Installation and the Moving Image

Over the past century, the integrity of architecture has been both affirmed and compromised by the ability of projected light to dissolve walls and rupture spatial continuity. At the same time, sculpture, that other engineer of solid matter, has become deeply enmeshed in moving image installation. In its early days, installation might appear to have enjoyed some congruence with Clement Greenberg’s modernist demand for sculpture to ‘avoid dependence upon any order of experience not given in the most essentially construed nature of its medium’.¹ This state of materialist grace was to be achieved, said Greenberg, only by artists categorically ‘renouncing illusion’. Structural filmmakers and video artists in the 1960s and 1970s did indeed launch their own brand of ‘truth to materials’, as we will see in chapter six. They determined to expose the mechanisms of illusionism that sustained realism and narrative modes. However, in spite of their efforts to present the technologies of moving image ‘solely in terms of their separate and irreducible selves’,² even the most abstract of structural films could not reform patterns of light genetically predisposed to masquerade as another reality. In screen reliant installations, the central tenet of modernist sculpture, the invocation ‘to be itself’ could therefore no longer be sustained to the level required by the Greenbergian ethos.

The imperfect adaptation of modernist sculptural precepts by the moving image formed part of the gradual erosion of the category of ‘sculpture’ that had been under way since the 1920s. The Russian Suprematist El Lissitzky created his series of Proun Rooms (1923) in which splintered paintings were straining to escape into the condition of sculpture (or, possibly, sculptures were fragmenting and leaping to the walls for safety) perfectly illustrating Phyllida Barlow’s concept of contemporary sculpture as ‘walls that come away from walls’.3 In the modernist period, the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Beuys exemplified sculpture breaking out of its conventional boundaries and distributing its constituent elements across a gallery space so that the viewer was not so much apprehending a discrete object from a frontal position outside as travelling inside the work itself. Alex Potts has linked the spatial expansion of sculpture to a desire on the part of artists ‘to get away from pure sculpture … to be able to exploit the powerful visual effects of intimate engulfment developed in cinema and certain painting installations’,⁴ an ambition that was realised when objects were combined with the dematerialised medium of film and video. In the 1960s, the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd also challenged the imperial singularity of the handcrafted object by exhibiting multiples of near-identical rectangular boxes in regimented configurations through which the viewer was free to roam. These works no longer proffered an internal argument of meaning created by centripetal formal incidents within its borders, but, as Robert Morris has observed, they became ‘a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision’ and as a result, the sculptural object had become ‘less self-important’.⁵

If a sculpture was an object like any other, by the same token could any object be a sculpture? This question was famously answered by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 submitted a urinal to an open show, renamed it Fountain, signed it ‘R. Mutt’ and convinced the world that it was art.6 If the urinal destroyed (momentarily) the craft base of sculpture and challenged notions of authenticity, it also heralded the eclipse of any expressive component that might reveal the subjectivity of the artist, an evacuation of emotive content that established a prohibition adhered to by the generations of conceptual artists that followed. As Duchamp himself declared, albeit somewhat disingenuously, ‘the choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste’.⁷ Of course, the urinal was carefully chosen for its ability to épater la bourgeoisie, and its successors, in a strictly limited edition authorised by the artist (the original was lost) subsequently became collectable objects of immense value.⁸ However, the principle of the found object, enacting a détournement, a transformation of its original purpose and meaning, was now firmly established in high culture and became the hallmark of the postmodern culture of appropriation, sampling and quotation. The artistry involved was no longer located in the sculptor’s skilful manipulation of materials but was transposed to the strategic public placement of the repurposed artefact, whose original creator was rarely credited. A found object work necessitates a declaration of the artist’s authorship and the communication of his or her conceptual intent, and on the broadcasting of the object’s existence by whatever means at its promoters’ disposal. Andy Warhol’s mantra, so beloved of marketeers, that ‘good business is the best art’ marks the transition of sculpture from an attributable artefact of intrinsic expressive and artistic value to a prop in the promotion of an idea (and its progenitor) in which the object becomes of secondary importance if not entirely incidental to the work as a whole.⁹

