installed inside a rectangular plywood box intended to remind the visitors of an

oversized packing crate, or an undersized cargo container. Inside, the video starred a

little girl who amused herself by playing cat’s cradle with her friends, and drawing

with a Spirograph. In an extreme close-up, the Spirograph merges with the girl’s eye.

Airplanes appear and vanish. The girl falls asleep. Her house, a prefabricated

structure resembling the structure housing the video installation is lifted onto a truck

and transported onto a highway at night. The house seems to have been cut in half to

encompass the arteries of the traffic. Beginning from the container that the visitor

enters and ending with the house on the truck, the installation becomes a series of

nesting containers that are entered both literally and visually.

This emphasis on the architecture of the installation emerges in sharp relief in

Interiors (2002), a multiscreen installation environment shaped like a Greek cross.

The cross was made of translucent material that allowed the visitor to view the

installation from both within and without. At the rear of three arms of the cross, three

videos were projected. The fourth arm was open-ended, serving as an entrance for the

visitors. At the cross’ center was a white, donut-shaped couch. Visitors could move

around the couch to watch a series of short narratives that appeared on the

projections.

The three screens showed four seven-minute narratives that rotated around the

four arms of the cross: this suited the nature of the videos shown in the installation,
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which were less about duration than about simultaneity, lack of hierarchy, and the

validity of any given moment. Typical of Aitken’s process, all the narratives of

Interiors shared momentarily repeated images that emerged across disparate city

nightscapes shown on the multiple screens: similarly composed close-ups of hands,

street signage, and traffic lights repeated across all three screens. Together they

produced the impression that the four protagonists featured in the work were wading

through one giant, globally connected megalopolis. This impression was reinforced

aurally as well as visually: during each cycle, the soundrack harmonized at specific

instances. At the beginning of each cycle the audio tracks played softly. Gradually,

they developed into an overlapping crescendo with increased speed.

The individual videos follow characters preparing for an activity: for example,

a young woman walks through a city to meet a friend in a handball court. She

changes in a locker room and plays a vigorous game that peaks in a string of grunts

and shrieks as the ball is sent careening through the court. A man shows up for the

night shift at a helicopter factory. Wearing a nylon coverall and blue rubber gloves,

the character breaks into a tap dance in his designated workspace by the assembly

line. In the third video, a character played by the musician André Benjamin

(Outkast’s André 3000) walks through a cityscape and stops in front of open water.

Benjamin’s sequence features increasingly surreal moments that move the narrative

along. At a certain point Benjamin defies gravity and moves along the ceiling. His

walk on the ceiling ends in a shot of petals and leaves that are carried along in his

wake as he walks past. Benjamin’s sequence climaxes with a rap that at times blurs
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into a relentless string of syllables. The fourth video intercuts two narratives set in

Tokyo: an auctioneer wanders through a deserted building at night, practicing his

chant. He sits, tapping his fingers in an empty room with curved rows of seating and

strips of neon. The auctioneer’s segment crescendos when he breaks into

incomprehensible auctionese. A young man drifts through emptied-out parking

complexes and crosses media-rich Tokyo cityscapes to meet his girlfriend and their

child at a waterfront. The sequence ends in front of a large pile of scrap metal at dawn

with the man whispering incoherent words to his silent, motionless baby, who is held

in a cocoon of blankets, strapped to the woman’s chest.

Aitken’s interest in architectural structures and interactions with urban

environments extend beyond the gallery. In 2000, with Glass Horizon, Aitken

projected a pair of eyes onto the facade of the Vienna Secession Building after it

closed for the night. The projection, looking out over the Austrian capital, imbued the

monumental building with the nervous motility of blinks and sideways glances. For

Aitken’s 2001 installation New Ocean at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the

building housing the gallery was incorporated into his work. Aitken’s use of both the

volumes and surfaces of architecture in general and of museum spaces in particular

was brought together in Sleepwalkers. Typically, the museum’s structure divides the

flow of pedestrians and commuters from the art inside. By including glass curtain

walls and recessed balconies in his redesign of MoMA, Yoshio Taniguchi broke

down some of these barriers and made it possible for the pedestrians and commuters

to see museum visitors from the street and vice versa. When he was invited to
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conceive of a public video work for MoMA, with Sleepwalkers, Aitken further

engaged the possibilities opened up by Taniguchi’s redesign, making the walls appear

to dissolve. From the sculpture garden, Sleepwalker’s audience could see through the

projections into the museum. The museum staff members and visitors, lit from behind

in the still-used offices and gallery spaces, became seamlessly integrated into the

ongoing narrative of social isolation and mechanical integration lived by

Sleepwalkers’ protagonists. Conversely, the museum’s occupants could see both the

projections and the public in the garden. Office worker and museum visitor, hot dog

vendor and security guard, their multiple, mundane realities became thus intertwined

into virtual, dreamlike sequences. In an interview included in an essay on the work by

Tom Vanderbilt, Aitken recalled that he could see, “‘through the image during an

early test projection,’ a light in the office of someone working late and the janitorial

staff cleaning after hours. ‘For me that was so relevant,’ he continued, ‘seeing that

level of reality blend through into the same image plane as fictional narrative.’”121

The simultaneous existence of virtual and actual, fiction and fact that has come to be

understood as a commonplace of everyday existence through expanded television

becomes central to Aitken’s work. As Vanderbilt writes, “…one might consider

Sleepwalkers as a kind of intervention in the changing psychogeography of the city,

in which whole building surfaces come to life, actively making appeals to passersby,

telling stories about themselves, or changing in response to fluctuating conditions.”122

121
Tom Vanderbilt, “City of Glass,” Artforum 45, no. 5 (Jan 2007): 46.
122
Vanderbilt, 46.
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This desire to animate the glass walls of the city, Vanderbilt suggests, proposes a new

way of living with our buildings:

Aitken speaks of wanting “to fold Manhattan inside out and create a kind of
architecture that is living and flowing, a waterfall of information and ideas.”
He wants, in an act of seductive legerdemain, to make MoMA dissolve, to
make it become what’s around it. Similarly, as in previous works, he
envisions the human protagonists becoming one with the city around them,
circadian rhythms syncing up with the hum of sodium-arc lighting. He moves
toward a minimalist economy of images: hands twitching awake, bodies in
motion…Sleepwalkers is a vanishing act of art and architecture, slipping
behind and beyond the glass curtain.123

Thus the work’s setting, New York City, also serves as a point of departure for its

content. Aitken chose locations that were both high profile and off-limits: the

helicopter platform on top of the Met Life Building, the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, the

New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn, the Staten Island Skating Pavilion, the

massive postal sorting center in Queens, the Landmark Sign Company where Times

Square signs are repaired, and the obverse of the LED sign at 1 Times Square, a

building whose revenue is generated by the electronic billboard that spans its facade.

Following “prototypical New Yorkers,” the narratives begin with the

characters waking as night falls. Like Interiors, one person’s rituals parallel and

sometimes synchronize with those of another person. Aitken imbues the banal

moments of their jobs a surreal beauty, underscoring the paradox of isolation and

intimacy in urban life. City functionaries, the stock New York characters in the

installation narrative consist of a business executive (played by the actor Donald

Sutherland), an office worker (played by the actor Tilda Swinton), a postal employee

123
Vanderbilt, 46.
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(played by the singer/songwriter Chan Marshall of Cat Power), a bicycle messenger

(played by the street musician Ryan Donowho), and an electrician (played by the

actor and musician Seu Jorge). The stories are told simultaneously and are woven

together through daily occurrences, chores and rituals like waking up, or washing, but

in very different environments and moments. In silent, parallel universes, all five

awake, study their reflections, bathe, dress, and breakfast. They exit their apartments

down endless corridors, pause in front of store windows, and commute to their

respective jobs. Chan Marshall’s character takes the subway to her decidedly blue-

collar job as a mail sorter; Seu Jorge’s character puts on a hardhat and unrolls

electrical cable in front of MoMA’s facade. Ryan Donowho rolls off someone else’s

couch, browses through a collection of old records and then leaves for his job as a

bicycle courier. As each thirteen-minute video moves through the routines of

characters, it builds up to increasingly dreamlike states of being. Tilda Swinton,

playing an office worker, absentmindedly performs her ablutions, dozes in a taxi on

her way to work and drifts through the deserted hallways of an office building. Her

segment diverges from reality as she stands in a darkened room, entranced before the

glowing lights and hypnotic movements of a monumental cluster of photocopiers.

After leaving his residence furnished in high modernist style, Sutherland is

chauffeured through the city in a Lincoln Town Car to a sparsely furnished office. At

his narrative’s climax, Sutherland’s character is hit by a taxi. Instead of collapsing to

the street, he breaks into a tap dance on the taxi’s hood. The other narratives all

crescendo in similar moments of private reverie. At the climax of their respective

 Between Distraction and Attention: 163
What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

segments, Marshall spins, Sufi-like, Jorge twirls a lariat, Swinton plays the violin, and

Donowho drums a plastic bucket.

The projections were not all visible from one site and required the visitor to

circle the museum complex in order to view all seven of them. While the work could

be experienced from various perspectives, the multiplicity of narrative combinations

discouraged all but the most dedicated of visitors from experiencing all the work’s

possible combinations.

Thelma Golden: The experience of the piece will be much like the way you
experience so much of the city-you’re doing it yourself, but other people are
doing it around you as well.
Doug Aitken: Yeah, and I want to create a work that lets the viewer enter their
own experience. That allows them to decide what vantage point they want to
see something from, or if they want to walk around the block, or if they just
don’t like it and want to leave.124

Siting the work on the exterior walls of MoMA would seem to blur the boundaries

between the museumgoers and passersby, art, and the kaleidoscope of billboards,

news tickers, and plasma screens that hug and fenestrate the city’s architecture.

Aitken rhapsodized about the associations between his work’s content and its

fragmentary reception by the commuter rushing by: “Ideally, it would be a piece that

doesn’t have a duration,” he said. “Someone can pull up, double-park, see something,

and take that concept away-as much as someone who wants to stand there for a half

an hour and get lost.”125

With the exception of the sidewalk on 53 Street, however, the choice of the

viewer’s location (the sculpture garden, the empty parking lot adjacent to the

124
Thelma Golden, “Interview with Doug Aitken,” Interview 37, no. 1 (2007): 244.
125
Quoted in Vanderbilt, 45.
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What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

museum) established a different expectation of movement. Instead of adapting to the

vernacular of the street, as Pfeiffer did and Douglas set out to do, Aitken’s work

transposed the museum visitor’s practices of looking outside onto the sidewalk. In

other words, the work solicited the role of the art spectator expounded on by

Wollheim, who refers to three fundamental perceptual capacities that the artist relies

on the spectator to have and to use: “seeing-in,” “expressive perception,” and the

capacity for “visual delight.” While for Wollheim, “seeing-in” is biologically

grounded, he conceived the role of the artist as a conduit for this innate capacity,

charged with directing and bringing it to a newly intensified focal point. This

separates the function of “seeing-in” from other representational strategies, such as

reading directional signs.126 Wollheim stresses a mastering look, a “careful, sensitive,

and generally informed scrutiny,” which will extract from art the information needed

to understand it. For this to succeed, “a spectator needs a lot of information about

how the painting he confronts came to be made: he needs substantial cognitive stock.”

Looking at art needs attention. It needs focus. The viewing subject cannot absorb art

in passing. Viewers came to midtown especially to visit the museum as well as

Aitken’s work. When they came, they stopped; they looked around; and they

absorbed a work whose spectacular qualities mesmerized, bringing them to a

standstill. Indeed, on 53 Street, the museum’s visitors formed crowds on the sidewalk,

creating an obstacle course for precisely the passersby that Aitken describes as his

ideal audience.

126
Wollheim, 129.
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What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

2.7 Conclusion

I have argued that given the intent of public art to command conscious attention, it

has not for the most part engaged with the distracted user of the architectural

infrastructure of expanded television. Consequently, by choosing to partially enter

into the flow of public movement through the possibilities opened up by expanded

television, Douglas and Pfeiffer do not reinforce a Habermasian ideal of consensus.

Rather, their work (both realized and proposed), doubled and stood in for the

experience of everyday life, creating a new model for thinking about the public.

Deutsche began her essay “Agoraphobia” with a question: “what does it mean for

space to be public?”127 As my reading of expanded television in general and Pfeiffer’s

and Douglas’s work in particular has demonstrated, drawing attention to public

movement is also ideologically charged, and doing so offers the following ideas:

Readings of both modern and contemporary spaces by Sennett and Holston

characterize their uniformity of purpose as both repressive and antidemocratic. With

Derrida’s notion of indirect expression, we come some way toward finding an answer

to the question, what does it mean for movement to be public? As Derrida describes

how the form of public opinion provides a silhouette of, or “ventriloquizes,” an

otherwise-indistinguishable phantom, Pfeiffer and Douglas’s public video art

temporarily gave shape to the circulation of the public by doubling it. They did not,

however, harden the lines of the phantom public into some constituency or another,

but rather they maintained its fluidity, its vagueness, its elsewhereness, its resistance

127
Deutsche, 269.
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What Does it Mean for Movement to be Public

to being made present. In doing so, they registered sediments of experience otherwise

unclaimed by social or economic rationality.

 167

Chapter 3
Disjunctures in Institutional Time:
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

When people first tried to sort out the impact of September 11 on the making of art,
one idea that often came up was that the video medium more than any other would be
changed for decades. How could it not? In the days following the tragedy, every
network carried the same three-second moving image of a plane hurtling into a tower
to create a ball of flame—and ran the segment again and again continuously, as if the
event were always happening at that very instant. It was a national case of repetition
compulsion: Reporters and viewers alike watched a newscast that was stuck in time,
unable to accept the reality of an event and therefore constantly reliving it onscreen.
Rarely, if ever, has editing mirrored an audience’s tormented psychology so clearly.
And, it was argued, video artists…would one day have to address the political, formal
and emotional power that an editing technique had displayed to millions of eyes.

—Tim Griffin

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

—Anonymous

3.1 Introduction: Buildings and Routines

Like all institutions, galleries, museums, and art fairs are, in part, shaped by a set

range of accepted practices and behaviors, as well as by their built environments.

Through the official and unofficial behavior of ticket takers, guards and docents, as

well as the structure of the public spaces where they work—specifically the entrance

halls, bookstores, cafeterias, and, most importantly the exhibition spaces—permanent

or temporary contemporary art institutions both describe and limit the manner in

which they are used. In museums, this emerges through something as simple as the

organization of public and private spaces. As Eilean Hooper-Greenhill writes, the

institution of a division between producers and consumers of knowledge assumes an

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architectural form in the relations between the hidden spaces of the museum, where

knowledge is produced and organized by the curatorial and administrative staff, and

the museum’s public spaces, where knowledge is offered to the museum-going public

for its passive consumption, under the watchful eye of the docent and the guard.1

And Tony Bennett describes the progression through museum spaces as “organized

walking,” wherein the conceptual or historical nature of an exhibit of anthropology,

natural history, or art channels the viewer’s attention by way of a “narrative

machinery” to a conclusion that is reached after passing through successive galleries

that make up an exhibit.2

The temporal and spatial demands of artworks influence both organized

walking and exhibition spaces. While both the public museum and the discipline of

art history were born in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the

selection of objects to exhibit reaches back to cabinets of curiosity that proliferated

throughout Europe in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Depending on its

formal qualities as well as its original function, each object demands a different form

of attention from the viewer. Ritual statuary, a suite of elaborately chased suits of

armor, a collection of dolls, a reconstituted courtyard from seventeenth-century

Spain, a diorama of North American mammals, a series of mid-twentieth-century

photographs documenting city life in New York—all require a certain viewing

distance and time for study. The formal component of how each work is looked at

1
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, “The Museum in Disciplinary Society,” in Museum Studies in Material
Culture, ed. Susan M. Pearce, (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989), 63.
2
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 180–
181.
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informs the way it is situated in its broader institutional context. The shape of the

gallery the work is located in and, is just as important (or perhaps more so), the

manner in which it is showcased to the public also determines how it is situated.

These material and institutional pressures, in turn, ultimately shape or influence what

is produced and how it is received.

Just as the meaning and function of objects manufactured before the

emergence of the museum were altered by their introduction therein, media forms

created after the invention of the museum—photography, film, and video—also

change after entering the institution. Since the 1960s, “artistic” versions of these

media have moved from other institutional locations into the museum. That “artistic”

is defined in part by the museum, art gallery, and art fair is by now a truism. In On the

Museum’s Ruins, Douglas Crimp writes,

[A]rt as we think about it only came into being in the nineteenth century, with
the birth of the museum and the discipline of art history.…For us, then, art’s
natural end is in the museum, or, at the very least, in the imaginary
museum.…The idea of art as autonomous, as separate from everything else, as
destined to take its place in art history, is a development of modernism.3

As Crimp asserts in his larger argument, the entry into the museum of media created

after its birth and from a much broader context—in his example, photography—

upsets the illusions necessary to the idea of the autonomous art object. Thus, the

introduction of photography, film, and then video (as well as the evolution of the

forms of their selection and display) depends, in turn, on a complex tangle of

discursive, historical, and formal shifts. This chapter and the one that follows will

3
Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 98.
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The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

examine in detail some aspects of the entry of film- and video-installation art into the

museum. Specifically, it will explore how institutional pressures create film and video

installations and how the presence of film and video installations influence both the

museum and the experience of museum visitors.

This chapter focuses on what happens to the temporal form of moving images,

primarily video, once it enters the museum through the byways of commercial

galleries, art festivals, fairs and biennials. My interest in the interdependence of

institution and object, however, takes its place within a wider body of literature that

both critiques the museum as an institution and considers the relation between the art

object and the viewer inside the museum. Crimp looks at the museum vis-à-vis the

radical reevaluation of photography on the part of the art world in the 1970s. For

photography to enter the museum—a modernist institution—it should have become

severed from the broader possibilities of the medium. As Crimp writes, however, this

requirement was not met, given that photography necessarily points to a world

outside itself, a characteristic that places it in direct opposition to the very nature of

the museum. “When photography is allowed entrance to the museum as an art among

others, the museum’s epistemological coherence collapses. The ‘world outside’ is

allowed in, and art’s autonomy is revealed as a…construction of the museum.”4

The curator Okwui Enwezor set out to bring the world into the museum in his

design of the eleventh edition of Documenta, an international contemporary art

exhibition staged every five years in Kassel, Germany. He accomplished this goal by

4
Crimp, 14.
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breaking Documenta XI up into platforms, or events and exhibitions in different parts

of the world that were staged before and contemporaneous to the art fair. While, like

Crimp, Enwezor sees the ideological limitations of the museum through the prism of

its status as a modernist, and therefore hermetic institution, he attributes this failure

not to the severance of a given medium—such as photography—from the outside

world, but rather to the break between all objects from all their worlds that resulted

from the exhibitionary model. Enwezor writes,

If the function of an artwork and the story it tells in an exhibition is to be

understood primarily through the nature of its presentation, or by calling upon
the context of the exhibition system to restore the temporal displacement that
a work is often pressed into through the empirical logic of one thing standing
next to another, this would also mean to establish the artwork’s limits as
such.5

Like Crimp, Enwezor describes a tension that exists between the artwork and its

exhibition context. Unlike Crimp, he conceptualizes it as a temporal phenomenon,

much the way that Martin Heidegger describes the displacement and subsequent

falsification of the world brought about by the “nearness” of television. In his short

essay “The Thing” (1950), Heidegger forecasts the philosophical consequences of

technological change that appeared to bring things closer together temporally while

maintaining their spatial separation: “the peak of this abolition of every possibility of

remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole

machinery of communication.”6 A false “nearness,” or temporal-spatial relation

disrupts an integral quality of the artwork in Enwezor’s argument, and our bond with
5
Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue, exh. Cat.
Okwui Enwezor et al., eds. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002): 42.
6
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York:
Harper and Row, 1971), 165.
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The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

the world in Heidegger’s. The false temporality produced by the exhibition space

brings about a tautological system, “into which the artwork is bound up in its own

self-referentiality through the relationships established between mediums, objects and

systems….” With these conditions in place, Enwezor continues, “there is no life for

the artwork outside the system of art, no autonomy outside the framework of an art

exhibition.”7 No matter what the vitality of any medium outside the institution of the

museum, it is diluted by the temporal displacement of the museum’s exhibition

practices. Furthermore, “The artwork—which, in any case, is understood a priori to

be extraterritorial to an exhibition’s logic—functions as time spatialized, but only

inside the space in which it is corseted, which does not refer to an external world.”8

The redress necessary to open an institution out onto the larger world, then, involves

formally changing the physical and temporal structure of the museum itself and

thereby its institutional time.

Enwezor extends this idea of institutional time into a dialogue between the

museum and the outside world necessitated by both globalization and the fallout of

9/11. Others have taken up this idea of institutional time as it relates more narrowly to

the experience of attending an exhibition. As I stated, Bennett conceptualizes the

museum-going experience as a spatialized narrative, guiding the visitor from

exhibition space to exhibition space. This culminates in a preconceived end-point,

designed to edify and elevate the museumgoer. Edification and elevation were central

to the museum’s formative mission in the nineteenth century. Bennett describes the

7
Enwezor, 42.
8
Enwezor, 42.
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The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

museum as “an institution in which the working class—provided they dressed nicely

and curbed any tendency towards unseemly conduct—might be exposed to the

improving influence of the middle classes….”9 In other words, the public museum

was to be understood not only as a place of instruction but also as a reformatory of

manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances took

place.

Crimp assigns a radically influential power to the relation between the entry of

a new medium, photography, and an existing institution, the museum. This chapter

also addresses the interrelation between the museum and the entry of a new medium,

in this instance, film and video installation. How does a medium change after it enters

the museum? Enwezor points out that the entry of objects into the museum changes

their temporal relation to the world. Bennett describes how the temporal pressure of

exhibition practices influences the behavior of its visitors. Each describes an aspect of

the existence of institutional time forms. These time forms demonstrate the

consequences of exhibition practices (Enwezor) and the shaping of public behavior

(Bennett). How are these institutional time forms affected by the entry of film and

video installation into the museum? How do the demands of the museum in turn alter

film and video installation? The following section traces the events leading up to the

emergence of video installation as a major force in contemporary art in the 1990s and

considers the decidedly mixed reception of the genre in relation to this history.

9
Bennett, 28.
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The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

3.2 Video’s Entry into the Studio, Art Gallery, Art Fair, and Museum

While this section will concentrate on the period covering the institutionalization of

video art, many other moving-image practices predate and parallel the emergence and

maturation of video as an art-form. These “exceptions” date from George Méliès and

the cinema of attraction to European surrealist and Dadaist filmmakers in the 1920s

and 1930s and the mid-century film avant-garde in the United States. By the mid-

1960s, many streams of ongoing moving-image practices in art existed, as Chrissie

Iles makes clear in the catalog accompanying a major exhibition on early examples of

moving image art, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 19641977.

By organizing this section around the emergence and subsequent institutionalization

of video art, however, I am tracing a self-conscious “birth of a medium” that

dominated the moving image in art in the 1970s and the 1980s, a period that closely

links avant-garde practices to the moving image. This period also overlaps with a

transition toward institutional centrality and consequent changes in film and video

installation’s temporal form.

The time lag between the development in 1965 of the Sony Portapak (the first

widely available portable video camera), its early adoption by artists, and video’s

successive entry into the art gallery, art fair, and the museum is astonishingly short. A

review of press releases from the Museum of Modern Art, as well as a chronology of

exhibition catalogs including video from the mid-1960s onward—especially

Documenta catalogs—tells a story of a progress from the margins to the center. This

movement takes several forms. As part of a transformation of urban geography, video

 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 175
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

emerges and develops in SoHo in the mid-1960s, the area south of Houston Street in

New York City, at the time a “new” art neighborhood. Video’s migration from

provinces to cultural capital started with its first patrons, regional museums—which

were located away from the broadly recognized (especially by itself) international art

center of New York City. There was also a movement from margin to center within

institutions that style themselves as the arbiters of what constitutes modern or

contemporary art. Here, I mark this movement in terms of both the activities that take

place within the museum and the spaces that house them. Video first enters the

museum as the subject of artist’s talks or as part of screening series held in rooms

tucked far away from the major exhibition galleries. At a certain moment, video

explodes into the “primary” exhibition spaces, and from there it rapidly evolves into

one of the dominant media found in contemporary galleries, art fairs, and biennials, in

many instances eclipsing painting. The approach of institutions such as the Museum

of Modern Art or the Whitney Museum of American Art initially appears as a

paradox: torn by their status as arbiters of what constitutes modernity, postmodernity,

and the contemporary, they act to stamp their imprimatur on an art form only after it

has been patronized by institutions with a lower profile and narrower scope of

cultural influence.

