: .
Bert: “It’s
easy. Now let’s see.
You think…. you wink….
you do a double blink.
You close your eyes and… .jump.”
and the objects that surround it.
Jane: “Is something supposed to happen?”
[Walsh, 1964.]
Just as
Bert fails to “jump” into the
world within the picture drawn on the footpath
in Mary Poppins, so is contemporary art
failing to understand the relationship between
the screen [1] and the
installational context of which it is part.
While Walt Disney could rely on a timely
tune and a special effect to fool the viewer,
contemporary video installation has no such
sleight of hand with which to assist the
audience in making the transition between
the modality of the screen and the modality
of the installation. Instead the viewer
remains stranded on the footpath and must
constantly cross the threshold that is the
monitor, oscillating between the information
on the screen
While visual arts practice has for 40 years2
been essentially a multimedia discipline,
the screen is afforded a treatment within
installation art that perpetuates a sense
of difference and separates it from other
media. [2]
Indebted
to modernist notions of truth to materials,
installation art brings together a disparate
body of materials and integrates them into
a cohesive statement. The contextual reading
of media in which the associations and surrounding
contexts are accepted as central to the
work, is the basis of not only contemporary
art practice but also the gallery. Even
the idealized neutrality of the “white
cube” is subject to this contextual
reading.
Yet the screen has largely escaped contextual
reading and is treated in a manner inconsistent
with other media in the installation. The
apparatus of the screen — i.e. the
monitor — is frequently ignored both
as an object within the installation and
as the context for the screen.
In this way the monitor assumes a position
parallel to the historical role of The Frame
in painting. [3] It separates
that which is interior from that which is
exterior. It becomes the interface between
the spatiality of the screen, the interior,
and the spatiality of the installation,
the exterior.
Why is it that installation art, despite
having integrated almost all other media
into art practice, has failed to bridge
the gap between the interior of the screen
and the exterior of the installation? Is
there a fundamental difference in the way
that we experience screen media that predisposes
an incompatibility between these elements
or has contemporary art practice simply
failed to find the “spoonful of sugar”
that will enable it, like Mary Poppins,
[3] to swallow its medicine and make a seamless
transition, back to the painting on the
footpath?
This paper
explores the reading of the screen in an
installation art context in order to identify
strategies for the integration of the screen
in installation art. [4]
The apparatus, the image and the space.
The video monitor, computer screen and data
show are the common apparatus of the image
in installation art. [5]
In each case the image presented is site
specific, not only to the apparatus that
is its source but
also to the “site” that is the
origin of the image. Both installation and
screen image thus become site specific elements.
A screen image is never without a source;6
the source being the apparatus that projects
the image onto a surface. The apparatus
is the monitor or the projector inclusive
of the screen surface. The apparatus is
the frame separating “two absolutely
different spaces that somehow coexist”
[Manovich, 1995, p.1]. It is the border
between interior and exterior.
It is however only the secondary site within
which the image is located. The primary
site is that of its origin, where it was
made: in the case of the video image, where
it was filmed; in the case of the computer-generated
image, the software
that was used. This is the space of the
screen interior. It is based in the relation
between the image [4] and
a space that is “elsewhere”.
This reading treats the image as a representation
that never becomes an autonomous original
that is a property of the apparatus alone.
The installation is the space within which
both these sites – the apparatus and
the elsewhere — are contextualised.
It is the exterior space separated from
the interior image by the apparatus —
the
monitor, the frame. Installation is often
site specific [7]. Like
the screen image the installation exists
in a particular
space and belongs to a specific period of
time. It is radically changed if it is re-made
or exhibited elsewhere.[8]
Both screen image and installation relate
to a specific site. Installation is present
in its own site, whereas the screen image
is premised in a site elsewhere.
Contemporary
art would have us see the screen as a strange
non-site that is neither the image, the
apparatus nor the physical context. The
screen in this sense does not exist, or
rather exists only as a concept defined
by other parts. Absent if any one element
is missing, the screen is an authentic illusion.
It exists as a product of the vector between
the parts that resembles Barthes tableau.
[9] Our attitudes to these
elements — the apparatus, the image
and the space — form a complex set
of relationships, a triad of shifting perceptions
and contradictions, which the viewer must
navigate.