Readymades in the expanded field of sculpture, whether singly or in multiples, challenged the autonomy of the unique sculptural object in the early twentieth century. In the counter-cultural ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, an orgy of miscegenation was unleashed in the arts whereby the traditional divisions between painting and sculpture, theatre and film, music and dance began to break down in a general overhaul of established categories and hierarchies. As indicated in my introduction, the avant-garde artists of the 1960s took the discrete artistic conventions with which the world was familiar and recombined them into hybridised happenings, assemblages and environments sprinkled with the fairy dust of chance, spontaneity and audience participation. There is a distinction to be made between works that juxtapose elements of different disciplines in surprising ways that nonetheless maintain, if not reinforce, the distinctions between them and those in which, as filmmaker Michael Snow commented, we witness ‘one medium eating another medium’.¹⁰ In the 1960s, practitioners such as Stan VanDerBeek sought to eradicate the divisions between artistic disciplines – in his case by combining all the currently available ‘experience machines’ into globally-networked media extravaganzas that he called the ‘cultural intercom’. His aim, wrote Mark Bartlett, was to ‘invent and to produce collaboratively communication forms for a new society’.¹¹ The sculptural aspects of the work were subservient to VanDerBeek’s utopian vision of social cohesion based on a common pictorial language.

When art pundits through the ages have proclaimed the death of a medium, the resurrection is never far behind, albeit in a different guise. Handmade or artist-designed sculptural components have regularly reappeared in hybrised, installed works from Mike Kelley’s punk DIY stage sets to the temporary structures made out of anything from breezeblocks to everyday tables and chairs that feature in the performances of Station House Opera. Feminists reintroduced the notion of ‘Home made, I’m afraid’12 in their radical reinvention of craft and recent performance works by Florence Peak include both found objects and sculptural assemblages. To describe any component of these fabrications as ‘sculptures’ might be a misnomer particularly when they are subjected to enforced co-habitation with live performers, sound, light, moving image and/or unpredictable interactions with an unrehearsed public. The special status of a sculptural artefact is also hard to maintain when it finds itself rubbing up against an assortment of everyday objects given equal weight and importance in the level playing field of installation. The contemporary artist Tomoko Takahashi seems to have dispensed entirely with the category of sculpture with her tangled assemblages made up of the detritus of consumer culture, liberated from what Walter Benjamin called ‘the bondage of utility’.¹³ Takahashi’s work comes from a long lineage of art bricolage beginning with Kurt Schwitters’ improvised domestic environments. In his Merzbau (1923–33), he transformed the rooms of his Hanover house into cubist memorials to his friends that included examples of their work and items of their belongings, replete with melancholic associations. Another antecedent can be found in the ‘Tropicália’ installations authored by Hélio Oiticica who, as a gesture of resistance to the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1960s, recreated the favelas (shanty towns) of Rio and invited the populace to come in and play. Some forty years later, Takahashi designed her Crash Course (2006) at the Mead Gallery like a three-dimensional, walk-in Pollock featuring worn out computers, torn books, broken clocks and lamps, gutted monitors – the discarded paraphernalia of an institute of learning. The scattered and entwined debris of modern university life formed an apparently random arrangement spreading virally throughout the space with no one object isolated for special attention. If there existed in the installation an item that the artist had made herself, it was impossible to detect in the unkempt ‘garden of stuff’ that Takahashi culled from the stores, corridors and skips of Warwick University.

In 1999, Rosalind Krauss coined the term ‘post-medium condition’ to denote the melting pot into which the distinctiveness of sculpture along with that of the other plastic arts had been gradually liquefied. Sweeping sculpture, painting, film and video into her now neutral repository of creative activity, all previously identifiable medium-specific practices were thoroughly ‘turned … inside out’ and sculpture, like painting, could no longer stand alone as a autonomous discipline. According to Krauss, traditional practices were ‘emptied into the generic category of Art: art-at-large, or art-in-general’.¹⁴ In due course, we will return to the issue of medium specificity in the contemporary field, but note here that Krauss’s concept of the post-medium reiterates the early twentieth-century rupture instigated by Cubism, Dada and Surrealism whereby conventional association of materials with particular artistic processes were dismantled: paint and canvas equating to painting, wood, steel and stone to sculpture. As Kurt Schwitters declared in 1919, ‘I am a painter and I nail my pictures together’.¹⁵