Video art was first adopted by artists who settled SoHo. In 1971 New York

City’s planning commission adopted zoning amendments that authorized the

conversion of underutilized loft buildings to artists’ live-work quarters. The lofts were

housed in old factories that had been originally built to accommodate light
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 176
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

manufacturing industries in New York City. The zoning amendment was intended to

balance the needs of the artists moving into SoHo with the area’s remaining

manufacturing and warehouse users. In 1976 the district was extended to include

NoHo, or north of Houston Street. At the time these lofts were considered a radical

new step in both art production and exhibition, and of a piece with the art that was

being produced within them. Video art’s first home in the United States lies in these

lofts—its users, including radical television collectives, postminimalists, Fluxus and

performance artists, all established themselves here. In a catalog for a 1976 German

exhibition designed to mark the bicentennial of the United States, René Block writes

that the relation between SoHo, video, and performance art at the time was mutually

beneficial. While video and performance art, he argues, stand out as SoHo’s

contributions to contemporary art, they “incontestably molded a new SoHo

aesthetic.…”10 Furthermore, between 1965 and 1975 SoHo evolved into the center in

New York City for contemporary artists because of money that flowed there from

granting institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York State

Council for the Arts. For Block,

This direct support explains the lead enjoyed by American artists in

performance dance and music techniques and the take-for-granted way in
which video has been integrated.…Probably nowhere in the world is there
such a concentration of electronics in the area of arts as there is in SoHo (the
studio of Nam June Paik and Shigebo Kubota has more video hardware at its

10
René Block, “Square Map SoHo. Europe in SoHo. Alex—or the Spirit of SoHo,” in New York,
Downtown Manhattan, SoHo: Ausstellungen, Theater, Musik, Performance, Video, Film exh. cat. Eds.
René Block, Ursula Block, Kurt Thöricht (Berlin: Akademie der Künste/Berliner Festwochen, 1976),
15.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 177
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

disposal than all the exhibiting cultural institutes of West Berlin put
together).11

The concentration of artists in SoHo not only resulted in significant government and

foundation support, and a (comparatively) high level of sophistication and intensive

focus on technological experimentation in video, but also in a move southward by

most art galleries, from the area on and around 57 Street, to SoHo.12 Stephen Koch

wrote that by 1970, the major uptown galleries such as Leo Castelli, Ilene Sonnabend,

and Andrei Emmerich had either moved downtown or opened satellite galleries in

SoHo. Coinciding with this move, according to Koch, was a shift in emphasis away

from the traditional media of painting and sculpture toward film, video, and

performance “as crucial to an avant-garde which had previously been officially

understood to encompass primarily painting and sculpture. And so, it seemed, SoHo

would represent a new era for art, as well as for where artists lived.”13 For Crimp,

there is not so much an association between the emergence of a neighborhood and a

medium as there is the development of a time-based medium that helps defines a

decade and that replaces painting:

[D]uring the 1960s, painting’s terminal condition finally seemed impossible to

ignore. The symptoms were everywhere: in the work of painters
themselves…in minimal sculpture…in all those other mediums to which

11
Block, 19.
12
A notable exception to this migration southward by gallerists patronizing video art was Howard
Wise. TV as a Creative Medium, the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to video
art, was presented in 1969 at his eponymous gallery on 57 Street. The show emphasized television sets
as sculptural forms and the machinery of video rather than its images. Most notably, Frank Gillette and
Ira Schneider showed Wipe Cycle (1969), a pioneering television installation that consisted of nine
monitors arranged in a grid. This early “video wall” combined both live and delayed coverage of the
comings and goings in the gallery, intercut with ongoing commercial television programs.
13
Stephen Koch, “Reflections on SoHo,” in New York, Downtown Manhattan, SoHo: Ausstellungen,
Theater, Musik, Performance, Video, Film exh. cat. eds. René Block, Ursula Block, Kurt Thöricht
(Berlin: Akademie der Künste/Berliner Festwochen, 1976), 109.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 178
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

artists turned as, one after another, they abandoned painting. The dimension
that has always resisted even painting’s most dazzling feats of illusionism—
time—now became the dimension in which artists staged their activities, as
they embraced film, video, and performance.14

Thus, SoHo both defines and is defined by the avant-garde’s declaration of the death

of painting.

The moment that was defined by the emergence of portable video technology,

the development of SoHo as a viable neighborhood for a new art community, the new

focus within the United States on video and film as an avant-garde art form, and the

emergence of performance art was recognized as both fleeting and vulnerable to

institutionalization. Douglas Davis describes how this moment became a victim of its

own success:

SoHo is simply a site. Video is simply a tool. Their coming together is a grand
historical mistake (the chic art community coming to public attention at
virtually the same hour with a radicalizing means), preceded by beginnings in
film and Fluxus, both vagabond activities. Since then, both site and the tool
have acted as microcosms for larger conflicts, between the reality of art-
making and the lens through which it is viewed. My pessimism about the
future is unbounded. So is my wonder at the achievements of the past. What
lies ahead—under inexorable social and political pressure—is breakage and
disbursal. The “critical mass” that made SoHo important between 1967 and
1976 is about to loosen, and take residence elsewhere. The esthetic left is
about to surrender, I think.15

The mourning over a lost moment and place is palpable in this text. What also

emerges is a sense of resignation about the inevitable progression of experimental

film and video from avant-gardist spaces to institutional legitimization.

14
Crimp, 92–93.
15
Douglas Davis, “SoHo du Mal: Video, Film,” in New York, Downtown Manhattan, SoHo:
Ausstellungen, Theater, Musik, Performance, Video, Film exh. cat. eds. René Block, Ursula Block,
Kurt Thöricht (Berlin:Akademie der Künste/Berliner Festwochen, 1976), 231.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 179
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

In addition to the groundswell of activity in New York City in the late 1960s

to the mid-1970s, alternative exhibition spaces that supported video art proliferated

throughout the United States and Canada. On the West Coast these included the

Video Inn in Vancouver, La Mamelle in San Francisco, the Los Angeles Institute of

Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Art schools like the

California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the

University of California at San Diego integrated video into their curricula, in the

context of experimental film and performance art. Exhibitions featuring video art also

took place in smaller regional museums elsewhere in the United States, including the

Ohio State University College of the Arts in Columbus; the Pomona College Art

Gallery in Claremont, California; the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University

of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; Media Study in Buffalo, New York; and the

Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.16 In 1975, the Institute of Contemporary Art

in Philadelphia organized a major international exhibition, Video Art, which surveyed

single-channel video and video installation art from North America, South America,

Japan, and Europe.

Some catalog essays that resulted from these exhibitions explicitly set out to

situate video art in an art-historical context. In the forward to the catalog

accompanying Frank Gillette’s 1978 Aransas: Axis of Observation, exhibited at the

16
For example: College of the Arts, Interactive Sound and Visual Systems exh. cat., text by Charles
Csuri (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1970); Pomona College Art Gallery, William Wegman:
Video Tape, Photographic Works, Arrangements exh. cat. (Claremont, Calif.: The Gallery, 1971);
Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Art video confrontation ’74 exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’art
moderne, 1974); Art Gallery of Ontario, Videoscape: An Exhibition of Video Art exh. cat. (Toronto:
Education and Extension, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974).
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Contemporary Arts Museum in Texas, museum director James Harithas draws a

lineage for Gillette beginning with the nineteenth-century realist Gustave Courbet.

Gillette’s work, for Harithas, “espouses a realism which recalls Courbet’s scientific

naturalism—descending through associations between Gillette’s work and Cezanne’s

‘relational series of overlapping planes,’ to Claude Monet and then finally Barnett

Newman.”17 Other essays chose to explain video art through mass culture,

specifically broadcast television. In the catalog accompanying the 1978 exhibition

New Video and Performance Art in Detroit, the curator Jay Belloli situates the

emergence of video in relation to the incorporation of mass-cultural artifacts by

contemporary pop art painters such as Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Litchenstein.18

And in the catalog to the 1983 exhibition Watching Television: A Video Event, John

Hanhardt wrote that the viewer’s perception of video art was largely determined by

the role television had come to play in the form of an entertainment and information

industry, which was in turn shaped by the marketplace of corporate capitalism.19

Most notably, the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, and the Long

Beach Museum of Art in Long Beach, California, maintained sustained video-

exhibition programs that were supported by ancillary research institutes. In 1972,

with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Everson Museum

17
James Harithas, “Foreword,” Frank Gillette, Aransas: Axis of Observation exh. cat. (Houston, Texas:
Contemporary Arts Museum, 1978), 2–3.
18
Jay Belloli, “Preface,” The Detroit Institute of Arts, New Video and Performance Art in Detroit
Works in Progress V, exh. cat. (Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1979): 4.
19
John Hanhardt, “Watching Television,” School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, Watching Television: A Video Event exh. cat. (Urbana-Champaign: School of Art and
Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983), 7.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 181
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established the first video department in a museum in the United States.20 David Ross

was appointed the first video curator, before leaving to become the deputy director for

film and television at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1974.21 The Everson

Museum maintained relationships with Synapse, an editing facility located in

Syracuse, New York as well as the Experimental Television Workshop in

Binghamton, New York. In addition to the Southland Video Anthology (1975, 1976-

77), the Long Beach Museum of Art also featured video art in group exhibitions such

as Videothos: Cross-cultural Videos by Artists (1979), Roles, Relationships,

Sexuality, Shared Realities: A Cultural Cable Series (1983), A Passage Repeated, A

Passage Repeated (1985), Video: A Retrospective: Long Beach Museum of Art,

1974-1984 (1984), Video Poetics: A Presentation of the Long Beach Museum of Art

(1990) and Choice Encounters (1992), as well as solo exhibitions such as Framed: A

Video Installation by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto (1989).

20
A representative sampling of artists and shows organized by Everson include Shigeko Kubota, and
Work from Experimental Television Center (1972), Circuit: A Video Invitational (1973, traveled in
1974), Frank Gillette Video Process and Meta-Process (1973), Videa ‘n’ Videology: Nam June Paik
(1974), Video and the Art Museum (three day workshop/seminar, April 4th, 5th and 6th, 1974),
Everson Video 75, Installations and Performance Works by Ant Farm, CAST (Community Video),
David Cort, Dance Media (live performance work by Joanne Kelly, Skip Sweeney of Video Free
America, Jane Miller), Dimitri Devyatkin, Dieter Frose (Restage, February 1–23), Electron Movers;
Beryl Korot, Shigeko Kubota, Andy Mann, Paul Ott and Fred Kessler, Walter Wright of the
Experimental Television Center, Peter Van Riper and Bill Viola (all 1975), The Dreme Style of
Michael Butler, Information, Works and Activities exhibition by the Experimental Television Center
(all 1976), New Work in Abstract Video Imagery, WGBH New Television Workshop Showcase.
Works by Ros Barron, Donald Burgy, Peter Campus, Brian Connell, Frank Gillette, Robert Goldman,
Ron Hayes, Tava Hudson, Andy Mann, Jo Sandman, TVTV and William Wegman were screened. In
conjunction with this exhibit, in October 1977 WCNY TV 24 aired a sixty-minute composite of these
selections and others produced by the WGBH Workshop from 1973 to 1977. Southland Video
Anthology 1976-77, Jamie Davidovich “Argentinian” video surveillance installation, Skip Blumberg
and John Margolies, “Resorts of the Catskills,” Aldo Tambellini exhibited video and photographs (all
1977). “Resources: Groups,” Video History Project,
http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/groups/gtext.php3?id=33 (accessed September 28, 2005).
21
He then became the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. The Everson Museum video department closed in 1981.
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In the museums widely regarded as primary arbiters of contemporary art

within the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of

Modern Art, video art arrived through three methods: from the fringes of the

museum’s program of activities, under the guise of sculpture, and as part of group

exhibitions focusing on large themes that incorporate video alongside other media. As

part of a 1968 exhibition considering the broader theme of the machine, two videos

by Nam June Paik (McLuhan Caged and Lindsay Tape) were included in an

exhibition at MoMA, The Machine Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. Lindsay

Tape consisted of an excerpt from a televised press conference given by John

Lindsay, then the mayor of New York, where he said: “As soon as this is over, you

may start recording.” By sliding magnets across the monitor, viewers were able to

distort Lindsay’s features. For the exhibition at MoMA, Paik set an open-reel, half-

inch play-back deck on the floor several feet away from a sewing-machine bobbin

and spool, and then ran the spliced tape between them. This configuration anticipated

both the yet-to-be-developed videocassette and the ubiquity of the loop from the

1990s onward. In 1970, MoMA included videotapes from the United States, Europe,

and Latin America in Kynaston McShine’s multimedia exhibition Information. A

videotape recording booth was set up in MoMA by the Argentine Group Frontera. At

the booth visitors answered questions in front of a video camera and then watched

themselves on television screens in both “real” time and “time delay.” In 1974 Fred

Barzyk, Douglas Davis, Gerald O’Grady, and the MoMA film department director

Willard Van Dyke organized a major conference, Open Circuits, on the future of
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television.22 Finally, in 1983, MoMA hosted a major traveling show, The Second

Link: Viewpoints on Video in the Eighties, which was identified at the time by a

reviewer for New York magazine as the first, and possibly the most ambitious,

traveling exhibition of video art to date.23

A sustained focus on video “as video” emerges with Projects: Video, a series

curated by Barbara London (a longtime advocate of the moving image at MoMA), in

September 1974. While that focus had been initiated at MoMA in 1971 with an

environmental-video installation by Keith Sonnier (which I look at in detail below),

the bulk of the series consisted of screenings organized by London.24 They were held

first in the Auditorium Gallery, and later in a dedicated gallery.25 In 1984 London

curated another retrospective exhibition on video at MoMA, Video Art: A History. A

review of this exhibition by Lucinda Furlong in Afterimage summarizes the criticisms

of MoMA’s attempt to establish the history of an art form that was, at the time, less

than twenty years old:

Any exhibition that attempts to present a history of one art form is bound to be
controversial, and whoever curates it becomes an easy target for criticism.
Barbara London, the Museum of Modern Art’s video curator, has put herself
into an even more precarious position since she has embarked on the relatively
uncharted waters of video art….Beyond the immediate issues of what was

22
Proceedings from this conference were later edited by Douglas Davis and Alison Simmons and
published as The New Television: A Public/Private Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978).
23
Kay Larson, “Through a Screen, Dimly,” New York, September 12, 1983, 86–87.
24
Nevertheless, the occasional installation was also included in this series: Shigebo Kubota’s Nude
Descending a Staircase (1978), Terry Fox’s Room Temperature (1980), Allan Scarrit’s Seven From
Three (for go) (1981), and Barbara Steinman’s Icon (1990).
25
Museum of Modern Art press releases refer to both the Auditorium Gallery and the Video Gallery:
March 1978. February 1979 “Projects: Video XVI;” January 1980, “Fields of Blue: Nan Hoover’s
Video Installation on View at MoMA”
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included and how it was presented looms the question of the implications of
video being singled out as a separate and autonomous “medium.”26

In her lengthy review, Furlong summarizes some of the debates that defined the later

discourse on early video: questions over who could categorize the forms of video and

skepticism over its restriction to a category separate from the other media forms it

developed alongside.

In my review of some of these debates in chapter 1, I focus on video as an

extension of or a commentary on television, its placement within institutional

contexts such as television stations and research centers, and its support by

philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. The complications

involved in attempts to place video art on television, however, do not fully describe

the range of activities that took place in the transitional period between video’s

“utopian moment” (late 1960s–early 1970s) and its current status as a dominant

medium in contemporary art.

For example, artists who integrated video into a larger sculptural practice,

such as Lynda Benglis, Keith Sonnier, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra, brought

video into the museum not as an art form unto itself but as one sculptural material

among many.27 These artists are historically identified as “process,” or

postminimalist, artists. When they first emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s,

they were identified as a group through their preference for a heterogeneity of

materials, a willingness to integrate space into their sculptural practice, and an

26
Lucinda Furlong, “Raster Master,” Afterimage 11, no. 8 (March 1984): 17.
27
This notwithstanding London’s categorization of the work of Keith Sonnier as video in her essay
included in The New Television, the text that resulted from Open Circuits, an international conference
on the future of television held at the Museum in 1976.
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emphasis on the process of making and receiving the artwork. Through this latter

emphasis, many of these artists extended their work to actively incorporate the

corporeal experience of the museumgoer as well. While a shift in emphasis takes

place away from many sculptural materials to the privileging of one, in reviews a

strong resemblance emerges between these works and contemporary film and video

installations such as Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth (1999), and Pierre Huyghe’s

Streamside Day Follies (2003). The Keith Sonnier installation at MoMA from 1971

(Untitled) exemplifies some of these parallels.

Sonnier had been given two rooms to work with. The lintel of the doorway to

the first room was dropped to four feet, forcing adults to crouch down before

entering. In an article published in Artforum, Kenneth Baker writes that after entering,

he immediately bumped his head when trying to straighten himself. Sonnier had

decreased not only the height of the doorway but the ceiling of the entire room to

approximately four feet:

[O]r so it appeared at first. At the far end of the now shallow room, there was
an opening in the lowered ceiling, a rectangle of perhaps four by five feet
through which bright red light poured from above. One naturally sought that
position in order to be able to stand up and because it promised something else
to see.28

On reaching the rectangular opening, the museumgoer saw that the top half of the

gallery space was bathed in the red light and empty, with the exception of a small

television camera, whose lens was trained on the space where the visitor’s head

would inevitably pop up. Two projected images of the resulting video were

28
Kenneth Baker, “Keith Sonnier at the Modern,” Artforum, 10, No. 2 (October 1971): 80.
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transmitted from the smaller gallery to the second, larger gallery, filling two opposite

walls in the larger gallery with positive and negative versions. For Baker,

The choice of this image was perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the piece; if
one wanted to apply illusionism to the limits of a real space such as a room,
and if projections filled the two walls, then there could hardly have been a
more appropriate image to use than that of another entrance to a real space, an
image which repeats the nature of illusionism itself.29

Sonnier treats video as a component that has a transformational influence on and is

integral to an installation. While his work remains defined by Baker as sculpture, the

critical work of the essay is devoted to elaborating how the video projections of the

action in the first room playing in the second room function as a successful challenge

of pictorialism, or the transformation of two-dimensional space into an illusion of

three-dimensional space:

Sonnier’s piece consisted simply in his devising a situation of constant

mediation for the experience of seeing and being seen by other people given
the fact that a literally immediate pictorial space is possible with the proper
use of video equipment.30

When viewed from the present, what emerges is how firmly embedded the defining

characteristics of film and video installation are in postminimalism, or process art—

the choreography between galleries and moving images, the debates over

pictorialism, and considerations of how these elements influence the shift in the

qualitative experience of temporality experienced inside the galleries housing the film

and video installation art. Aitken’s Electric Earth, Batsry’s Set, and Huyghe’s

Streamside Day Follies placed the audience at the center of their respective

29
Ibid., 247.
30
Ibid., 248.
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installations. Aitken’s Electric Earth established a highly nuanced choreography

between the moving image, the gallery space and the audience. All, however, are

grouped under a broader repudiation of these later installations’ use of “pictorialist”

moving images, an anachronistic descriptive that I take up at length in the next

chapter.

Notwithstanding the place of video—and the moving image more broadly—as

media of choice for the avant-garde in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the speed at

which film and video installation overtook the more traditional media of painting and

sculpture at a certain moment in the 1990s as the central medium in large-scale

institutions is breathtaking. The quickest way to survey this is through a review of

Documenta catalogs, both because Documenta takes place every five years and

because of its status as a lightning rod for reactionary criticism.31 In 1977 Documenta

VI introduced video for the first time, alongside photography and film. In the catalog,

and we may assume, at the exhibition, video was organized into two sections: out of a

total of 396 artists, 63 video artists were included, from which 50 were single-channel

videos shown in a Videoteck and 13 videos were installations, scattered throughout

the exhibition spaces, by artists such as Vito Acconci, Rebecca Horn, Joan Jonas,

Friedrike Pezold and Ulrike Rosenbach. In the accompanying essay, Wulf

Herzogenrath uses the ideas of Marshall McLuhen, as well as the history of video in

Europe and the United States up to that point, to account for the inclusion of video in

Documenta.

31
One problem with this methodology is that each Documenta has a different curator, with a different
view of the relative importance of various media.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 188
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In Documenta VI, photography, film and video works considerably

outnumbered painting and sculpture. In Documenta VII (1982) however, while artists

such as Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Martha

Rosler, and Dara Birnbaum were represented, the balance had shifted back to more

traditional media. This was also the case in Documenta VIII (1987). A more

substantial number of single-channel videos were exhibited in Videoteck, and “video

sculptures” (Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Shigeko Kabuto, and Nam June Paik) were

grouped with other media in the main section of the catalog, and shown in the

primary galleries of the exhibition.

For London, video’s rapid ascendancy on the international art scene and in the

commercial galleries in New York in the 1990s is attributable to two factors: the

maturation of video as an art form and the coincidental pressure of economics:

The maturity that video as an art form had attained by the early 1990s was
evident at the international survey exhibition Documenta IX, in Kassel,
Germany, in 1992. Unlike Documenta VII (1982) or Documenta VIII (1987),
the numerous video installations here were on an equal footing [we may
presume, aesthetically] with painting and sculpture throughout the many
pavilions.32

Significant here is the association drawn by London between the development of

video as an art form and its equal stature with painting and sculpture in the pavilions

that made up the art exhibition. In Documenta IX (the exhibition identified by

London as the one where video takes its place beside painting and sculpture), a new

wave of moving-image artists, Matthew Barney, Mari José Burki, Ernst Caramelle,

32
Barbara London, interview by John Johnston, “From Video to Web: New Media Yesterday and
Tomorrow—An Interview with Barbara London,” Art Papers, November/December 2001, 25–26.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 189
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Stan Douglas, Vera Frenkel, Rodney Graham, and KeunByung Yook, as well as

artists from earlier generations—Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Tony Oursler, Dara

Birnbaum, and Bill Viola—were represented.

London tells the backstory of the rise of film and video installation in a salty,

acerbic interview given in 2001 in Art Papers. For London, with improvements in

projection technology, video developed into a more visually sensuous medium:

“Once something very rough and scrappy, video got bigger and more deluxe at the

same time that painting got bigger and juicier with David Salle and all.” In the 1990s,

developments and improvements in exhibition technologies (the maturation of digital

video, the commercial viability of projection) made video’s image quality visually

more congruent with film. The lines between the media blur, making it difficult to

sharply distinguish cinematic from video practices in the museum, especially because

some nominally video artists take on the conventions of film: on the one hand, they

are filmmakers, or artists who have transported the conventions of narrative cinema

into the museum, by virtue of budget and complexity. On the other, they are not

filmmakers, because they use the “language” of video art, playing with temporality,

simultaneity, duration, audience expectation, and the relation between exhibition

space and art work.

Contemporaneous with this aesthetic and technological transformation was an

economic depression in the art market that suddenly made video a more attractive,

that is, a cheaper commodity than painting:

Barbara London: You had a sort of little economic boom, and then it bottomed
out again, and it was pull up your socks time, and people got back to
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basics…And when the market was down in the early 90s, I remember [the
New York art dealer] Barbara Gladstone doing a show that included the work
of Dara Birnbaum, Bruce Nauman, and a few others. I don’t think Barbara
would ever have done video in the 80s, but because the bottom had fallen out,
she put this little show together and attracted more than she had attracted in
her life there in SoHo. So it was interesting to think there was that moment.
And it certainly picked up again.33

The attraction held by video survived after this dip. In the 1992 Documenta, out of a

total of 196 artists, 53 painters were represented, compared with 8 video installation

artists and 3 video artists showing single-channel videos in a screening room. By the

mid-1990s, in London’s words, video in general and video projections in particular

satisfied the artworld’s

feeding frenzy over the “new-new-new.” Everywhere you looked, there were
more artists, more museums purchasing contemporary art and producing
international survey shows, and more private collectors building larger homes
to house more art. Competition, in a word, was fierce.34

Not only did film and video installation slake an appetite for novelty, it also appealed

to an interest in new technologies. London related that MoMA became increasingly

interested in technology in the 1990s, which coincided more generally with a greater

openness to art that stressed installation and interactivity. These elements were

satisfied by large-scale film and video installations: in 1995 London curated a show,

Video Spaces, where eight installations by artists such as Tony Oursler, Bill Viola,

and Stan Douglas filled a floor of the museum. And in a clear shift in emphasis from

the previous edition, in the 1997 Documenta, out of a total of 115 artists, 6 painters

were represented alongside approximately 40 moving-image artists. Documenta was

33
Ibid., 26.
34
Ibid., 25–26.
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not alone in this tilt toward film and video installation: “in a Biennial,” concluded

London in the 2001 interview, “it’s very natural now to have a video installation, and

it used to be an anomaly.”35 This new prominence is also evident in the artists chosen

for awards: video installations won the Turner Prize awarded by the Tate Gallery in

1996 (Douglas Gordon), 1997 (Gillian Wearing), and 1999 (Steve McQueen); top

awards at the Venice Biennale went to Pippilotti Rist in 1997, Doug Aitken and

Shirin Neshat in 1999, and Pierre Huyghe, together with Janet Cardiff and George

Bures Miller, in 2001; finally, in 2000 the inaugural Bucksbaum awarded at the

Whitney Biennial went to Paul Pfeiffer, and then in 2002 to Irit Batsry.