[5] The
Image.
The notion of the image as a product of
“elsewhere” is supported by
two seemingly contradictory stances that
present
the image as either a window or a mirror.
By extending Lev Manovich’s [1995]
analysis of the classical screen, it is
possible to locate the image within the
framework of the window established by pictorial
representation, a representation that is
“not defined directly by imitation”
[Barthes, 1973, p.69], and is extended by
cinema, television and subsequently amended
by computers. Manovich asserts that in each
of these cases visual culture has been largely
premised on
“the existence of another virtual
space, another three-dimensional world enclosed
by a frame, and situated inside our normal
space” [Manovich, 1995, p.1]. Failing
to analyse the composition of the screen,
Manovich confuses the screen with the image.
It is the image that is the product of another
space and not the tripartite relationship
of the screen. Nevertheless Manovich clearly
establishes a chronology between the illusionary
window of pictorial representation established
by painting and our reading of contemporary
screen images [10].
Anna
McCarthy more clearly separates the image
from the screen in her analysis of television
in non-domestic spaces. As part of exploring
the relationship between the screen image
and its physical location McCarthy analyses
marketing strategies that employ the screen
image to promote products. These strategies
are an attempt to “collapse spaces”
[6] [McCarthy, 2001, p.161]
by employing a “spatiotemporal ideology
of the screen as a kind of window, binding
one place to another and bringing the spectator
closer to another (real or imaginary) location”
[McCarthy, 2001, p.162]. This “collapse
of space” is a result of carefully
contrived “semiotic interplay between
images and things” (McCarthy, 2001,
p132). McCarthy ‘s work relies on
a reading of the image as a window to elsewhere.
For her it is a multi-directional window
that can both transport the viewer elsewhere
and transform the space it appears in. This
duality is the basis for Vito Acconci’s
Television, Furniture and Sculpture: The
room with the American View that enables
us to conceive of the screen image as both
window and mirror. Acconci [1990] asserts
that it is naïve to perceive the image
as a window to elsewhere due to the physicality
of the apparatus that contains it. Acconci
proposes a notion of the image as “some
kind of distorting, inside-out mirror”
(Acconci p125). The content of the image
might be the world elsewhere, but the subject
is a reflection of the viewer and their
perception of the world. In this way the
image can be seen as “placeless: at
least its place can’t be determined”
(Acconci, 1990, p132). For Acconci, then,
“video installation is a conjunction
of opposites” (Acconci 1990, p132),
in which the placelessness of video and
the site specificity of the installation
mirror each other, forming a narcissistic
reflection that Rossalind Krauss (1978)
would claim is the medium of video. In analysing
Acconci’s video Centers, 1971, in
which the artist points for 20 minutes at
the screen, Krauss presents the screen as
a mirror that holds the image of the artist
in the narcissistic gaze between the camera
and monitor. The narcissism of video’s
gaze that is [7] present
in the image effectively eliminates the
exterior world of the installation from
the
image’s interior. The image, bound
up in the reflection of its source, cannot
acknowledge its context. It is a reflection
of the artist and the subject but not the
space that surrounds it. The artist becomes
the elsewhere that is made present within
the installation.
I have
argued here that the image is site specific
in that it is premised in a space that is
elsewhere. This argument does not exclude
the reading of the image as either window
or mirror, as both are representations —
views or reflections — of that which
is elsewhere. The image can thus be located;
it is not “placeless” even though
that place may not be known. The image belongs
to a place that is other than the space
of the installation, a place that is its
source. The image is thus always separated
from the installation by its site specificity,
which exists outside of the site specificity
of the installation. This site specificity
differentiates the image from other installational
elements/objects. While objects may reference
another context their source does not lie
elsewhere. They exist autonomously in the
space of the installation and within the
strategies defined by the artist. [11]
The image
is not, however, autonomous. It relies upon
the electronic apparatus of the screen to
give it form. The apparatus is a presentation
device based on the format of frame. It
is easy to understand televisions, computer
monitors, PDAs (Personal Diary Assistants)
and cellphones in this way because the surface
that receives the image is an integrated
part [8] of the physical
equipment. The screen frame, however, is
not reliant on proximity to the image and
may even be so removed as to escape our
notice. Video projections have established
a niche within contemporary practice by
working between the conventions of painting
and theatre. The datashow effectively hangs
the image on the wall of the gallery and
to a large extent is disregarded by the
viewer in the same way that a conventional
frame is. The darkened gallery space becomes
a theatre and the image becomes something
akin to Manovich’s “classical
screen” which is frontal and disembodied.