If the separate status of sculpture was systematically undermined by the combined efforts of artists in the early years of the last century backed up by theorists in more recent times, it was devalued even further when avant-garde film and video emerged in the experimental ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. By giving shelter to moving image practices, installation art acquired by association a Marxist-inflected politics that rejected the creation of unique objects to be bought and sold in what radical practitioners regarded as an indefensible capitalist art market. By the 1970s, a period dominated by artist collectives in both Europe and North America, this critique of art as a luxury commodity provided one of the motivations for those who embraced analogue video;¹⁶ a videotape could be infinitely reproduced and had a scarcity value of close to nil.¹⁷ In the UK, videomakers such as David Hall, Tamara Krikorian, Tina Keane and Tony Sinden determined to avoid the production of anything that might resemble the collectable bronzes by Edgar Degas or Henry Weekes that enrich our national museums, nor did they wish to emulate the major public sculptures that grace our city squares.¹⁸ Artists now created installations in which any sculptural structures were temporary, disposable and constitutively uncollectable, an attitude that survives in the up-cycled trash installations of artists like Takahashi who, on the last day of her exhibitions, invites the public to remove any objects that take their fancy.

Our discussion so far has encompassed the apparent demise of freestanding sculpture in the post-war, postmodern era, and the concomitant survival of a sculptural sensibility and its material practices, albeit transformed and expanded in the context of installation art. It will become clear that the manipulation of materials and processes and the re-siting of non-art objects to a gallery setting by moving image practitioners reiterates sculptural traditions. Just as sculptors consider the emplacement of a sculpture, moving image artists now attached a new importance to the actual space of projection and the configuration of monitors. Many film and video-makers would have agreed with Robert Morris who in 1966 declared that sculpture was not in the ‘pious’ business of giving up illusionism as had been decreed by Greenberg because it had always been an essentially tactile medium and dealt in ‘the sculptural facts of space, light, and materials’, elements that have ‘always functioned materially and literally’.19 As solid matter, sculpture stakes a physical claim on space, and according to Morris, it shifts focus from the expressive potential of representational objects to the impact of the space and prevailing light conditions on the work.²⁰ The sculptural structures in turn reiterate the physical properties of the gallery, setting up a kind of cybernetic exchange between crafted matter and architectural space. According to Alex Potts, the staging of a sculptural object in a demarcated space sets off ‘quite unstable oscillations between a centring and a dispersal of looking’.²¹ Yet the sculptural object can serve to articulate and reinforce the visitor’s apprehension of the gallery dimensions principally by being physically welded to a given coordinate in the space – even kinetic sculptures are only a gesturing extension of their fixed supports. As Robert Morris observed, ‘one of the conditions of knowing an object is supplied by the sensing of the gravitational force acting upon it in actual space’.²² These located anchorages form part of the information we process to orient ourselves in space, and the data we collect about the work simultaneously serves to develop a mental map of the architectural environment as a whole. Of course, some artists seek to mask, obliterate or redefine the familiar lineaments of the space distorting perceptions of scale, depth and elevation. For instance, in 1962, the Stedelijk created a disorienting maze for the group exhibition Dylaby. Recent ‘fictional architecture’ by Mike Nelson consists of rooms within rooms, while Christoph Büchel presents the visitor with a labyrinth of Lilliputian chambers secreted into the gallery space through which the spectator is required to crawl. John Bock’s 2004 Klütterkammer at the ICA in London presented a similar challenge. Visitors climbed through a ‘confusing shanty of wooden tunnels’ where works by early video artists such as Bas Jan Ader and Vito Acconci could be encountered along with dust, debris and obstacles of every kind.²³ These post-apocalyptic interiors infer the dark persistence of a traumatic memory, the dislocation of a dream or the surreal shape-shifting of Alice in Wonderland. The works are rendered in the language of cinema with its abrupt changes in point of view, scale and ambience, the visual experience framed by doorways, windows and corridors.

In these total transformations of the exhibition space, the outer shell of the gallery is lost and the viewer has no recourse to previous knowledge of the building to help her negotiate the work. However, as I have suggested, in the more familiar circumstance of a single sculptural object or a grouping of structures installed in an otherwise empty space, the knowledge of the essential dimensions of the gallery will not be altered and will, on the whole, be enhanced by the reference points provided by objects. However, sculptural installations have the capacity to refine the spatial template of the gallery as each new work draws out different features of the interior that may have been previously overlooked. While the actual dimensions of the space are understood to remain constant and are held as a blueprint in the imagination, different exhibitions render the space itself malleable and changeable to perception. A series of kaleidoscopic impressions of the gallery may form akin to the impact on a familiar landscape of changing light and weather conditions as the seasons turn, which nonetheless combine to create a stable topographic armature for the view.

