Euthyphro: But, Socrates, I don’t know how to convey to you what I have in mind. Whatever we put forward somehow keeps on shifting its position and refuses to stay where we laid it down.
THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF ANALOGUE
I shall now edge towards some closing observations based on three issues left outstanding in this genealogy of installation and the moving image. Firstly, the consequences of the displacement of analogue technology by the digital age merit closer examination. The demise of celluloid film gave rise to expressions of grief from senior filmmakers who, coming of age in the 1970s, had based their practice on medium specificity. They related viscerally to both the filmic apparatus and the charged moment of projection. Very few videomakers suffered equivalent withdrawal symptoms on the loss of analogue videotape, as I have discussed elsewhere.2 Where Marty St. James embraced the ‘once-removed’, abstract nature of the video signal,3 Ken Jacobs declared that making a film is ‘an act of congress’, adding rhetorically, ‘who isn’t a cinephiliac these days?’4 Jonathan Walley has interpreted the retrospection of archival works as a move to ‘restore film to the centre of the cinematic practice’, and within the cultural laboratory of the gallery, bestow upon it what Derridian poststructuralists deemed untenable, a degree of ‘aesthetic autonomy’.5 Meanwhile, in Rosalind Krauss’s post-medium universe, the outmoded, now released from its utility value, is mined for its overlooked potentialities,6 ‘alternative possibilities’, according to Thomas Elsaesser that ‘were actually suppressed in early film’.7 In 2011, Tacita Dean, eager to excavate those possibilities in her ongoing film practice, spearheaded a sadly unsuccessful protest against the closure of the last 16mm film processing lab in the UK. Her concurrent installation Film (2011), a 13-metre screen in the form of a vertical filmstrip complete with (digital) sprocket holes, stood as a monument to the glories of both analogue cinema and the creative enterprise of experimental filmmakers over the last hundred years. Film also celebrated the ‘burdensome physicality’8 of the medium, a feature that artists like Dean cherish while David Hall’s epic 1,001 TV Sets (see chapter eleven) affirmed the similarly cumbersome mass of analogue televisions, devices that required considerable musculature to transplant to a gallery.
Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Light Spill (2005), 16mm film projector, 16mm film, screen. Lonely at the Top: Graphology Chapter 4, curated by Edwin Carels, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium, August 25–September 25, 2011. Photo: Courtesy of M HKA and the artists.
Tributes to analogue media have taken many forms. In Light Spill (2005) Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder subjected a random selection of old films to ‘death by projection’,9 running each one through a projector with no pick up reel, so that the films spilled out onto the floor gradually creating a tangled burial mound under the projection beam that had accorded them a last gasp of life. As discussed in chapters six and eight, many artists fashioned reconstructions and pastiches of classic movies attesting to the interpenetration of Hollywood and their creative imaginations. Where in 2000, Mark Lewis created a ‘part-cinema’ version of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Episodes from the Life of) (2001), Paul Bush fashioned a witty remake of key scenes from the eponymous 1941 horror film. The image flickers between two amateur performances of the same scenes so that the actors seem to vibrate, as if they are suffering from a form of archival epilepsy while the original soundtrack provides the anchorage. According to Chris Darke, these mimetic works act out a futile ‘desire to repeat the gestures of the master-director’,10 or perhaps they betray an Oedipal ambivalence compelling the artists to both acknowledge and challenge the authority of the father figures of Hollywood.
Tacita Dean also targeted inflated masculinities, drawing analogies between the obsolescence of analogue film and the grand failures of human enterprise. In Bubble House (1999), she sought ‘the connection between the subject and the disappearance of the subject’11 in the remains of a spherical house on the Cayman Islands built by a French embezzler currently languishing in an American jail. In Teignmouth Electron (1999), Dean turned her attention to Donald Crowhurt’s boat washed up in a storm. Desperate to win a round-the-world race, the yachtsman had falsified his position until exposure became inevitable and, clutching his navigational equipment, he jumped overboard never to be seen again. Dean combined clattering projectors, encased in glass like endangered species, with images of what Germaine Greer termed ‘an insentient relic of a man’s great failure’.12 The artist called attention to the fragility of film on the brink of extinction and seemed to suggest that like Crowhurst’s broken ambitions, celluloid dreams make unstable foundations for the business of life.
The notion that looking into the past delivers a better understanding of the present is often invoked, and Dean certainly reflects productively on human nature through her historical invocations. However, it is unclear what insights can be derived about contemporary life from, for instance Ken Jacobs’s Tom Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969–1971/2008), in which a silent short from 1905 featuring the antics of a thief in a busy village is endlessly reworked. Edwin Carels has speculated that Jacobs’s film is an assertion of the artist’s right to his ‘autonomy of vision, a personalised perception’.13 This aligns with the 1970s scratch video ethos of the guerrilla artist adding her signature to pilfered or discarded television footage, what Hito Steyerl later renamed the ‘poor image’, or a copy ‘in motion’.14 The recycling, or remediation, of found footage arguably offers some resistance to the commercial world of unrelenting commodity consumption based on novelty, although as rehearsed many times in this volume, as a visual strategy it is already well integrated into the language and purpose of advertising.15
While individual artists forge poignant memorials to cinema and celluloid, film theorists who have increasingly embraced artists’ practice, have now lost their ongoing object of study. Undeterred, they are energetically championing the conservation of artists’ film in museums and archives, and endorsing large survey shows that enthrone selected works in the canon.16 Academics have also provided a discursive context for artists such as Gibson and Recoder who engage in ‘media archaeology’, a practice-based historicism, most energetically theorised in film studies by Thomas Elsaesser.17 As I have demonstrated, a number of installations rework the back catalogue of cinema with humour and consummate skill; however, many expeditions into film history can be sentimental, fetishistic and mournful exercises – as Stéphane Delorme observed: ‘the admired object [is] never as beautiful than when threatened with disappearance’.18 The corpus of such necrophilic works gives rise to tautological conversations with the past, and inspires in Erika Balsom melancholic reflections on the ‘pathos of the index’19 and human senescence. Like Balsom, Jonathan Walley emphasises the mortality of film, and its role as a memento mori, reminding us that celluloid shares our organic natures, and degenerates over time as we do.20
A less morbid discourse arises from work that mobilises the artisanal traditions of hand-made films. These offer a counterweight to the anonymity of mass-produced objects, the disposability of digital images and the superficiality of mainstream entertainment. Martine Beugnet and Kim Knowles have argued persuasively that manipulated films by contemporary artists such as Alia Syed and Frédérique Devaux raise questions about the ‘production of obsolescence’ in the wider culture.21 However, it is possible to overestimate the impact of stylistic quotations from a time when painted and scratched filmic images formed part of an identifiable anti-narrative, materialist movement. Beyond a postmodern predisposition for quotation, what would be the political relevance of re-enactments today of early works by Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneemann, Hollis Frampton or Marina Abramović?22 As Lis Rhodes pondered, ‘if expanded cinema was a reaction against the status quo then, what is it now?’23 The argument that such works challenge the imperative of progress and recast our conception of linear time into folds, loops or recursive regressions, seems to disavow the deeper intimations of mortality that Balsom and Walley have intuited in archival practices. Colin Perry has interrogated the ‘archaic death-grip’ that analogue film appears to have on artists, concluding that an archival work should be read not as a political response but as a psychological one based on ‘invocations of subjective desire, nostalgia and memory’.24 There is no reason why such allegories of mortality and nostalgic returns should not be indulged and I have appreciated the charm of Lindsay Seers’ Extramission (Black Maria) (2009), a scale model of Thomas Edison’s film studio-cum (very stuffy) micro-cinema accompanied by the narrative of the artist’s childhood desire to metamorphose from a camera into a film projector. My concern is that the more time artists spend peering down the retrospectoscope of the cinema and television archive, seeking their personalised ‘salvage memories’ of historical events,25 honing their analyses of classic films and TV programmes in the ‘autopsy room’ of the gallery or tinkering with the technological toys of yesteryear, the less time they spend forging a language to address the more urgent issues that attend the perilous, uncomfortable realities of the modern world.26
Medium specificity in the age of code
Digital is not the analogue of analogue.