[12] Margaret Morse suggests
that the projection is a strange inversion
of interiority and exteriority in which
an image that is “ nothing but light”
[Morse, 1990, p.162] is emitted from the
interior to be manifested in the exterior.
Not only does this notion not bare comparison
to the light emitting from a monitor but
it conceives of the screen as a two dimensional
device. For the video projection the frame
is not the surface of the wall
but the dark invisible space between the
projector and the wall. Viewers who haplessly
walk into this space traverse the frame
and are literally entering the image, much
to the irritation of other viewers whose
expectation of the image has been interrupted.
A frame then is not necessarily visible
but is a requirement of the image that cannot
exist without it. So when Manovich asserts
that “with VR, the screen has disappeared
altogether” [Manovich 1995, p.2),
he is confusing the screen with the frame.
While the virtual and actual spaces have
coincided to eliminate the frontality of
the “classical screen”, the
scale [9] and relative
placement of the viewer have not changed
but the unseen frame of the VR apparatus
has obscured them. As Darren Tofts [1999]
points out in Your place or mine? Locating
Digital Art, virtual reality
requires a meta-place that is “actual”.
Without this “actual” space
virtual reality becomes reality. The very
notion of the virtual then predisposes that
its image is framed. That we can’t
see the apparatus of the frame does not
mean it does not exist. A framing apparatus
then is a prerequisite of the image in order
for that image to remain separate from that
which surrounds it – the space of
the installation.
.
The space
is the place of the object and the viewer.
The apparatus exists as an object in the
space yet simultaneously separates the space
from the image it presents. [13]
The apparatus mediates the relationship
between the space and the image. Installation
art is premised on establishing relationships
between its parts. Installation’s
content then is located more in the space
between its elements than it is in the identity
of the elements themselves. The parts are
treated as signs in a text.
McCarthy includes the screen as part of
the installation’s textual field,
stating: “At such times the wall’s
dense semiotic interplay between images
and things extends to encompass the material
on screen as well” [McCarthy, 2001,
p.132]. She substantiates this by asserting
that elements are capable of “referencing
each other across linguistic and material
[10] categories”.
McCarthy sees the screen as being present
in the space of the installation whereas
in fact the screen, as I have argued, is
comprised of three elements, one of which
is located, as McCarthy acknowledges, “elsewhere”.
This makes it impossible for the screen
to fully participate in the discourse of
the parts that comprise the installation.
Fig.2 – Anna McCarthy. Monitor in
a restaurant. McCarthy’s own methodology
supports this impossibility. Using photography
to document the television in a wide variety
of locations, McCarthy presents photographs
to accompany her analysis.14 In these photographs
the screen image is often so unreadable
or so in contrast with its environment as
to effectively separate it from the objects
that surround it. In the most extreme example
the screen is nothing more than a glowing
rectangle – it is literally missing
from the space (See Fig.2).
I am not naïve enough to argue that
the photograph is a “truthful”
depiction of the site; after all, it too
is an image that belongs to a place that
is elsewhere. But I do want to propose that
[11] these photographs
expose the subtlety of the dislocation that
occurs almost seamlessly between the image
and its environment. This dislocation is
as unnoticeable and as instinctual as a
blink.15 The shift between the interior
and the exterior has become so established
as a frame that it becomes an almost invisible
boundary. But as is the case with the frame
apparatus of VR, our failure to see it does
not mean we do not perceive it.
It is, then, the viewer not the artist who
connects the space of the screen and the
space of the installation and breaks down
the proscenium arch that is the apparatus.
It is, as Margaret Morse points out, the
viewer “who is the subject of the
experience” [Morse, 1990, p.159] —
their own experience, and an object in the
space. Is it here in the vector between
image, apparatus and space that the viewer
is able to experience the screen installation
almost as a seamless whole?
