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255 11 Into the “Imaginary” and “Real” Place: Stan Douglas’s Site-Specific Film and Video Projection JI-HOON KIM FILM AND VIDEO PROJECTION IN THE GALLERY AND THE ENGAGEMENT WITH PLACE In the terrain of contemporary art, the projection of film and video in the gallery is a popular means of combining an image, a viewing subject, and a space. The term projection refers to the transfer of images—those made of light but not identical to it in their final figuration—onto the surfaces that embody them. This “travel of luminous images”1 is inherently indissociable from the apparatus and the space-time situation in which the viewer perceives them. In this sense, the concept of projection offers us the rendering of two places simultaneously; first, we are invited to an “imaginary” place carried and framed by the luminous images that adhere to the material and technical constitution of its apparatus (natural or electric light equipment and film or video projector), and second, this journey literally takes place in the “real” place through which the images travel with the operation of the apparatus. The now pervasive use of projection in gallery-based exhibition and the concomitant burgeoning of time-based moving images in this mode of exhibition date back to the inception of film and video installation during the 1960s and early 1970s by a number of artists and experimental filmmakers who called into question relationships between those two—imaginary and real—places. Their variegated experiments were driven by two different yet often overlapping intentions. On one hand, some filmmakers, such as Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, and Anthony McCall, forged nonnormative modes of projection to elicit the inseparability of the two, distancing themselves from the theatrical format that is still dominant in our experience of moving images. In the institutionalized theatrical mode of projection, the apparatus of theatrical projection remains invisible, its images fixed onto a single screen and separated from the auditorium wherein viewers 256 | JI-HOON KIM are obliged to maintain their immobility. As much discussed in the discourses of apparatus theory, this formation is understood as inducing viewers to identify with the images and thereby to be little concerned with the material conditions of the space framing them, including the screen, the auditorium, the light of projection, and so forth.2 Seen in this light, the real place in the dominant mode of cinematic projection serves to enhance the illusory power of the imaginary place contained in the images as its existence is neutralized. By contrast, nonnormative forms of film projection installed within the walls of the gallery—split or multiple screens, and mobile projection via rotating equipments—provided multiple or decentralized perspectives, while, at the same time, they exposed to viewers their apparatus. In this way, they turned the viewers’ attention not simply to images on the screen (the imaginary place) but “to the surrounding space, and to the physical mechanisms and properties of the moving image”3 —the real place. The interconnectedness of those two places, too, was explored by many video artists of the time: Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Graham, to name just a few. Their works were not strictly projective in the sense that they utilized the video monitor instead of the projector, but the artists assumed that installing it within the various physical positions and settings of the gallery could furnish viewers with the opportunity to contemplate a perceptual process of domesticated spectatorship triggered by televisual devices.4 On the other hand, many of the practitioners’ attempts to devise alternative modes of projection in the gallery aimed at transforming both the exhibition space and its relation to the artwork and the audience. While the institutionalized art exhibition has been tied to regulating its gallery space as the white cube, a framing device that functions to exalt an object to the status of artwork through isolating it from its real surroundings,5 film and video installation promises a transformation of the exhibition place through the experience of projected images. Unlike the evenness or clarity of the light that illuminates the artwork in the traditional museum, the darkened setting of film and video installation introduces a lack of visibility into the exhibition space, thus turning the white cube into the black box.6 This condition engenders the viewers’ somatic and affective involvement in projected pictures. Despite its fascinating and sometimes hallucinatory power, however, projection in the gallery more or less allows viewers to keep their distance from the image...

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