If a sculptural object can register impressions of change in what a viewer knows to be a constant architectural interior, what does a sculptural presence actually entail? Any object creates an interruption of space, an obdurate concentration of matter that consumes the available floor, walls and air, and sets up an interrogatory relationship with whatever or whoever else enters its orbit. It activates the spaces between itself and other objects, including people, thus establishing the possibility of a hierarchy – determining who, or what, is bigger, more refined, more significant. While enacting a territorial occupation of space, a gallery artefact proclaims its status as art and commands of the audience adrift in the gallery the appropriate aesthetic response. These anticipated readings will be determined by the arguments of the work’s basic attributes. The marble flesh of Rodin’s The Kiss (1889) orchestrates an appreciation of spectral sensuality; the uncompromising monumentality of Richard Serra’s steel Fulcrum (1987) elicits awe; and Méret Oppenheim’s surreal Object (Le déjeuner en fourrure) (1936), a teacup incongruously covered in gazelle fur, teases out uneasy laughter as the viewer struggles to resolve its mixed messages. Sculptural objects hail and interpellate the moving target that is the gallery-goer and define the exchange that takes place as an art experience. The object’s ability to snare the eye of the beholder is structured by what James Elkins has described as the ‘threads of desire’ that bind us to the world of things.24 Sculpture is social, dialogic and, depending on its status, it may wield the authority of a ‘masterpiece’ earning it a place in the pantheon of art historical marvels. It may, like Duchamp’s urinal, seek to derail the existing trajectory of sculpture and send it off in new directions or indeed, as we have seen, attempt to render the category of ‘sculpture’ itself redundant, thereby achieving greatness through notoriety.

The human body is the elementary building block of all sculpture. Initially, we scan a solid object for its degree of correspondence with the human form, its scale and shape and potential for action. ‘In daily life,’ observed Elkins, ‘as each new scene presents itself, we tend to look first at bodies and only afterward let our eyes take in whatever else is there.’²⁵ Eye-tracking studies have found that the gaze is drawn to faces in preference even to motion, but the initial calculations we make on encountering an external phenomenon take in the whole and are made instantaneously. We ask ourselves, is the presenting entity human and alive, and if so, is it bigger or smaller than I am, younger or older, desirable or dangerous, friend or foe? This instinctive cognitive processing for the classification of a mass in space informs Anthony McCall’s conscious application of the dimensions of the body as the basic unit of measurement in his ‘solid light’ sculptures. McCall makes simple conical shapes out of projected light originating on film or latterly generated digitally with animation software. These ghostly shapes are projected through smoke or dry ice to give them the semblance of solidity and spectators move freely through the vaporous light beams. In an article in the journal October, McCall confirmed that ‘the body is the important measure. Standing inside the cone near its base at the wall, where it is at its tallest dimension, the body should be completely subsumed within it. With outstretched arms it should not be quite possible to touch the upper surface.’²⁶

It is clear that McCall’s light installations were designed to establish what Daniel Miller described as ‘particular patterns of directed attention’,27 and indeed the disposition of the projected elements in the work govern the tracks of movements through the light beams and delimit the potential of physical interaction. In this respect, the moving image installation shares with architecture, gallery design and sculpture the imperative to guide the visitor through a largely pre-determined itinerary, what the sculptor Phyllida Barlow calls ‘a choreography for the viewer’.²⁸ The sculptors of antiquity and the classical period understood that the viewer constructs a mental image of the object partly through haptic memory – as Giuliana Bruno contends, ‘touch teaches the eyes to see beyond themselves’ – and partly from overlapping points of view, gathered as she circumambulates the work.²⁹ This journey mirrors that of the sculptor who took equivalent turns around the model to gather the data she needed to fashion a human likeness in stone, wood or clay. The contours of the sculpture are not, in this sense, fixed and constantly mutate, expanding and contracting according to where we stand in relation to the object. As Robert Morris pointed out, in common with the changes we might perceive in an architectural space under different occupation, it is the concept of the overall shape of the sculpture, the ‘known constant’ (or even the Platonic ideal shape), that makes the changes perceptible.³⁰