Tacita Dean, 2011
One of the unintended consequences of the digital era has been the ironing out of technical and procedural differences between artists’ film and video by means of standardised digital equipment and universal data conformity. The trace-like quality of the index that C. S. Peirce identified has also wavered now that an image can be generated entirely by a computer with no originary moment of capture from nature. Ian Christie has reiterated David Rodowick’s contention that in the digital era, technically, there is no longer an image, and only ‘an assemblage of code’.27 The autonomy of the image is further compromised by the infinite malleability of digitised material. Without a verifiable original, the ‘itinerant image [is] thrust into digital uncertainty’28 and the convention of a unique artefact generated by a singular, verifiable auteur becomes untenable. As we have seen, the threatened loss of celluloid film’s Benjaminian ‘aura’ and the erosion of artistic exceptionalism have been mitigated by the transformation of the moving image into an object of aesthetic contemplation and, beginning in the 1990s, its gradual incorporation into mainstream gallery culture. The digital itself offers compensatory features. David E. James has asserted, the effects pursued by experimental filmmakers such as Morgan Fisher and Pat O’Neill can be ‘recreated digitally with breathtaking efficiency’.29 In 2000, Rosalind Krauss’s ‘post-medium condition’ was rooted in the expressive potential of a given practice attached to, but not defined by, its ‘material support’; here an artist was able to draw on its ‘layering of conventions’.30 What mattered now was not the medium an artist chose but what purpose it served and, as Noël Carroll maintained, the work should be judged according to its ‘aesthetic, moral or intellectual value’, not on its ability to enumerate the unique properties of a given technology.31 This has suited those postmodern and millennial artists who are largely indifferent to the vehicle they flag down as long as it fits their creative purposes.32 Balsom has put a more positive gloss on the culture of pick ‘n’ mix, arguing that if an artist selects a medium, she is ‘necessarily engaging its specific qualities’.33 I would make a distinction between artists who use media uncritically for their mimetic and phantasmagorical properties, often to say what has been said before, and those who continue to investigate the codes and relations of power embedded in the manufacture and function of contemporary imaging technology. However, I bow to Nicky Hamlyn, who concurs with Balsom: ‘practitioners’, he writes, ‘however multiple, mixed or post-media their work may be, can never escape the question of medium’.34 The octogenarian filmmaker Michael Snow briskly silenced all opposition when he declared at a recent congress, ‘technological essentialism is called thinking’.35
Jay David Bolter has theorised the convergence of disparate analogue technologies in the digital domain as the now familiar process of ‘remediation’ in which the cinematic and televisual canon are not lost but suspended in the amber of the digital. Embellished by computer graphics, the image becomes infinitely malleable and increasingly accessible.36 According to Yvonne Spielmann, ‘intermediality’ has spawned exciting ‘new forms of media arts’.37 Following Dick Higgins, Spielmann includes ‘painting, photography … and computer animation’ in the ‘spatialised’ digital soup, and while the boundaries blur between the analogue or material originals, they nonetheless maintain their disciplinary associations.
Not everyone believes that the digital signal is a neutral encoder, indiscriminately levelling everything in its wake. In a recent article, Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Les Walkling have insisted that the digital is a specific medium in its own right, subject to the same institutional and economic exigencies as any analogue equivalent.38 The development of codecs has been spearheaded by commercial companies such as Apple and Adobe, and these codecs ‘establish an aesthetic: they are the frames through which we observe and construct the world and our experience of it’.39 These unfathomable algorithms, contend Cubitt, Palmer and Walkling, are not unassailable and they cite technicians and artists such as Alex Monteith and Lynette Wallworth who ‘chip away at the normative tendencies inherent in technical innovation processes … and create new uses and applications’40 for digital information. Practitioners such as the Net-based artist Jim Punk have developed a ‘glitch’ aesthetic, not unlike the Scratch video of the 1980s, but this time the image distortions are created by tampering with digital code and by programming for ‘random breakdown of computer processes’ thereby demonstrating ‘the digital medium’s physical instability’.41 In the 1990s, hackers broke into obsolete technologies such as Atari ST computers and Gameboys to rearrange their output and more recently, Cory Arcangel modified Nintendo video games for his gallery works such as Super Mario Clouds (2002).42 Building on the achievements of pioneers – including the Vasulkas, Nicole Stenger and William Latham – Dan Dandin uses code for the random generation of abstract imagery, a unique function of electronic media. Genevieve Yue has pointed out that like the analogue image, digital information is unstable and prone to ‘glitches, errors and lossy compression, not to mention the devastating effects of computer viruses, system failures and hard drive crashes’.43 The digital environment even suffers its own form of ageing. Like the decay of celluloid and videotape over time, data degradation means that code has a material finitude comparable to its analogue predecessors. Cubitt, Palmer and Walkling shift the discussion away from any Greenbergian quest for essences towards a consideration of the distinctive ensemble of elements that make up a media installation. Medium specificity, they suggest, lies not in the precise nature of digital code but in the unique deployment of technologies (old and new), materials, networks, processes and events that make up an individual installation.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that artists retain the desire for an object-oriented (human) relationship with the materials from which they fashion a work. Where Ken Jacobs confesses to an erotic attachment to the filmic dispositif, Mark Street is drawn to ‘the texture of it … when you shoot a roll of film, it becomes a specific entity and it’s unlike any other thing. It has its own weight and characteristics’.44 When contemporary artists gather diverse objects, mechanisms, individuals and moving image mediums in a spatialised environment with prescribed dimensions and conditions, they not only re-invoke the material presences of the analogue age but also satisfy a need, literally and metaphorically, to get their hands dirty.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND SPECTATORSHIP
The eye wants help. The eye says to the brain, ‘Something is happening which I do not in the least understand. You are needed.’
Virginia Woolf, Cinema (1926)
In April 2009, as the Expanded Cinema Conference at Tate Modern was winding down, a weary panel of academics and filmmakers edged towards the conclusion that in the quest for understanding the subject’s relationship to the moving image, the limits of speculation had been reached. None of the theories of spectatorship so far proposed based on structural/materialism, feminism, psychoanalysis, nor those that emphasised the social/relational dimension, the haptic, the historiographic, geographies of emotion (Guiliana Bruno), the ‘pensive spectator’ (Raymond Bellour), object relations (Graham Harman) could prove beyond doubt that they were correct. Had the moment arrived when we might profitably turn to brain sciences for some new answers – which, if not conclusive, at least would suggest new avenues of investigation?
