God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught, nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash and Patience.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
PREAMBLE
Conventional wisdom postulates that the aim of installation art is to produce in spectators an expanded spatial awareness, a phenomenological sensitivity to all that is actual and present within a bounded space.1 If artists hope to induce in their audiences an embodied knowledge of their situated place within a gallery, then the medium of the moving image would appear to be the natural enemy of installation. Moving images are moulded to the shape of absent or imaginary beings signalling from elsewhere in time and space, from a dream world with no obvious causal link to the setting in which they are presently manifest. In common with representational painting, but with enhanced effect, film and video can transport viewers to that fictional domain, simultaneously dulling their awareness of the here-and-now. Once immersed in the phantasmagoria of the life-like succession of images, so often writ large in the gallery space, the haptic and vestibular senses dedicated to the orientation of the subject in space go into idling mode, while vision takes the lead in the apperception of onscreen people, objects and places. However convincing these apparitions, they remain tantalisingly out of reach of the tactile, gustatory and olfactory senses and, as Ken Wilder has pointed out, in the moving image ‘the continuity between fictional space and real space is implied but systematically negated’ – there, but not there.2 Central to the trick of cinematic verisimilitude is the concealment, in and around the moving image, of the technical means whereby an illusion of reality is created.3 Where an installation ethos might draw attention to the walls and ceiling delimiting a gallery space, the projected image, while momentarily affirming the presence of any given surface it encounters, nonetheless dissolves, scatters and dematerialises fixed partitions and concrete objects with a kaleidoscope of coloured light. Meanwhile other inactive walls, artefacts or people recede into peripheral awareness especially in the darkened spaces favoured by many contemporary moving image installation artists. The bulky technologies of projectors, monitors, DVD players and flat-screen home video systems tend to fade into the background, upstaged by the lure of glowing emanations from the screen or screens and the quadraphonic invasion of their soundtracks. In the light of the divergent objectives of installation and the moving image – the former to assert material reality, the latter to deflect it with fugitive impressions – I find myself wondering whether my attempt to give an account of their frequent co-incidence in galleries will get mired in a struggle to cohere two irreconcilable artistic practices. Happily for the enterprise of this book, the co-existence of the mimetic enterprise of the image and the concreteness of its material support, framed by the volumetrics of the gallery space, resolve not so much into contradiction as an unfolding dialogue, one with a long history that has given rise to innumerable permutations and adaptations. As I shall argue, moving image installation embodies the perceptual doubleness of the spectator, the human ability to suspend disbelief and entertain two realities simultaneously. Our quotidian experience increasingly demands of us nimble perceptual shifts between any number of remediated realities presented to us in myriad electronic forms. Moving image installation, now ever-present in our galleries and museums, constitutes a resonant analogue of the increasingly enmeshed conditions of understanding we derive from the modern world.
Inevitably, a gallery-based practice, especially one as hybridised as moving image installation, will evoke the creative traditions from which it is descended, incorporating both visual arts and mainstream entertainment media with which it shares its technologies. It is this lineage that I shall attempt to trace in the present volume, isolating the antecedents to which the practice can lay claim, beginning with architecture, the material envelope of installation, followed by the surface incidents and spectatorial positioning of painting, the spatial, object-relation of sculpture and the live encounter of performance art. A short detour into film history will establish the armature of film and touch briefly on early experimental works that lay the foundations for the era of ‘film as film’ in the 1960s and 1970s that follows. The arguments of experimental film’s detractors will then be aired and I will counter these by indicating the lessons we may derive from oppositional film practices, structural/materialist film, in particular. How we perceive the cinematic and televisual image has been central to any discussion of moving image installation and I will consider the various concepts that have addressed the spectatorial position.4 Expanded cinema rightfully occupies a substantial section of the book with its dramatisation of the filmic event. Before turning to video and its relationship to both the space of the gallery and broadcast, I divert briefly into a consideration of sound, a component of installed work that is often overlooked. I end this text with the death and rebirth of analogue film, I offer some thoughts on the role of the artist and speculate on what cognitive science might be able to tell us about the spectatorial experience to supplement the hypothesising of film and video theorists.