In discussing
Peter Campus’s mem, 1974, Krauss observes
that as soon as “he stands outside
the triangular field of the works, the viewer
sees nothing but the large, luminous plane
of one of the walls in a darkened room”
[Krauss, 1978, p.188]. The screen in McCarthy’s
photograph appears as a glowing rectangle
because the viewer has been removed from
the work by the camera. In the viewer we
find the installations gest [16]
described by Barthes [1973] in which disparate
sites, for Barthes the past and the present,
are brought together. The viewer located
in the vectors of the installation literally
connects the site of the installation with
that of the screen. The screen and the installation
are not otherwise integrated. The viewer
is thus split [12] between
two site-specific locations — the
actual space of the gallery installation
and the meta-space of the image.[17]
This has the effect of doubling “the
viewing subject who now exists in two spaces,
the familiar physical space of his/her real
body and the virtual space of an image within
the screen” [Manovich, 1995, p.6].
While the installation viewer is thus imprisoned
within the vector that is Plato’s
cave,18 the viewer is not immobilized.
S/he simply sees nothing if s/he steps “outside
of the vector formed by these three elements”
[Krauss, 1978, p.188].
An alternative interpretation of the divided
viewer that does not incapacitate the viewer
is found in Guy Debord’s notions of
the spectacle in which the viewer is both
subject and object. In this sense the artwork,
inclusive of the viewer, is both mirror
and window, real and illusory, actual and
virtual. Any separation that we perceive
“is itself part of the unity of the
world” [Debord, 1967, p.1], of the
combined viewer/installation relationship,
[19] that
is housed in the “world” of
the gallery. Seemingly Debord has found
another way to dismantle the frame and separate
the image from the space, the internal from
the external. To do this is simply to impose
a new frame, the frame of the gallery. Continuing
to apply this inclusiveness to each successive
layer of framing would reduce everything
to sameness. However, the unified world
that Debord envisages would still require
Toft’s meta-place to exist in. The
viewer is thus destined to remain in the
vector between image and space where s/he
must find a means of navigating its structures.
[13]
Tactics
for the viewer.
Without
the viewer the vector beaks down. The interplay
of parts ceases as its elements become solipsistic
and isolated. The viewer then assumes a
pivotal role in activating the work and
is the central element in a framework contrived
by the artists. The viewer thus informs
the “strategies” that the artist
employs in the artwork. [20]
The artist, like the “strategies”
of Michel de Certeau, is isolated from his/her
environment. They do not directly figure
in the viewer’s vector and are only
evident through the artwork that is the
strategy. [21] For de
Certeau a strategy serves as the interior,
“the base from which relations with
an exteriority… can be managed”
[de Certeau, 1984, p.36]. De Certeau also
asserts that outcomes are as much a result
of actions as they are of the structures
that govern them. These actions are the
“tactics” of those operating
within the strategic systems. A “tactic”
then is something that occurs within a “place
that belongs to another” [de Certeau,
1984, p.36]. The viewer and his/her “tactics”
remain exterior, outside of the work, informing
it and navigating within it but not determining
its nature. While the relationship between
the viewer and the artist is clear, the
relationship between the screen and the
installation is less clear given that both,
being separate sites, possess “strategies”
independent of each other. Within the larger
strategic construct of the artist they remain
exterior to each other. [14]
The two strategic positions only achieve
awareness of each other via the vector established
by the viewer who is split in two, expected
to conform to two sets of rules. To cope
with this the viewer develops “tactics”
that enable him/her to integrate the elements.
This is how Anna McCarthy failed to recognize
the blank screen in her photographs and
why the data show and VR interface are often
not seen as frames. Viewers willingly blinker
themselves, choosing to ignore the conflicting
spatialities as they strive to make the
work make sense. [22]
It is an
integration that is not authored by the
artist, for the artist does not conceive
of the split. The art world has accepted
the “tactic” of the blink, and
it is ignored in the same way that the Modernist
plinth was not read as part of the work.
It is integration of content but not of
subject. [23] The screen
and the space remain separated. Even the
tactics of the viewer cannot integrate them.