It is in the field of cognitive science that empirical research is been carried out to help determine how we watch films, and the degree to which mainstream filmmakers and artists can predict and ‘craft the viewing experience’.45 Cognitive film theory began in 1985 with the publication of David Bordwell’s Narration in Fiction Film,46 but it was Uri Hasson et al.’s influential studies in neurocinematics47 that introduced the use of eye-tracking to plot visual attentiveness and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to record brain activity across a number of subjects viewing the same film.48 By measuring degrees of correlation between subjects, Hasson et al. were able to identify those film styles that were most successful in directing spectatorial attention. Unsurprisingly, Hitchcockian noir came out on top. Since then, extensive empirical and theoretical research has been undertaken in cinema spectatorship, not least by the members of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) including David Bordwell, Murray Smith and Paul Taberham.49 In London, the psychologist Tim Smith has also used eye-tracking technology to study screen-based attentional synchrony in adults, and more recently in infants, hoping to determine how screen literacy develops alongside children’s understanding of the environment.50 Steven Hinde and colleagues in the Interdisciplinary Vision group at Bristol University are investigating spectator ‘presence’ measured in degrees of immersion, and attempting to determine how screen engagement is modulated by shot length in both 2D and 3D footage. Even artists’ film and video appears to subscribe to guided imagery. In 1994, adopting a constructivist model of cognition, James Peterson first identified ‘strategies of comprehension’ that could be learned, enabling spectators to find meaning in even the most abstract or dismantled structural films.51 Following Peterson, Murray Smith has postulated that avant-garde works engage our ‘problem solving’ abilities and we search for the ‘unique logic of the work’, however esoteric.52 Meanwhile, at Deakin University in Melbourne, research into ‘vision regimes’ is emerging, led by Sean Redmond and Jodi Sita.53 The Australian team re-imagines the notion of ‘double vision’ in which the spectator is able to apprehend the narrative of the mise-en-scène whilst remaining sensitive to the incidental details on the margins of the action: ‘an obscure pattern on a wall … a distant, minor or irrelevant sound just off-screen’.54 This suggests an attentiveness to what Barthes called the ‘supplementary’ meaning of a film and could well account for those anomalous, non-correlational responses that Hasson et al. recorded but did not explain.55 Tim Smith has suggested that not only does the ‘noise’ in Hasson et al.’s data arise from ‘individual differences in what spectators are attending to’, but also variations in ‘how they are processing what they are attending’.56
Tim Smith. Illustration from the article ‘The Attentional Theory of Continuity Editing’ (2012), Projections: The Journal for Movies and the Mind, 6: 1. © Paramount Vintage. Courtesy of Tim Smith.
Cognitive science has tested and nuanced craft wisdom about how lighting, sound and editing techniques are used by mainstream filmmakers to orchestrate the trajectory of our gaze. For instance, onscreen faces give rise to an immediate intensification of attention. Faces ‘punctuate the scene’ observed James Elkins, they represent ‘a center of power, a moment of concentrated meaning against the backdrop of everyday objects’.57 Tim Smith confirms that the eye is also drawn irresistibly to hot spots of light, as well as gestures and movement, their dynamism often used to disguise edits, those fissures in the flow of events that threaten to disrupt the narrative. An action begins on one side of the cut and ends on the other; attention is drawn to the movement, not the edit.58 In film noir, shadows set up tensions in the audience because of the unknown threats they might conceal just outside the frame. The shadow in cinema, wrote Virginia Woolf, is a ‘monstrous quivering tadpole’ that embodies ‘fear itself, and not the statement “I am afraid”’.59 Matthew Sweet observed that when cutting across a face, a shadow can reduce an actor to ‘meat on a slab’ and concludes that shadow ‘dismembers people’.60 Shadows, like film scores, performance styles, narrative arcs and costume form part of the extensive vocabulary of the cinematic language we have all learned, leading to screen literacy whose origins Tim Smith is searching for in his infant subjects.61
In recent years, vision scientists have sought to understand the impact of contemporary moving image editing techniques. Wide establishing shots, lengthy dialogue and extended durations familiar to audiences in the 1940s and 1950s have been gradually overtaken in mainstream movies and TV by rapid editing, reduced illumination, fewer words and increased motion generated by both a more mobile camera and amplified action within the frame. We are also witnessing a greater use of music to manipulate emotions, tighter framing, and as Tim Smith has observed, a concentration of visual attention in the centre of the picture and a concomitant reduction in peripheral visual information.62 Together with David Bordwell in the 1970s, the film statistician Barry Salt developed the art of ‘cinemetrics’ with which they charted the evolution of filmic styles over the years,63 and James Cutting has registered the reduction of shot lengths between 1935 and 2010 from an average of 15 seconds to 3.5 seconds.64 According to Smith, the result of this shift in cinematic grammar is that the spectator becomes passive; ‘you wait for the information to come to you rather than work to discover it through your perceptual/cognitive system’.65 From the perspective of artists’ film and video, the irony is that historically, rapid-fire editing was employed precisely to shock spectators out of their passive consumption of film and televisual narratives. The gap between the manipulation of audience attention in the mainstream and the ‘productive’ dissonances engendered by avant-garde techniques to produce in the viewer a critical awareness of process appears to be narrowing.66
As we saw in chapter eight, in his essay The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, Hugo Münsterberg argued that filmic language reproduces ways of seeing that are analogous to the cognitive mechanisms we use to perceive the world. However, in the light of the evolving language of mainstream media vision, Tim Smith, like Peterson before him, is now concluding what intuition also confirms – that cinematic literacy is indeed acquired. Smith has hypothesised that horror buffs, for instance, develop an ‘expertise in viewing’, anticipating events in the diegesis where those new to the genre might account for divergent attentional eye patterns.67 Smith also emphasises the role of memory in the apperception of filmic content: ‘Our memories are constantly being updated by new perceptual experiences and our perceptual experiences are always cast in the shadow of our memories.’68 The pre-existence of individual memory, both cultural and personal, as well as ‘expertise in viewing’ based on previous exposure to the film canon has led Ian Christie to emphasise the diversity of spectatorial experiences. Quoting national audience surveys, Christie argues that ‘films mean different things to different people; or more precisely, can have different meanings according to context and subject-position’.69 Christie’s assertion aligns with notions of spectatorship developed in the context of moving image art discussed in chapter eight. However, the findings of audience surveys are based on verbal evidence provided by respondents after the event and can neither be proved nor disproved by the measurement of fluctuations in overt attention, nor by charting correspondences in brain activity across a number of subjects.
This introduces some drawbacks to the empirical approach. If scientists measure only neuronal activity in the anterior brain (whose functions are still largely a mystery) or restrict their study to monitoring eye movements during screen viewing, they can deduce neither the quality of attention that is being brought to bear on the film sequence, nor the emotional journey an individual might be undertaking as she watches. The limitations of statistics based on attentional excitation alone have, as Tim Smith confirms, led many ‘hypothesis-driven studies to match eye movements or brain activity to behavioural measures such as self-reported emotional states, perception, comprehension or memory’.70 The Deakin group is supplementing eye-tracking with triangulation points advocated by Murray Smith, including measures of pupil dilation, heart rate and respiration, factors that might provide evidence of affective spectatorial experience.71 Gareth Polmeer has identified another problem with the cognitive science approach, arguing that even these co-ordinated empirical methods often fail to differentiate among subjects and refer to ‘the’ subject when, in fact, variations exist because ‘practice and ideology … impact on the particular, concrete circumstances of the individual’.72 Polmeer contends that the role of historical, political and ideological forces on cognition must also be taken into account if these experiments are to deliver not only statistically significant results, but also knowledge that is socially relevant. Tim Smith reminds us that in averaging responses across participants, quantitative methods reveal the ‘statistical distribution of the sample’.73 This already tells us ‘how “individual” a participant’s experience is’, how far it diverges from the mean. Notwithstanding, Smith acknowledges the importance of triangulation research methods that also incorporate variables of age, ethnicity and gender, and in spite of reservations about the reliability of first-hand accounts, as Smith reports, researchers are beginning to include questionnaires in their studies allowing participants to record their subjective responses, indicating the levels of feeling and affect being experienced in each case.