Although the sculptor endeavours to fashion the work so that we might pause at pre-determined points, to appreciate what Barlow describes as the ‘glamour shots’ – for instance the frontal aspect of Rodin’s The Kiss – the sculptor cannot legislate for visitors going off piste. If like Barlow a viewer abandons the ‘classic views’ and looks for ‘the most awkward place to view it’, the work takes on a ‘bizarre shape’ that the sculptor did not intend. The acknowledgement that there are no fixed points of view in the apperception of an object is a foundational principle of twentieth-century sculpture. Barlow has said of Picasso’s extruded cubist collage Glass of Absynthe (1921) that it sets the terms of modern sculpture by ‘asking us to walk around it … and guess where one facet meets the other’.³¹ In common with architectural space, with religious observances and moving image installations, ‘an action completes the work’.³² Sculpture, then, is the outcome of a stable arrangement of physical elements – whether static or looping through a predetermined set of kinetic movements. It is perceived to embody an aesthetic, conceptual and historical significance. It asserts its presence in relation to a mobile viewer whose orientation in space is dependent on the simultaneous registration of the object relative to his/her own body and the extensive precinct in which, together, both sculpture and viewer are enclosed. However much the actual status of an individual object as ‘sculpture’ may have been eroded in modern ‘post-medium’ art practices, the constellation of physical and perceptual operations to which artefacts, singly or collectively give rise have not substantially changed in the last hundred years. The concept of sculpture has remained extraordinarily tenacious in the artistic imagination, to the point where today, although most art propositions are classified in the catch-all category of ‘installation’, their formulation and execution is invariably described as sculptural.

Throughout the modern period and into the new millennium, successions of disparate materials and artistic practices have been nominated, at different times, as ‘sculptural’, including painting itself. Kazimir Malevich’s canvas Black Square on a White Background (1915) achieved the intransigent solidity of an object in space. Phyllida Barlow declared that space itself ‘is a physical material’ like any other at the disposal of the sculptor,33 while David Hall has often asserted that in his video works, he is sculpting in time. Chris Meigh-Andrews discovered a similar conviction in Michael Snow when he asked the filmmaker whether ‘duration was equivalent to mass in sculpture’; Snow acknowledged that La Région Centrale (1971), his 360-degree film shot in a raw Quebec landscape, a work that clocks up three hours of screen time, would be considered ‘in certain circumstances a long time’.³⁴ He agreed that for him, time is the equivalent of weight in sculpture and in his films, he ‘makes a shape in time’, a shape that is to be reconstituted in the time zone of the viewer. According to Daniel Birnbaum, film and video artists ‘install time in space’, endowing temporality with a material presence, and even narrative has taken on the solidity of sculpture.³⁵ Neville Wakefield has argued that in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle of surreal neo-feature films, ‘character, for Barney is sculptural material’.³⁶

As we have seen, in the 1970s Anthony McCall sculpted with the projection beam creating a series of ‘solid light films’, as did Lis Rhodes, Nicky Hamlyn and many other expanded cinema practitioners as I will discuss in chapter nine. Moving image artists’ use of sound takes on a similar thickness, spreading through and occupying space, suggesting expanses and conditions outside the field of vision and when employing the gallery as an echo chamber, reiterating the contours of the area in which the viewer is located. The absence of sound takes on an equal atmospheric mass. When surrounded by what Steve McQueen calls ‘a claustrophobic silence in which you can hear your own breathing’,³⁷ we tune in to the rumblings of the body, that fleshy soundbox. The weight of sound is constantly signalled in the terms artists use to describe the acoustic universe: ‘pies’ (Christian Marclay), ‘a city sinking into water’ (Chantal Ackerman), and, as an adjunct to the human frame, ‘a production of the body’ (Lorna Simpson). Marcel Duchamp wrote a musical score in 1934 entitled Sculpture Musicale, which John Cage described as ‘different sounds coming from different places and producing a sculpture which is sonorous and which remains’.³⁸ Yet for all its reverberating presence and sculptural potential, sound has indefinable borders and, as John Cage added, ‘it’s less like an object and more like the weather. In an object you can tell where the boundaries are but in weather it’s impossible to say when something begins or ends’.³⁹