The movement of film and video installation in the United States from SoHo

loft to commercial gallery, from commercial gallery to regional museum, from

regional museum to art-capital lecture hall, from lecture hall to ancillary gallery, and

finally from ancillary gallery to main pavilion spatializes the narrative of this art

form’s shift from the margins to the very center of contemporary art. As catalogs of

international art exhibitions demonstrate, the speed of this move accelerated

dramatically in the 1990s. By 1998, as the art critic Roberta Smith remarks in a

feature article in the New York Times:

The Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman, understandably biased,

defined sculpture as something you bump into when you look at a painting.
These days painting may be in danger of becoming something you lean
against when you pause to look at a videotape….The baby of the camera arts
has come a long way since 1965, when the first portable video camera
appeared in stores and a handful of artists started exploring what technology
had wrought. At first, the bulk of videotape-as-art was made by people closer
to the world of film than to art. Over the next few years, some names began to

35
Ibid.
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emerge…But their work was hard to find; in museums it was usually relegated
to darkened rooms that visitors could avoid or overlook.
Today, you don’t have to go out of your way to see video art....In the
last decade—maybe even in the last few years—video has become an
unavoidable, if not ubiquitous, fact of artworld life, prominent in museums
and commercial galleries, and increasingly, in collectors’ homes.36

In 2002 the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl ruminated on the history of the

current status of video:

I think the current hot thing is video, which is indeed enjoying a kind of
flowering. There are any number of artists doing extraordinary things. Which
is interesting. Video technology became viable around ‘66 or ‘67. Bruce
Nauman immediately did a number of definitive videos, sort of tracing the
parameters of the aesthetics. Then video just went around bumping into things
for the next 25 to 30 years. That’s typical of new technologies, by the way.
For a new technology to go past the point of novelty to where it is a matter of
fact artist’s tool takes two or three generations. Now, video’s a tool in the
artist’s kit like pencils and brushes. There are a number of artists doing terrific
things with it. The next development, if flat screen technology becomes
economical, it solves the problem of commercialization for videos.37

And in 2002 Mark Nash (a former editor of Screen) wrote in the catalog

accompanying Documenta XI:

Artists’ film and video has emerged as a major if not dominant moving image
discourse in the museum and gallery circuit: avant-garde and experimental
moving image practices are reconfigured and restaged; Hollywood narratives
are reworked and represented (Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon) in forms of
critical or cynical pastiche….New kinds of cinema are being developed,
entailing new visual and sonic conditions in the production of
subjectivity….38

While close attention has been paid to the new manifestations of projected screen

media, as the recent publication of books such as Broken Screen: 26 Conversations

36
Roberta Smith “Art of the Moment, Here to Stay,” New York Times, February 15, 1998, Section 2, 1.
37
Peter Schjeldahl, Interview by Kurt Wolgamott,
http://www.unl.edu/macaa/pdfs/InterviewSchjeldahl.pdf (accessed August 26, 2004).
38
Mark Nash, “Art and Cinema: Some Critical Reflections,” in Documenta 11 exh. cat. Eds. Okwui
Enwezor et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 129.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 193
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With Doug Aitken: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative, and The New

Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative (edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp);

journal articles such as “Should We Put an End to Projection?” by Dominique Païni

(published in translation in October 110, fall 2004); conference panels such as

“Screen Media/Media Screen,” (held at the 2004 College Art Association); and

finally exhibitions such as the Projected Image at the Whitney attest, there is not a

similarly sustained analysis of the disruptions and continuities the new temporal

forms introduce to the museumgoing experience.

3.3 Critical Reception of Contemporary Video Installations

One sign of film and video installation’s ascendancy is its inclusion into the

Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection for the first time in 2002. The

anxiety over film and video installation art’s status as the “new-new-new” (as London

put it in her Art Paper interview) replacement of painting emerges in the choice: Bill

Viola’s 2000 work, Quintet of Remembrance. Consisting of a medium shot of three

women and two men against a darkened backdrop, the video shows a group that

variously expresses through facial grimaces and body contortions emotions of

compassion, shock, grief, anger, fear, and rapture over a sixteen-odd minute period.

These expressions were filmed in extreme slow motion, without sound—the sixty-

second performance was shot on high-speed thirty-five millemetre film, transferred to

video and extended to approximately sixteen minutes. In the online summary of the

work, the Metropolitan’s assistant curator of modern art Anne L. Strauss, writes the

following:
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Inspired by the artist’s study of late medieval and early Renaissance paintings
and their iconography, specifically the depiction of the Passion in Italian and
Flemish painting of the era, the work belongs to a series of four, created in
2000 and 2001, in each of which a grouping of five people undergoes a
mounting wave of emotional intensity.39

Strauss concludes with the following: “Running continuously on a loop, this powerful

work makes provocative connections between the art of early Renaissance Europe

and that of twenty-first-century America.”

At two points in her summary, Strauss emphasizes the association between

Viola’s work and late medieval and Renaissance painting. Not only did the video

work make obvious references to early examples of easel paintings through its subject

matter, but its size and the way it was hung also bore striking similarities to painting.

While it was exhibited as a rear projection on a large screen at the Metropolitan, when

the larger series was exhibited by Viola’s commercial representative, the James

Cohan Gallery, it was shown on a series of flat plasma screens. Given this advance in

video technology display, the series by Viola (and video more broadly) comes much

closer to painting than earlier methods of video display, or the cathode-ray television

monitor and the video projection. Furthermore, Viola drastically slowed down the

work’s “moving” component: the experience of viewing the work approached that of

a still, rather than a moving image. It was only after a certain period of prolonged

looking, or by turning away from the work, and after a minute or two, turning toward

it again, that it became possible to perceive a shift in the emotional register of the on-

39
Anne L. Strauss, “Bill Viola: Quintet of Remembrances,” Metropolitan Museum of Art-The
Collection: Recent Acquisitions,
http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/recent_acquisitions/2001/co_rec_modern_2001.395a-i.asp
(accessed September 1, 2004).
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screen actors. Finally, the absence of sound, another essential component of video

and film, brought the work that much closer to its point of comparison, easel painting.

In other words, given its resemblance to painting from the standpoint of historical

antecedents (the quintet of actors and their dramatic resemblance to late medieval and

early Renaissance subject matter) and form (the drastically slowed pace, the absence

of sound)—all characteristics unique to Viola’s work—it became “fit” for

consumption by a conservative institution like the Metropolitan.

I began this section with this description of a single work to make the

following point: while of course not all film and video work that has entered the

museum resembles painting so closely, the anxiety produced by such work’s recent

dominance at art fairs, biennials, and contemporary galleries has been very high—so

high that the representative work selected by the Metropolitan closely corresponds

not only to a painting but also to a Renaissance easel painting. When Irit Batsry won

the second annual Bucksbaum award at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Smith reported

that the announcement was greeted with a somewhat collective “‘Oh no, not more

film and video! The joke was [Smith continued] that the museum’s survey would be

renamed the Whitney Biennial Film Festival.”40 Like Smith’s and London’s

characterizations, much of the critical rhetoric that surrounds the explosion of video

installation art describes (and unlike Smith and London, dismisses) it as part of a

frenzy threatening to replace painting, for good or for ill. A representative sampling

40
Roberta Smith, “Getting Caravaggio from Video, with Several Hearts of Darkness,” New York
Times, January 9, 2004,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EFDB1E31F93AA35752C0A9629C8B63
(accessed June 12, 2006).
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of both journalistic art criticism and scholarly writing brings this anxiety into focus,

while also providing a good picture of the new aspects of time-space-viewer

interactions introduced by video installations to the museum.

Schjeldahl also states:

[The art critic] Dave Hickey says painting isn’t dead except as high art. It’s
now a high popular art, like jazz, which has a limited but sophisticated
audience. The public face of basically institutions desperately filling up their
spaces with exhibition agenda for which post-minimalist installations and
videos are perfect. [sic] To get enough paintings to fill them, the insurance
alone is going to bankrupt you. You get somebody to turn off the lights, set up
a video projector and you’re cool for the next two months.41

In a few flippant turns of phrase, Schjeldahl trivializes the dominance of “post-

minimalist” video installations in museums, art fairs, and contemporary galleries as a

consequence of both budgetary expediency and as a fast, cheap, and dirty way to be

“cool” for two months. His characterization performs the neat rhetorical trick of

simultaneously retaining for painting its ascendancy among the various contemporary

art media (notwithstanding its shift in status from high to high-popular art) while

undermining the “new” institutional dominance of video installations. Schjeldahl

links “festivalism” with film and video installation in a New Yorker review of

Documenta XI:

Documenta 11 brings to robust maturity a style of exhibition—I call it

festivalism—that has long been developing on the planetary circuit of more
than fifty biennials and triennials, including the recent Whitney Biennial.
Mixing entertainment and soft-core politics, festivalism makes an aesthetic of
crowd control. It favors works that don’t demand contemplation but invite, in
passing, consumption of interesting—just not too interesting—
spectacles….Enwezor flanks promenades of installations and innumerable

41
Peter Schjeldahl, interview by Kurt Wolgamott,
http://www.unl.edu/macaa/pdfs/InterviewSchjeldahl.pdf (accessed August 26, 2004).
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 197
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photographs with darkened rooms, equipped for the prolonged enjoyment of

videos and films. Given the show’s anti-contemplative and anti-individualistic
aims, painting and sculpture are scarce.42

Of particular interest here is his biting reference to “crowd control,” which, for

Schjeldahl, is made possible through the selection of “anti-contemplative and anti-

individualistic” works, whose reception results in an audience conditioned to

maintaining a predetermined traffic flow. In other words, for Schjeldahl, film and

video installations create a viewing experience that maintains a bad-faith relation to

both the spiritual and the political needs of its audience. The time that the visitor

spends inside a film and video installation is not, we may deduce, of his or her own

choosing. This idea about such installations places them in contrast to the more

traditional media of sculpture and painting, which “allow” for spiritual and political

insights produced by a lingering gaze. At the heart of Schjeldahl’s claim lies a major

contradiction: he seems to think that time-based works demand less time than

paintings. For other reviewers the rewards offered by this additional layer of crowd

control at Documenta XI were scant. Lev Manovich observes that the exhibition was

so dominated by video and film installations that it felt like an “artist’s cinema

multiplex,” stripped of the pleasures that comfortable seats, good sound quality and

food offered in the mass-cultural version. Manovich notes further that the size of the

video and film installations was determined not by the internal requirements of the

individual work but rather by the prestige value of the artists such as Ulrike Ottinger

and filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas. In other words, Documenta’s exhibition plan

42
Peter Schjeldhal, “The Global Salon: European Extravaganzas,” New Yorker, July 1, 2002, 78, Issue
17, 94.
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pandered to a trend instead of making a serious attempt to engage with the spatial

demands of time-based work.43

In fact, Schjeldahl’s criticism of a “new” form of traffic control reaches back

to the older idea of exhibition practices described by Tony Bennett. Throughout the

nineteenth century, both architecture and the placement of artifacts within the

exhibition environment had been synchronized to spatialize what Bennett

characterizes as “backtelling,” a structure of both evolutionary narratives and

detective stories designed to bring the viewer to a predetermined conclusion. As

Bennett tells it, “the objects displayed and the order of their relations to one another

allowed them to serve as props for a performance in which a progressively civilized

relationship to the self might be formed and worked upon.”44 The museum, through

this design, “enjoins the visitor to comply with a programme of organized walking

[which I began this chapter by referencing] which transformed any tendency to gaze

into a highly directed and sequentialized practice of looking.”45 The travel writer

Barbara Ireland describes this experience in an account of her visit to the National

Gallery in Washington to see the exhibition Cézanne in Provence: “Sometimes I

merged with the flow of the crowd holding onto audio players and taking studied

looks; other times I fought back against the current for one more view of a painting

43
Lev Manovich, “Welcome to the Multiplex: Documenta 11, New Generation Film Festival (Lyon),
LA Film Festival’s New Technology Forum,” http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-
0207/msg00003.html (accessed August 30, 2004).
44
Bennett, 186.
45
Ibid., 186.
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too lovely not to be seen again…”46 This programmatic walking and looking

continues to be “taught” to the museum visitor through tour guides, didactic texts,

audio guides providing interpretive programming, as well as the choice of the objects

displayed.

Instead of dismissing the similar assumption made by Schjeldahl and

Manovich—that the new dominance of film and video installations produces an

audience conditioned to maintaining a certain pace through the exhibition spaces at

the expense of insight—I would argue that when additional temporal narratives are

introduced through time-based media the audience is made aware of a preexisting

imperative built into the exhibition spaces. A tension is created among the preexisting

pace, or flow of traffic that is created by didactic texts, by other visitors, by museum

guards, by the form of the exhibition spaces, and by the desire to see “what’s next,”

as well as the average time a visitor sets aside from his or her daily routine to go to

the museum; by the internal viewing demands of an object; and the new time

demands created by the new narrative forms of film and video installation. The

introduction of a new temporality does not in itself define film and video installation

as ideologically or spiritually progressive. Nor does the awareness of two temporal

narratives automatically create a form of Brechtian awareness. When the disjuncture

between the two time forms is conceptually incorporated into the film or video

installation, however, interesting results become possible.

46
Barbara Ireland, “Cézanne's Provence,” The New York Times, June 11, 2006,
http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/travel/11cezanne.html?scp=1&sq=%22barbara%20ireland%22%
20cezanne&st=cse (accessed June 15, 2006)
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In a more contemplative response to the aesthetics of film and video

installation, Boris Groys focuses on changes in two aspects of the gallery-going

experience. The temporality of film and video installations, Groys writes, matches the

temporality of everyday life, rather than the institutional time of the museum. Groys

independently reiterates Schjeldahl’s point when he argues that the temporal frame of

film and video installations suggests to the viewers how much time they should spend

in contemplation. Moreover, should we “interrupt our contemplation of some video or

film work in order to return to it at a later point, we will inevitably be filled with that

very same feeling of having missed something crucial and will no longer be sure what

is really happening in the installation.”47 With the entry of film and video into

exhibition spaces, in other words, we are returned to the experiences of real life, “that

familiar place…where one is forever haunted by the feeling of being in the wrong

place at the wrong time.”48 Film and video installations, for Groys, create an anxiety

in the viewer for which there is no adequate and satisfactory solution: “Whatever the

individual’s decision, to stay put or to keep moving, his choice will always amount to

a poor compromise.” 49

Groys’ second point concerns illumination—film and video exhibits are not lit

by the museum but rather emit their own source of light or darkness: “Video and film

installations have now introduced deepest night or dusk into the museum.”50 The

artist, Groys points out, now controls the light by which we see the work. Curators
47
Boris Groys, “On the Aesthetics of Video Installations,” in Stan Douglas: Le Détroit (exh. cat.)
Basel: Kunstalle Basel, 2001.
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 201
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who work with film and video installation take this further by arguing that while the

installation of video and film in the gallery introduces the black box into the white

cube, it also frees the spectator from what they regard as the strictures of traditional

cinema (in contrast to Manovich’s complaint about the discomfort of film and video

installation seating). Lynne Cooke, in an essay on Marijke van Warmerdam, stresses

the absence of fixed seating as a plus because it required spectators to “determine

their own vantage points.”51 This process, for Cooke, produces a consciousness

within the viewers of their own bodies that prevents them from becoming “totally

immersed, incarnate viewers” who passively experience popular cinema while

“cocooned in a darkened chamber.”52 Chrissie Iles used a similar analogy when she

writes: “Cinema becomes a cocoon, inside which a crowd of relaxed idle bodies is

fixed, hypnotized by simulations of reality projected onto a single screen. This model

is broken apart by the folding of the dark space of cinema into the [modernist] white

cube of the gallery.”53

The metaphor of a black box nesting inside a white cube is a potent one. For

Groys it spells the end of the white cube, and for Cooke and Iles it describes the end

of a certain kind of cinematic experience commonly associated with Hollywood

narrative film. However, as Mark Nash points out, “much writing on video and film

in the gallery can too easily gloss ‘sitting in a cinema’ with ‘passivity,’ or ‘mobility’

51
I engage fully with this point in the final chapter.
52
Lynne Cooke, “B(e)aring Meaning,” in Marijke van Warmerdam: Single, Double Crossing, exh. cat.
(Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum, 1997), 8.
53
Chrissie Iles, Into the Light: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art, 19641977, exh. cat. (New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001), 34.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 202
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with ‘freedom’….”54 As Nash goes on to elaborate, to go to the movies in Puerto

Rico, Lagos, or Mumbai is to encounter a very different, active, call-and-response

approach to spectatorship. Umberto Eco describes this form of spectatorship at length

in his account of the Italian viewing habits of popular film, where the cinemagoer is

allowed to enter a theater at any point and stay on to see the film again from the

moment where one has entered the on-screen narrative:

I think this is a good custom, because I hold that film is much like life in a
certain respect: I entered into this life with my parents already born and
Homer’s Odyssey already written, and then I tried to work out the story going
backward…until I more or less understood what had happened in the world
before I arrived. 55

Here, Eco does not characterize the audience experience of a filmic narrative as an

event with a beginning, a middle, and an end that provides a neat, predetermined

conclusion over which the audience has no control. Rather, the narrative is something

that can be viewed in part or whole, from the beginning, middle, or end. The

cinemagoer works out for herself or himself (or does not, as the case may be) the

story that precedes his or her entry and can repeatedly watch elements of the film that

were of particular interest. Eco describes this in his recollection of a moment where

half the audience left after a particularly dramatic scene in the middle of a Hollywood

narrative film, Black Day at Black Rock. The protagonist, played by Spencer Tracy,

had finally lashed out against a systemic injustice:

They were spectators who had come in at the start of the delectation morose
and had stayed on to enjoy the preparatory phases of the moment of liberation
all over again. From this you can see that…time functions not only to keep the

54
Nash, 131.
55
Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 65.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 203
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attention of the naïve first-level spectator, but also to stimulate the aesthetic
enjoyment of the second-level spectator.56

For Eco, this allows the film audience to potentially retrace events that have already

occurred, arriving at a different experience of the same material. Antonio Pasolini, an

editor of the online journal Kamera, recalls childhood memories in Brazil of entering

the theater midway through a feature film and staying on for the next screening: “Of

course we were always late and unwittingly constantly re-edited films and watched

them in a loop.”57

Eco’s description of difference experienced through repetition and Pasolini’s

of an audience-centered editing process correspond perfectly with the by-now-

ubiquitous temporal structure that came to define film and video installation in the

1990s: the loop. As Tim Griffin, then an art critic for Time Out New York, remarks

“The high count of artists working with loops makes a totally comprehensive survey

of the trend nearly impossible.”58 In the light of this ubiquity, my final summary of

the decidedly ambivalent reception of the newly dominant form of film and video

installation will be David Beech’s essay, “Video after Diderot.” Written in 1999,

Beech predicted that in the—for him, hopefully not too distant—future, the video

loop would be retroactively interpreted as the “defining embarrassment” of the 1990s,

as a phenomenon that serves to both define and dismiss a decade, just as fashion

trends like shoulder pads, fanny packs, and big hair have come to define the 1980s.

56
Ibid., 65.
57
Antonio Pasolini, “Looping: from A to B and Back. Again and Again and Again....,”
http://www.kamera.co.uk/features/looping.php (accessed May 31, 2006).
58
Tim Griffin “Circular Logic: P.S. 1 throws viewers for a ‘Loop,’” Time Out New York, January 17–
24, 2002, 55.
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Beech writes, “It is easy to blame the preponderance of the video loop on the modes

of attention developed in the galleries for the convenience of painting and

sculpture.”59 In other words, for Beech, the loop as a temporal form does not emerge

as a function of the museum, art gallery, or art survey it is presented in. Rather, he

links the prevalence of the loop in video installations in part on the decision from

within performance art in the 1960s and 1970s to pursue temporal realism to the

detriment of the abstraction necessary for narrative. Beech argues that this history

accounts for the video loop’s failure, hence its assumed fate as an embarrassing trend.

As these responses indicate, since the mid- to late-1990s, film and video

installations have come to dominate art fairs and biennials in particular, and

contemporary art venues in general. As a consequence of this level of presence, a

“new” model of institutional time has insinuated itself into exhibition spaces. An

institutional space with a specific temporal imperative and a new temporal form, the

loop, meshes with advances in technology to potentially create a new form of

experience. The film or video loop is a result of editing that involves the telling and

retelling of a narrative. Given its protean nature, the loop takes many forms, and in

the following and final section, I review some of the possibilities produced by its

introduction into the gallery space. The following examples of film and video

installations will elaborate on the mutable nature of the loop as a temporal form, and

its relation to the institutional time of the museum.

59
David Beech, “Video after Diderot,” Art Monthly, no. 225 (April 1999): 8.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 205
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

3.4 New Institutional Time: The Loop

As Beech and Griffin observed, loops emerged in the 1990s as the dominant temporal

form of film and video installations in the gallery and museum. References to the

loop in descriptions of film and video installation art first appear in catalog essays and

art magazines between 1991 and 1993.60 Its proliferation and then ubiquity coincides,

as Beech notes, with the rise into institutional dominance of film and video

installation. The loop would appear to be the ideal temporal form for the museum, in

that it allows viewers to edit and control their viewing experience through their

comings and goings, like Eco’s Italian cinema audience. But whereas the temporal

experience of looking at painting or other still media produces the illusion that the

time needed to view the work is produced by the audience, as Groys points out, film

and video installations introduce the experience of the insufficiency of everyday time

into the museum.

3.4.1 Stan Douglas: Win, Place, or Show (1997)

As a temporal form, the loop establishes new relations among past, present, and

future and between space and time. There are manifold possibilities for this: it could

take the form of a figure eight, a succession of rings, a cat’s cradle, or a skipping

rope. Loops do not establish the “perfect” cycle assumed in, say, a circular

movement, but rather establish a slightly distorted repetition that maintains the idea of

either an imperfectly imagined future or a persistently misremembered past. An

60
Early references can be found in David Joselit “Projected Identities,” Art in America, 79, no. 11
(Nov. 1991): 116–123, and Jean-Charles Masséra, “Pierrick Sorin: arrêt sur le ratage” [Pierreck Sorin:
Focus on Failure] Art Press (France), no. 185 (Nov. 1993): 46-47.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 206
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

advance is made into the future or the past, followed by a withdrawal and then

another advance that is slightly different from the first. A brilliant example from film

and video installation that formally plays with this oscillation between past, present,

and future is Stan Douglas’ Win, Place, or Show (1997). Exhibited as two images

projected side by side, the on-screen narrative, or set piece, between two characters is

presented simultaneously from two viewpoints. The setting is a planned but never

constructed dormitory building on Hastings Street in Vancouver, Canada. The set

piece’s point of departure is the fundamental transformation of civic space that

occurred in North America during the postwar era, initiated at the institutional level

under the rubric of urban renewal. The characters in the story, two dockworkers

named Donny and Bob, share a tenth-floor, one bedroom apartment. They are trapped

together inside the apartment on a rainy day. They touch on a series of topics in their

forced conversation: successively the weather, news items from the day’s paper,

occult mysteries, conspiracy theories, and games of chance triggered by the betting

odds for the day’s horse races that are printed in the newspaper. Close to the end, an

argument flares up over the paper’s racing form. It escalates briefly into a physical

confrontation that the older roommate, Bob, wins.

Filmed using twelve separate camera angles, the various takes of the six-

minute narrative were edited together in real time by a computer during the

exhibition, generating an almost endless series of subtle variations in dialogue, shot

angle, and resolution of the same story. Douglas wrote that the loop would only

theoretically repeat for a given viewer after “six minutes of more than 20,000 hours
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 207
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

[or approximately 200,000 variations] are presented.”61 Thus, viewers who remain in

front of the work for more than one narrative cycle would not feel as if they were

watching a significantly different narrative: nevertheless while the cycle is not

disrupted, it does not repeat. The work is “less concerned with the narration of the

event than with the space of its unfolding,” Douglas argued. On the one hand, the

events appear to repeat themselves eternally. Donny will forever rub Bob the wrong

way with his pontifications regarding a game involving horse racing; Bob will always

win the fight; the work will always close with a variation of the laconic remark, “If I

wasn’t so tired I’d slug you again”; and Donny will forever reply with a version of, “I

know it.” On the other hand, nothing repeats: the shot angles, the perspective on the

apartment, the dialogue and point of view always change, ever so slightly. In this

way, the work reproduces the experience of memory, in which even the most

obsessive return to an event that took place in the past fails to perfectly repeat the

occurrence: “[L]ike the obsessive remembrance and reconsideration of a traumatic

incident in one’s life that cannot be resolved because its true cause was elsewhere,

and remains unavailable to the space of memory.”62 Was the professor wearing a

purple or a mauve sweater? Did the cat come into the room from the partially opened

French doors leading onto a Juliet balcony, or from the bedroom cupboard? Did the

mother tell the son, “I love you too?” or “I love U2?” When repeatedly imagining a

future event, the details constantly shift: When my son is born, it will be a normal
61
Quoted in Gordon Lebredt, “Stan Douglas: Living the Drive” Parachute 103 (July–September,
2001), 28.
62
Dia Center for the Arts press release November 2, 1999 “Double Vision Installation at Dia Center for
the Arts February 11, 1999–June 13, 1999.” http://www.diachelsea.org/dia/press/douglasgordon.html
(accessed June 18, 2006)
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 208
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delivery following twenty-three hours of labor. It will be an emergency C-section. My

newborn son will lie on my chest for the first forty-five minutes of his life. My

newborn son will be taken away from me immediately because I will have a fever.