I will end this brief foray into cognitive science and the moving image with some questions that could usefully be raised in an empirical research context. With some notable exceptions such as the work of James Peterson and Murray Smith, cognitive research has concentrated on mainstream film and television and the methodology employed is geared towards the industry. In the ‘attention economy’, the priority is to find ever more precise techniques for maintaining spectatorial engrossment in the short term, for ‘crafting the viewing experience’ and controlling desire, especially the desire for consumer products and services. This is where a concern with ethics returns. Having demonstrated the capability of certain cinematic modes to hold spectatorial attention, what is the responsibility of the image-maker who uses them in either a commercial or an art context? This question leads to the perennial issue of representation and its power to mould experience. To my knowledge, researchers in the cognitive sciences rarely consider the content of the filmic stimulus to which they expose subjects, beyond its stylistic genre. For instance, the Deakin website shows a clip from a recent episode of the British serial, Sherlock (2012) in which criminals break into Sherlock’s home and his elderly housekeeper Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs) is physically intimidated by the thugs while an unruffled and supercilious Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) mocks Mrs. Hudson for betraying her fear. The narrative accompanying the analysis of this clip does not mention the content and fails to consider how it might impact differently on male and female spectators. Another problem relates to the current experimental methodologies that record only the immediate responses of the human sensorium to a single film clip rather than, as Murray Smith suggests, the cumulative impression of ‘whole movies’.74 One might ask, what, across a lifetime of television viewing, is the effect of sustained exposure to mediatised images of, say, violence and the abuse of women and children? This last question can be recognised as one that moving image artists, sociologists and developmental psychologists have been asking for a very long time, and one that I have rehearsed at various junctures in this text.75
In spite of the reservations one might have about the wider implications of a cognitive scientific approach, I believe that it has the potential to throw some light on the subject of this book. Although Alva Noë and J. J. Gibson have considered the mobility of the perceiving agent,76 most of the empirical research into film reception has concentrated on static subjects wired up to single screens. Could physiological monitoring be usefully applied in the context of a moving image installation in which viewers are free to wander through a space and where they encounter a series of screens, singly or in clusters?77 At this point, other factors would come into play, such as the social space of the gallery, what Ipek Kaynar calls the ‘collective social experience’.78 Here, certain pre-set behavioural conventions apply and these would discipline how spectators negotiate the space of galleries. Seating undoubtedly influences where and how long they linger and the architecture of the space also modulates those decisions. So much depends on what else a spectator can see out of the corner of her eye and this is where the role of peripheral vision would come into the equation. Eye-tracking technology locks to the position of the fovea, the centre of vision, and ignores peripheral vision, which is adapted to perceive motion, especially in reduced light conditions, a refined faculty of vision that is critical to a mobile spectator traversing a poorly lit installation space. Even when viewing a frontally-presented cinema screen, peripheral vision must still be playing a role, checking the outer edges of the image, and internally, registering those distance cues that orient the onscreen figures in a logical three-dimensional space; the curve of a staircase, the frame of a window, a winding lane anticipating the journey a character will take as the narrative concludes.79 Could it be that those anomalous readings Tim Smith and others have witnessed in which some subjects appear not to be following the main action are simply instances when they are momentarily verifying information that peripheral vision has signalled?
Murray Smith has also raised questions about empathy80 and the role of mirror neurons that produce what he calls ‘motor mimicry’, an affective response that falls short of empathy, but can provide the ‘scaffold’ for ‘volitional’ empathy.81 ‘The underlying hypothesis’, Smith explains, ‘is that filmmakers have an intuitive understanding of these different but related mechanisms, and can thus shape their films to elicit particular patterns of mimicry, and empathy’.82 The artist clearly has an investment in the efficacy of her practice, in its ability to rouse sympathetic reactions in an audience, whether emotional or intellectual, particularly when that audience is to be guided through a field of multiple elements in the built environment of an installation. Although both Bordwell and Peterson have intuited what filmmakers ‘usually can’t tell us’ about their investments in a work,83 the cognitive research I have touched on focuses exclusively on the responses of the spectator. So, I will end here with a final question: apart from the material advantages of success, what is in it for the artist?
…the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.
Joseph Heller, Catch 22 (1961)
In the late twentieth century, many cultural theorists subscribed to the post-structural view that an artwork is but a product of intertextual networks of meaning. The artist, meanwhile, was reduced to a kind of ventriloquist, being ‘spoken’ by language.84 The individual expressive agency of the maker was disavowed in academic writing, while 1960s and 1970s artists, often working in collectives, saw themselves as ‘cultural workers’ with the emphasis on group creativity rather than singular achievement. Feminists did not wish to replicate the spurious art world meritocracy based on male artists’ unique endowment with what Linda Nochlin termed ‘the golden nugget of artistic genius’.85 However, the cultural capital of modernist artists working in painting and sculpture remained undiminished and towards the end of the 1990s, the status of moving image artists also began to rise when practitioners such as Bill Viola, Martha Rosler and Isaac Julien, once valiantly struggling on the margins of experimental video, gained international recognition. However self-effacing some avant-garde practitioners intended to be in the early days, as Michael Newman remarked, in the post-conceptual age, the artist now ‘acknowledges the impossibility of disappearing’.86
Since the 1950s, there has existed a mistrust of statements by artists. Beardsley and Wimsatt’s ‘fallacy’ of authorial intent strayed from literary criticism into the arts, and the maker was regarded by critics as the least qualified to discuss her work.87 However, practitioners are being listened to once again although their utterances are not all treated equally. When artists are also writers or cultural theorists in their own right – for instance, Jean Epstein in the 1930s or Hito Steyerl today – then their hypotheses about practice are given greater credence and commentators will establish a dialogue as much with the artists’ writings as with their practice.88 Where an artist is less academic, but the content of the work is documentary in nature or draws on historical archives, or takes as its subject a cultural institution and employs current research methodologies, then academics find it conducive to their own frames of reference. T. J. Demos has championed the documentary works of Sven Augustijnen, for instance, and Melissa Gronlund has reflected on the observational films of Beatrice Gibson, Anna Lucas and Elizabeth Price.89 However, even in this productive synergy, the artists’ motives are rarely questioned and their role in managing the responses of an audience is generally passed over unremarked.90
There are film theorists like Catherine Fowler who de-emphasise the role of the artist by appealing to concepts of ‘inter-relationality’ and reallocate agency to the audience or to ‘participants’,91 on the basis that by appearing in the work of an artist, ‘those who were once the audience’ are transformed into ‘the performers for audiences of their own’.92 Tess Takahashi has identified the ‘fake’ archival techniques adopted by Walid Ra’ad of the Atlas Group as another strategy that ‘displaces the artist’s personal voice’.93 However, I would suggest that these contrivances have a largely cosmetic effect and the authorial voice is simply replaced by authorial ingenuity, wit and skill, and only total anonymity would eradicate Ra’ad’s individual creativity from his work. In his study of documentary films that deliberately or not had an impact on the circumstances they were recording, Steven Eastwood established the realpolitik of collaboration: over the longer term, he contended, ‘film-makers usually benefit more than their subjects’.94 There has been surprisingly scant discussion of either what those privileges and benefits might involve for the artist, or what satisfactions and anxieties might attend their pursuit. While attempts to define the subject position of the spectator are legion, we hear less about what motivates the artist to create a moving image installation for public consumption. What manner of creature would be driven to such an enterprise?