This must be achieved within the work by
the artist, so that there is a singular
strategy that governs the installation (the
screen and the space) and the viewer is
not torn between two locations.
The artist, then, must find a strategy for
integration that removes the viewer from
the vector between the screen and the space.
This strategy must enable the screen, the
space and the viewer [24]
to share the same interiority, rather than
attempt to isolate the viewer in an exterior.
The viewer cannot become passive in the
work, for according to de Certeau they will
continue to develop “tactics”
for interacting with it. The viewer must
therefore become active. Interactivity may
in fact be the “strategy” by
which the artist is able to achieve integration.
[15]
This possibility
is explored by Dr McKenzie Wark where he
identifies interactivity as “the medium
that gives one thing, and one thing only,
back to the artist; the ability to determine
relations” [Wark, 1995, p.280]. Wark
[1995] argues that instead of giving more
choices in constructing the meaning of a
work, interactive multimedia rigidly structures
the way a viewer (or should I say participant)
experiences a work. By integrating everything
[25] Wark conceives of
a singular dimensionality, one in which
the artist reclaims control of the art work:
Along with one dimension and one dimension
alone the possibility of constraint returns.
And with constraint comes the possibility
of making meaning. That one dimension of
the manifold, almost infinite dimensions
of aesthetics is relation. Relations between
sounds, images, movements, words –
between any and everyform. Now the artist
can install a limit within the work to the
omnivorous desires of the viewer, listener,
interpreter. The godlike power of the other
on the end of art to paw at the object,
flip through pages, flick their eyes over
the artwork and on to the next can be taken
back and given to the artist. [Wark, 1995,
p.280] Wark specifically identifies the
interactivity of digital multimedia as the
site of this one dimensionality. But making
the screen alone interactive will not unify
the screen and the installation. The installation
will remain outside of the screen. The installation
space must [16] be located
within the screen and the screen within
the installation space so that there is
only one site for the viewer to interact
with.
This would require installation to relinquish
its dominance over the screen [26] and allow
the “eleswhereness” of the screen
to become part of the nature of installation.
Similarly the screen would accept the otherness
of installation. Installation and screen
would share the same site specificity.[27]
This bears
comparison to Debord’s unified world
— a concept that becomes problematic
if the gallery is excluded and becomes a
meta-space. To achieve integration, the
integrated screen installation must be located
in the world and not separated from the
experience of the viewer.
Dieter
Daniels identifies the Internet as a site
where such an installation might exist when
he says “the Internet dissolve(s)
all contextual relationships” [Daniels,
2000, p.15]. Viewers and location are brought
together by the Internet, as their content
is specific to one location and applicable
to all. For the Internet to become an installation
site it must do more than simply serve as
a pinboard for paintings. It must be active
in the content of the work – it must
be site specific. “Virtual galleries”
operate primarily as extensions of “real
galleries”. They do not establish
an active relationship with the net as context.
They remain an image on a monitor, referential
to that which is elsewhere. To become a
site capable of integrating the screen [17]
space and the installation space, the content
of the net-based art must address its location
and the location must be both content and
media.
The same
anti-institutional, anti-commodity stance
that gave rise to the land-art28 of the
1970s in which artists began making work
in the environment outside of existing gallery
structures has produced Net.Art. The term
Net.Art was coined in 1995 as a result of
a scrambled email.[29]
It has subsequently been adopted to define
what by nature is a diverse intangible practice
that uses the Internet as a site of both
content and media.
Still largely ignored, and for a long time
unnamed by the art world, Net.Art is autonomous
and amorphic. Its decentralised and diverse
nature stems from the manner in which it
is a product of the Internet. Net.Art is
too playful to be taken seriously and too
cynical to be anarchistic. It implants itself
in the very institutionalised systems it
critiques – those of classification,
communication, commodification. Perhaps
the most useful definition to date is to
be found in the “manifesto”
Introduction to Net.Art by Natalie Bookchin
and Alexei Shulgin. In the irony of sections
like Critical Tips and Tricks for the Successful
Modern Net.Artist [Bookchin, 1999, p.3],
this Net.Art project enables the viewer
to assemble a chimerical understanding of
Net.Art. Net.Art eludes any clear definition,
a definition that would be its demise, because
there is nothing to define other than the
activity of the user/viewer. [18]
By turning the viewer into content in this
way Net.Art projects create a feedback loop
between the viewers and the artwork. This
parallels Acconci’s Centres, 1971,
but instead of the artist pointing a finger
at the monitor it is the viewer who is at
the epicentre of the work.