3.4.2 Marijke van Warmerdam: Sprong (1994)

By destabilizing both the present and the past, the loop insists on a present tense,

which, while not necessarily refusing either the future or the past, nevertheless alters

the present’s relation to both. Douglas embeds this refusal in the technological

structure of Win, Place, or Show. When a loop mechanically reproduces itself,

however, the audience’s experience of what preceded and what will follow alters the

quality of the narrative. Like Eco’s Italian film audience, the repetition of the cycle

brings to the viewer advance knowledge of the narrative, thus situating the viewer

between an imperfect recollection of what just occurred and a constantly shifting

anticipation of what is about to take place. Given this structure, the viewer of the loop

is presented with new “institutional” choices inherent in the unfolding of a

(potentially) perpetual temporality: either to view the unresolvedness as an end in

itself or to wait for the cathartic moment to return again and again. This

fundamentally shifts the audience’s relation to both the narrative and the rest of the

museum experience and makes even the weakest work in the genre persuasive, as

Griffin comments, thanks to its “deep, dreamlike uncanny pulse.”63 Thus the loop

becomes a temporal form whose length may be chosen by the viewer, produce

catharsis, evoke a dreamlike state, mimic everyday life, or all of the above.

63
Griffin, “Circular Logic,” 55.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 209
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A simple and elegant example of this is the work of the Dutch artist Marijke

van Warmerdam. Van Warmerdam’s works are not installations, in that they “do not

enclose or engage physical space.”64 Nor, as Iles contends, are they purely “film,”

even though van Warmerdam shoots her work on celluloid. Her works use the

strategies of looping to refuse the progression of a filmic narrative and to draw

attention to their own constructions, thus presenting the idea of a narrative without

actually serving one up. While her body of work depends on the loop as a temporal

form, it can in turn be broken down into several subcategories. Some are looped for

the sake of gallery presentation rather than using the loop as an integral conceptual

device. One group endlessly repeats short, single, unedited shots, filmed in real time,

such as Handstand (Handstand, 1992), Rijst (Rice, 1995), Douche (Shower, 1995),

and Blondine (Blondie, 1995), while others such as Sprong (Jump, 1994), Vliegtuigen

(Airplane, 1994), and Skytypers (Skywriters, 1997) are more obviously edited. As Iles

notes, “In Handstand, the loop is so fluid that it is hard to discern how many

handstands the young girl makes before the sequence is repeated.” Whereas in

“Sprong, by contrast, the breaks between the end of one short sequence and the

beginning of another are made clear through sharp edits and staccato sound. A single

shot of a man performing a somersault is continuously repeated in both forward and

reverse motion, drawing attention to the artificiality of the sequence.”65 In the

temporal structure of these works, tracing the beginning and the end of the narrative

64
Chrissie Iles, “The Magic of the Unreal,” Marijke van Warmerdam, exh. cat. (Köln: Oktagon Verlag,
2000)
65
Iles, “The Magic of the Unreal.”
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 210
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

structure, or its past and future, becomes almost impossible. Iles writes, “We stare at

Van Warmerdam’s film loops not purely for the pleasure of experiencing a short

sequence over and over again, but to find out whether what we are seeing is the same

as what we have just seen. We cannot always be sure that this is the case.”66

Given that the temporal form of the loop alters our relation to the past,

present, and future, it also disrupts the museum’s spatialized narrative, with its

preconceived endpoint. Ellen Seiferman writes in her introduction to a catalog on van

Warmerdam that the “permanent repetition of the film loop expands time into

infinity, redeeming the action from its logical conclusion….”67 In all these works

causal loops are upended, in that events occur and effects come before and after their

causes. In Van Warmerdam’s Sprong, for example, the commonplace assumptions of

the physical mechanics required for a jump are potentially destabilized: it becomes

momentarily possible to believe that a jump could begin in mid-air, or move in the

opposite direction. As Joseph Berkowitz observes, this redeems causal loops from

tautological formulations such as, “causes precede their effects,” hence the

impossibility of backwards causation. This reversal contradicts the presuppositions

built into linear time, wherein the causal dimension of space/time is time, and time is

linearcauses determine the possibilities of their effects.68 The loop interrupts the

inevitable quality of linear narrative by introducing forms of nonlinear time into the

museum. Consequently, the visitor is temporarily lifted out of the movement within

66
Ibid.
67
Ellen Seiferman, “Preface,” Marijke van Warmerdam, exh. cat. (Köln: Oktagon Verlag, 2000)
68
Joseph Berkovitz, “On Chance in Causal Loops,” Mind 110, no. 437 (January 2001): 4.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 211
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

and between galleries, and while he or she is not removed completely from the

museum’s narrative progression, this narrative is disrupted through the range of

responses produced in the viewer by a competing temporal system.

3.4.3 Douglas Gordon: Through a Looking Glass (1999)

While van Warmerdam’s work neither takes into consideration the space in which it

is installed nor draws on Hollywood narrative, her close, exhaustive study of this time

form over an impressive body of work makes clear some of the possibilities opened

up by the loop for both narrative and exhibition spaces.69 Beech sees the loop’s

greatest failing as its inability to provide a narrative. But when segments of a

Hollywood narrative are excised and re-represented in a space other than the movie

theater, an entirely new experience is produced. Douglas Gordon’s video installation

Through a Looking Glass (1999) is an excellent example. It features the scene from

Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which the protagonist, Travis Bickle

(played by Robert De Niro), challenges his mirrored reflection with the now-iconic

provocation, “You talkin’ to me?” In Gordon’s reworking, the scene is projected

onto two screens placed on opposite walls of a gallery space. The original scene from

the movie, filmed as a reflection in the mirror, is shown on one screen. The other

screen in Gordon’s installation reverses the image, flipped horizontally left to right.

The two facing mirror images (endlessly) repeat the dialogue fragment, firing

Bickle’s provocation across the gallery’s space and through its viewer, who becomes

69
For more on narrative space see Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” Questions of Cinema (Theories
of Representation and Difference) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 19–75.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 212
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trapped in the crossfire, like a reluctant third party drawn into enabling an

emotionally ever-more corrosive, yet indissoluble relationship. Beginning in sync, the

twinned provocations progressively fall out of joint, in this way performing the the

loss of control and mental breakdown that both forms the narrative arc of Scorcese’s

movie and is distilled in this quintessential scene. In its almost dizzying play of

dualities, Through a Looking Glass is also typical of Gordon’s body of work, in the

way that it articulates a series of dialectical inversions, doublings, and repetitions

without resolution.

When a previously filmed or videotaped act is looped, the action is

paradoxically transformed through unending repetition. By lifting a segment from a

longer narrative, or by repetitively editing together an originally conceived work of

film and video, the loop becomes, first, an “extended fragment.” Second, it becomes

distinguished from repetition in that it is truly infinite and seamless: forward and

backward motion eliminates the beginning and end of the action. Through both

looping and doubling, the original intention behind the action—de Niro’s menacing

gesture toward the mirror—becomes altered in Gordon’s work. The originating

interrogatory, “You talkin’ to me?” does not simply dissipate through repetition.

Rather, the meaning of the gesture is transformed into a specific sensation chosen by

Gordon through his selection from the ongoing narrative of a specific action and the

manner in which he loops it. Gordon’s choice of subject and fragment contributes to

the effect the loop has on the viewer’s interpretation. The loop produced by doubling
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 213
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the scene, and then letting the repetition fall out of sync, transforms the sample from

its original context into a new work.

Gordon’s Through a Looking Glass embeds the museum visitor in a spiraling

series of exchanges that are hurled across the exhibition space between the two de

Niros. This placement of the visitor inside the work would seem to establish a

continuum between Gordon and artists such as Keith Sonnier, whose work I address

above in this chapter. But when the installation (and contemporary film and video

installation more broadly) is considered in relation to postminimalist concerns with

the phenomenological interrelation between the viewer, the space, and the work, a

difference is perceived between Sonnier’s and Gordon’s generation, which has to do

with the virtual and the phenomenological. George Baker elaborated this in a

roundtable discussion about the projected image in contemporary art (published in

October in 2003). Describing Gordon’s work as exemplifying the problems intrinsic

to contemporary film and video installation, Baker notes that with the “cacophonous

disassociation” arrived at through the desynchronized looped appropriations, the work

“derealized the exhibition space and seemed in a parallel manner to utterly negate the

viewer by recourse to a pathological space of the virtual.…This is opposed to the

hyperconsciousness of the phenomenological typical of the tradition of the ‘60s and

‘70s.”70 Hal Foster, a roundtable participant, describes a current disregard for the

apparatus—notably, the embodiment of the viewer and the parameters of space that

result in a “rampant virtualism”—which, he claims, goes beyond disembodiment and

70
George Baker, in George Baker et al., “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,”
October 104 (Spring 2003): 77.
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conditions the viewer to a state of postsubjectivity, an experience originally

conceived of by media conglomerates.71 Whereas the subject of the October

roundtable is the projected image, I am addressing a form of temporality that is also

taken up in performance, sculpture, as well as video installation.72 Nevertheless, for

Baker the deciding mechanism that makes “virtual space” possible in Through a

Looking Glass is the rapidly degrading loop. Because of the particular way that

Gordon chose to construct his loop, the net result, for the roundtable discussants, is

that the museum space and, by extension, the viewer are shut out of, or obliterated

from, a pathologically dissonant series of exchanges. I would argue, on the contrary,

that an adversarial relationship is established between the installation and the intrinsic

temporal demands of the institution. A visitor strays into the work, whose

engagement takes place exclusively between the two versions of the protagonist,

producing a form of insanity by obliterating the flesh-and-blood visitor. Precisely

because the visitor is both trapped in and shut out of any meaningful participation in

the virtual exchange between the two versions of Bickle, a “new” pathology is created

through the ultimately fruitless attempt at viewer-work interaction when the

pathology negates the museum experience. The visitor has entered the room,

experienced the virtual exchange, and he or she will leave the work and “re-enter” the

museum.

71
Hal Foster, in George Baker et al., “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,”
October 104 (Spring 2003): 75.
72
See the catalog accompanying the exhibition Loop at PS1 from December 9, 2001, through January
27, 2002, for examples. Artists in the exhibition included Francis Alÿs, Ceal Floyer, Rodney Graham,
Christoph Keller, Aernout Mik, Susan Philipsz, Santiago Sierra, and Yutaka Sone.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 215
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3.4.4 Doug Aitken: Electric Earth (1999)

Contemporaries of Gordon, such as Doug Aitken and Pierre Huyghe, directly address

the exhibition space by playing with this distinction between the artist’s virtually

conceived environment and the phenomenological relation the visitor maintains with

his or her museum experience. Huyghe’s and Aitken’s manipulations of the

imperfectly enmeshed nature of the exhibition space’s intrinsic temporal structure

with that of its institutional context offer examples of the possibilities open to artists

working with film and video installation. Doug Aitken does so with large-scale film

and video installations such as Electric Earth that expand on the possibilities of the

loop’s complexity in the museum; Huyghe by staging his work, such as Streamside

Day Follies, in and outside the museum. Less directly grounded in the prehistory of

minimalism, postminimalism, land art and conceptual art, as I show in the previous

chapter, Aitken’s installations in general, and Electric Earth in particular (awarded

the Prezio Internazionale at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999), consist of highly

structured plans internal to the museum, which are designed to accommodate his

complex temporal structures. Shown at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Electric Earth

both incorporated the traffic flow of the biennial and created temporal structures that

were separate and discrete from it: its spatial and temporal complexity requires a

lengthy description.

The installation had a clearly defined entry and exit point. Consisting of three

rooms, the central room was in turn divided by a scrim, with an opening located in the

middle for the audience to pass through. Signage outside Aitken’s installation
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 216
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

directed the audience to the entryway: as a result, the audience traffic flowed from

rooms 1 through 4 (notwithstanding, fully one third of the traffic moved in the

direction “not recommended”). Eight laser-disc videos were projected onto eight

screens spaced out across the installation.73 Four narrative sequences were projected.

The first room showed a single-channel loop whose running time was approximately

eighty seconds. In the second room, two multichannel loops were shown. The first,

projected across three screens and shown in the first half of the second room had a

running time of approximately three minutes and twenty seconds. The second, also

consisting of three screens and shown in the second half of the second room, had a

running time of approximately four minutes. The last loop projection, shown in the

third room, was, like the first, a single-channel video and had a running time of

approximately forty-five to fifty seconds.

The video installation created a mise en abyme whose center was the shifting

tide of visitors that ebbed and flowed through the rooms. Within the mise en abyme,

Daniel Birnbaum writes, a multitemporal world emerged that “harboured not one

flow of events but a labyrinth of diverging paths, each with its own pace and

temporality.”74 With his loops, Aitken’s installations refuse the authority of a linear

narrative driven by cause and effect, freeing the installation’s visitor to see a before

and after simultaneous to the present. The installation’s looped progression was

broken into several zones that the viewer could move through. In doing so, each

73
Filmed first onto thirty-five millimeter film, the footage was then transferred onto digital video.
74
Daniel Birnbaum, “That’s the Only Now I Get: Space, Time and Experience in the Work of Doug
Aitken,” in Doug Aitken, Daniel Birnbaum, Amanda Sharp and Jorg Heiser (New York: Phaidon
Press, 2001), 51.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 217
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

sequence drew attention to its own construction, whose form allowed for a range of

variations that produced, as Birnbaum puts it, “intricate labyrinths of folded space

time.”75 By breaking linear plot into simultaneous options, Aitkens created a temporal

and spatial counterpoint to the viewer’s movements. This description evokes the

interchanges taking place between the multiple screens. At moments, the shots on

three screens shifted together. At others, one screen held a shot for a longer time,

while the action moved from point to point across the other two screens. At all times,

the choreography between the screens carried the museum visitor along inside a

narrative with manifold strands, or pathways. These pathways changed not only as a

consequence of the action that took place between the screens in a given room but

also because of interchanges created between the four distinct narratives that were

projected across the single or multiple screens in each room. Unlike van

Warmerdam’s loops, the progression of Electric Earth’s narrative strands is not short

or simple enough to meld into a loop with uncertain beginnings and endings. Rather,

the uncertainties of Aitken’s loops are achieved by combining narratives of different

time lengths.

Filmed at the Los Angeles International Airport, Electric Earth follows the

hip-hop dancer Ali Johnson’s progress as he moves through and “with” a

depopulated, heavily industrialized landscape. His free-form dance acts as a call and

response to the industrial sounds, images, and movements that fill the protagonist’s

and the audience’s senses. In the first room of the installation, the action begins with

75
Ibid., 51.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 218
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

a still shot of Johnson lying on a partially made bed, watching television. The space is

anonymous, presumably a hotel or motel room. The camera cuts to progressively

tighter shots of the protagonist, and eventually his eye fills the screen. It then cuts

away to a tight shot of his hand resting on the bed, holding the television’s remote

control. Over shots 1 through 4, a man’s voice speaks: “A lot of times I dance so fast

that I become what’s around me. It’s like food for me, I like absorb that energy,

absorb that information. It’s like I eat it. It’s the only now I get.” In the ensuing

silence, the camera cuts to a shot split in two: the left half shows a mirror reflection of

the man lying in bed, the right half a television screen. There is no signal, and electric

snow fills the screen as the voice-over repeats the phrase, “It’s the only now I get,”

followed by silence. An electronic hum begins and progressively increases over the

next shots. The camera cuts back to the television screen filled with electric snow,

and then to a closer shot of the man falling asleep in front of the television. Waking

from his “electric sleep,” the protagonist rises from his bed, puts on a jacket, and

leaves the room. The door swings shut, and the screen in Room 1 fades to black,

ending the loop.

Rooms 2a and 2b contained the most sophisticated interchange of loops,

continuing the narrative set up by the prelude in Room 1. While each subchamber of

the central room contains a distinct narrative, the action on the two sets of three

screens is inevitably interrelated, thanks to the scrim that only partially intercepted

the flow of sound and images. Essential to the experience is the sound, composed by

the electronic producers Uziq and Caustic Window, and the location of the visitor. In
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 219
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

Room 2a, the action “begins” across multiple screens, which show a freeze-frame of

Johnson: on screen 2 and 3 the freeze-frame started with a tight shot framing his right

shoulder—releasing the freeze-frame, he steps out of the frame, stage left. On screen

4, the freeze-frame of an out-of-focus image of Johnson’s head “breaks” into

movement at the same time as the other screens. The succeeding shots at times

alternately doubled or trebled the action across two or three screens or else showed

variations of the same sequence. In one of the earlier sequences in room 2a, a shot of

an airplane taking off is repeated across screens 2 and 3. On screen 4, out-of-focus

fingers snap and flicker frenetically. Over these shots, atmospheric traffic sounds

escalate in volume, gradually fading into a succession of notes that reach a crescendo

and that are cut off when Johnson falls into a push-up. Screens 2 and 3 then cut to a

tracking shot of Johnson walking along a chain-link fence, silhouetted against the sun

sitting low on the horizon. Overhead, to his right, an airplane descends, preparing to

land. Screen 4 shows a mirror reversal of screens 2 and 3. Until screen 3 cut away to a

new sequence, it matched up perfectly with 4 so that the two images formed a right-

angle, animated Rorschach blot. Over the shots the phrase “that’s the only now I get”

is repeated and layered over the atmospheric sound of traffic in the distance.

The subsequent scene begins with screen 3 cutting away earlier than screens 2

and 4 to a variation of a close-up of a fragment of flapping, plasticized cloth caught

on the barbed wire running atop the chain-link fence, which encloses the airport

runways. The sound of the wind and of the plasticized fabric flapping in the breeze

begins at the moment that screen 3 cuts away to the fabric: layered over the wind is
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 220
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

the sound of bells and an ascending and descending series of notes. Most of this scene

is taken up with variations of close-ups of Johnson’s hands silhouetted against the

sky. Sometimes only one out-of-focus finger is visible; at other times his entire hand

appears in the foreground, while airplanes take off and land in the twilight. At the

Whitney, some of the audience members mimed the on-screen hand’s movement by

projecting their own shadow puppets onto the projection.

The remainder of the narrative follows Johnson through a series of

interactions with his environment, including an elaborately painted hallway, a

streetscape populated by shuttered pawnshops and cut-rate department stores, empty

car washes, Laundromats and parking lots; these interactions culminate in a

penultimate scene composed of a tightly edited sequence between Johnson and the

movement created by a dollar bill jerkily sliding in and out of a broken vending

machine. The last sequence in room 2b and the climax of the two multiscreen loops

begins with a fade into a long shot of the city at night, spread out below the camera

like a field of lights partially filling the screen. Accompanying the new sequence is a

very abrupt shift into drums and bass from what had been an atmospheric soundscape.

A very rhythmic, intense, aural moment, at the Whitney it caught the audience

members up in the excitement. Overlaying the drums and bass is the sound of an

acceleration, like a jet plane taking off. While three screens cut between a profile shot

of Johnson breathing very heavily, either out of heavy physical exertion or a very

strong emotion and the landscape of light, the center screen, or screen 6 stayed on

Johnson. The light seems to break into movement and accelerate across the screen,
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 221
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

after which follows a series of images of lights speeding by that replace each other in

lightning-quick succession. The trails of light speed by like a roller-coaster, merging

into a whirligig of movement. At the climax of this aural and visual acceleration it is

abruptly cut off. After holding onto a black screen for a period of time, screens 5 and

7 fade into a shot of Johnson that is already up on screen 6. The image projected on

all three screens then freezes, ending the loop.

After the climactic sound and the fury of rooms 2a and 2b, the simplicity of

the last room provides a denouement to the work. One projection fills the wall

adjacent to the exit. The loop is the shortest, consisting of one long still shot of

Johnson walking away from the camera, through a tunnel empty of traffic.

For Birnbaum, the temporal variations produced by Aitken’s installations in

general and Electric Earth in particular succeed in upsetting the conventional

Western conception of time, a tradition marked by a series of “now points” strung

along a line, an image that recurs from Aristotle’s Physics to Edmund Husserl’s

phenomenology of time consciousness. Instead, Birnbaum writes, Aitken’s

multichannel, multiroom installations succeed in establishing temporal forms

described by Gilles Deleuze in his study The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque. For

Deleuze, time takes the form of “an intricate structure of bifurcating and divergent

series,” or in the words of Jorgé Luis Borges, a “garden of forking paths.”76 In

sharing a title with this phrase, Borges refers to a Chinese architect and philosopher,

Ts’ui Pên, who does not believe in absolute, uniform time:

76
Ibid., 51.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 222
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of

diverging, convergent and parallel times. This network of times that
approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for
centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majorities
of these times. In some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others,
both of us.77

Birnbaum’s citation of Deleuze and Borges begins to establish a conceptual

framework for the experience that Aitken’s work brings to the museum. The

vocabulary developed to describe the canon as a musical form provides a clear

descriptive model of the structure that emerge out of film and video installations like

Aitken’s. Canons consist of a melodic line that is played both consecutive

simultaneously. A melody can be introduced by one instrument, followed after a

number of beats by a second instrument, either on the same or a higher or lower pitch.

A simple and familiar example is the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” More

complex methods of composing the call and response between melodic lines can

include augmentation and diminution (lengthening or shortening the notes of the

answering instrument), inversion (turning the subject upside down by making each

rising interval a falling one and vice versa), retrogression (giving the subject notes in

reverse order), or repeating the melody pitches of the subject but changing its meter

and note duration. While more loosely structured than a canon, the form of Electric

Earth strongly resembles this description, with the mirroring and inversion of shots,

the variation of on-screen footage across multiple screens, and the repetition,

interaction, and overlay of the multiple narrative strands. Unlike the canon or the

77
Quoted in Birnbaum, 51.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 223
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

round, however, and like Stan Douglas’ Win, Place, or Show, each repetition of

Electric Earth’s looping narrative varies endlessly.

A key difference between film and video installation and music is the place of

the audience. Audience members who attend a live performance of an orchestra or

who listen to the same performance at home are not inside the performance, in that

they are not walking around between the performers, picking or choosing which

instrument they would like to concentrate on.78 Johnson’s journey through the

postindustrial landscape makes him Aitken’s idealized stand-in for the audience. Like

Johnson, the museum visitor wanders from point to point within Aitken’s landscape

and, from each point, experiences the work from a new perspective. The confluence

of the wandering audience member and the multitudinal variations of the loop’s

strands succeed in producing a cat’s cradle of “now” points from which the work is

continuously produced from and by the visitor. The museum’s visitor who moves

from one room to the next in Electric Earth becomes, as Birnbaum writes, “part of

the scenario, not through empathy, but through the physical experience of the work.

It’s his/her bodily conduct and kinaesthetic experience that determines the rhythms

and structure of the work.”79 To return to Birnbaum’s rehearsal of the various

philosophies of time, Edmond Husserl’s comet provides a useful image to

78
A transcendent example of an installation that achieves this experience is Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part
Motet (2001), a reworking of Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis, a sixteenth-century English composer.
A composition for forty voices, Spem in Alium was written on the occasion of the fortieth birthday of
Queen Elizabeth I. In the installation, forty separately recorded choir singers were played back through
forty speakers positioned around the room. The visitor could listen to each of the voices in turn or to all
of them together from the middle of the room. With this work, Cardiff wanted to make it possible to
“climb inside the music.”
79
Birnbaum, 97.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 224
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

conceptualize the “now” experience produced by the interaction between Aitken’s

work and the audience: “The line represents the succession of now-points, but the

now itself is constantly new.” Or, to return to the voice-over that begins Electric

Earth, “that’s the only now I get.” The journey through Aitken’s installation is “never

predictable and never the same,” and it requires both the museum’s intrinsic narrative

trajectory and the loop’s tautological failure.