Assertions of self
Freud regarded artists as dangerous, unfettered egoists ‘who have no occasion to submit their inner life to the strict control of reason’.95 Instead, opined the great man, they air their desires in public, becoming subjects of their own fascination. Most contemporary artists remain unapologetic about their public projections of self. Art, Jeremy Deller says, is ‘a personal thing … you do it to satisfy yourself’.96 Over the course of a successful career, an artist like Deller will accumulate a substantial personal-public archive memorialising his subjectivity and life experience. If the moving image, a medium still endowed with a veneer of ‘truth’, is a central element in the work, the life preserved in the art acquires an additional mantle of authenticity. Some artists adopt directly autobiographical material within the frame of identity politics (Linda Montano), while others employ stand-ins or introspect more obliquely through investigations of cultural phenomena coeval with incidents in their own lives (Gillian Wearing, see chapter eleven). Others such as Stan Brakhage explore their own mental landscapes, and through the medium of the hand-held, ‘subjective’ camera, seek to transition ‘directly from thought to film’.97 In the case of Kenneth Anger, the artist mines the underground rumblings of his own subconscious. Speaking to a group of London students in 2009, Anger revealed that all his films are based on his dreams whose essence he notes down and faithfully reproduces in his work. His dreams are troubled and violent, and like all dreamers, he cannot control their content or outcome – until he turns them into films.
The therapeutic benefits of art for the artist are axiomatic and none have been more outspoken in this respect than Yayoi Kusama who stated bluntly: ‘if it weren’t for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago’.98 Kusama uses art to stave off her suicidal impulses but practitioners can also find solace for lower levels of anxiety in the public exhibition of their work. Many artists have spoken of their feelings of despair at being able to control events in their lives and assert that they gain a modicum of self-determination only through the manipulation of elements in their work – as the performance artist Gary Stevens confided, he feels more insecure at social events than when working live.99 An artist may experience a sense of empowerment when she takes possession of a gallery space or stages a live performance; at last, she is calling the shots. She creates an environment in a pocket of time in which she largely directs the outcome of events. Some take the opportunity to preach (Kevin Atherton); others set a trap for the audience (Vito Acconci). There are those who create a home from home, dressing the sets with the contents of their studios or their houses (Annabel Nicolson, Allan Kaprow); while others create interactive video playgrounds (Bruce Nauman, David Hall); or calming media lounges, courting the pleasurable engagement of the audience (the Kabakovs, Pipilotti Rist).
Play-grounds
All children build improvised dens, tree houses, shelters in the woods, or simply organise a small part of a shared room into a magical domain. They create miniature kingdoms (and queendoms) where they reign supreme and the terrifying power of adults is re-enacted and diffused in childhood games. Michael Rosen has observed that children’s play represents a shift from the rules made by adults to rules made by children themselves.100 Artists similarly rewrite the rulebook when they invite others to enter into their art games. The psychologist Adam Phillips observed that like the child, the artist ‘wants to be recognised and found, but the child, like the artist, also wants to be able to hide, to know they can hide’.101 Artists thus adopt different levels of disguise in the installation game of hide-and-seek, from Kusama simulating her disappearance in a sea of dots, through Wearing’s childhood surrogate to Tony Oursler’s doll-like doppelgängers. An element of the playground popularity contest persists in works that create social environments. The worst that can happen is that no-one shows up, that no-one wants to be in your game.
The social psychologist Erich Fromm identified the urge to ‘overcome his sep-arateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness [as] the deepest need of man’.102 Reaching out to achieve ‘union with the group’ may ‘overcome separateness’, as Fromm suggests,103 but it also raises the fear of rejection, which may be another reason why artists take shelter in acting out different personas. While Eleanor Antin disperses into various alter-egos – the Ballerina, the King and ‘Florence Nightingale’ – the camera itself can function as a witness for the artist, registering the dimensions of her body: the extent of her reach, the length of her stride, the measure of her stamina. The bodily inscriptions in the work recall Walter Benjamin’s observation that ‘the traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’.104 Paul Taberham has suggested that beyond the registration of artists’ thinly disguised self-portraits, documenting their vital statistics and states of health, art can function as a crude form of sexual display, one that extends beyond the sexual organs: ‘Here’s my art, let’s make babies.’105 Without reaching this level of boldness, George Kuchar used the camera as a social lubricant helping him to meet people: ‘every shot of another person becomes an encounter.’106 Vito Acconci similarly betrayed his social awkwardness in his ‘futile’ desire to change into a woman. Instead, he ‘played out maleness’107 by attempting to seduce the putative female viewer in Theme Song (1973), which he described as a ‘scene for a come-on’ enabling him to ‘bring my legs around, wrapping myself around the viewer’.108 However clumsy or ironic these gendered advances, they do express the anguish of the perennial outsider, more used to rejection than happy integration into the group. ‘There is a compulsion to match others’, wrote Freud, ‘to stay in tune with the many, the masses’,109 and yet the artist remains separate, withdrawn into her exceptionalism. Gilbert and George consider the splendid isolation of the practitioner to be a necessary condition of the creative process, one that enables them to ‘feel the world in a different way’, which in turn qualifies them to avoid the fate of becoming ‘a boring person like everyone else’.110 Heaven forbid!
Above the law
‘Like scientists in our culture’, wrote Suzi Gablik, ‘artists have been encouraged not to worry about the applications or consequences or moral purpose of their activ-ity.’111 A ‘monocentric mythology of the artist’ has evolved, Gablik continues, one that appears to grant them total licence. The landscape artist Christo confirms this view: ‘I think the artist can do almost anything he wants to do.’112 Robert Hughes traces the rise of ‘the Romantic worship of the artist’s creative powers’ to the demise of religious belief in the nineteenth century; the godhead’s ‘traits of omnipotence and self-sufficiency became displaced onto the figure of the painter or sculptor’.113 Vito Acconci has spoken of ‘the fantasy of omnipotence’ that he can indulge when holding the viewer enthralled to his video performances. This leads to instances of mistreating collaborators (as in Acconci’s Pryings [1971], a tape in which he tries to prise open a woman’s eyes) and to varying degrees of assault on the audience. Nowadays, few would coat seats with glue to aggravate an audience as did the Futurist Filippo Marinetti,114 but I can find no published objections to Louise Sudell’s Black Lift (1998) in which she adapted a lift so that visitors became trapped when they pressed the button, their panicked faces being relayed to a monitor outside. It may seem heretical to object to the magnificent Michael Snow’s more extreme optical-acoustic works such as Triage (2004), a two-screen work made in collaboration with Carl Brown. Snow’s contribution to the work was ‘24 images per second of everything’,115 a rapid-fire montage of found images including animals, colour charts, landscapes and pornography, flickering impressions barely breaking into the perceptible field, and accompanied by an ear-splitting sound track. I submitted to the work as long as I could bear it. I had a similar feeling of being out of synch with the prevailing consensus in London at a screening of work by Luther Price who subjects found footage to the standard physical abuse – burying, hand-painting and scratching, resulting in a sea of optical babble. Erika Balsom wrote of ‘beautifully assaultive films’116 and although I could appreciate their historical value, their use of the liberating ecstatics of abstraction and, following Balsom, the curatorial integrity of the screening itself, on the day I experienced a solipsistic work that took no account of the spectator’s experience, the artist blithely blinding and deafening the compliantly seated audience.117
The ‘coercive nature of screen-based viewing’ has been well documented, principally by Kate Mondloch who extended her notion of audience control to an analysis of the configuration of installed works.118 Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor (1969) in which visitors were obliged to squeeze down a narrow, claustrophobia-inducing opening between two theatre flats, Mondloch described as an example of ‘the bullying of built structures’.119 Apparently, Nauman was not satisfied with the work and found ways to ‘control the situation’ more effectively in future versions using saturated coloured lights and CCTV.120 Robert Smithson observed how film already ‘wraps us in uncertainty’,121 and László Moholy-Nagy planned an unrealised film in 1936 that would include ‘shocks, surprises, uneasiness and oppression’, cumulatively designed to ‘scare’ the public.122 However instructive or thrilling the resulting cinematic experience might be judged, this does not change the fact that the artist wielding the moving image is holding a sensory weapon with which it is possible to indulge aggressive instincts, maltreating the viewer with impunity. And whilst in self-preservation mode, the spectator finds it difficult to think.