Woven into this genealogy of moving image installation is a discussion of the procedural, political, theoretical and ideological positions espoused by artists, concentrating on the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present. I do not attempt a teleological canon of ‘key works’ progressing confidently from successive eras and arriving triumphant at the high renaissance of today’s digital gallery installations. Instead, works come into focus on the basis of their ability to elaborate the issues that arise at each stage in my journey through the landscape of installation and the moving image.
THE OBJECT OF STUDY
It is better to open minds than to influence people.
A moving image installation invites a viewer physically to enter a work that takes account of the setting of the screened event. An installation might encompass lighting, seating (perhaps) and the work’s technical paraphernalia – wires, flat screens, monitors, speakers, playback machines and computers, being more or less in evidence. These could be enhanced, or perhaps diminished by a miscellany of additional objects, static images and live performers all disposed around a delimited, architectural space. While institutional forces – galleries, curators, funders and the army of ancillary critics, commentators, academics and bloggers – all inflect the work, it is the individual visitors who pass through and interact with the installation who contribute the final, vital ingredient in the constellation of elements that make up a moving image installation. Although there are artists who have re-sited moving image environments and events to external locations, including the virtual space of the Internet, my study will be restricted to works intended for public spaces, especially those designated for the appreciation of art: galleries, cinemas, auditoria and museums as well as temporary spaces coded as art venues. These spaces are analogous to the testing-ground of the bedroom, living room or studio. As Marcel Proust remarked, galleries ‘symbolise the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create the work’.6 It is in the concentrated atmosphere of the gallery that I feel most keenly the presence of the artist’s imagination, skill and labour and it is to the gallery that artists who have graduated to feature filmmaking so often return.7
In recent years, there has been something of an epidemic of installations; a hang of paintings, drawings or photographs is said to be installed, sculptures too are grouped to create an ‘installation’ where previously they might simply have been regarded as propitiously arranged. A bricolage of discarded artefacts presented by the artist Tomoko Takahashi would be similarly classified as installation and the pluralism of the discipline has led Claire Bishop to declare the term ‘installation’ not just arbitrary but ‘almost totally meaningless’.8 Many artists, perhaps too many artists, simply turn galleries into cinemas, with perfect blackout and uncomfortable or sparse seating, and call the work a film installation. Nicky Hamlyn has argued that when a projected work takes the spectator ‘out of the gallery space and into the absorbingly illusionistic space of the film’, and where ‘nothing causes the spectator to reflect on the relationship between the space of the film and that in which it is being shown’, then what is being witnessed ‘is not installation, it is cinema’.9 This does not mean that such a presentation strategy is devoid of interest and many commentators, notably Maeve Connolly have reflected productively on the phenomenon of ‘artists’ cinema’, a social space that generates a ‘sense of ownership’ linked to ‘claims that are made by artists upon, and for, cinema’.10
TERMINOLOGY
Already, three different terms for my object of study have arisen: moving image installation, film installation and artists’ cinema to which I will later add video installation and expanded cinema. For the animated element of the equation, William Raban has returned to the designation ‘motion picture’ with its roots in film history, echoing Raymond Bellour’s ‘other cinema’.11 In its installed condition, Jean-Christophe Royoux favours the term cinéma d’exposition, while Erika Balsom revised Bellour’s concept to ‘othered’ cinema, ‘a site at which the cinema has become other to itself’.12 Balsom configures the gallery as a laboratory for film, a place in which its social, technological and aesthetic history can be picked over and recycled. These cinematic terms, mostly generated by the film studies arm of academia, invoke the associations we might have with particular films as well as the wider cultural memory that cinema and cinema-going embodies. Meanwhile, more expansive notions of the cinematic have come from outside the Euro-American axis. Amrit Gangar introduced the term prayōga, which he translates as ‘perpetual experimentation’, a universal process that exists in mainstream filmmaking worldwide just as much as it does in western experimental circles.13 Malcolm Turvey narrows the definition to ‘projected image installations’, thereby excluding screen-based works and the contribution of analogue video art. As these examples demonstrate, there are as many terms for moving image art, in and beyond the gallery, as there are Inuit words for snow.