3.4.5 Pierre Huyghe: Streamside Day Follies (2004)

Aitken succeeded in making the phenomenological and the virtual come together to

produce a new experience in the museum. Nevertheless, as my analogy of the mise en

abyme suggests, Electric Earth truly became a black hole, not the black box

mentioned previously. When entering Electric Earth, the museum visitor entered a

new space-time configuration but then returned back to the larger museum, which had

its temporal imperative intact. My final example, Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day

Follies, brings together some of the defining characteristics of the loop that I have

outlined here: the relocation of the audience, the refusal of tautology, and most

important, the disruption of the museum’s narrative. With Streamside Day Follies,

Huyghe undermines the museum’s imperialist mandate to absorb and separate a

carefully edited version of the world by redefining it through a new set of temporal

relations. Like Enwezor, he does so first by staging critical components of his work

outside the museum, and second by carrying out a radical reassessment of the

temporal nature of the work of art.

 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 225
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

In an interview with George Baker, Huyghe stresses that Streamside Day

Follies played with exhibition conventions and protocols. Huyghe wanted it to

“register the manner in which there had been a shift in terms of these issues between

the ‘Dia’ generation,” or Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer,

and his own generation of artists. “The earlier artists were mostly concerned with

space and sculptural resolutions, whereas temporal issues seem more important

today.”80 For Huyghe, a temporal consideration of display protocols takes shape as a

study of the nature of an event and its translation into the exhibition space. Huyghe

distinguishes the event from a performance, in that a performance is, by definition,

unique. By contrast, he wanted to incorporate repeatability, or, as he put it, replay,

into his work:

The replay really is the most important thing. It is not the event anymore that
is important, it is the replay. If artists in the 1960s and ‘70s used to deal with
this idea of event, performance, action—Kaprow for instance—the
representation of the event was not incorporated into the conception of the
project. 81

An annually observed holiday like Christmas is an event that repeats every year. But

performances such as the happenings—or unique events that are shaped by the

actions of the audience participating in any given performance—that are exemplified

by Allan Kaprow were intended to be neither repeated nor reproduced. Indeed, the

defining characteristic of the happening is its ephemeral quality.

80
Pierre Huyghe, “An Interview with Pierre Huyghe,” interview by George Baker, October 110 (Fall
2004): 82.
81
Huyghe, 83.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 226
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

Streamside Day Follies’ production and reproduction took place over several

stages; at each one, the artist engaged his audience as if he or she were a member of

the public. The first iteration was a press release from the Dia Art Foundation dated

October 2, 2003, extending an invitation to the public to come join a “Streamside Day

celebration” that was set to take place on Saturday, October 11, 2003, between 2:30

and 7:00 p.m. in a new residential development community called Streamside Knolls,

located in Fishkill, New York.82 Advertised highlights included a parade, animal

costumes for children, live music, and a “barbeque dinner with hot dogs and

hamburgers, corn on the cob, pumpkin pies, ice cream, lemonade, and cotton candy.”

Participants in the Streamside Day celebration, the press release continued, would

also appear in a film by Pierre Huyghe that would form a record of the event.

The second iteration of the work was, of course, the Streamside Day

celebration. The third was the film. Opening with a scene from a paradisical

landscape, the filmic narrative is propelled forward through a myriad of cultural

references: the utopian social projects of the nineteenth-century (the new residential

community formed out of the primeval forest), Disney animation (the emergence of a

Bambi), and romantic landscape painting. From the depths of an old-growth forest, a

fawn unsteadily emerges. Crossing a stream and wandering down a path, it comes to

the forest’s edge. Instead of marking a natural transition from forest to field, the

forest’s edge is abruptly sheared away by the raw incursion of a new development’s

82
Dia Art Foundation press release October 2, 2003: “Dia Art Foundation Invites Public to Streamside
Day Celebration and to be Part of Pierre Huyghe’s Film ‘Streamside Day Follies,’”
http://www.diacenter.org/dia/press/huyghe.html (accessed July 16, 2004).
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 227
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

construction. The deserted site is dotted with unoccupied houses. Descending from

the forest, the fawn picks its way through the freshly paved streets and arrives at a

particular house, whose front door stands open. Passing through the door, the final

shot of the first segment shows the fawn standing alert and splay-legged in a freshly

painted, unfurnished interior. Huyghe’s film then cuts abruptly to its second section, a

young family moving to this new community.

The myth that structures these two sections—nature is overtaken and

submerged by the advancing wave of culture—is brought forward in the third section,

the Streamside Day celebration. Designed to create a community identity out of

nothing, Huyghe orchestrated this celebration with a series of “typical” community-

formation scenes. The event begins with the planting of a tree. Children are offered

animal costumes to wear. At 3:30 p.m. a parade with a fire engine, police car, mail

truck, school bus, two floats, and an ice-cream truck make their way through

Streamside Knolls. Opening remarks by public dignitaries take place. A Streamside

Day cake and live music follow dinner, and the public is encouraged to take pictures

throughout the event. The film ends with the day’s end and the celebration’s desultory

disintegration.

The fourth iteration of the work took place at Dia: Chelsea. Unlike most

contemporary film and video installations, Streamside Day Follies was not exhibited

as a continuous loop. Rather, its regularly spaced-out screenings were dependant on

the ceremonial formation and disintegration of a projection room that periodically

came together to form a haphazard pentagon in the center of the exhibition space out
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 228
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

of five mobile walls. Guided on rails installed in the ceiling, the walls moved slowly

through the gallery. When stationary, each wall concealed a faintly visible colored-

pencil line drawing applied directly to it. Each drawing mapped a particular locale of

Streamside Knolls. When the walls finished moving to the center, Huyghe’s film was

projected inside the ad hoc pavilion.83 The obverse sides of the walls were faced in a

shimmering blue-green film that referenced the greenish glow emitted by a television

screen: while the film was shown, these walls became the first impression of the

work. When the film ended, the walls retracted to their original positions along the

perimeter of the space, restoring the gallery to its pristine state. At this stage of the

work’s cycle, the white interiors of the walls of the projection room blended into the

white walls of the gallery. Combined with the disappearance of the projection, the

focus of the “work” shifted entirely to the audience, which, once liberated from the

confines of the walls, scattered throughout the gallery space. Temporarily without a

work to focus on, the audience’s attention diffused into a party atmosphere until the

walls formed once again into a projection room at the center of the exhibition space.

For Huyghe, the exhibition at Dia: Chelsea functioned as a mise-en-scène for

Streamside Days, providing a structure “within which things could happen.” His

choreography of the celebration was open at all points to accident, modification, and

ultimately to the possibility of future Streamside Day celebrations to be staged by the

community, independent of the artist’s guiding hand. Here, fiction was designed to

precede and give rise to fact: “What interested me,” Huyghe told Baker, “was…how a

83
The running time was approximately twenty-six minutes.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 229
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

story could in fact produce a certain kind of reality. An additif of reality. I’m not

speaking about change here. In Streamside Day Follies, I wanted to create a fiction

that would lead to a fête, a celebration, an event that could be repeated.”84

Two formative elements of Streamside Day Follies crystallize the logic that

has grown out of the evolution of film and video installation. First, when Huyghe

chooses to reverse the usual order of fact and fiction so that fiction precedes and

creates fact, he applies the kind of backward causation produced by the loop and

overturns assumptions about the relation between fact and fiction—or, as Baker

asserts, Huyghe uses “representational conventions as a mode for doing things in

reality, as opposed to documenting reality within representation.”85 Huyghe draws

broader links between his reversal of fiction and fact and the reversal of images and

“real” events:

But now things have changed, and ultimately representation or images became
more important than real events. We can see this with the current war, we can
witness the way the media twists an event, the way representation is dictating
the event. Today, an event, its image and its commentary have become one
object.86

In other words, the breakdown of the linear narrative is not restricted to the museum.

Enwezor proposes that the exhibition is a kind of “meta-language of mediation that

constructs a tautological system in which the artwork is bound up in its own self-

referentiality through the relationships established between mediums, objects and

systems”87 Embedded in the temporality of the film and video installation, as Boris

84
Huyghe, 84.
85
Huyghe, 104.
86
Huyghe, 83.
87
Enwezor, “The Black Box,” 42.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 230
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

Groys has demonstrated, is the potential for the intrusion of the everyday. With his

loop, Huyghe realizes the potential produced by this intrusion in two ways: first, the

oscillation between the museum and the world, which he arrives at through his

successively staged events, and, second, through the pivotal role of the audience in

setting in motion this series of events. Huyghe elaborates on the construction of the

event through the analogy of the retournelle.88 A retournelle describes a refrain that

repeats throughout an orchestral movement. With Streamside Day Follies, Huyghe

wanted the event he set in motion to repeat as an annual holiday. In this way the event

would become a retournelle, or a loop, indissolubly linking the exhibition space to the

outside world—potentially forever—given the will of the Streamside Knolls

community.

3.5 Conclusion

By bringing the audience into the center of each iteration of his work, Huyghe

reconnects the museum audience to a broader group, the public. Writing about

Streamside Day Follies, David Joselit is struck by the parallels between the formation

and disintegration of the mobile walls in Dia: Chelsea’s gallery and Huyghe’s attempt

in the Streamside Day celebration to draw a sense of a public sphere out of what are

structurally and socially private spaces. Instead of repeating the formulations of the

audience made by the Dia generation, Huyghe brings into relief contemporary

understandings of the public. Joselit concludes: “If there is a political message in

Streamside Day Follies, then it lies in Huyghe’s impossible hope that the

88
Huyghe, 84.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 231
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

sentimentality enveloping places like Streamside might somehow be perverted to

social rather than merely personal ends.”89

Joselit also draws parallels between the media coverage of the war on Iraq and

historical and contemporary video installation art:

Formalism has a pretty bad name among socially concerned and left-oriented
artists and art historians, yet we live in a world structured by a rigorous
discipline of form. We’re haunted by a sense of our own irrelevance as critical
or aesthetic practitioners, afraid that our whole enterprise is little more than a
fancy mode of retailing. And yet all around us, political speech, in which I
include coverage of the Iraq war, is conducted in terms that would be familiar
to many a viewer of video installations or underground films from the 1960s
to the present day.…90

The form that the media coverage takes is as important a vehicle for the political

message as the content. Joselit notes similarities between Andy Warhol’s Empire and

the camera work coming from Baghdad in the early days of the United States-led

invasion of Iraq. A similar parallel exists between the loop as a temporal form inside

and outside the museum. Griffin, writing about the coverage immediately following

the destruction of the World Trade Center, observes that the loop has become the

temporal form that best describes our historical moment. In film and video

installation, the loop has emerged relatively recently. While its emergence was a

consequence of institutional pressure—the need to have a temporal work that could

be seen by waves of viewers entering and leaving a gallery—its success (and here,

finally, I agree with Beech) was not simply a result of this institutional pressure.

Rather, I think the loop has been successful because of the way it parallels time forms

89
David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” Artforum 42, no. 7 (March 2004): 159.
90
David Joselit, “Commanding View.” Artforum 42 no. 5 (January 2004): 45.
 Disjunctures in Institutional Time: 232
The Museum and the Loop as a Temporal Form

that already exist in the world, as Huyghe’s work demonstrates. This success has

produced the ambivalent reception of contemporary film and video installation.

 233

Chapter 4
Confusions of Nearness:
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments1

4.1 Introduction: Mapping the Studio, Mapping the Museum

Bruce Nauman recorded the video component of his 2001 installation Mapping the

Studio I (Fat Chance, John Cage) over forty-two nights in his studio in New Mexico

in the summer of 2000. He shot seven different perspectives of his studio using

infrared tape loaded onto a surveillance camera that could only record for an hour at a

time. He edited forty-two hour-long segments into seven videos that were five hours

and approximately forty minutes long. The time length chosen for the work was made

with the audience in mind. In an interview, Nauman told the curator Michael Auping:

It just felt like it needed to be so long that you wouldn’t necessarily sit down
and watch the whole thing but could come and go.…I wanted that feeling that
the piece was just there…ongoing being itself. I wanted the piece to have a
real-time quality. I like the idea of knowing it is going on whether you are
there or not.2

From January 10 to July 27, 2002, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance, John Cage)

was installed at Dia: Chelsea in a square room built inside a former industrial space.3

Within, seven greenish-grey infrared video loops of Nauman’s studio space were

1
When I use the term projected video environment throughout this chapter, I do so to differentiate its
topic from the broader area of video installation art. Projected video environments depend on, as the
term suggests, video projections, whereas video installations can draw on a broader array of output
technologies.
2
Bruce Nauman and Michael Auping, “A Thousand Words: Bruce Nauman Talks about Mapping the
Studio,” Artforum 40, no. 7 (March 2002): 121.
3
Chelsea is a neighborhood in New York City that in the late 1990s became the new epicenter of
commercial art galleries. The Dia Art Foundation specializes in art from the 1960s and 1970s,
including collections of work by Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin, and Andy
Warhol, in addition to Bruce Nauman. A private foundation, it was founded in 1974 with the mandate
to support contemporary art through long-term commissions. In 1987 the Dia Art Foundation opened
an exhibition space in a four-story converted warehouse in Chelsea. Dia: Chelsea closed its doors in
January 2004. In 2003 the Dia Art Foundation opened Dia: Beacon (Beacon is a small town north of
New York City on the Hudson River) in a former Nabisco plant.
 Confusions of Nearness: 234
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

projected onto the four walls of the square room. The glowing projections reflected

onto the smooth, highly polished concrete floor, merging the projections with the

space. Individual pixels quivered on the walls like sequins, shimmying under the

influence of a slight air current. Seven high-backed office chairs on castors provided

seating for the audience in the center of the space. Visitors to Nauman’s installation

could stand, walk around, sit, or wheel themselves across the floor.

Evenly spaced around the gallery, the projections show the detritus of

Nauman’s work: a stepladder, leftover lumber, C-clamps, partially opened shipping

crates, a plaster-mixing tub, a drawing tube, three mismatched chairs arranged in a

semicircle, as well as an unstretched, unfinished painting dangling from the wall.

Over the videos’ duration, objects flip-flop from wall to floor, change place, or

disappear altogether, indicating that the videos, which initially appear to show a

seamless chronology, do anything but. Multiple soundtracks of incidental noises in

and outside the studio record a coyote’s bark, the restless movement of horses in the

corral outside, the crack of thunder, and a distant train whistle. These sounds are

punctuated by the drone of an air conditioner and other less identifiable bumps,

crashes, and bangs from inside Nauman’s studio.

Like John Cage’s 1952 composition 4'33", Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I

(Fat Chance, John Cage) depends on a field of unintended, unplanned movement and

sound, or the chance and indeterminacy created by the animals and insects who

appear in Nauman’s studio. Glowing pinpoints of light dance across the screen and

resolve into the nervous, stop-and-go motion of mice and lizards, exaggerating the
 Confusions of Nearness: 235
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

already-present pulse and quiver of the video pixels. Moths scud across the camera

lens, leaving vaporous jet streams of light. The appearance of a black, tailless cat is an

event. Like the moth, the cat’s eyes, reflective twin points, create phosphorescent

trails as the cat looks this way and that, hunting for mice. From one corner of the

Dia: Chelsea space, a hoarse meow can be heard, while in the other the cat lopes

across a corner of Nauman’s studio, disappearing through a doorway into another

room. Incrementally, cat, mouse, lizard, and moth map the contours of Nauman’s

studio and the objects within.

In a 2003 October roundtable discussion on the projected image in art, the

avant-garde filmmaker Anthony McCall argues that on the one hand, the reception of

video and film involves entering “the elsewhere of a moving image.”4 In doing so,

one’s physical body is left behind, remaining “rooted to the spot.” On the other hand,

for McCall, the reception of sculpture and architectural space involves moving, or

“measuring what you see with your eyes and your physical body.” When it was

shown at Dia: Chelsea, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance, John Cage) directly

contradicted this split between physical action and the reception of the moving image

described by McCall. With no sculptures to knock over or paintings to brush up

against, the projections, coupled with the mobile chairs and the dark room, created an

atmosphere of mobility and uncertainty for the visitor to Nauman’s installation, which

drew on the exhilaration of the bumper-car ride and the mystery of the tunnel of love

in a fairground midway rather than the conventional museum experience. Suspended

4
Anthony McCall, in George Baker et al., “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,”
October 104 (Spring 2003): 76.
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The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

between a moving and a still image by the sporadic nature of the videotaped action,

Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance, John Cage)’s projections also set up a temporal

suspense that informed the kind of attention its audience gave to it. These spatial and

temporal conditions produced two diametrically opposed responses from visitors that

were described by critics from the popular and art press: boredom and full attention.

The art critic Frances Richard reported that “[v]isitors sit in the middle of the

room…where they soon grow bored, but the experience is also soothing,

narcotic.…”5 “A cat and mouse game” was a phrase that came to mind the second

time I entered the installation at Dia: Chelsea. Michael Kimmelman of the New York

Times came up with a similar analogy when he compared the visitors to night

watchmen, suspended between sensory deprivation and the professional requirement

to pay attention: “After a while the tendency is simply to stop watching and just gaze

passively, the empty room becoming strangely comforting, with much of what you

register happening unconsciously on the periphery of your vision.…”6 As

Kimmelman’s comparison to night watchmen implied, the on-screen movement in

Mapping the Studio I activated its audience’s peripheral vision, creating the

impression that they were required to remain at full attention before seemingly empty

rooms. In his review, however, Kimmelman failed to acknowledge the jolt of

pleasure produced by onscreen movement.

5
Frances Richard, “Bruce Nauman-DIA Center for the Arts” Sperone Westwater
http://www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/articles/record.html?record=158 (accessed August
26, 2008)
6
Michael Kimmelman “Art in Review: Bruce Nauman‘Mapping the Studio I,’” New York Times, July
5, 2002, E35.
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The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

The audience’s response to the work was also a collaborative effort. Tim

Griffin, a former art critic for Time Out New York, notes: “When someone spots

something, whether rodent or feline, everybody turns to face the same direction and

starts pointing joyously. Art becomes a game of cat and mouse in a

collective…version of peekaboo.…”7 The dark, uncluttered space also created a

context for people to behave in unexpected and unpredictable manners. Griffin

continues:

Audiences inevitably start clowning around…folks obviously find it hard not

to start spinning themselves about the space like chess pieces on a board
without squares. I saw one couple in their sixties whirl each other around in a
whimsical, romantic dance.

When I was there, two girls transformed their experience into sentry duty, perched at

taut attention in the middle of the space. Facing opposite directions so as to miss

nothing, they eagerly pointed out various disturbances in the projections’ electronic

fields: “I saw a dog, look!” “Where?” “Over there!” And then one turned to the other

and asked, “Do you think it’s a live video?” An intertwined couple vigorously made

out; a group of women straddled the chairs and gleefully propelled themselves across

the smooth floor; and an unhappy young man wandered up to me and asked, What’s

supposed to happen?

When inside the projected video environment Mapping the Studio I (Fat

Chance, John Cage), visitors simultaneously mapped the physical space of the

gallery’s interior and the virtual space of Nauman’s studio moment by moment, inch

by inch. Visitors making out, dancing, propelling themselves across the space or

7
Tim Griffin, “Cut to the Chase,” Time Out New York, January 24–31 2002, 47.
 Confusions of Nearness: 238
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

surveilling it, mimicked the on-screen movement and thus created, as Charlie Finch

notes in an online review, a synchronicity between themselves and the on-screen

animals, thereby immersing themselves in the virtual space. “By sitting on one of

these chairs and propelling oneself across Dia’s exquisite stone floors…one can

become one of the animals…and achieve the illusion of really being in Bruce’s

studio.”8 The distinctive characteristics of the Dia: Chelsea version of Mapping the

Studio I (Fat Chance, John Cage)—the darkness and the mobility offered by the

chairs—created a set of circumstances critical to its reception. This becomes

especially apparent when considered in relation to the version of Mapping the Studio

I (Fat Chance, John Cage) that was installed in the basement of Dia: Beacon in the

late summer of 2003. When I visited it, incidental light entered the space through both

the translucent screens and the work’s entryway, and the chairs in the center were not

on casters: these two changes removed from the work two critical elements.9 Mobility

and darkness, virtuality and the placement of the viewer at the center of that darkness

came together in the installation at Dia: Chelsea to produce the effect remarked on by

members of its audience: the walls of the gallery in Chelsea may have been overlaid

by the ghostly doubles of mice that could, at that very moment, have been scurrying

under a doorjamb away from a cat in Nauman’s New Mexico studio. Their full

immersion in an environment that was created out of both actual and virtual elements

resulted in a sensory response to and an intellectual engagement with both.

8
Charlie Finch, “Turn 'Em Loose, Bruce,” ArtNet Magazine,
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/cfinch/finch1-14-02.asp (accessed May 21, 2006).
9
I have been told that it has since then been reinstalled in a better location at Dia: Beacon.
 Confusions of Nearness: 239
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

4.2 Immersion and Autonomy

When writing about audience and participation, Rudolf Arnheim observed a range of

possible engagements: from applause in the theatre, to the call and response required

of the faithful in the church liturgy, to the “total involvement [or immersion] of all

participants.”10 Oliver Grau defines immersion as an experience that in most cases is

“mentally absorbing and…is characterized by diminishing critical distance to what is

shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening.”11 As Grau and

others have shown, the concept of immersion has a long history in Western visual

culture. From antiquity through the Renaissance and the nineteenth century to the

present day, Grau describes an archaeology of “immersive” image spaces, or works

that seek to enclose viewers within the fabric of the image itself: a cycle of frescoes in

the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii (c. 60 BCE) dedicated to the cult of Dionysus fill a

visitor’s visual field with life-sized renderings of figures; frescoes of a garden in the

Villa Livia near Primaporta (c. 20 BCE) create an illusion of nature brought indoors,

as do renderings of hunting scenes for the study of Pope Clement VI in his new

palace in Avignon, the Chambre du Cerf (c.1343); in the Renaissance Baldessare

Peruzzi’s Sala delle Prospettive (1516) foreshadows nineteenth century panoramas

through its use of a continuous horizon line.12 Exemplary of the immersive totality of

nineteenth-century panorama structures is the way that they break down the

10
Rudolf Arnheim, “The Coming and Going of Images.” In Leonardo 3, No. 3, 2000: 167.
11
Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. Gloria Costance (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2003), 13.
12
For more examples, and more detailed descriptions of these works see Oliver Grau, “Historic Spaces
of Illusions,” in Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, 25–89.
 Confusions of Nearness: 240
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

psychological distance between observer and work. Panoramas were shown in

enclosed rotundas. Visitors would enter a viewing platform from which to see the

panorama. A balustrade would separate the visitor from the image, keeping them in a

position from which the image’s upper and lower limits were imperceptible.

Overhead lighting illuminating the image would also be out of visible range, leaving

the viewer with the impression that the image itself provided the light, an effect later

repeated in cinema, television, and computer screens. A prominent critic of the

panorama, Johann August Eberhard described his response to being incompletely

immersed in the virtual environment it created using terms usually reserved for the

sudden onset of physical illness, especially an anxiety attack. In Handbuch der

Ästhetik (1805) Eberhard observes:

I sway between reality and unreality, between nature and non-nature, between
truth and appearance. My thoughts and my spirits are set in motion, forced to
swing from side to side, like going round in circles or being rocked in a boat. I
can only explain the dizziness and sickness that befall the unprepared observer
of the panorama in this way….I feel myself trapped in the net of a
contradictory dream world…not even comparision with the bodies that
surround me can awake me from this terrifying nightmare, which I must go on
dreaming against my will.13

His criticism focused on the inability of the panorama to create a perfect illusion for

its audience, leaving it unable to distinguish among the actual and virtual elements of

the environment—or “truth and appearance”—and the resulting perceptual

destabilization.

Thirty to forty years before viewer participation first played a central role in

happenings, Fluxus, and avant-garde performance art, Peter Weibel claims that

13
Quoted in Grau, Virtual Art, 63–64.
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The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

virtuality and interactivity had already been well established in modern art by the

1920s with Bauhaus and Dada. These early-twentieth-century explorations shared

strategies with earlier immersive works, such as the panorama, for removing the

psychological distance between viewer and work. What distinguishes these works

from the earlier examples is the invention of electricity and its potential for

generating artificial light and movement, as well as an explicit invitation to the viewer

to actively engage. In The New Vision: From Material to Architecture (1929), László

Moholy-Nagy describes an evolution of material and static volumes that moves

toward a kinetic and “virtual” experience. When observing both Bauhaus student

work and everyday virtualities, Moholy-Nagy notes two forms of volume: “The

circumscribed mass of measurable weight” that is tangible in three dimensions, and

[t]he virtual contour, apperceived merely visually, resulting from motion,

which—although bodiless—is yet an outstanding plastic element of creation,
recognizable on the three-dimensional plane. [Resulting mainly from motion
of one-dimensional linear elements (bodies).] Therefore…sculpture is both the
path from material-volume to virtual volume and from factual grasp to visual,
relative grasp.14

Examples of everyday virtual volumes provided by Moholy-Nagy include

photographs of a gyroscope—when set in motion, rigid materials optically

disintegrate—and a merry-go-round on a midway in Blackpool, England. Limned

with light, the merry-go-round’s whirling contours produce a temporary illusion of

volume created out of light and movement. Experiments in kinetic art from the 1920s

concentrated on inciting the audience to set in motion works that create illusory, or

14
László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: From Material to Architecture. trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann
(New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, Inc., 1932), 134.
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The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

virtual, bodies and movement through optical tricks. Like a gyroscope, Marcel

Duchamp’s Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) from 1920 requires the viewer to

set the optical machine in motion. Unlike the gyroscope, the viewer is then instructed

to stand one meter away: the location of the viewer is crucial to activating perceptual

experiences.