These belligerent works are regularly staged in the international network of homogenised galleries and museums. Here, clean white (or black) boxes function like neutralised ‘free’ transitional spaces, where, as Amanda Beech observed, anything can happen ‘as though galleries were a sort of ethical prophylactic’.123 Where any real criticism has been levelled at the constitutional hubris of the artist, it has taken the form of renewed accusations of narcissism.124 Beyond Krauss’s original shot over the bows in 1976, Miwon Kwon has lamented the extent to which contemporary art ‘restores the centrality of the artist as the progenitor of meaning’.125 For her, the ‘renewed focus on the artist leads to a hermetic implosion of (auto)biographical and subjectivist indulgences, and myopic narcissism is misrepresented as self-reflexivity’.126 How should an artist avoid this regression into apolitical individualism? In the 1980s, Kevin Atherton saw the solution in the strategies he adopted for positioning his work. He condemned national art spaces as ‘an ever-diminishing centre or so-called centre of creativity’.127 He resisted ‘being drawn into that centre’, because for him, ‘it’s not the centre, it’s the plug hole. The real centre is at the edge and that’s where I want to be.’128 Whether or not Atherton still subscribes to this principle, I cannot say, but it is clearly unrealistic. Even dancing around the edges of the plughole, artists cannot make work without impressing their views upon an audience – and in this respect, Atherton has hardly been shy. Narcissism or hubris are inevitable outcomes of the desire to create and the wish for others to witness one’s enterprise is a fundamental human characteristic. This does not absolve artists from the ethics that regulate encounters with the public in other spheres, nor does it blind us to displays of unfettered amour propre. However, it does signal the will of the artist as a dynamic force in the conception, execution and reception of a work, a consideration of which should form part of any expanded analysis of the work. Artists are lured by the opportunity installation offers to create a temporary physical universe, a totalising environment bathed in the enchantments of the moving image. Installations function as a mirror to the subterranean phantasmagoria and the waking dreams of the artist’s creative imagination. Art can provide a sense of (temporary) agency and those few who achieve even partial material and critical success enjoy the recognition of others and they maintain that connection with a wider public for as long as their brand sells. I suggest that beyond all the joys and agonies of the creative process, immediate recognition and endorsement by her peers is what is in it for the artist.129
Last words
In these pages, I have attempted to chart the various historical and disciplinary strands that run through contemporary practices of moving image installation. I have reviewed the political and theoretical ideas that inform the work at different times, in the hands of a variety of artists and from the perspectives of a range of critics and commentators. My question for ongoing research revolves around debates about spectatorship. When and to what extent we can ascribe agency to viewers and/or participants in the embrace of an installed work? This question has led me to consider the discursive, expressive and personal power wielded by the artist. Further investigation is needed into the dynamic between her individual will and the point of both reception and resistance that constitutes the spectator. I would like to see cognitive science applied to a triangulated study of the physical emplacement of the moving image in the gallery space and the use of empirical methods to measure spectatorial choice and levels of attentiveness. Finally, statistical methods could usefully be applied to formally investigate the gap between the artists’ intentions and the outcome of a creative project, in the flesh – a kind of meta-market research for fine art. In any study I would like to see maintained the principle set down by the philosopher John Locke in the seventeenth century, that ‘the rational man will hold his opinions with some measure of doubt’; that is, I would advocate that we proceed with a degree of reasonable scepticism.130
NOTES
1 Plato, The Last Days of Socrates (1954), trans. Hugh Tredennick. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, p. 33.
2 See Catherine Elwes (2013c) ‘Visible Scan Lines; on the transition from analog film and video to digital moving image’, Millennium Film Journal, 58, pp. 58–65.
3 Marty St. James (2001) ‘Video Telepathies’, Filmwaves, 14, p. 59.
4 Ken Jacobs, letter to Eivind Røssaak, in ‘Celluloid City: Diary from an Encounter’, Millennium Film Journal (2009–10), no. 52, p. 17. Jacobs is reiterating Annette Michelson’s view of his practice as an ‘act of congress’.
5 Jonathan Walley (2011) ‘Not an Image of the Death of Film: Contemporary Expanded Cinema and Experimental Film’, in A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball and David Curtis (eds) Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. London: Tate, p. 243.
6 Rosalind Krauss (1999) A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames & Hudson, p. 42.
8 Tacita Dean quoted in Kim Knowles (2012) ‘Tacita Dean, Film’, Millennium Film Journal, 56, p. 5.
9 Jonathan Walley discussing Light Spill at the Expanded Cinema conference, Tate Modern, London, 17 April 2009.
10 Chris Darke (2000) Light Readings: Film Criticism and Screen Arts. London: Wallflower Press, p. 164.
11 Tacita Dean in conversation with Michael Berkeley, Private Passions, BBC Radio 3, 26 February 2012 (no longer available).
12 Germaine Greer and Tacita Dean in conversation at Tate Britain, 2003.
13 Edwin Carels (2010) ‘Reanimating Tom Tom’, Cinéma & Cie, 10: 14/15, p. 113.
15 For example, the 2011 Dior perfume ad that seamlessly incorporated appearances by the late movie stars, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich or the re-released Chanel No. 5 ad featuring Monroe, first shown in 1960.
16 See Erika Balsom (2012) ‘Brakhage’s Sour Grapes, or notes on experimental cinema in the art world’, MIRAJ, 1: 1, pp. 13–25. Survey shows include Into the Light: Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), Shoot Shoot Shoot at Tate Modern, London (2001) and Le Mouvement des Images at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2006).
17 See Thomas Elsaesser (2005) ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology’, Cinemas, 14: 2/3, pp. 75–117.
18 Stéphane Delorme quoted in Chris Darke (2000), op. cit., p. 165.
19 Erika Balsom (2013), Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, op. cit., p. 79. Original emphasis.
20 Jonathan Walley (2011), op. cit., pp. 241–51.
21 See Martine Beugnet and Kim Knowles (2013) ‘The aesthetics and politics of obsolescence: Hand-made film in the era of the digital’, MIRAJ, 2: 1, pp. 80–90.
22 In 2012, Kerry Tribe re-enacted live Frampton’s Critical Mass (1971) as a virtuoso performance perfectly reproducing the fragmented editing of the original footage featuring a man and woman engaged in a bitter argument.