While academics wrangle over nomenclature, the slipperiness of terms becomes even more apparent if we consider what contradictory words or phrases are in daily usage. Mainstream film is regularly experienced as television while video – analogue, digital, streamed or archived – is often referred to as film. Fragments of home video shot with anything from a Handicam to a mobile phone and uploaded to YouTube are typically described as video clips. In common with many artists’ works, they often adopt a remediated, hybrid form that might include television footage, photographs, computer-graphics, animations or fragments of archive film. Artists regularly say they are ‘filming’ with a high definition digital video camcorder while others describe their practice as ‘media art’, which can mean more or less anything. While the stop-start of the analogue VCR and later digital processing enabled the frame-by-frame forensic examination of classic movies, the photograph has become the building block for digitally composited works, ‘photo-films’ made up of innumerable stills. Rob Bernard makes ‘time-lapse photography’, David Claerbout ‘sculpts in time’ and Daniel Crooks creates mesmeric ‘time slice films’. Film is not involved in any of these works nor even ‘filming’ in the conventional sense.
My own preference is for the descriptor ‘moving image’ because it emphasises the dynamic element of apparent motion that unifies all the work I reference in this volume. My strategy might seem foolhardy, given Peter Kubelka’s reminder that ‘cinema is not movement … cinema is a projection of stills’, the only movement involved being the shunting of the filmstrip through the projector’s gate.14 In the case of video, ‘a still image does not exist’, declared Bill Viola, ‘in fact at any given moment a complete image does not exist at all’.
15 Indeed, technically, a video is a sensitised, static grid subject to continuous electronic scanning. However, I would argue that the impression of movement in film and video, the continuous flow of imagery that registers upon the viewer’s senses is not diminished by the technology’s structural stasis.
16 Devices for capturing moving images have been designed to achieve precisely that sensation of flux, which is what attracts artists to the medium. With the addition of sound, the moving image creates as close an approximation of life-likeness, of the observable world as it is possible to manufacture – as Ken Wilder put it, ‘Brad Pitt is breathing’.
17 For me, ‘moving image’ implies a lack of discrimination between artist and technician, often one and the same individual, and between analogue mediums where video was regularly characterised as the poor relation of film – something one might practice
en route to film, equivalent to the sketch for a large-scale painting. Beyond its demotic credentials, its blurring of conventional hierarchies and its sense of locomotion, historically, ‘moving image’ also encompasses the idea that film and video artists have significantly expanded and reframed the traditions of art as well as those of cinema and broadcast television.
18 For better or worse, I shall stick with ‘moving image’.
The ratio of screen-based or projected imagery to material objects disposed in the gallery space varies across the history of moving image installation. At times, the image has been subordinate to unruly collections of found objects, or, as in the apocalyptic installations of Christoph Draeger, reduced to a TV set flickering abjectly in a corner. The moving image can be fractured in a bricolage of its own technology as it was in the multi-monitor works of Nam June Paik, or it can be upstaged by the drama of a performative media event choreographed by a contemporary artist such as Greg Pope. In the 1990s and into the new millennium, the materiality of film and video was, in some quarters, suppressed in favour of the reification of cinematic and televisual illusionism rendered as ecstatic spectacle. The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of interest in obsolete analogue technologies that once again put the apparatus of film and video centre stage; for example, Rosa Barba’s ‘sculptural’ films, Gibson and Recoder’s funereal pile of lost movies, or David Hall’s graveyard of televisions. Digital media have spawned their own form of techno-fetishism as exemplified by the wizardry of Jeffrey Shaw’s breathtaking multi-screen works. Other approaches pursue an interactive aesthetic within a single physical space or across multiple venues as in early work by David Hall, Dan Graham and Peter Campus, or more recently in ‘convivial’ installations by Pipilotti Rist or Gerard Byrne, while ‘jukebox’ viewing lounges for browsing visitors are common. Artists such as Adrian Piper, Stuart