The final element in the new lexicon of base matter commandeered by moving image installation must be the bodies and perceptual apparatus of spectators and, as I have argued, these moveable objects can be manipulated like any other material in the three-dimensional space of a gallery. According to the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman and the Speculative Realists, as spectators or citizens, we are all objects within a level playing field of things, processes and institutions constituted as quantifiable entities in which no one ‘object’ takes on more significance than any other. One of the major detractors of this approach is Laura McLean-Ferris who has lamented the suppression of difference and the loss of human agency implied in Speculative Realism, not to mention the elision of the question of ethical responsibility. McLean-Ferris concludes that ‘objects don’t care. Care is the responsibility of humans’, a responsibility that we cannot and should not renounce.43 Notwithstanding, she acknowledges the return of a new ‘realism’ in contemporary art that in contradistinction to Kant’s Idealist philosophy endows the object with a pre-existence that is independent of human cognition. We are even witnessing a renewal of interest in animism, whereby, in the words of Phyllida Barlow, ‘an object emerges as a sentient thing in its own right’.⁴⁴ The artist Eulalia Valldosera has pointed out the persistence of animism ‘in children’s films, in the animism of animations’ but, she argues, our belief in the ‘inner life of objects’ has been ‘relegated … to the unconscious’, from where she and artists such as Marcus Coates and Judith Hopf are seeking to recall it.⁴⁵

This new licence to engage with objects, to embrace the mythical and historical significance of sculptural artefacts appears to legitimise trends that have been evolving in the field of moving image installation for many years. Madeleine Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfield began working in the 1970s and since then have combined the moving image with stone and metal structures, water, weather vanes and banks of autumn leaves blown in by the wind in their elegant meditations on the relationship between art and science, nature and technology.⁴⁶ Tony Oursler has traumatised his audiences by projecting screaming faces onto crudely-made rag dolls trapped under overturned furniture; Annabel Nicolson has run a strip of film through a sewing machine and Tony Conrad has gleefully stir-fried film stock with an egg. There is a sense in which the sculptural was revitalised in its new relationship with the moving image, a sentiment that might be extracted from a footnote to Rosalind Krauss’s theory of the ‘post-medium condition’. Although Krauss rejected medium specificity and demoted the paraphernalia of the moving image to a mere material support to the image and the ideas it encapsulates, she has since conceded that ‘when a form falls into obsolescence, an evocation of the utopian ideals that the form held in promise at its advent re-emerges, freed from the technological cell we’re in’.⁴⁷ In the case of early video, much of that utopianism was profoundly connected to the social and political potential that the medium might deliver. However, we might also say that the interaction of the moving image with the unequivocal ‘objectness’ of material artefacts releases, or perhaps simply dramatises the human impulse of creativity. Firstly, we witness the weaving of dreams in the moving image, the projection of ideal states and spaces both interior and exterior to the psyche. Secondly, we can detect, in the manipulation of sculptural elements, the enduring compulsion that artists have to make things, to experiment with new materials, to get their hands dirty.

I fondly recall observing male colleagues relishing the ludic pleasures of inventing unorthodox technical configurations of analogue film and video machines, to the point of functional collapse; Steve Littman at the Riverside Studios in the late 1980s, sitting contentedly in a tangle of wires, transformers and screens plugging cables into half-dissected video decks; Steve Farrer at the Modern Art Oxford in the 1990s cheerfully advising his audience that if we wanted to avoid decapitation, we should not hesitate to duck in the event of the spinning projector in his Against the Steady Stare (1988) flying off its housing; David Dye at Tate Modern recreating in 2009 his 1973 film event Western Reversal in which he manipulates a simple arrangement of car wing mirrors, refracting a cowboy movie into a constellation of starry fragments.48 The pleasure being taken in exploring what simple objects and machines could do to light was palpable. At some psychic level, the artefacts with which artists interact, both manufactured and found, may well function as transitional objects and serve an archaic need to symbolise maternal loss. However, toys for the boys – and girls – in the context of a moving image installation are also the external manifestations of human endeavour. At the simplest level, they enable us to leave a mark. In the context of storytelling, Walter Benjamin observed that the content of a tale, ‘the thing’ is ‘[sunk] into the life of the storyteller’ and his traces ‘cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’.⁴⁹ Whether motivated by the existential pleasures of working with materials or a desire for immortality, artists will always sculpt in time and space, wood and metal, cloth and ashes, electronic signals, light and air. As in art, our lives are dominated by encounters with materials, with people and things and these relationships can be restaged and renegotiated in the sculptural context of moving image installation, where the conventions and sanctions of everyday life have loosened their grip.