Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art

3. Installing Time: Spatialized Time and Exploratory Duration

40 3. Installing Time Spatialized Time and Exploratory Duration The “other cinema” of today. . . emerges as an attempt to insert spatial modes into the temporal dimension, and to “install time” in space. Installing time is a matter of choosing the right spatial model, the most adequate “schematism” allowing the translation of temporal properties into space. —DANIEL BIRNBAUM, Chronology It is well known that installations made with time-based media have become increasingly pervasive since the 1990s, aided by the enthusiastic institutional embrace of this now predominant art form and exemplified in celebrated screen-reliant sculptures by artists such as Tacita Dean, EijaLiisa Ahtila, Douglas Gordon, Doug Aitken, Bruce Nauman, Pierre Huyghe, Pipilotti Rist, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Stan Douglas. The temporal dynamics of post-1990 screen-reliant installation art have been rigorously assessed in recent years by scholars in art history as well as film and media studies.1 In spite of important differences in their specific arguments, these critics share an interest in the way in which “exhibiting” film and video in art galleries allows viewers a critical standpoint from which to better understand the intricacies of time itself in our media culture. This chapter complicates the current discourse surrounding temporal experimentation in media installation art by drawing attention to an aspect that remains undertheorized: the multiple and sometimes contradictory durational impulses at work in the presentation of moving images to moving bodies in space. As evocative attempts to, in critic and curator Daniel Birnbaum’s words, “install time in space,” the many media installations created since 1990 that use time as a material are as variegated as they are abundant. Prominent examples range from a classic Hollywood horror movie extended over approximately twenty-four hours and projected onto a transparent Installing Time 41 screen (Gordon) to a panoramic, eight-hour quasidocumentary video of an artist’s studio screened onto four walls (Nauman), a rapid-fire circular narrative played out on eight screens across three rooms (Aitken), and a richly textured twenty-four-minute film projected onto two adjacent screens (Ahtila). Close readings of these four familiar works—Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001), Aitken’s electric earth (1999), and Ahtila’s Consolation Service (1999)—will allow us to investigate the overlapping and at times conflicting temporal impulses—artistic, institutional, individual—that structure the viewer’s experience with these screen-reliant pieces. While the audience’s expected time commitment is putatively preordained in the case of viewing non-installation variants of film or video (such as experimental film or single-channel videotapes, whose discrete duration implies some sort of closure, however unresolved), viewers routinely enjoy what one might call an exploratory duration in observing gallery-based media installations: that is, spectators autonomously determine the length of time they spend with the work.2 Largely unburdened by externally imposed timetables, museum visitors of film and video installations appear to be free to walk in or out at any time. As Fredric Jameson has observed about video in a different context, “We can always shut [it] off, without sitting politely through a social and institutional ritual.”3 This chapter extends chapter 2’s analysis of the charged relationship between bodies and media screens by investigating the multifaceted conditions that grant viewers the apparent autonomy to determine how long they will observe moving-image installations, as well as the critical import of the ambulatory observer’s shifting power. What might promote the audience’s self-directed “window shopping” approach toward these spatialized timebased objects?4 Could there be something structural to the work itself that incites or compels the spectator’s perceived temporal self-sufficiency? If not, who or what is in charge and to what effect? And finally, does the institutional framework of the art gallery oblige viewers to stay to see all of the film or video footage or, in a seeming paradox, might it invite them to keep on strolling at their own pace? As we shall see in what follows, the individualized, exploratory duration of engaging gallery-based installations is central to the complexity of screen-reliant installation, both in terms of its critical leverage and its ideological function. This open-ended mode of engagement is routinely praised for allowing alternate modes of interaction with media technologies and with the structure of time itself. At the same time, however, this form of spectatorial empowerment is...