Marshall, John Akomfrah and Eija-Liisa Ahtila have harnessed video as a discursive medium, creating an arena for storytelling and lyrical explorations of social, racial and sexual identity. Other artists including Martha Rosler, Fantasy Factory, Mike Stubbs and Ann Whitehurst invoke the association of video with information gathering, and its historical relationship to campaign politics. Artists may also reassert a documentary and ethnographic regime in order to highlight a political cause, however obliquely, for instance, Aernout Mik, Hito Steyerl, Omar Fast or Sven Augustijnen. A moving image installation may be staged as a disquisition on the nature of being, or allied to environmentalism, as in the work of Simon Faithful. Artists like Christian Marclay have challenged our notion of cinematic time and space, while others such as Isaac Julien have interrogated the institutions that host them and critiqued the markets that reap the profits – albeit symbolically.19 A moving image installation may give rise to an immersive sensation as in the work of Doug Aitken or Pipilotti Rist, playing out the existential moment of the cinematic encounter with every trick in the ‘movie’ conjurer’s book. Others, such as Matthew Barney, Sam Taylor-Wood and Candice Breitz exploit the aura of glamour attendant on the moving image’s family connections to Hollywood.
If one concurs with Thomas Elsaesser’s claim that ‘there is no art outside capitalism and technology’,20 or Dean Kenning and Margareta Kern’s conviction that there is ‘no autonomous critical sphere’
21 then it is easy to ‘succumb’ to a ‘defeatist mood’.
22 However, many artists believe that it is possible to critique the system from within and, like Kenning and Kern, devise projects that ‘brush directly against neoliberal power’.
23 Although oppositional practices are compromised at every turn, according to Julian Assange, when it comes to the establishment, ‘the cage can still be rattled’.
24
Sean Cubitt has insisted on the continuing potential for moving image to be annexed to a ‘renewed political aesthetics’.25 Beyond exposing the ecological cost of the material substrate of its own technologies, it can ‘recount the tragedy of capital’s interference in the processes of inhabiting surfaces and geologies’ and indeed document the ‘unerased memory’ of the collateral damage in both the human and non-human sphere. This invites the subject to take responsibility for the condition of the planet and place its ‘duty outside itself with the unmourned and the excluded’.26 As a medium that allows makers to present arguments, discussions and polemics it will always attract those with a political agenda. In terms of representation, the moving image mediates reality, thus ensuring that the image is always incomplete, and in the cracks that open up, it can undercut dominant readings. Moving image installation trades in ambiguity by virtue of its occupation of that liminal space between material reality and what we understand to be not-real, yet present to the senses and the imagination. By staging what is familiar in an unexpected setting and offering up the uncanny for inspection in relative safety, moving image in the gallery holds the potential to recalibrate the terms of our engagement with our contemporary environment.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR: NAILING MY COLOURS TO THE MAST
I believe that every work encountered contains a potential that rewards thoughtful consideration and in spite of the discrediting of authorial intention, I never disregard what artists themselves say about their work. Many of the installations discussed in these pages are included because I have experienced them at first hand, and, given the emphasis installation artists place on viewer participation, being there undoubtedly provides the best access to the work. However, there are historical installations that I have admired and imagined from the fractured remains of their documentation, and whose meanings I have appreciated through the insights of others. I will occasionally allow my own enthusiasms, and no doubt prejudices, to invade the canvas of this book but at the same time, I hope to maintain the wider view that may be of use to students, researchers and enthusiasts of the field.
This account of installation and the moving image is presented as a guided tour – mine is not a definitive history nor do I exhaust the potential theoretical frameworks that might be constructed around the work. As both an insider and an observer, I devote the present volume to a speculative investigation into the mesh of influences that have converged in a field of practice that demonstrates a remarkable ability to beguile even the most media-bombed among us into paying attention.