23 Lis Rhodes (2011) ‘Unfolding a Tale: On the Impossibility of Recovering the Original Meaning’, in A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball and David Curtis (eds) Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. London: Tate, p. 222.
24 Colin Perry (2009) ‘Reel to Real’, Art Monthly, 328, p. 3. Perry has added: ‘I want to emphasise that on occasion these invocations are very deliberate, as in the work of Manon de Boer, for example’; email correspondence with the author, 18 July 2014.
25 According to Thomas Elsaesser, ‘salvage memory’ is the American term for cultural memory. AHRC seminar, London, as above. In the context of ethnographic practices, ‘salvage ethnography’ denotes attempts to document cultures that are under threat of disappearance following colonialism and modernisation.
26 ‘The art gallery (has) become the autopsy room and laboratory in which artists undertake a pathological dissection of film grammar and cinema history’: Chris Darke (2000), op. cit., p. 163.
27 Ian Christie discussing Rodowick at the AHRC Artists’ Moving Image Network, University of the Arts London, 19 January 2011.
28 Hito Steyerl (2009), op. cit.
29 David E. James (2009) ‘L.A.’s Hipster Cinema’, Film Quarterly, Fall, p. 59.
30 Rosalind Krauss (2000), op. cit., p. 53.
31 Noël Carroll (1997) Theorising the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 19.
32 Their indifference to medium specificity may be a reaction against what they regarded as a proscriptive approach in the earlier modernist period, when form largely dictated content.
33 Erika Balsom (2013), op. cit., p. 74.
34 Nicky Hamlyn (2010) Medium Practices, unpublished, unpaginated.
35 I am grateful to Janine Marchessault for reporting Snow’s intervention at the 2010 International Experimental Media Congress in Toronto.
36 Jay David Bolter (2001) Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
37 Yvonne Spielmann (2001) ‘Intermedia in Electronic Images’, Leonardo, 34: 1, p. 55.
38 See Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Les Walkling (2012) ‘Reflections on Medium Specificity Occasioned by the Symposium '’Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation’’, Melbourne 2011’, MIRAJ, 1: 1, pp. 37–49.
41 Sean Cubitt speaking at the Exhibiting Video conference, Westminster University, London, 24 March 2012.
43 Genevieve Yue (2014) ‘Cinema immemorial: “EMPIRE” and the experimental machinima of Phil Solomon’, MIRAJ, 3: 1, p. 10.
45 Tim Smith in conversation with the author, Birkbeck, University of London, 2013.
47 Uri Hasson, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin and David J. Heeger (2008) ‘Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film’, Projections, 2: 1, pp. 1–26.
48 I am grateful to Murray Smith for his close reading of this section.
49 Further research can be found in the journal Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind and Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham (eds) (2014) Cognitive Media Theory. New York: Routledge.
50 See for instance, Tim Smith and Sam V. Wass (2014) ‘Individual Differences in Infant Oculomotor Behavior During the Viewing of Complex Naturalistic Scenes’, Infancy. Available online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/infa.12049/abstract (accessed 25 May 2014). Also, Tim Smith and Sam V. Wass (forthcoming) ‘Visual Motherese? Signal-to-Noise Ratios in Toddler-directed Television’, Developmental Science.
51 James Peterson (1994) Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Peterson’s structural approach was expanded in 2011 by Jocelyn Cammack who contends that ‘unstable’ abstract films return us to conditions of uncertainty associated with earlier forms of perception, and productively mobilise the powers of the imagination; see https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/852673/1 (accessed 26 May 2014).
52 Murray Smith speaking at the MIRAJ Cognitive Science and the Moving Image symposium at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, 30 March 2011. Smith’s mapping of cognitive processes onto avant-garde film sets up an interesting tension between the human urge to make meaning and artists’ declared goal to defeat the logic of dominant regimes of representation. Smith has argued: ‘in watching a [Peter] Gidal film … that confronts viewers with absolutely nothing more than the material of film … our problem to solve is: what is the filmmaker getting at here? What kind of experience am I supposed to have?’; email correspondence with the author, 29 May 2011.
53 Sean Redmond and Jodi Sita (2013) ‘My Sherlockian Eyes: An Intro to the Work of the Eye-Tracking and Moving Image Research Group’. Available online: http://cstonline.tv/sherlockian-eyes (accessed 26 May 2014).
55 See Barthes’ essay ‘The Third Meaning’ ([1977] 1979) trans. & ed. Stephen Heath, Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana/Collins, pp. 52–68.
56 Tim Smith, email correspondence with the author, 27 September 2014.
57 James Elkins (1996) The Object Stares Back. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 169.
58 See, Tim J. Smith and J. M. Henderson (2008) ‘Edit Blindness: The relationship between attention and global change blindness in dynamic scenes’, Journal of Eye Movement Research, 2: 6, pp. 1–17.
60 Matthew Sweet (writer/presenter) ‘The Rules of Film Noir’, BBC 4, 23 August 2009.
61 Smith does not claim that infants are fully screen literate; this facility is discernible only in older children; email correspondence with the author, 27 September 2014.
62 Tim Smith in conversation with Ian Christie (2012) ‘Exploring Inner Worlds: Where Cognitive Psychology May Take Us’, in Ian Christie (ed.) Audiences. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 170–84. Available online: http://dare.uva.nl/document/463041 (accessed 26 May 2014). At the 2014 Screen conference, Jeff Langille observed that restricting vision in film has budgetary implications as it obviates the need for costly sets; extended travelling shots also pad out a film for little added outlay.
63 For the evolution of film styles in contemporary cinema, see David Bordwell (2006) The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
65 Tim Smith in conversation with the author, 2012.
66 Murray Smith has contended that ‘beyond superficial similarities, the underlying aesthetic goals of the mainstream and the avant-garde remain very different’; email correspondence with the author, 25 June 2014. This is certainly true of the 1960s and 1970s generation, but a new alignment is occurring as contemporary work increasingly adopts stylistic approaches and production values that originate in narrative film and television (see Connolly 2014).
67 Tim Smith in conversation with Ian Christie (2012), as above.
69 Ian Christie (2012), op. cit., p. 231; italics in the original.
70 Tim Smith, email correspondence with the author, 27 September 2014.
71 Murray Smith (2011) ‘Triangulating Aesthetic Experience’, in Steve Palmer and Art Shimamura (eds) Aesthetic Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 80–106. Smith extends the physiological measures to include phenomenological evidence derived from reported experience and psychological evidence deduced from perceptual behaviour.
72 Gareth Polmeer (2012) ‘States of Flux: Cognitive Science and the Moving Image Symposium, 30 March 2011, Chelsea College of Art & Design, London’, MIRAJ, 1: 2, pp. 279–85.
73 Tim Smith, email correspondence with the author, 27 September 2014.
74 Murray Smith, email correspondence with the author, 25 June 2014.
75 See, for instance, Annie M. Moses (2008) ‘Impacts of television viewing on young children’s literacy development in the USA: A review of the literature’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 8: 1, pp. 67–102.
76 See Alva Noë (2004) Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
77 The team at Deakin University intend to extend their eye-tracking studies to moving image installations.
78 In ‘An Analysis of Visitor Circulation: Movement Patterns and the General Value Principle’ (2006), Stephen Bitgood has studied the circulation of visitors to galleries. Available online: http://www.jsu.edu/psychology/docs/49.4.Bitgood.pdf (accessed 17 December 2014). Ipek Kaynar has carried out research in the Ann Arbor Museum, in which he considered the effects on spectator preferences of visibility in open plan museum design (2005); see chapter one.