Like the panorama, these new electrified-light environments produced

uncertainty over “reality and unreality,” in Eberhard’s words. Moholy-Nagy (like

Robert Venturi approximately fifty years later) celebrated the new virtual landscape

created by commerce, the news media, and the new forms of transportation.15 Unlike

Venturi, Moholy-Nagy saw the new electronic signage proliferating throughout

everyday life as raw material waiting for the deft hand of the artist to realize its full

potential, rather than a postmodern semiotics of architecture:

[L]ight—as spatial projection—is an outstanding aid in attaining virtual

volume…The night life of a city can no longer be imagined without the varied
play of electrical advertisements, or night air traffic without the lighted
beacons along the way. The reflectors and neon tubes of advertising signs, the
moving lighted letters of storefronts, the rotating mechanisms of colored
electric bulbs, the broad strips of the electric news bulletin, are all elements of
a new field of expression, which will probably not have to wait much longer
for its creative artist.16

Farkas Molnar’s U-Theatre, Andreas Weininger’s Spherical Theatre, and Walter

Gropius’ Total Theatre were all unrealized attempts by Bauhaus members to

experiment with artificial light sources that were already being used in both everyday

life and the movie-picture studio. Molnar, Weininger and Gropius set out to break

15
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten
Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977).
16
Moholy-Nagy, 132.
 Confusions of Nearness: 243
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

away from the existing model of proscenium and spectator found in the movie

theater, by structuring new relations between film, light, performance, and the theater

audience from various angles and distances:

While artificial light sources are used to an amazing extent in the motion
picture studio and on the stage, the present-day painter or sculptor has hardly
any notion of how to employ them. It should be mentioned that at the same
time the stage, and more especially the motion picture, are still far from
rational in their practical use of light. The splendidly equipped motion picture
studios should not plan their lighting—or their architecture—on unintelligent
principles of imitation of nature, but should exploit the special possibilities of
light.17

Moholy-Nagy proposed replacing the traditional movie screen and its connotation of

the picture frame with convex or concave screens of different sizes and shapes. In a

1924 version of his models, three films were to be projected simultaneously onto the

inner surface of a hemisphere.18

In the 1950s and 1960s op art and kinetic art continued these experiments in

virtuality, movement, and audience interaction through paintings, sculptures, and

environments. As a movement, op art included painterly experiments with surface

kinetics, in which colors and patterns were used to create visual effects such as

afterimages and trompe-l’oeil. Vibrating colors, concentric circles, and pulsating

moiré patterns are characteristic of works by artists such as Victor Vasarely, Richard

Anusziewicz, Larry Poons, Yaacov Agam, and Bridget Riley. As viewers walk before

Riley’s paintings, for example, its appearance changes. “In my earlier paintings, I

wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in

17
Moholy-Nagy, 142.
18
Michael Kirby, “The Uses of Film in the New Theatre,” The Tulane Drama Review 11, no.1,
(Autumn, 1966): 50.
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The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

that space, paradoxically, the painting ‘took place,’” Riley summarizes. She

continues: “It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind’s eye,

or the eye’s mind, can move about it credibly.”19 Jesús Rafael Soto produced kinetic

art through the illusion of movement. When talking about his work, Soto spoke of

“virtual relations” and extended these relations from the surface within a room into

the “environment”—simultaneously drawing the viewer into the work of art.20

Spectator participation extended from adjustable paintings to sculptures, and from

sculptures into space. In Soto’s Penetrables series in the 1960s, spectators

experienced the work haptically by passing through a field of suspended nylon

filament. In 1963 the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel exhibited its first collective

work, a labyrinth that is still on display at the Museum Cohue in Vannes, France.21

Visitors are expected to enter the structure and get lost, embodying the museum’s

exhibition motto: Défense de ne pas participer. Défense de ne pas toucher. (It is

forbidden not to participate. It is forbidden not to touch).

Notwithstanding these art-historical precedents, when the audience members

in Nauman’s projected video environment measured both virtual and the actual space

19
Bridget Riley, “The Experience of Painting,” interview by Mel Gooding, in The Eye's Mind: Bridget
Riley. Collected Writings 1965–1999, ed. Robert Kudielka (London: Thames and Hudson, in
association with the Serpentine Gallery, London, and De Montfort University, 1999), 122. Early in her
career, Riley worked to develop pictorial relations between her paintings and their audience out of
which, at a certain moment, a particular visual memory or a phenomenal sensation could be
recognized. Movement in Squares (1961) and Crest (1964) were studies in sharply defined black-and-
white contrast. Across the picture plane of Movement in Squares, dynamic movement was arrived at
through optical illusions that were developed with a minimal use of patterns: this technique established
new spatial relations between the viewer and the surface.
20
Peter Weibel, “It is Forbidden Not to Touch: Some Remarks on the (Forgotten Parts of the) History
of Interactivity and Virtuality,” in MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007),
21–42.
21
A group founded in 1961, it was made up of artists Horacio-Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François
Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Joel Stein and Jean-Pierre Yvara.
 Confusions of Nearness: 245
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

of the environment with their bodies and their eyes, they inadvertently placed

themselves at the heart of a fiercely fought debate over the split between the virtual

and the phenomenological. Action, participation, and the performative relation

between visitors’ bodies, the artwork, and the enveloping space all carry a significant

ideological charge. A break away from immersion and virtuality, and more

specifically away from the integration of “illusionistic” film and video into an

environment, begins in Nauman’s historical context. This debate finds its roots in key

texts by theorists of minimalist art and structural film. For the champions of these

movements, the success of the interaction between audience, work, and space

depended on the distance, or autonomy, of the visitor in relation to the space and the

object, the autonomy of the artwork from the media world that surrounds it, and in

particular the autonomy of film from Hollywood narrative film and the illusions it

delivered to its audience.

In his 1966 essay “Notes on Sculpture,” the minimalist sculptor Robert Morris

established the conditions for “new sculpture.” Beginning with the ideal scale relation

between the viewer and the sculpture (or the object), he wrote, “The awareness of

scale is a function of the comparison made between that constant, one’s body size,

and the object.” 22 Depending on the size of the object, the space between the viewer

and the object also enters into play, establishing a performative relationship between

subject and object: “it is just this distance between object and subject that creates a

22
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock,
(New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1968), 231.
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The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

more extended situation, for physical participation becomes necessary.”23 For all

these factors to work, not only is the size of the object in relation to the subject

critical, so too is the size of the space of the room: “itself…a structuring factor both in

its cubic shape and in terms of the kinds of compression different sized and

proportioned rooms can effect upon the object-subject terms.”24 All of these factors

are “real” elements present at the same time, in the same place.

An equally influential text is a 1966 interview with the minimalist sculptor

Tony Smith. Published in Artforum, Smith describes a nighttime ride he took in the

1950s with his students on the yet-to-be-finished New Jersey Turnpike. He spoke of

the unfinished, unmarked turnpike’s limitlessness, its dual evocation of culture and

experience without cultural precedent. “The experience in the road,” he continued,

“was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought

to be clear that’s the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is

no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.”25 This established—not the

end of art—but the beginning of minimalism and its declaration of the “death of

painting,” or the death of illusionistic representation.

Structural film was an avant-garde film movement that first made its

appearance in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the mid-1960s.

Filmmakers and artists such as Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton were concerned

with interrogating the film’s apparatus: the projector from which film is projected, the

23
Morris, 233.
24
Ibid.
25
Tony Smith and Sam Wagstaff, “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum 1, no 4 (December 1966): 18.
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theater in which film is shown, and the screen on which it is seen; and structural

elements, such as time and movement, flatness, filmstock grain, and light.26 In his

book Visionary Film, Sitney defined structural film as a “cinema of structure in which

the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape which

is the primal impression of the film”27 And Peter Gidal, one of the foremost

champions of structural film in the United Kingdom observed:

Structural/Materialist film attempts to be non-illusionist.….An avant-garde

film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist
function does not represent, or document, anything. The film produces certain
relations between segments, between what the camera is aimed at and the way
that “image” is presented. The dialectic of the film is established in that space
of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the
supposed reality that is represented. Consequently a continual attempt to
destroy the illusion is necessary.28

The formal terms established by Morris in his essay set up an axiomatic relationship

between space, body and object that displaced earlier explorations of virtuality by

Bauhaus, Dada, kinetic art, and then op art. Smith’s “end of art” provided the

conceptual framework for both minimalism and the criticisms of contemporary

projected video environments, as did Sitney’s and Gidal’s repudiation of the

illusionism celebrated by Moholy-Nagy in the effort to sever avant-garde film from

Hollywood cinema. As the video artist Dan Graham put it: “A premise of 1960s

26
Other Structural filmmakers include George Landow (aka Owen Land), Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad,
Joyce Wieland, Ernie Gehr, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Kurt Kren, and Peter Kubelka.
27
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), 348. Canonical examples of Structural films include Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965),
Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1966-67) and One Second in Montreal (1969); Paul Sharits’
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968); Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1970); Ernie Gahr’s Serene Velocity
(1970); and George Landow’s Remedial Reading Comprehension (1971).
28
Peter Gidal, “Theory & Definition of Structural/Materialist Film,” Studio International, 190.978,
1975: 189.
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modernist art was to present the present as immediacy—as pure phenomenological

consciousness without the contamination of historical or other a priori meaning.”29

These ideas are brought together in Anthony McCall’s film Line Describing a

Cone. Made in 1973, it was first screened as an independent film, and more recently

exhibited in art museums.30 In an interview with Gautam Dasgupta, McCall described

in detail the viewing requirements of the film, and their correspondence to its

conceptual framework: “Line Describing a Cone is what I term a solid light film. It

deals with the projected light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere

carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface.”31 The

projection is first perceptible as a white dot on the black ground of the exhibition’s or

theater’s wall. Gradually this dot grows into a line, which eventually forms an arc that

slowly grows into a circle. The projection’s duration is governed by the slow

emergence of this circle onto the wall perpendicular to the beam of light. As the circle

grows, between the screen and the projector the beam of light evolves into a gradually

growing cone, embodied forth by particles in the air illuminated by the projected

light.

McCall originally conceived the work as an assault on cinematic conventions:

“This film…refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a

29
Dan Graham, “Video in Relation to Architecture,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to
Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York and San Francisco: Aperture and Bay Area
Video Coalition, 1990), 186.
30
Line Describing a Cone was included in the exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in
American Art, 1964–1977 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 18, 2001-
January 6, 2002.
31
Anthony McCall, interview by Gautam Dasgupta, “Interview: Formalist Cinema and Politics,”
Performing Arts Journal 1, no. 3, (Winter, 1977): 52.
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primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is

real, not referential.”32 The projector was to be set up inside the exhibition or

theatrical space, not cloistered in a projection both. The viewing space was to be

“entirely empty of chairs or other furniture.” The space was to be “absolutely pitch

dark.” There was to be no screen: the “beam merely ‘stops’ at the wall. The light of

the beam from the projector was to be made visible through “contact from particles,

in the air, be they from dust, humidity or cigarette smoke. Smoking should not be

prohibited.”33 For the museum or theater visitor, Line Describing a Cone provided no

singular point of aural, visual, or temporal focus, rather making it possible for the

visitor to listen to the rattle of the sixteen-millemetre projector, watch the growing

circle on the wall, and the growing cone between wall and projector. Most

importantly for McCall, they move around a space empty except for the projector.

This provides the viewer with the opportunity to interrupt the cone of light when they

step between the projector and the screen. This performative dimension becomes

more complex when more than one visitor becomes immersed in both room and

work, as each person’s behavior in the space affects the other’s when they

temporarily alter the shape of both the cone and the circle of light.

While both Minimalist art and Structural film established the terms of his

historical and conceptual context, Nauman is typically grouped with process artists,

or post-minimalists who were active in the 1960s and the 1970s. Like Morris and

McCall, they considered the corporeal experience of the visitor to be integral to their

32
McCall: 52.
33
McCall: 52.
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work. Like McCall, they used video and film as one of many sculptural materials.

Unlike McCall and the Structural filmmakers, they use illusionistic spaces, or video

and film as carriers of “coded information.”34 Artists not typically associated with

postminimalism such as Peter Campus and Dan Graham also made the audience

essential to their work when they created environments where viewers could wander

through feedback loops of live video cameras and monitors. In Campus’ installation

Aeon (1977) the visitor enters an empty, dark room, only to discover her or his virtual

double inverted, enlarged and projected onto one of the four walls. The (limited)

tension lies in the fact that she or he can only see the projected video image of

her/himself in her/his peripheral vision, provoking the visitor to “chase” the image of

her/himself in a fruitless attempt to get a better look. Dan Graham’s Present

Continuous Past(s) (1974) uses mirrors, time-delayed video cameras and monitors to

set up a spatialized representation of the present and a series of immediate pasts. Like

Campus’ Aeon, the work would only be activated when the visitor steps into the

space. In Present Continuous Past(s), a mirror reflection of the visitors in the

installation represents present time. The video camera tapes what is immediately in

front of it and the entire scene that is reflected on the opposite mirrored wall.

Graham’s description of the work best sums up its temporal mise en abyme:

The image seen by the camera (reflecting everything in the room) appears
eight seconds later in the video monitor (via a tape delay placed between the
video recorder, which is recording, and a second video recorder, which is
playing the recording back)….A person viewing the monitor sees both the
image of himself or herself of eight seconds earlier, and what was reflected on
the mirror from the monitor eight seconds prior to that–sixteen seconds in the

34
See my description of Keith Sonnier’s installation in chapter 3.
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past (the camera view of eight seconds prior was playing back on the monitor
eight seconds earlier, and this was reflected on the mirror along with the then
present reflection to the viewer). An infinite regress of time continuums
within time continuums (always separated by eight-second intervals) within
time continuums is created.35

When writing about video feedback in general and the work in particular, Graham

observed: “ Two models of time are contrasted in Present Continuous Past(s), the

traditional Renaissance perspective static present-time, which is seen, in this work, as

the (self) image(s) in the mirror(s), and the time of the video feedback loop.”36 The

mandate of this splitting of time was no less than the splitting of the self into subject

and object:

use of video time-delay in conjunction with the mirror allows the spectator to
see what is normally visually unavailable: the simultaneity of his or her self as
both subject and object….a spectator realizes himself/herself as acting and
acted upon: In causing a reflection and at the same time finding the self
reflected, he/she divides into subject and object, into an awareness and an
image. The image separates the individual, but is it he/she who forms the
image or is it the image that describes him/her?37

In the process, Graham extends Morris’ project: the viewer becomes both the subject

and the image under consideration.

A premise of 1960s modernist art was to present the present as immediacy—

as pure phenomenological consciousness without the contamination of
historical or other a priori meaning. The world could be experienced as pure
presence…Each privileged present-time situation was to be totally unique or
new. My video time-delay, installations, and performance designs use this
modernist notion of phenomenological immediacy, foregrounding an
awareness of the presence of the viewer’s own perceptual process; at the same
time they critique this immediacy by showing the impossibility of locating a
pure present tense.38

35
Graham, 186.
36
Graham, 185.
37
Graham, 185–186.
38
Graham, 186.
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Campus’ and Graham’s work requires the audience to maintain a detached awareness

of their environment rather than becoming fully immersed into it. Technology plays

an integral role in the production of these performative, phenomenological

experiences that requires both an intellectual and an emotional distance.

Nauman’s installations from the 1960s and 1970s, as Janet Kraynak points

out, “assertively engage and operate upon the beholder’s body, senses, and mind.”39

The experience that Nauman asked his participants to undertake—unlike his later

work Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance, John Cage)—more closely resembled an

endurance course than a fleeting moment of misrecognition and frustration (Campus)

or a bloodless reflection on the experience of duration (Graham). For example Green

Light Corridor (1970) is one of a series of constricted spaces by Nauman that are

built within the exhibition space. The installation consists of a narrow hallway, nearly

forty feet in length, with walls ten feet high but only approximately one foot apart.

Museum or gallery visitors interested in experiencing the work can only do so by

turning sideways and shuffling awkwardly from left to right or right to left along the

corridor formed by the two walls. The haptic senses are privileged over sight: to see

anything but the wall, inches away from her or his nose, the participant must turn her

or his head perpendicular to her or his feet. As its title suggests, the corridor is lit

from above, bathing the participant in green fluorescent lights. The intensity of the

color produces a magenta afterimage for the participant after he or she emerges from

the piece into natural light. According to the artist’s catalog raisonne, when the work

39
Janet Kraynak, “Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman’s Environments,” Grey Room 10 (Winter
2003): 23.
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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.”40 In

describing Green Light Corridor, Nauman remarked: “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.”41 Think (1993) carries forward the

qualities of anxiety, constraint and control that defined Green Light Corridor. One

television set is stacked on top of another. On each monitor, a loop of Nauman’s face,

tightly framed, shows him bouncing up and down. The top television monitor is

turned upsidedown, creating the illusion that with each bounce Nauman’s head

repeatedly merges and splits. The loops are doubled, but not synchronized. Only the

top of his head comes into full view, with the occasional view of his mouth ostensibly

screaming the soundtrack. “THINK! THINK! THINK!” is punctuated by grating,

abrasive sounds such as clashing cymbals. It is impossible to obey Nauman’s demand

to participate, given that the repetitiveness and volume produces the opposite effect;

making it impossible, indeed, to think.

This division between subject and image creates within Graham’s audience a

phenomenological awareness of the presence of temporality, rather than a vertiginous

immersion into an environment made up of actual and virtual elements such as the

experience described by Johann Eberhard in the nineteenth century. Like Morris’,

40
Joan Simon, ed. Bruce Nauman (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: Distributed Art
Publishers, 1994), 245.
41
Bruce Nauman, interview by Michele De Angelus. “Interview with Bruce Nauman, May 27 and 30,
1980” in Please Pay Attention, Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2005), 258–59.
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McCall’s, Campus’ and Graham’s work, in Nauman’s earlier installations “the viewer

is directly, physically engaged—‘performing’ rather than ‘viewing’ the object—and

indeed the completion of the object is contingent upon such interactions.” Here, the

stress is placed on prodding the audience into both an active engagement with the

material of the work and an awareness of their sensory engagement with it. All of

these works privilege detachment over involvement, autonomy over immersion,

“reality” over illusion. This notion of autonomy goes beyond the detachment of the

individual from the environment, but also between art and the rest of cultural

production: in the case of projected video environments, art and media culture were to

become established as two terms in a dialectical relationship.

4.3 The Anti-Entertainment Polemics

Kraynak uses Nauman’s technocratic critiques to dismiss more recent installations

such as Jorge Pardo’s Pier (1997) and Charles Long’s Bubble Gum Station (1995) for

being entertaining rather than difficult. She writes:

in these (and other) examples the once radical premises and potentially
destabilizing effects of participation are transmogrified into a user-friendly
doctrine of artistic viewing. The artist is no longer producer but caretaker and
nurturer who provides sustenance, entertainment, and other pleasures for an
audience that can enjoy such spoils without having to purchase anything….42

Pleasure through entertainment is integral to the economic relationship of this gift

economy, itself a mask Kraynak argues for “forced participation.” Pardo’s Pier—as

its title suggests—is a pier constructed out of imported California redwood that juts

out onto Lake Aasee, at whose edge sits Münster, Germany. Perched on its end is a

42
Kraynak: 30.
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hexagonal pavilion (complete with cigarette machine), inside which the viewer is

invited to contemplate both the lake and the city. Commissioned as a temporary

installation for the 1997 Sculptor Project in Münster, it has since become a permanent

fixture. Charles Long’s Bubble Gum Station is the centerpiece of a series of nine

collaborative sculpture installations featuring the music of the British pop band,

Stereolab. It consists of three stools, three headsets, a table, sculpting tools, and a

mountain of pink artificial clay. With these elements, the installation extends a tacit

invitation to the museum visitor to sit on the stool, put on the headphones through

which Stereolab plays continuously, and sculpt the pink mound into new forms. For

Kraynak,

far from operating outside the dominant [late capitalist] system, this “gift
economy” (as…“participation”) is structurally immanent to that
system….[Pardo and Long] both propose a reading of participation as
obligation: a tacit form of control in which reciprocity is all but guaranteed
and desires and will are exploited, becoming, in effect, forms of submission—
or dependency. Technocratic society, we shall see, is precisely built upon this
dynamic: a dialectic of participation and control.43

Left intact in Kraynak’s position are the central arguments of 1960s modernism: that

audience actions determine meaning production, and art and mass culture maintain a

dialectical relationship. Moreover art must be difficult, because mass culture is

entertaining.

In the 2003 October roundtable on the projected image in contemporary art,

McCall opposes the experience of watching a video or film, in which the body

becomes “rooted to the spot,” to the experience of sculpture or architectural space,

43
Ibid., 30–31.
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where “you must walk, measuring what you see with your eyes and your physical

body.”44 He uses an installation by Rosemarie Trockel to illustrate the

irreconcilability of these two experiences. The installation’s title, Spleen (2000-

2002)—defined as “the seat of emotions and passions”—serves as the generative

concept for a cycle of short videos that together narrate fragments of the story of a

fictional character, a woman named Manu. In the configuration at Dia: Chelsea that

McCall describes, Trockel installed a series of five freestanding walls throughout the

gallery. Each wall is covered on one side with interlocking, mobile aluminum plates,

and on the obverse continuous loops of the five-part video cycle are projected. Each

sequence is shot in a different style, and each shows a different event: a press

conference, a party, and a theater performance. As McCall observed, the riddle of the

work lies in the relationships between the five video sequences. The visitor needed to

walk from one to the other, stop, consider, and compare then with each other. The

trouble for McCall lay in the audience’s fragmented reception of the installation’s

sculptural elements and video sequences.

For most of this time, you are rooted to the spot, absorbed, as you watch and
listen to a clip, before you move on to seek out the next. During this entire
process, you barely notice the free-standing planes of aluminum plates, which
you are invited to consider as part of a single, integrated installation.
Physically, these are large, sculptural surfaces. But while you study the clips,
they seem gratuitous.45

Following this argument, most film and video, because it describes an “elsewhere,” or

an illusionistic space, cannot produce a phenomenological experience on par with the

44
Baker et al, 76.
45
Ibid.
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interrelationship between “present” elements such as space, the object and the

audience’s body, as Dan Graham described. I would argue, rather, that McCall chose

an example that failed not because the experience of illusionistic film and video is

incommensurate with phenomenology, but because it failed to provide an immersive

experience.

I began this chapter with an example of a contemporary projected video

environment by an artist, Nauman, who is lauded for making “good” audience-

centered environments. More generally, however, contemporary projected video

environments have been criticized by critics and theoreticians for their “bad”

relationship to their audiences. The break between virtuality and immersion begins in

the late 1960s, as texts by Morris, Smith, Sitney, Gidal and Graham that I cited earlier

attest. It reemerges in the critical response to contemporary projected video

environments in the mid- to late-1990s. Principles established in the 1960s and the

1970s are used to critique, and then dismiss the immersion into pleasure and media

culture generated by the confusion between the virtual and the phenomenological in

projected video environments.