Fig.3 - C5, Softsub.
C5’s Softsub project (Fig.3) that
scans the composition of users’ hard
drives, plots their data profiles on a comparative
grid and restructures their hard drive,
typifies the way that Net.Art turns viewers
into content. The artist has simply managed
information and compiled a database. Content
is derived from the input of users/viewers
interacting with the work. The information
supplied is itself what constitutes the
work. Exhibited as part of the 2002 Whitney
Biennale, 1.1 (Fig.4), another C5 project,
eliminates the need for direct user input.
Instead it uses existing Internet data to
provide a visualisation of the web. The
C5 software searches the web for possible
IP addresses and maps them as a pixel value
on the screen. The viewer can navigate the
web by selecting a pixel. [19]
Fig.4 - C5, 1:1.
Lawrence Rinder notes, “1:1 collapses
the distinction between map and interface.
Its interface suggests that it is the environment
it refers to” [Whitney, 2002, p.116].
The spatial location of the sites around
the globe has become actualised in the image
on the screen. The screen has become a geographical
terrain, an installation space in which
the project exists. It is no coincidence
that metaphors such as surfing, navigating
or architecture have become an integral
part of both web design and use. Metaphors
are, as Thomas Erickson points out, “an
invisible web of terms and associations
that underlie(s) the way we speak and think
about a concept” [Erickson, 1990,
p.21].
If it is hard to conceive of a screen as
a spatially defining agent, consider James
Buckhouse and Holly Brubach’s Tap,
2002 (Fig.5), in which PDAs become the screen.
Users/viewers select one of Tap’s
animated characters to download onto their
PDA. This character can be “taught”
a dance routine, take lessons and give a
recital by beaming information to another
Tap user’s PDA. [20]
Fig.5- Buckhouse and Brubach. Tap.
What is interesting about the work in the
context of this essay is the way that the
mobility of the PDA engages the screen as
a spatial coordinate. The mobility of the
PDA that could be anywhere heightens our
awareness of its physical presence in space.
Its spatial autonomy, or that of the user,
makes it a spatial agent. The PDAs effectively
become the walls of the gallery outside
of which there is nothingness. The act of
beaming, while less tangible than an Internet
connection, is somehow a more physical connection
between participants who must achieve relative
proximity to exchange data. While the Internet,
due to its scale, becomes hard to conceive
of spatially, it is an interrelation of
sites in exactly the same way as the PDA
in TAP.
Encased in a self-referential framework
delineated by images in remote locations,
Net.Art becomes the site where installation
space and screen space are integrated. Every
monitor, [21] every room,
every user connected to the Internet is
part of the installation. It is a sculptural
installation that exists as a result of
the apparatus that frames it, the Internet.
[30]
In bringing both image and space together
within one site-specific frame Net.Art does
not trap the viewer between spatialities.
It exists only in one space — the
screen installation of which the viewer
is part. The screen image and the space
are reduced to one dimension [31]
along with the viewer. The only element
not part of the work is the artist.
Net.Art then is nothing but a rhizome of
autonomous sites. Remove any one of its
parts – the image, the site, the monitor
or the viewer — and the artist is
left with nothing but a strategy. Net.Art
is pure strategy whose contents are determined
by the tactics of the viewer/user.
The problematised
relationship between the screen image and
the installation is premised on a spatial
incompatibility. The screen belongs to a
space that is “elsewhere” and
can never be fully present in the installation.
This “elsewhere-ness”, while
abstract, is not placeless. It ties the
image to a meta-space equal in its specificity
to that of the installation. The viewer
is compromised and must develop tactics
to shift between modalities. The tactical
“blink”, which enables the viewer
to shift between the present and the elsewhere,
also traps the viewer in the vector between
image and installation. Proximity does not
integrate image and the installation. The
semiotic interplay between parts where the
[22] meaning of the installation
is distilled cannot operate across this
vector, or operates in a way that is inconsistent
with the relationship of other parts within
the installation.
