Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art

2. Body and Screen: The Architecture of Screen Spectatorship

20 2. Body and Screen The Architecture of Screen Spectatorship Spectacle is not an optics of power, but an architecture. —JONATHAN CRARY, Suspensions of Perception What we need is respite from an entire system of seeing and space that is bound up with mastery and identity. To see differently, albeit for a moment, allows us to see anew. —PARVEEN ADAMS,“Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety” Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s Wipe Cycle (1969) greets viewers with flickering black-and-white electronic images that rotate through a grid of nine stacked televisions. Commonly lauded as the first work in the field of video installation, Wipe Cycle also numbers among the first to incorporate live feedback by employing closed-circuit video technology. The television sets are arranged in rows of three—an illuminated tic-tac-toe board displaying continuously shifting arrangements of live and prerecorded footage interspersed with images of the work’s viewers themselves. Observers stand entranced before the glowing sculptural environment, studying the intricate shifting combinations of pictures, including their own likenesses. Gray light impulses, or “wipe cycles,” periodically brush across the stacked surfaces , temporarily canceling all imagery. This seemingly haphazard visual display instead follows a detailed script: live playback depicting the viewers ’ images always appears in the center monitor, for instance, while the videotapes and television feed wander between bordering screens in one of four programming sequences interspersed with time delays of between eight and sixteen seconds. In the art critic’s rush to examine the various scenarios played out on the multiple monitors, however, one might neglect a more basic question: how, precisely, do viewers look at screen-reliant sculptures? Body and Screen 21 How might the terms of engaging media installations differ (or not) from observing other art objects? The moving images and illuminated surfaces of screen-reliant works provoke a different kind of attention from other art objects, both psychologically and physiologically. On the most basic level, moving and illuminated imagery insistently solicits the observer’s gaze and in so doing disciplines his or her body. Here I am less concerned with distinctions of the degree of attention various media screens presumably demand—such as the “gaze” conventionally associated with cinematic viewing, in pointed contrast to the “glance” supposedly characteristic of television viewing— than with the fact that illuminated media screens tend to immediately draw the spectator’s attention in any context, if only for an instant.1 Attention, observes art historian Jonathan Crary in his Suspensions of Perception, is the feature of perception that enables subjects to focus on portions of their surroundings and delay or neglect the remainder. The viewer’s shifting attentive Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, Wipe Cycle, 1969. Installation view from “TV as a Creative Medium” exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York, 1969. This side view emphasizes the objecthood of the screens that compose the closed-circuit video environment. Courtesy of Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider. conduct with screen-based technologies, then, has weighty consequences for media art spectatorship. Although this chapter will investigate the cultural foundations for this behavior—why and how viewers focus on media screens, whether inside or outside of the art gallery—physiological explanations are equally note22 Body and Screen Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, Wipe Cycle, 1969. Artist’s diagram of the installation’s complex video-programming cycles. Courtesy of Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider. Body and Screen 23 worthy. Scientist Christof Koch, for example, in an important neurobiological study of consciousness, explains how the viewer’s focus on certain objects is essentially involuntary. “Some things don’t need focal attention to be noticed. They are conspicuous by virtue of intrinsic attributes relative to their surroundings,” he writes. “These salient objects rapidly, transiently, and automatically attract attention.” Screens, he points out, aggressively and inexorably claim a certain amount of concentration. Tellingly, the ubiquitous video screen is Koch’s first concrete example: “It takes willful effort to avoid glancing at the moving images on the TV placed above the bar in a saloon.”2 Koch’s account is helpful in explaining the observer’s obedient posture in front of flickering images such as those in Wipe Cycle, even if, as rehearsed in the previous chapter, the viewer’s experience with screens employed in sculptural installations can be considerably more complex. As we shift from the saloon to the salon, Koch’s point about how certain salient objects unavoidably influence viewing...