80 See Murray Smith (2011a) ‘Empathy, Expansionism and the Extended Mind’, in Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (eds) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 99–117.
81 Murray Smith, email correspondence with the author, 29 May 2011. In her review essay ‘Exhaustion’, Fiona Wright describes the embodied experience of empathy: ‘There is a kinaesthetic response to watching someone else move, our own nervous system knows something of their dancing.’ Available online: http://www.animateprojects.org/writing/essays/f_wright (accessed 26 September 2014).
83 David Bordwell (2012), op. cit.
84 These theorists would include Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler.
85 Linda Nochlin ([1971] 1973) ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, in Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker (eds) Art and Sexual Politics. New York: Collier Macmillan, p. 8.
86 Michael Newman (1999) ‘After Conceptual Art: Joe Scanlan’s Nesting Bookcases, Duchamp, Design and the Impossibility of Disappearing’, in Michael Newman and John Bird (eds) Rewriting Conceptual Art. London: Reaktion, p. 206.
87 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley (1954) The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry Lexington: University of Kentucky. Noël Carroll later argued against this position on the basis that a work of art is ‘conversational’, driven by an artist’s desire to communicate an idea; see Noël Carroll (1992) ‘Art, Intention, and Conversation’, in Gary Iseminger (ed.) Intention and Interpretation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 97–131. In 2006, David Bordwell argued that ‘stylistics’ can ‘reveal intentions’; see http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/figures_intro.php?ss=5 (accessed 26 July 2014); see also Paisley Livingstone (2005) Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
88 For instance, Rachel O. Moore has written ‘A Different Nature’, an illuminating account of Jean Epstein’s practice, published in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds) (2012) Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 117–94.
89 See Melissa Gronlund (2012) ‘Observational film: Administration of social reality’, MIRAJ, 2: 2, pp. 169–79.
90 At a MIRAJ Network seminar on 2 June 2011, I suggested to T. J. Demos that Sven Augustijnen ‘doesn’t reveal [his] intentions … and fails to acknowledge the power that he has to make and manipulate the meaning of the piece’. Demos replied that Augustijnen was ‘not interested in declaring a position’ but instead wished to set up an ambiguity around his relationship to his subject and create ‘a potential ambiguity for us as viewers as well’. Available online: http://www.movingimagenetwork.co.uk/research-resources/extracts-seminar-2/ (accessed 26 July 2014). Others have drawn attention to the social reality of an artists’ practice. In VB55 (2005), Venessa Beecroft exhibited 110 naked models. Writing in the Guardian on 8 April 2005, Luke Harding concluded, ‘the most interesting aspect [of the work] is its almost calculating cruelty’.
91 This refers to works that are founded on ‘inter-relationality, sociality and connection, rather than the self’, Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood quoted in Catherine Fowler (2013) ‘Once more with feeling: Performing the self in the work of Gillian Wearing, Kutlug Ataman and Phil Collins’, MIRAJ, 2: 1, p. 23.
93 Tess Takahashi (2013) ‘Walid Ra’ad and The Atlas Group: The photograph and the archive in experimental documentary’, MIRAJ, 2: 1, p. 77.
94 Steven Eastwood (2012) ‘Powers of the False’, MIRAJ, 1: 2, p. 221. Maeve Connolly also considers the role of collaborators in TV Museum, op. cit.
95 Sigmund Freud in a letter to his wife Anna quoted in Jack J. Spector (1972) The Aesthetics of Freud. New York: Praeger, p. 33.
96 Jeremy Deller quoted in Matheus Sanches (2004) ‘Turner winner: I’m glad I didn’t take art O-level’, Evening Standard, 7 December.
97 Phil Solomon describing Brakhage’s practice in the documentary, Brakhage (1998, Jim Shedden).
98 Yayoi Kusama (1986) Yayoi Kusama: Driving Image catalogue. New York/Tokyo: Parco, unpaginated.
99 Gary Stevens speaking at a symposium on Performance at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, 2 December 2004. As I noted in chapter four, when he was a student at the Slade in the 1970s, Iain Robertson (who collaborated with Stuart Brisley), admitted that it was only when he was performing live that he felt any kind of control over the chaos of his life.
100 Michael Rosen interviewed by Alan Yentob, 22 June 2010, in Imagine, BBC1, episode 3: ‘Art is Child’s Play’.
101 Adam Phillips speaking on Imagine, ibid.
102 Erich Fromm ([1957] 1985, 2nd edn) The Art of Loving. London: Unwin Hyman, p. 15.
104 Walter Benjamin ([1936] 1973) ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, pp. 91–2.
105 Paul Taberham speaking at the Cognition at the Movies symposium, Birkbeck College, London University, 9 November 2013.
107 Vito Acconci (2003) interviewed by Klaus Biesenbach in Video Acts catalogue, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
109 Sigmund Freud (2004) Mass Psychology and Other Writings, trans. J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin, p. 34.
111 Suzi Gablik (1992) ‘Value Beyond the Aesthetic’, Edge catalogue, pp. 16–19.
112 Christo quoted in Suzi Gablik, ibid. p. 18.
113 Robert Hugues (1979) ‘10 Years that Buried the Avant-Garde’, Sunday Times magazine, 30 December, p. 19.
114 See Roselee Goldberg (1979) Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 13.
115 Michael Snow speaking at the British Film Institute in London, 6 December 2008.
116 Erika Balsom (2013b) ‘LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images’, MIRAJ, 2: 2, p. 274.
117 Colin Perry has described other works by Luther Price as ‘rather beautiful elegiac works suffused in personal memories and subjectivities’; email correspondence with the author, 18 July 2014. It would seem that mine is a minority response.
118 See Kate Mondloch (2010) Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. 26.
120 See Bruce Nauman interviewed by Michele de Angelus, May 27 and 30, 1980, in Janet Kraynak (ed.) (2003) Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words; Writings and Interviews. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 258.
121 Robert Smithson (1996) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack D. Flam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 141.
122 Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone (2012) ‘The Lost City: László Moholy-Nagy’s Things to Come, 1936’, MIRAJ, 1: 2, p. 244.
123 Amanda Beech speaking at the Curating Video conference, Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London, 22 February 2008. Beech goes on to argue that galleries should be considered as ‘part of a real social space’, offering the public the same degree of protection as they would enjoy in any other public environment; http://www.curatingvideo.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=63 (accessed 24 August 2013).
124 When interviewed by Matthew Stadlen in 2011, Tracey Emin showed the degree to which she collapses her own perceptions with those of others: ‘If I make something which surprises me, I’m sure that it’s going to be fresh to other people.’ On the Road with Tracey Emin, BBC news channel, 29 May 2011.
127 Kevin Atherton (1980) ‘An Audience with Kevin Atherton’, catalogue folder for PIECES, the Basement Group, Newcastle, unpaginated.
129 Others are also concerned with their legacy. For instance, Tracey Emin is creating her own archive. ‘My studio will become a museum,’ she declared. ‘I’ll leave that as a legacy [so that future generations can] see how a twentieth/twenty-first century female artist operated and worked in London.’ Emin talking to Matthew Stadlen, in On the Road with Tracey Emin, BBC news channel, 29 May 2011.
130 Bertrand Russell paraphrasing Locke in The History of Western Philosophy ([1946] 1961, 2nd edn). London: Unwin, p. 586.