The tactical blink is a response to the
doubling of the viewing subject who is divided
between two site-specific locations each
of which posses a strategy independent of
the other. This blink does not place the
screen image as an equal object in the space.
It is an act of selective omission.
In order to integrate, image and installation
must be specific to the same site –
each existing within the other. In the way
that it brings together structure and content32,
Net.Art appears to be positioning itself
as such an installation site. Intangible
in both its identity and physicality, Net.Art
offers opportunities for sculptural practice
to engage the spatiality of screen and installation
on equal terms.
Net.Art, autonomous and disrespectful, has
largely avoided the scrutiny of the art
world. Its inclusion in recent exhibitions
such as the 2002 Whitney Biennale suggests
that this will be shortlived. As the art
world’s disciplinarity remodels itself
once again to embrace this outsider, will
the inclusive site-specific non-locatablity
of Net.Art that makes it effective be retained,
or will it end up on the footpath next to
Bert, waiting for Walt Disney’s remake
of
Mary Poppins? [23]
[1]
This essay treats the screen as a concept
of framing parallel to Barthe’s notion
of the
tableau (Barthes, 1973, p.75). It exists
as a product of the monitor (apparatus),
the image
(video) and the space (installation).
[2]
The exhibition, The Art of Assemblage Museum
of Modern Art, New York 1961 can be
sited as the point from which visual arts
practice became interdisciplinary. However,
the
first multimedia works in contemporary practice
can be attributed to Pablo Picasso (Guitar,
1912).
[3]
Contemporary painting has largely done away
with the convention of the “frame”
as
separate from the artwork. Instead, painting
addresses its boundaries as an integral
concept
within the work.
[4]
This notion of integration privileges the
installation as the dominant site into which
the screen must fit. Integration in these
terms is a prejudiced concept premised on
the domination of an established disciplinarity
over that, which is new. Strangely, installation,
the Johnny-come-lately of contemporary art,
finds itself entrenched within the establishment
of the art world where once it was the radical
outsider striving for acceptance. This is
the integration-turned-assimilation to which
new media are subject. Thus the screen is
in the position of defining its identity
within the installation context. It is expected
to define itself in terms of installation
rather than to negotiate a position based
on its own intrinsic qualities (to develop
tactics that enable it to function within
installation).
[5]
The image produced by the video monitor,
computer screen and data show all involve
hardware that has physical presence in a
space. With the data show we are reminded
of Lev Manovich’s classical screen
and its proscenium arch, but denied this
reading by the installation which forces
us to acknowledge the data projector as
a source for the image.
While physically distanced from the screen
the image/source relationship is no different
from that of the TV monitor and the image.
In fact it is more pervasive in the installation
as it operates across the space.
[6]
In Plato’s cave, the source is the
light by which the image is projected on
the wall of the cave.
[7]
The term “site specific” came
into currency within the visual arts in
the 1960s as artists began to explore process-based
and ephemeral works.
[8]
All installation is not site specific in
that its environment is part of the conception
of the work. Most installations are responsive
to and inclusive of the site to the extent
that they become site specific and can be
distinguished from other forms of art which
are “installed” in a gallery
in a manner consistent with the conventions
of that space.
[9]
“The tableau is a cut-out segment
with clearly defined edges irreversible
and incorruptible; everything that surrounds
it is banished into nothingness, remains
unnamed, while everything that it admits
within its field is promoted into essence,
into light, into view” [Barthes, 1973,
p.70].
[ 10]
Manovich extends this argument beyond the
dual windows of the modern computer to the
window of virtual reality, at which point
his failure to deconstruct the screen confuses
his argument.
[ 11]
I exclude from this discussion artworks
that are so fused with the non-art world
as to become indistinguishable from it in
a manner premised in Beuys’ “art
is life”.
[ 12]
Manovich’s notion of the screen is
based largely on Roland Barthes’ reading
of the screen as an incorruptible segment
isolated from everything which surrounds
it. See page 6.