That projected video environments resulted in an all-enveloping experience

was accepted early on. In 1996 Barbara London (the curator of film and video at the

Museum of Modern Art) wrote:

By releasing the image from a single screen and embedding it in an

environment, artists have extended their installations in time and space. The
works envelop the viewer, who moves around and through them. Engulfed by
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the assemblage of temporal parts, the process of looking is as much about the
physical experience as the composite memories that live on in the mind.46

Since the 1970s Bill Viola has used video to create immersive environments that

envelop the audience in image and sound, providing an avenue to both self-

knowledge and a spiritual experience.47 An example singled out for criticism by

Foster is Stations (1994). The installation consists of five video projections arranged

along a wall in a darkened room, five granite slabs that form a right angle to each of

the projections on the gallery floor, and a sound track. The projections show lifesize

images of five naked people suspended upside-down in the water: a boy, an old man,

46
Barbara London, “Video Spaces,” Performing Arts Journals 18, no. 3 (September 1996): 14.
47
Other notable examples include the Swiss artist Pippilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All, and Stasi City by
the British twins Jane and Louise Wilson (both 1997). Ever Is Over All envelops viewers in two slow-
motion videos that are haphazardly projected on two adjacent walls, forming a right angle. A haunting
melody both lures the visitor to the installation from elsewhere in the museum, and guides the
narrative. On one screen a roving camera uncertainly focuses on a field of red flowers swaying in a
lush, sun-dappled meadow. The hypnotic lull created in this projection complements the narrative
taking place in the projection to its left. Filmed in medium- and long-shot, an attractive woman dressed
in sparkling ruby slippers and a pretty blue dress skips down a neat car-lined street in a small European
town. Carried a long-stemmed tropical flower, she seems to have stepped out of a scene from The
Sound of Music. The multiple illusions that this scene projects are violently disrupted when the woman
raises her flower and smashes in the passenger-side window of a parked car. Unruffled, the soundtrack
continues as our interpretation of her glee shifts from innocence to anarchic pleasure. As the (now
relabeled) vandal continues down her path of mayhem and property destruction, a police officer
approaches. Our expectations are further destabilized when the officer smiles approvingly and offers a
friendly salute as she passes the pretty vandal. The Wilson sisters’ installation Stasi City consists of
four projections onto four walls in a cubical room. The projections show documentary sequences of
the abandoned headquarters of the defunct East German secret police—unofficially called Stasi City—
a few years after Germany’s reunification. The work’s success stems from the vertiginous quality of its
editing. Plunging its audience into dreamlike scenes redolent of East Germany’s nightmarish past, the
four-channel video installation projects a vertiginous juxtaposition of lateral and vertical shifts. The
camera takes the installation’s visitors up and down dumbwaiters, through labyrinths of abandoned
corridors, and past doors that open onto interrogation rooms, surveillance rooms and record rooms.
The physical plant both offers a mute testimony to the power and terror of the Stasi regime, and the
completeness and suddenness of its downfall. The equipment lies abandoned under a thick layer of
dust. Documents spill onto the floor. The paint is peeling. A soundtrack of industrial and electronic
noise accompanies these sequences: clangs, buzzes, and clicks that could have been emitted by the
equipment used by the building’s former occupants. Together the soundtrack, the camera work and the
placement of the audience in the center of the museum room performs the subtle psychology of a space
that opens a window onto the power relations produced by the surveillance and paranoia that
characterized East Germany’s Cold War experience.
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a 30-something man and woman, and another, very pregnant woman. The projections

are reflected in the polished slabs of granite, merging the exhibition space with the

screen space. The room is filled with amplified sounds produced by the bodies

drifting and bobbing underwater: long trills of gurgles race around the gallery,

interrupted by sloshes and the occasional splash. One of the figures’ heads leaves the

projection’s frame, creating concentric rings in the water as she surfaces (at the

bottom of the projection) for air. Occasionally a figure drifts offscreen, leaving its

projection’s narrow rectangles blank, further plunging the exhibition space into

darkness. An eruption of churning, bubbling water interrupts the soundtrack’s

somnolent trills, as a figure plunges up from the floor and into the water, and the

video’s loop begins again.

The Museum of Modern Art website describes Stations as “a meditation on

the continual cycles of life, death, and rebirth.”48 In a first-person narrative posted

online, an audience member, Philippe Bessière, described his experience inside the

work after visiting it at the American Center in Paris in 1994:

Simultaneously, the onscreen bodies and I produce a communal experience of

immersion and damnation inside a threatening and uncomfortable universe: I,
by penetrating this darkened room; they, in their immersion into troubled
waters. The submerged, immobilized, stagnant bodies twist slowly in the
water currant, seemingly weightless, as if delivered to the whim of the all-
powerful water, dying within, perhaps already dead, like animal corpses
preserved in formaldehyde. The flickering video screen reinforces this
impression of agony and heavy calm: it makes the fingers twitch like a hanged
man’s before the moment of death; like a thrashing fish jerked out of its
element. The slowed-down sound emphasizes the morbid quality of the

48
MoMA.org | The Collection | Bill Viola, Stations (1994),
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A7898&page_numb
er=3&template_id=1&sort_order=1 (accessed June 10, 2008).
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installation: breaths, shudders, lapping water, weak and continuous,

modulated sadness.49

Like the nineteenth-century panorama critic Johann Eberhard, Bessière describes his

experience inside Viola’s immersive environment using adjectives usually reserved

for physical impairment. Both descriptions bear out Grau’s linking together of

immersion and the erosion of emotional distance. Eberhard reeled and lurched

between reality and nightmares. Bessière, for his part, finds himself drifting toward

death, in an account that stresses the seductive, irresistible dreamlike nature of the

experience, notwithstanding his characterizations of the universe he shared with the

onscreen bodies as “threatening” and “uncomfortable.” Eberhard also describes a

dream, but it is a nightmare from which he is straining to wake up.

In an interview with Marquard Smith, Hal Foster defines autonomy as a

“diacritical term [that] like any other, [is] defined in relation to its opposite, that is [in

this case], to subjection.”50 The art object is defined by its autonomy in relation to

“media culture.” Thus, for Foster autonomy is especially urgent right now, in that it

distinguishes art from the distractive conditions produced by “our media/web world:”

“And this concern has led me to rethink my own take on some art after Minimalism –

49
“Nous faisons, les corps sur les écrans et moi, une expérience commune et simultanée d'immersion
et de perdition dans des univers menaçants et inconfortables: moi en pénétrant dans cette salle obscure,
eux en étant plongés en "eaux troubles". Ces corps immergés, immobiles, stagnants et tournoyants
lentement sur eux-mêmes au gré des courants d'eau, semblent en apesanteur , comme livrés à la
volonté toute-puissante de l'eau, agonisants dans son sein, peut-être même déjà morts comme ces
animaux que l'on conserve dans du formol. Les vacillements de la trame vidéo renforce cette
impression d'agonie et de calme pesant: ils font trembler leurs doigts un peu comme ceux d'un pendu
avant le trépas ou comme les frétillements désespérés d'un poisson sorti de son élément. Les sons
ralentis accentuent l'effet morbide de l'installation: souffles, frémissements, clapotis, faibles et
continus, à peine modulés.” My translation. Philippe Bessière, “BILL VIOLA, Stations 1994”
http://www.lensemblevide.com/viola.htm (accessed June 10, 2008).
50
Hal Foster, Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002): 102.
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to think about how it might participate, knowingly or not, in this distractive

condition.”51 Foster dismissed immersive spaces—a state he considers to be the next

step down from immersion—such as Viola’s projected video environment as “faux-

phenomenological” works that “want to overwhelm bodies and space, to produce a

kind of techno-sublime. Today this seems to be the desired effect of much art,” he

continued, “And people love it, of course, in large part because it aestheticizes, or

rather artifies, an ‘experience’ already familiar to them….”52 Foster rejects these

“faux-phenomenological” works in part because their success lies in the repetition of

an experience already familiar to people through “the intensities produced by media

culture at large.” Television in and outside the home, video games, the internet and its

ubiquitous influence on everyday life have been added to the virtual sites described

by Moholy-Nagy—billboards, news tickers, a fairground midway as well as

Hollywood movies. Foster argues instead for a dialectical relationship between art

(autonomy) and media (immersion). “For the most part, such art is happily involved

with an image space that goes beyond the distractive to the immersive.”

While Foster refers to the expanded field of media and the expanded field of

art in his 2004 interview, art critics, historians and artists from the left blame the

introduction of “cinema” into the gallery for a broader shift away from a politically

and ideologically progressive past. The underlying logic for this backlash is grounded

in the dialectic of autonomy versus immersion laid out by Foster in the interview, and

51
Hal Foster and Marquard Smith: “Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space,”
Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2004): 326.
52
Foster and Smith, 327.
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the political promise autonomy holds out for so many critics. Cinema as well as

television emerges as a bad other throughout this discourse. It is used as the foil in the

backlash I summarized in chapter Three from conservative art critics such as Peter

Schjeldahl.53 Similarly, Roberta Smith observed a disparaging joke circulating at the

time of the 2002 Whitney Biennial that it be renamed the “Whitney Biennial Film

Festival.” Ann M. Wagner used television as the bad other of video when she quoted

Gary Hall’s reference to video as the “non-site of t.v.” As the “broken piece” of this

“absent whole,” Wagner argues that pleasure and entertainment produced by

contemporary projected video environments spells the death of its critical

dimension.54 The separation of the viewer’s experience from her or his body is one of

the two main arguments that surfaces. Earlier environments were seen to offer the

audience member a degree of interactivity, “even if the interaction afforded is the

arguably passive one of inserting one’s body within a media.”55 For David Joselit

wall projections in the 1990s result in a move away from video’s radical potential as a

medium and toward mere entertainment when it “reintroduces a more conventionally

theatrical mode of spectatorship in which the audience remains outside the media

feedback loop rather than participating as actors within it.”56 He collapses the concern

over the absent body with the introduction of mass media into the art context when

asserting that “The major consequence of projection’s shift in spectatorship lies in its

weaker acknowledgement that the video apparatus (including its commercial

53
See pages 175–182.
54
Ann M. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000):
80.
55
David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” Artforum 42, no. 7 (March 2004): 154.
56
Ibid., 154.
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manifestation as television) is a machine for reproducing social relations.”57 As Karen

Beckman writes, “Haunting these statements, of course, is the specter of the art

museum as cinema, a symptom of the growing fear that in the age of advanced

capitalism, art galleries will offer only entertainment, helping to foreclose the

possibility of nonconsumptive modes of looking.”58 The introduction of video into the

museum, Beckmann points out, is seen as a symptom of a broader shift away from a

reformist critique and toward the amnesia of pleasure.59 And as Katie Mondloch

argues, “Indeed, many critics have pointed to a ‘filmic turn’ in recent artistic

production, some going so far as to portray this as a crisis for art criticism and

history.”60 These views referred to by Beckman and Mondloch on the regressive

relationship between audience and projected video environments underpin a

roundtable on image and sound installation that was published in the spring 2003

issue of October. Chrissie Iles (a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art)

blames the failure to include space on contemporary projected video environments’

postmodern conceptual structure.61 For Foster and McCall, the ramifications of the

move from modern to postmodern spill over into broader political consequences.

Foster argues that these consequences are rooted in the new projected video

environments’ relationship to virtuality:

57
Ibid., 156.
58
Karen Beckman, “When Video Does Foster Care: Pepón Osorio’s Trials and Turbulence,” Grey
Room 19 (Spring 2005): 82.
59
Ibid., 81.
60
Katie Mondloch, “Be Here (and There) Now: The Spatial Dynamics of Screen-Reliant Installation
Art,” Art Journal 66 no. 3 (Fall 2007): 21.
61
Chrissie Iles, in George Baker, et al., “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art”,
October 104 (Spring 2003): 75.
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When you say that film now is related to painting, I wouldn’t say painting so
much as “pictorialism.” There’s a rampant pictorialism, which is also a
rampant virtualism, that the sculptural and spatial interests of your generation,
Anthony [McCall] wanted to challenge, or at least to probe. The pictorialism
of projected images today often doesn’t seem to care much about the actual
space. Sometimes it doesn’t matter when you walk in, or even whether you
do. This is beyond embodiment. It’s habituating us to a kind of post-
subjectivity.62

By “post-subjectivity,” Foster could also be referring to Jean Baudrillard’s

“simulation,” where “the real” is created through conceptual models that have no

connection or origin in actual reality. Images (simulations) and signs (simulacra)

become the determinants driving perceptions of the real.63 Boundaries between the

simulacra and reality implode, creating a world of “hyperreality” where distinctions

between real and unreal are blurred. The culture industry blurs the lines between facts

and information, between information and entertainment, between entertainment and

politics. Because simulations and simulacra ultimately have no referents, a process of

cultural entropy leads to the collapse of all boundaries between meaning, the media,

and the social, resulting in no distinction between classes, political parties, cultural

forms, the media, and the real.64 Simulation and simulacra become the real,

producing an undifferentiated flow of images and signs. In other words, for Foster,

when ‘pictorialist’ video projections sever the relationship between the moving

image, space and the body then it joins the postmodern flux, and prevents the subject

62
Hal Foster, in George Baker et al.: 75.
63
See Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila
Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 1–42.
64
See Jean Baudrillard, “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans.
Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006) 79–86.
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from potentially rejoining, or reconnecting with a meaningful political experience

through his or her body.

For George Baker, the engagement with pictorialism by contemporary

artists—or as he puts it, virtualization— also describes a split between the

phenomenological and the virtual: “some artists engaging with virtualization make it

so excessive that we in fact enter into a new dynamic.”65 However, Baker’s

perspective on these new works is not as unilaterally hostile as McCall’s or Foster’s.

In the roundtable, he describes a renewed attempt to engage with the utopian

possibilities inherent to the form of projected video environments, just as artists from

the previous generation set out to activate the body as an agent through the tools of

mass media, or television and cinema:

But I think that this engagement with virtualization can also be a utopian
condition for contemporary artists, as opposed to the utopias of the previous
generation around phenomenology. Artists from the French context…are
thinking of fictionalized scenarios, or virtualized scenarios, as a reengagement
with utopia—with reconstructing social relations, imagining difference,
constructing impossible scenarios—and are not dealing with physical
limitations at all. Virtualization here is a potential source of utopian ambitions
that one wants to reconnect to now in the wake of postmodernism, in a
sense.66

For Baker, artists like Pierre Huyghe or Stan Douglas deal not so much with a

“critique of representation,” as with “a very concerted project to bring [fictional or

mass-cultural] constructs into the realm of the real, to bring fiction into reality as a

65
See chapter 3 for Baker’s response to one such installation, Dougas Gordon’s Through a Looking
Glass (1999).
66
Baker et al, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October 104 (Spring 2003):
77.
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utopian model.”67 Just as the avant-garde saw portable video as an opportunity to

invade mass media and remake network television, Baker sees a resurgence of utopia

in projected video environments that depends on mass media as the bad other, whose

tools can be turned against it. For Foster, any attempt to theorize utopia using

projected video environments is short-circuited by the impossibility of operating

outside of mass media and its controlling conglomerates. For Baker, the downside to

this most recent utopian formulation is the uncertainty regarding its ultimate outcome,

or “product:” does it form a break, or a perceptible difference from mass media

spaces, or can it simply be another event that remains submerged in late capitalism?68

These positions have not gone unchallenged. In his interview with Smith,

Foster recounted a question on immersion from an audience member at a talk he

gave.

Essentially I agree with you: this expanded field of art has hooked up with an
expanded field of media, but to pull back from it as you do under the cover of
terms like ‘culture industry’ and ‘spectacle’ isn’t satisfactory anymore; that
response’s too easy, its judgment too automatic. Can’t you think of other ways
to consider this mediated illusion, this immersive experience, if indeed, as you
suggest, it is a principal experience that the culture gives us today?69

Foster worked through his reply in the interview with Smith.

That question…has stuck with me, and I’m working on a response now….Is
there another side to this culture of immersive experience? Might there be a
cultural politics that doesn’t leave it to our masters to control every aspect of
these terms? Of course this immersion is much more total in its effects than
distraction faced by Benjamin and Kracauer, and both terms seem completely
other to critical consciousness, and so we often fall back on the model of the

67
Ibid., 78.
68
A similar uncertainty lead critics to either dismiss or ignore Paul Pfeiffer’s Orpheus Descending
(2001). See chapter 2.
69
Foster and Smith: 327.
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autonomous subject as a crutch. But there are other ways to address the
problem.70

Challenged to think beyond the dialectic of autonomy and immersion, Foster

proposes a “good” immersive experience, a passage through Richard Serra’s Torqued

Ellipses that is based, in the end, on critical awareness, itself a measure of autonomy:

“With Serra you’re made reflexive in your immersion; you’re not virtually obliterated

by the experience.” Returning to the “bad” immersive experiences, he refines its

characteristics as follows:

With the world of [James] Turrell and Viola…you’re somehow lost in relation
to your body, and you stumble not only into the work but through it as well.
It’s an effect, beyond distraction, of disorientation, of being lost in space.

Foster’s argument against immersion, in the final analysis, is grounded in the same

paradigm as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s abhorrence of mimesis, which

they describe as a “…trend which is deep-rooted in living beings, and whose

elimination is a sign of all development: the trend to lose oneself in the environment

instead of playing an active role in it; the tendency to let oneself go and sink back into

nature.”71 Rather than continuing to struggle within the terms originally put forward

by Minimalist artists and Structuralist filmmakers, I want to propose another way to,

in the words of Foster’s questioner, “consider this mediated illusion, this immersive

experience.” As Beckman observed in her essay on the video installation of Pepón

Osorio:

…we need to find ways of critiquing those works that seem to sustain or
encourage passive and uncritical spectatorship without reductively invoking
70
Foster and Smith: 328.
71
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Translated by John
Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1997), 227.
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narrative cinema and its usual exhibition modes as a negative foil against
which all “progressive” noncommercial film and video practices can be
measured. Such binary oppositions of the reception of cinema and video
art…prevent us from inventing and recognizing the alternative possibilities of
commercial culture.72

Indeed.

4.4 Sense as Carnal Matter, Sense as Conscious Meaning

As I observed at the beginning of this chapter, both the virtual and the

phenomenological were central to the reception of Nauman’s installation, as its

audience members mapped both Nauman’s studio and the museum. Furthermore,

when they were dancing, surveilling, or sliding through the space, I contend that they

collapsed the phenomenological and the virtual. Other responses to contemporary

projected video environments focus on the way in which they integrate the body with

the traditional cinematic apparatus. Boris Groys observed that video installations

introduced night into the museum.73 The curator Lynne Cooke argued that the black

box freed the spectator from the restraints of traditional cinema when it required the

spectator to determine his or her own vantage points, requiring a consciousness that

would prevent he or she from becoming “totally immersed, incarnate viewers” that

passively experience cinema. In a catalog essay Iles calls cinema a cocoon in which

individual bodies are fixed, hypnotized by simulations of reality, a model that is

broken with the introduction of projected video environments into the museum. The

separation of the body from the environment or its integration therein is consistently

72
Beckman, 83.
73
See chapter 3.
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seen to be pivotal to the political or ideological value of the installation. In defense of

moviegoing, Mark Nash proposed that rather than equating watching a movie with

passivity, and entering a projected video environment with activity, that we look at

going to the movies in Puerto Rico, Lagos or Mumbai, which produces a very

different, call-and-response approach to spectatorship.74 While these responses carry

forward the idea of the movement of the body through space theorized by Morris and

McCall, they also understand the virtual to be key to the formation of the experience.

When offered the possibility of moving around in the dark in the presence of

multiple projected moving images, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance, John Cage)’s

viewers mimicked what took place on screen. Given that the critical model proposed

by the inheritors of Minimalism and Structuralist film falls short in their anaysis of

the immersive experience of projected video environments, I want to propose two

alternate models that will address the connections between virtual and

phenomenological, and will address the sense of strangeness and inability to detach

that was abhorred by Foster, Adorno and Horkheimer. In his essay “Mimicry and

Legendary Psychasthenia,” Roger Caillois considers the phenomenon of darkness and

the effect that this has on the subject’s relationship to space. In the dark, a place

becomes doubly strange: both unknown and obscured. Rather than simply an absence

of light, Caillois argues that the dark takes on “something positive” that

depersonalizes the subject through his or her assimilation to space. This in contrast to

a well-lit environment, where space as a “positive entity” is eliminated by “the

74
See chapter 3.
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materiality of objects…” Darkness, on the other hand, is “‘filled,’ it touches the

individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him: hence

the ego is permeable for darkness while it is not so for light.”75 For Caillois, the

psychological state arrived at through the dark’s breakdown of the distinction

between the subject and the space surrounding him or her produces a psychological

weakening, mirroring the absence of clarity between figure and ground. For example

if, while walking down a country road in absolute darkness I put my hand in front of

my face, I have no idea where my hand is in relation to my face. Furthermore, I can’t

see the foot that I put down in front of me. The absence of light produces a degree of

uncertainty as to where “I” leave off and “space” or “object” begins. I know neither

“where” my foot or my hand is, nor “where” the road, or a bordering tree, or a rock

looming up as a potential obstacle are. This breakdown of the distinction between

self, space and other creates a vertiginous sense of uncertainty. Given that the

projected image sheds enough light that—while erratic—is usually adequate to orient

the incoming viewer in the “black box” of the movie theatre or the projected video

installation, the visitor is usually not forced to move through absolute darkness.

Nevertheless the absence of light relative to the passage from the preceding space into

the theatre or the projected video installation’s interior gives rise to a distinct

receptivity to the work. This relationship between space, object and the subject’s

body is quite different from the one theorized by Foster and McCall.

75
Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (Winter 1984): 28–29.
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For Caillois, the porosity of the borders between subject and space in the dark

parallels what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species through

their use of camouflage. He argues against the assumption that mimicry be considered

an adaptive behavior. Rather, mimicry as camouflage is “dangerous excess” when it

increases the threats an animal faces from its environment. On the basis of these

increased threats, which he supports by citing two studies demonstrating birds’ failure

to discriminate between insect and vegetable life based on coloration, Caillois denies

the utility of camouflage. It is this failure of utility that leads him to postulate a

psychical explanation for the development of camouflage. The psychical condition

experienced by the insect, or “legendary psychasthenia,” is dangerous when it leaves

the insect captivated by its environment.

If mimicry cannot be considered defensive then it must affect the insect’s

psychical relation to space.

In short, from the moment when it can no longer be a process of defense,

mimicry can be nothing else but this. Besides, there can be no doubt that the
perception of space is a complex phenomenon: space is indissolubly perceived
and represented. From this standpoint, it is a double dihedral changing at
every moment in size and position: a dihedral of action whose horizontal
plane is formed by the ground and the vertical plane by the man himself who
walks and who, by this fact, carries the dihedral along with him; and a
dihedral of representation determined by the same horizontal plane as the
previous one (but represented and not perceived) intersected vertically at the
distance where the object appears.76

Camouflage disrupts the insect’s ability to locate itself in space, preventing it from

situating itself at the place where it is, as it is no longer distinguishable from that

place. “It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living

76
Caillois, 28.
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creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among

others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place

itself.” For Caillois, the presence of represented space has a deleterious effect. When

the confusion between represented space and the organism’s sense of its place arises,

…the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary
of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses…He feels himself
becoming space…He is similar, not similar to something, but just
similar…All these expressions shed light on a single process:
depersonalization by assimilation to space.77

The breakdown of the subject’s sense of self-awareness interrupts its capacity for

distancing, thus rational thought. “All these expressions shed light on a single

process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves

morphologically in certain animal species.” He links this decline to mimicry’s one-

way reversion to an ‘earlier’ state of life: in mimicry “life takes a step backwards,”

toward death.78 This explains the sensations of sickness, loss of awareness, and death

described by Eberhard, Foster and Bessière.

Thus, mimesis is not simply an imitation, but a drawing near and yielding to

its object of mimicry. Here the yielding inherent to mimesis is presented as a passive

function that leads inexorably to a state approaching death: the self loses itself and

sinks, and by sinking begins to break down, or to decompose like so much rotting

organic matter back into the surrounding world. This reversion is also used to explain

the catatonic postures often involved in mimicry; in these cases, the animal ‘reverts’

to death, acting out its death drive. This yielding is both an act of imitation and

77
Ibid., 28–29.
78
Ibid., 30.
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contact. In his 1905 discussion of the comic, Freud put forward the idea of

“ideational mimetics,” in which the physical imitation of another dominates: “in

‘trying to understand’, therefore, in apperceiving this movement, I make a certain

expenditure, and in this portion of the mental process I behave exactly as though I

were putting myself in the place of the person I am observing.”79

Be they drifting through a haze of inattention or at full alert, vigilant for the

slightest movement, through mimicry visitors to Dia: Chelsea became involved in

Nauman’s work in such a way that breached the distance between the self and the

surrounding space(s), conceivably turning a there, that is to say Nauman’s studio, into

a here, or the museum in New York City. These spatial and temporal conditions

created a web where here and there bleed into each other, resulting in a response that

directly contradicts the split between physical movement and the reception of the

moving image argued for by McCall and Foster. It also produces the opposite effect

than the one desired by Graham, where the self was split by his installation into

subject and object. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote that the elimination of mimesis is

the “sign of all development.” Mimicry is both the condition and the action that links

visitors to projected video environments such as Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance,

John Cage) and Stations. The entropy implicit in mimicry’s yielding resembles the

“narcotic haze” observed in the audience of Nauman’s work by Kimmelman and

Richards in their reviews in the New York Times and Artforum.