NOTES
1 The film theorist Michele Aaron has invoked the distinction between the ‘spectator’ who is ‘the product of the ideological machinations of cinema’ and the ‘viewer’ who constitutes a living, breathing historical subject. However, since there is chiastic exchange between these two conditions of spectatorship, and one would be hard put to say where one ends and the other begins, I have used the terms interchangeably according to the demands of style. See Michele Aaron (2007) Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
2 Ken Wilder, ‘Levels of Unreality’, unpublished paper delivered at the Expanded Cinema Symposium, Central Saint Martins, London, 20 May 2009.
3 Here, I include the conventions of classic Hollywood filmmaking, in which editing is rendered transparent, actors ignore the camera, sound and picture are synchronised.
4 The term ‘televisual’ is employed by John Thornton Caldwell in his book Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (1995). I use this term throughout to mean the language and formal conventions of broadcast television.
5 Chantal Ackerman in conversation with Michael Newman, Tate Modern, March 2002.
6 Marcel Proust quoted by Theodor W. Adorno, in his essay ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, in Prisms ([1981] 1988), trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 179.
7 Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood regularly test their ideas in a museum environment. Even Thomson and Craighead, whose work is located online, now show in galleries.
9 Nicky Hamlyn (2002) ‘What’s wrong with cinema in the gallery’, MIRAJ, 1: 2, p 265; p. 266.
10 Maeve Connolly (2009) The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen. Bristol: Intellect, p. 9.
11 See Raymond Bellour (2008) ‘Of an Other Cinema’, in Tanya Leighton (ed.) Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader. London: Tate/Afterall, pp. 406–29.
12 See Jean-Christophe Royoux (1998), ‘Remaking Cinema’ in Marente Bloemheuvel, and Jaap Guldemond, Cinéma Cinéma: Contemporary art and the cinematic experience. Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, p. 21 and see also Erika Balsom (2013) Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, p. 16.
13 See Amrit Gangar (2006) ‘The Cinema of Prayōga’ in Brad Butler and Karen Mirza (eds) Cinema of Prayoga; Indian Experimental Film & Video 1913–2006. London: no.w.here, pp. 9–26.
14 Peter Kubelka (1970) ‘Interview with Peter Kubelka’, in P.A. Sitney (ed.) Film Culture Reader. New York: Praeger, p. 291.
16 Colin Perry has added, ‘Yes – in fact it is enabled by it. Those gaps in the film and the sequencing of discrete images, and the flow of light in video are the technical means that deliver the impression of movement to the viewer’; email correspondence with the author, 23 May 2014.
17 Ken Wilder speaking at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, 18 May 2011.
18 The influence of artists can be seen everywhere in the mainstream from the Ariston ad reworking Zbigniew Rybczynski’s Tango (1983) through to the Centre Park commercial based on Tim Macmillan’s time slice camera technique to Steve McQueen’s recent Academy Award-winning successes in commercial filmmaking.
19 Julien’s exhibition Playtime (2014) at Victoria Miro in London addressed ‘the nuanced subject of financial capital’ and ‘interconnected major figures in the world of art and finance’ (Miro gallery publicity).
20 Thomas Essaeser, unpublished address to the AHRC Artists’ Moving Image Network, University of the Arts London, 8 June 2011, unpaginated.
21 Dean Kenning and Margareta Kern (2013) ‘Art & Politics’, Art Monthly, 369, p. 2.
23 Dean Kenning and Margareta Kern (2013) ‘Art & Politics’, Art Monthly, 369, p. 4. Colin Perry has commented that ‘not all galleries are alike; you can say and do things at the Showroom or Gassworks about the oil economy than you can’t at BP’s Tate’; email correspondence with the author, 23 May 2014.
24 Julian Assange in conversation with Amy Goodman and Slavoj Žižek at the Troxy Theatre, London, 2 July 2011.
27 See, for example, Catherine Elwes (2000) Video Loupe: A Collection of Essays By and About the Videomaker and Critic Catherine Elwes. London: KT Press; see also, the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) of which I am a founding editor.
28 See, for example, Catherine Elwes (2005a) Video Art: A Guided Tour. London: I.B. Tauris.