[ 13]
The Internet window in remote locations
is not inconsistent with this premise. However
in certain circumstances the www is able
to challenge this reading. See page 9 Net.Art
as installation.
[
14]
McCarthy discusses her methodology in pages
20-26 with extensive footnotes regarding
photography [McCarthy, 2001, p.22 footnote
53]. McCarthy acknowledges here the problems
of documenting these sites and the indistinct
quality of many of her early attempts. It
is interesting that she resorted in many
cases to sketches of the environments that
enable her to present the monitor as an
equal in the space.
[ 15]
As our eye moves between the keyboard and
the monitor image we involuntarily blink
as a means of cutting between scenes. This
cutaway device is parallel to that found
in film and video where a break in continuity
can be achieved by cutting away to another
shot.
[ 16]
[Barthes, 1973. pp.69-78].
[ 17]
See Peter Campus’s mem (1974).
[
18]
Plato talks of more than a captured audience.
He is addressing the contextual readings
of truth and knowledge and the problem of
shifting between contextual paradigms. In
our contemporary context, the exterior space
of the installation and the interior meta-space
of the screen.
[ 19]
Debord’s combined spectacle/spectator
relationship to the mirror bears comparison
to Michel Foucault’s Recognition by
Mirror in the Birth of the Asylum. Madness
and Civilization. In Paul Rabinow (Ed.),
The Foucault Reader (1991) London. Penguin
Books.
(p152) – “without surface or
exterior limits Madness would see itself,
would be seen by itself – pure spectacle
and absolute subject.”
[ 20]
There is logically a point here where the
audience becomes the author. But as with
Debord’s spectator/spectacle relationship
this would simply shift the authorship of
the work endlessly outwards in meta-space
as each layer of authorship is subsumed.
[ 21]
With the exception of performance art we
do not directly see the artist when we visit
an exhibition. In this case, too, I would
argue that the artist is absent. They have
employed a strategy that is their body from
which their authorship remains separated.
[ 22]
This is analogous to poorly tuned televisions
in which the continuity of the image is
disrupted by a flicker. After a while the
viewer is able to ignore the interference
and perceives the image as a seamless whole.
[ 23]
Given that the artist is the subject of
all artworks
[ 24]
For the viewer of installation art cannot
be exterior to the work and still perceive
it.
[ 25]
“Signs proliferate, mutate, their
relations with each other, promiscuous and
obscene. Audiences shimmer like a mirage
on the horizon. They warp into black holes
or become polyvalent creators of their own
sense and sensibility. Objects demateralise
into digital bits. Everything is a copy
of a copy. Everything is permitted, and
so nothing is true, not even to itself”
[Wark, 1995, p.280].
[ 26]
See footnote 2.
[ 27]
I exclude artists whose work is based on
the incompatibility of elements. In this
case the duality I have identified becomes
a “strategy” within the work.
The blink in this case is likely to exaggerated,
bringing it to the audience’s attention.
[ 28]
Land-art of the 1970s used the Earth’s
geography as a location for the work. Works
existed not only in the land but in specific
locations that were related to other locations
and existed outside (at least for a while)
of the gallery system.
[ 29]
The term Net.Art comes from an anonymous
e-mail sent to Vuk Cosic in December 1995.
The message was scrambled due to a software
incompatibility. The word Net.Art was the
only decipherable content. Vuk then started
to use this term for the work he was producing.
Alexei Shulgin. (1997). Nettime: Net.Art
– the origin. Retrieved 13/6/02 from
http://www.amsterdam.nettime.org/List-Archives/nettime-l-9703/msg0009.4.html
[ 30]
It is pertinent to note that many of the
more technically sophisticated Net.Art works
present data taken from the Internet spatially.
Often this has nothing to do with the location
of viewers rather the data they have provided.
It nevertheless substantiates the notion
of the Internet as a sculptural artform.
See: Benjamin Fry, Valence, 1999.
www.acg.media.unit.edu/people/fry/valence/,
John Klima, Earth, 2001.
www.cityarts.com/earth.
[ 31]
See: Wark, 1995, p.280
[ 32]
“Structure=content” and “net=art”
[Blank, 1996, p.3].
BIBLIOGRAPHY