79
Sigmund Freud and James Strachey. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York:
Norton, 1989), 240.
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While historically classified as a modernist, with Mapping the Studio I (Fat

Chance, John Cage) Nauman also produces an indirect rebuttal to the polarities

between phenomenology and virtuality established by the critics of projected video

environments, one which is repeated in environments such as Viola’s, as well as the

panoramas from the nineteenth century, the streetscapes of the twentieth, and virtual

works produced by artists working in kinetics, and Op art from the first half of the

twentieth century. In other words, not only does the current response to immersion

cut itself off from mass media through its dialectic of autonomy and immersion—and

as I have argued in previous chapters this greatly reduces and minimizes the critical

field—it also cuts itself off from art history.

As Vivian Sobchack also points out, the relationship between the audience’s

body and the movies they go to is not quite as incommensurate as these theorists,

artists and curators would have us understand it to be. We “matter and mean,” she

writes, “through processes and logics of sense-making that owe as much to our carnal

existence as they do to our conscious thought.”80 She argues, rather, for a moviegoing

experience that is absorbed through all our senses on a regular basis, not just

exceptionally.

Richard Dyer hints at the spectator’s direct, bodily experience when invoking

the apocryphal account of the theatrical audience recoiling in terror from the movie of

an onrushing train filmed by the Lumière Bros. Summing this up as the quintessential

movie experience for many, Dyer describes it as the “celebration of sensational

80
Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh.,”
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/5/fingers.html (accessed December 10, 2008).
 Confusions of Nearness: 275
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

movement, that we respond to in some still unclear sense ‘as if real’…”81With the

phrase “in some still unclear sense,” for Sobchack, Dyer confesses himself to be at a

loss to explain its (the audience’s response) very existence. For Sobchack, what

makes a physical reception of cinema’s visual (and aural) representations possible is

not only expressed by Dyer as a continuing mystery, but it is further destabilized by

his phrase “as if real,” in this way “…further plunging the reader into a mise en abîme

of experiential undecidability.”82 When Sobchack plumbs the depths of this mise en

abyme, what emerges is an accounting of a multisensory experience of film that

involves both the phenomenological and the virtual facets also found in the response

to projected video environments. Rather than an absence of a multi-sensorial

experience on the part of the spectator, Sobchack suggests, film theorists have refused

to theorize bodies whose wanton and crude actions at the movies—screams, sweaty

palms, bulging, damp or wet crotches, tears, clenched fists, accelerated heart-rates—

involuntarily counter “the fine-grained sensibilities and intellectual discriminations”

of these theorist’s critical reflections.83

The interaction between the on-screen action and the moviegoer’s body is a

“circuit of sensory vibrations that links viewer to screen,” or a somersault84 This

“somersault” describes the ambivalence between the “as if real” location onscreen

and “real” location in which the viewer’s body that is embedded in “a

phenomenological structure grounded in the…reciprocity…of sense as, at once, a

81
Richard Dyer, “Action!” Sight and Sound 4, no. 10 (October 1994): 7–10.
82
Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh.”
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/5/fingers.html (December 10, 2003).
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid.
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carnal matter and a conscious meaning…” Sobchack begins with her own multi-

sensory experience of watching the movies, as well as descriptions from the popular

press that are filled with tactile, olfactory and gustatory references to mainstream

films. Describing a scene from The Piano (1994) in which Baines (the protagonist’s

lover, played by Harvey Keitel) reaches out and touches Ada’s (played by Holly

Hunter) flesh through a hole in her black woolen stocking, Sobchack writes that she

felt:

…an ‘immediate tactile shock when flesh first touches flesh in close-up.’ Yet
precisely whose flesh I felt is ambiguous...At that moment when Baines
touches Ada’s skin through her stocking, suddenly my skin is both mine and
not my own: the ‘immediate tactile shock’ opens me to the general erotic
mattering of flesh…Thus, even confronted with an "objective" shot, my
fingers know and understand the meanings of this "seen" and this viewing
situation and they are everywhere—not only in the touching, but also in the
touched.85

Pivotal to this experience is Sobchack’s uncertainty over whose flesh was being

touched—hers, or the onscreen character’s. The line being subject and object,

touching or being touched, blurred to the point where it lost both meaning and

distinction.

Sobchack insists that she is not speaking metaphorically of touching and being

touched. Rather, the sensory experience of touching and being touched that she

experienced through The Piano is a consequence of the non-exclusivity of on-screen

and off-screen locations for the “cinesthetic subject.” This commensurability and

incommensurability, for Sobchack, is both made possible and finds its counterpart in

language:

85
Ibid.
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…just as the lived body in the film experience turns back reflexively on itself
to sense and make sense of the flesh on the screen…so, too, do our linguistic
descriptions of that experience turn back on themselves reflexively to convey
the sense of that experience as literally physicalized…

Language that makes sense of the movie going experience through the use of

multisensory descriptions abound. Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994) is described as

“Viscerally…a breath-taking trip,” or “This white knuckle, edge-of-your-seat action

opus is the real thing. A reviewer of John Lasseter’s Toy Story (1995) wrote that “A

Tyrannosaur rex doll is so glossy and tactile you feel you could reach out and stroke

its hard, shiny head.”86 This structure of sense-making “is experienced as both real

and ‘as if’ real.”

Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sobchack describes the circulation of

“sense” (using both definitions of the word) between the body and representation as a

“relationship of commensurability and incommensurability that, in certain

circumstances, manifests itself as an oscillating, ambivalent, and often ambiguous or

‘undecideable’ experience.” In this way, the self as the body is both merged with and

kept distinct from representations of elsewhere. Working from Paul Ricoeur’s

discussion of literal and metaphorical meaning in Wittgenstein’s distinction between

“seeing” and “seeing as,”—itself constructed as both the slippage from one to the

other and the maintenance of the boundary between direct sensory experience and

metaphors—Sobchack writes that:

…in the act of “making sense” of the movies, catachresis is to language as the
chiasmus is to the lived body. Ambivalently subtending fusion and
catachresis not only points to the “gap” between the figures of language and

86
Both quoted in Sobchack.
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literal lived-body experience but also reversibly, chiasmatically, “bridges” and

“fills” it. As Ricoeur suggests…catachresis ‘designates the non-verbal
mediation of the metaphorical statement.’ 87

Or to paraphrase Wittgenstein’s formulation, with the acknowledgment of the non-

verbal mediation of the metaphor, which the prior experiences of vision, taste,

hearing or smell are used by the subject to create its meaning. With this, semantics

finds its limit and a phenomenology of imagination takes over. Most importantly,

through this Sobchack bridges the schism “between the sensuous on the screen as the

semantic property of cinematic objects and the semiotic effects of cinematic

representation, or off the screen in the spectator’s fantasmatic psychic formation, and

basic sensory reflexes.”88 The virtual is never divided from the phenomenological.

4.6 Irit Batsry: Set (2003)

My final example of a projected video environment, Irit Batsry’s Set, is made up of a

complex interplay of all the elements referred to in this chapter: the opposition

between the virtual and the actual, the centrality of the audience’s physical

participation, the fragmentation (in this case) of the cinematic apparatus, and an

identification and merging with onscreen characters that is aided and abetted by the

environment.

Using seven videos in both black and white and color, Batsry’s installation

consisted of documentary footage of the making of a feature film Madame Satã

(directed by Karim Ainouz, starring Lázaro Ramos as Madame Satã/Joao Francisco

87
Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh.”
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/5/fingers.html (accessed December 10, 2003).
88
Ibid.
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dos Santos). The installation’s configuration intercuts the audience into the actors and

the crew, situating it somewhere between the fiction of cinematic space and the

reality behind its construction. Batsry exhibited behind-the-scenes-footage as three

sets of diptychs within in the installation space. Make: Measure 1 and Make: Measure

2 show the actor Lázaro Ramos being made up for his role as Madame Satã, and

having his distance from the camera measured for a shot. The second diptych

juxtaposed Setup, or a video projection that shows scenes of technical aspects of

filmmaking, such as blocking, lighting, and shooting, with Light, depicting effects of

light and shadow. Reflect, the third dyptich, consisted of imagery from the video

monitor used by the director, actors, and crew to review the day’s work. On the south

side of the Museum’s bridge a final video, Make: Measure was shown

The videotapes documented the set of the film, Madame Satã. The feature

film Madame Satã doesn’t set out to provide an accurate biography of the historical

Francisco, who in 1900 was born to slaves in North Brazil and sold by his mother at

seven. Rather, it narrates his story through a series of romanticized vignettes that

come together to form a type, rather than a nuanced portrait. It is 1932; we are in the

impoverished bohemian neighborhood of Lapa in Rio de Janeiro; a motley underclass

made up of pimps and prostitutes, thieves and misfits calls this slum their home. In

this setting, a former slave, a black, homosexual criminal chooses to reinvent himself

anew, with a persona pulled together from the gauze of a sequin-encrusted

Hollywood dream: Francesco’s stage name, Madame Satã, payed homage to Cecil B.

DeMille’s 1930 film Madame Satan. His stage alter-egos, The Negress of the
 Confusions of Nearness: 280
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

Bulacoché, Jamacy the Queen of the Forest and St. Rita of the Coconut Tree, could

have peopled a Jack Smith fever dream. The sequins and the gauze do not blunt, but

rather frame and highlight his furious machismo. “I’m a queen by choice,” he retorts

to a drunken homophobic heckler after bringing the house down with an over-the-top

performance: “It doesn’t make me less of a man.”

Not only did Batsry’s video of Set bring the viewer into an ambiguous space

located between the fiction of the cinema and the actuality of its creation, but the

various components of its display dispersed throughout also reinforced this

ambiguous space. Each diptych loop was shown in both small- and large-scale

versions, producing a dialogue between the monumentality and immateriality of the

projected image, and the intimacy of the television set. The multiple projectors in the

installation were customized with image maskers and Plexiglas, and projected their

images both onto a small board leaning against the wall and across the gallery,

creating cones of light that sliced through the darkness. In this way the gallery and

the audience formed additional strata in an already densely layered work that cross-

cut between the “fact” and “fiction” of the production and reception of images: the

facts of the Brazilian transvestite’s life, the fiction that lies in its being made into a

film, the fact of Batsry’s footage that documented the behind-the-scenes process of

making the film, and finally the material fact of the audiences’ bodies intersecting the

streams of light that in turn cut across the darkness of the room, like McCall’s Line

Describing a Cone. Set’s use of space through the intersection of projection and

viewer describes a conscription of the “real” gallery space into the play between fact
 Confusions of Nearness: 281
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

and fiction, virtuality and phenomenology. Given the fragmentation of the film’s

narrative, apparatus and constituent components (projected light), when the visitor

moved through the space, they too became a determinative element in the installation.

The individual audience members’ point of view drove the narrative, creating a

kaleidoscopic effect that formed and reformed around them.

4.6 Virtual Reality

While the phenomenal and the virtual are at work in both, one important factor

differentiates Nauman’s and Batsry’s work in particular, and projected video

environments in general from popular film shown in the movie theatre: the integral

nature of audience movement to the work’s completion. The experience of the work

is produced through the visitors’ direct, physical engagement with it through mimicry

of Nauman’s onscreen cat and mouse game, or by moving around Batsry’s exploded

cinematic apparatus. In these contexts, the multi-sensory structure described by

Sobchack is turned inside out, or externalized onto the physical and social structure of

the projected image installation environment. In the “black box” of the video

installation the carnal and conscious response described by both Sobchack and the

popular press is performed or acted out by an audience otherwise required to sit in

rows of fixed chairs. However, I am not interested in this movement for the reasons I

summarized earlier—the way in which it distinguishes itself from “virtuality”—but

rather for the way in which it moves Sobchack’s somersault into “virtual reality.”

While there is no textual evidence that Nauman relies on the tropes of virtual reality
 Confusions of Nearness: 282
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

in Mapping the Studio I, or Batsry in Set, as their actions suggest, the visitors

certainly do.

Oliver Grau identifies the following characteristics of computer-based virtual

reality: a sense of control over the perameters of time and space, instantaneous access

to other “spaces and communication worldwide via data networks, together…opens

up a range of new options…where it is often impossible to distinguish between

original and simulacrum.”89 This creates the impression of a “living” environment

whose agency both extends beyond the visitors and is under their control. The

emergence of “virtual reality” dates back to Morton Heilig. A cinematographer active

in the 1950s, he was inspired by short-lived curiosities such as Cinerama and 3D

movies. Heilig wanted to create an experience for the spectator that would immerse

them into an image as opposed to placing them in front of it, as well as incorporating

all the senses, not just sight and hearing. A rollercoaster ride shown using Cinerama,

he observed, would give the participant “the feeling that you were actually there, with

the feeling of vertigo and other sensations. I immediately understood that this was a

qualitative difference in the film experience. You were no longer apart from the film.

Because of the size of the screen you were suddenly part of the experience.”90 By

expanding cinema to involve not only sight and sound, but also taste, touch, and

smell, he envisioned the dissolution of the traditional fourth wall of film and theater,

transporting the audience into an inhabitable, virtual world.91 He called this cinema of

89
Grau, 7.
90
Quoted in Francis Hamit, Virtual Reality and the Exploration of Cyberspace (Carmel, Ind.: Sams
Publications, 1993), 54–55.
91
The parallels to Gene Youngblood’s expanded cinema are striking.
 Confusions of Nearness: 283
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

the future “experience theater.” In the late 1950s he developed a nickelodeon-style

arcade machine, the Sensorama, which ushered participants into multi-sensory

adventures in surrogate travel.92 Heilig’s Experience Theater was a version of the

Sensorama Simulator intended for a larger audience. Patented in 1969, its large, semi-

spherical screen makes it possible to show three-dimensional motion pictures.

Peripheral still images, directional sound, smells, forced air, temperature fluctuations

and a body-tilting seat set out to provide the audience with a full-body immersion into

the story’s illusion, or virtual reality. Scott Fisher, a developer of NASA’s Ames

Virtual Environment Workstation built on Heilig’s vision, developing technologies

that later resulted in the kind of helmeted user of virtual reality first envisioned by

Heilig, and since then made iconic in examples from popular culture such as the 1982

Disney science fiction film starring Jeff Bridges, Tron.93

From virtual reality’s inception, the presence, absence or role of the body has

been central to discussions about it in scholarship as well as the popular press. A New

York Times review of Wii, an exercise program and a video game described it as

upending the notion of what video games could be by moving beyond “the sunlight-

deprived young men at gaming’s core.” A user described it as “like playing Nintendo,

92
Worth noting is that the dioramas in the nineteenth century were popular for precisely this function.
93
Bridge’s character’s (Kevin Flynn) video game ideas are stolen by his ambitious and unscrupulous
coworker Ed Dillinger (David Warner). With help from his friends, Flynn tries to hack into the Master
Control Program (MCP) to prove Dillinger’s guilt. The MCP is an artificial intelligence that started out
as Dillinger's chess program, and later develops ambitions to take over the company and then the
Pentagon computer systems. Flynn is kidnapped into the digital world by the MCP, a feat made
possible by experimental lasers that can digitize objects, causing them to reform inside the computer as
software programs, before reappearing into the material world, intact. Inside the computer, Flynn and a
number of other Programs are forced to compete in gladiator-style games that will result in their
eventual elimination, and real world demise. Flynn joins forces with Tron, an honest safety program, to
outmaneuver the MCP.After many plot twists and turns, the MCP is defeated, Flynn is sent back to the
real world, with his reputation restored.
 Confusions of Nearness: 284
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but with your body.”94 The new media scholar Daniel Palmer writes that virtual

reality also suggests a form of simulation that often involves multiple senses, or parts

of the body.95 Again, the emphasis is placed on either the separation from or merging

between the body and electronic technology. Virtuality is conceived not in opposition

to the real (a state which, in turn, is grounded in bodily experiences of the world), but

as a potential that may be realized as many different actualities. Mark Hansen argues

that cyberspace is anchored in the body, and the body—not high-tech computer

graphics—makes it possible for a person to feel like he or she is really “moving”

through virtual reality. Reciprocally, virtual experiences are seen to profoundly affect

our understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings.96

This understanding of embodiment through virtual realities is reframed

through the visceral responses of gamers playing computer games. Diane Carr’s

reading of the game player’s body parallels the audience responses inside projected

video environments that I and others have identified. Carr notes the intense

correlation between the game player’s body and manipulated computer

representation, observing that game players often respond by “flinching when their

avatar bangs their head…[leaned] over with pseudo-centrifugal forces, or felt their

94
Seth Schiesel, “Fitness for Every Body: O.K., Avatar, Work With Me,” The New York Times, May
15, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/15/fashion/15fitness.html?scp=1&sq=fitness+for+every+body&st=n
yt (accessed May 20, 2008).
95
Daniel Palmer, “Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global
Culture,” Transformations no. 15 (November 2007),
http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_15/article_11.shtml (accessed January 14, 2008).
96
Mark B.N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2006), x.
 Confusions of Nearness: 285
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stomach lurch when their avatar plunges over a cliff.”97 An avatar is a computer

user’s representation of him or herself, or an object representing the embodiment of

the user. The term avatar can also refer to the personality connected with the screen

name of a user.

Given the role performed by avatars it is arguable that any uncanny resonance
potentially generated while we watch a body move on film is amplified when,
as players, we operate and navigate avatars. We use avatars as embodiments
or vehicles, as our agents in the gameworld. The player hits a button; the
avatar jumps, somersaults or flicks a switch.98
Carr refers to an essay by Lesley Stern that uses the Freudian concepts of the uncanny

and the double to explore the carnal sensations generated by “bodies in motion on

film, and the instants of recognition they generate.”99 Relationships between the lived

experience and representation are inextricably intertwined in these accounts.

Internet usage, Carr argues, has an even more consequential effect on this

identification than film and other media because of the assumption that the user is

part of the setting, and bodies elsewhere are accessible through the Internet. This

more fluid relationship between the virtual and the actual provides the subject with

the illusion of being present in a simulated world whose elsewhere could either be

electronic, or physical. In an argument that predates Sochack’s recognition and

strangeness that is called forth by the screened image of a body in motion that

somersaults us, in Stern’s words, between the screen and ourselves. A more recent

97
Diane Carr, “Play Dead: Genre and Affect in Silent Hill and Planescape Torment,” Game Studies:
The International Journal of Computer Game Research 3, no. 1 (May 2003),
http://www.gamestudies.org/0301/carr/ (accessed June 5, 2008).
98
Ibid.
99
Lesley Stern, “I Think, Sebastien, Therefore...I Somersault: Film and the Uncanny,” Australian
Humanities Review, November 1997, http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-November-
1997/stern2.html (accessed June 5, 2008).
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form of virtual interaction is massively multiplayer online role-playing games

(MMORPG).100 Players control a character avatar within an online game world that

continues even while an individual player stops playing. In it, players explore

landscapes, overcome obstacles, set out on quests, build skills, and interact with non-

player characters and other players. And most recently, Second Life, an Internet-based

virtual world launched in 2003, broke through the public imagination.101 Unlike

MMORPGs, Second Life is not a game. A downloadable client program developed by

Linden Research Inc. (commonly referred to as Linden Lab), the Second Life Viewer

makes it possible for users (or Residents) to interact with each other through avatars.

Residents can meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group

activities, and create and trade virtual property and services. All of which form part of

a “metaverse,” or a fictional virtual world.102

Some critics take the relationship between the screen and the user’s body even

further. Brenda Laurel defines telepresence as:

…a medium that allows you to take your body with you into some other
environment... you get to take some subset of your senses with you…And that

100
Richard Garriott, the designer of Ultima Online (a massive multiplayer online role-playing game
that put the genre on the map in 1997) is acknowledged to have come up with the term MMORPG.
Ultima Online, http://www.uoherald.com/news/ (accessed June 10, 2008)
101
James Harkin, “Get a (second) life,” Financial Times, November 17, 2006
http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto111720060914365020 (accessed May 11, 2008);
Irene Sege, “Leading a double life,“ The Boston Globe, October 25, 2006
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/10/25/leading_a_double_life/ (accessed May
11, 2008).
102
First described in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, in a metaverse
humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents in a three-dimensional space that uses
the metaphor of the real world. The word metaverse is a compound of the words “meta” and
“universe.”
 Confusions of Nearness: 287
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

environment may be a computer-generated environment, it may be a camera-

originated environment, or it may be a combination of the two.103

In Laurel’s definition, telepresence encompasses two different situations: being

“present” inside a camera- or computer-generated environment (or virtual reality) and

being “present” in a real remote physical location via a live video image. Fisher does

not distinguish between being "present" in a computer-generated or in a real remote

physical location.104 Working from Heilig’s experience theater, Fisher defines

“telepresence” as “a technology which would allow remotely situated operators to

receive enough sensory feedback to feel like they are really at a remote location and

are able to do different kinds of tasks.”105 Through its ability to manipulate physical

reality from a distance in real time using an image, telepresence breaks from the other

examples in that it becomes possible for a subject to control not just a simulation, but

reality from a distance. For example, a space station can be repaired, underwater

excavation can be carried out, and surgery can performed from a distance. Lev

Manovich reinforces this distinction by characterizing telepresence as “teleaction:”

“the essence of telepresence is that it is anti-presence. I don’t have to be physically

103
Quoted in Rebecca Coyle, “The Genesis of Virtual Reality,” in Future Visions: New Technologies
of the Screen, eds. Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 162.
104
In the late 1980s Scott Fisher’s research into virtual reality, or the Virtual Environment Workstation
(VIEW) project was carried out at the NASA-Ames Research Center in California. Adapting surround-
sound headphones, a speech recognition microphone, and the “dataglove”—a wired glove worn by the
user that makes it possible to grasp virtual objects in computer space—Fisher developed a virtual
interface that produced full sensory immersion.
105
Scott Fisher, “Visual Interface Environments,” in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design,
ed. Brenda Laurel. (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990), 427.
 Confusions of Nearness: 288
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

present in a location to affect reality at this location. A better term would be

teleaction. Acting over distance. In real time.”106

Currently, we are witnessing the transformation of the image into a computer-

generated, virtual, and spatial entity that seemingly is capable of changing
“autonomously” and representing a life-like, visual-sensory sphere. Interactive
media are changing our perception and concept of the image in the direction
of a space for multisensory, interactive experience with a temporal
dimension.107

An analysis of projected video environments would do better to draw on these ideas,

and these assumptions, than to a debate over whether or not the virtual and the

phenomenological are commensurable or incommensurable.

4.7 Conclusion

Once it is established that the virtual and the phenomenological are inextricably

intertwined through sense and sense, as Sobchack points out in her corrective of film

criticism, the split between the phenomenological and the virtual claimed by certain

contingents of art criticism can no longer be argued for. Followers of minimalism

raise the political danger of pictorialism as a mere additive to the society of the

spectacle, resulting in disorientation and media intensification rather than critical

reflection. This dismissal of mass media is something that I have observed in the

multiple configurations of video and site over the course of this dissertation:

broadcast television, expanded television, and now virtual reality. I would argue that

these most recent dismissals continue the heuristic failures made following the earlier

106
Lev Manovich, “To Lie and To Act: Potemkin's Villages, Cinema, and Telepresence,”
http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/telepresence.html (accessed June 5, 2008).
107
Oliver Grau, “Introduction,” in MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2007), 7.
 Confusions of Nearness: 289
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

attempts to enter broadcast television by the avant-garde in the 1970s, and then in the

more recent re-emergence of this dismissal in the spaces of expanded television.

Finally, the response produced by projected video environments that I

identified earlier in this chapter questions art criticism, and the position of the

individual art critic. Foster understands autonomy, or distance, as a constitutive

element of reflection, politics and the experience of art. The experience of virtuality

involves a sensory and emotional process that challenges the tradition of aesthetic

distance, when it collapses the physical and affective distance between the audience

and the work, undermining critical distance. The art itself necessitates a new type of

reflective criticism, which goes beyond the traditional function of legitimation and

judgment and places the body at the indeterminate centre of critical concerns. For

Grau, “in certain seemingly living virtual environments, a fragile, central element of

art comes under threat: the recipient’s act of distancing.”108 By bringing in Caillois,

Sobchack, and pointing toward some of the literature on virtual reality, I argue,

rather, for an analysis of the entropic response to these projected video environments

that moves beyond the dialectic of autonomy and immersion, or distance and

involvement. The term “immersion” tends to refer to work that not only requires the

active involvement of the viewer, but also somehow overwhelms the senses. It is a

spatial experience, in the sense of enveloping the spectator in a discrete and often

panoramic zone. Registering the body’s affects, while dissolving the space of

108
Oliver Grau, “Immersion and Interaction: From Circular Frescoes to Interactive Image Spaces,”
Media Art Net 1: Survey of Media Art. Eds. Rudolf Frieling and Dieter Daniels (New York:
SpringerWien, 2004), 304.
 Confusions of Nearness: 290
The Virtual and the Phenomenological in Projected Video Environments

individual self-possession, enables an exploration of the uncertainty and instability of

all perception and consciousness. In this way, such work blurs the normally clear

distinctions between self and other, viewer and object. These environments offer the

opportunity to restage these everyday experiences, as it is already being experienced

in video gaming, as well as the interactions that take place online.

 291

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