Multi-Media: Video—Installation—Performance (review)

For the last fourteen years, Nick Kaye has engaged in a prolonged collaborative project with the artists he studies, and in important ways “his” books during this period have been co-authored with them. Having identified early on the difficulty of an author writing about forms that aggressively challenge the very concept of the single author, he has subsequently dedicated himself to finding a manner of authoring that foregrounds his “subjects” as collaborators. With his latest project, Multi-Media: Video—Installation—Performance, Kaye continues this work, opening the volume with a submission from Fiona Templeton, and closing it with one from Vito Acconci and the Mekons. Also included are documentations by Pipilotti Rist, John Jesurun, The Builder’s Association, motiroti, and Paolo Rosa of Studio Azzurro. In between, Kaye proposes his own interpretations of these and other artists’ tactics for blending and separating various media in representations and performances of time, space, and “presence.”

Each of the book’s four main chapters offers an in-depth engagement with works of an artist or company, and shorter, though no less incisive analyses of other artists directly or indirectly connected to them. Kaye begins by using John Cage’s Variations V (1965) to demonstrate how technological mediation was employed to heighten rather than diminish a sense of the work’s “liveness.” The unpredictability of sound and video technology made accidents almost certain, and the determination of artists like Cage and Nam June Paik to distort transmissions in the moment of performance emphasized that the times of performance allowed mediated sounds and actions a place in the “live.” In this chapter and later, Kaye relies heavily on Samuel Weber’s Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (1996), in particular the chapter, “Television: Set and Screen.” Weber argues that the transmitted image “contains” the divisions of place and time inherent to the medium, with the result that we are not left adrift in absence or separation, but delivered to what Kaye calls “the presence of vision to events elsewhere” (16).

The specifics of this alchemical process are the subject of Kaye’s next two chapters. The first of these primarily addresses Paik’s early film and video installations—provocations that in some ways followed Cage by siting the phenomenon of ephemerality in projection technologies. Kaye argues that Paik’s pieces proposed more than a unitary experience of time. This was possible because Paik manipulated their operation and so exposed attendants to the time of the equipment’s original state, that of its alteration, and that of the attendants’ own interactions with it during exhibition. Kaye’s analyses of Bruce Nauman’s Corridor Installation (1970) and Dan Graham’s Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974) highlight how these artists used delayed image transmission to engage attendants while causing them to just “miss” themselves projected as part of the installation. By forging multiple times for the attendants, Kaye argues, these works troubled traditional assumptions about the supposed immediacy of artwork that engages attendants with spatial relationships.

Kaye’s second and strongest chapter, “Video Space/Performance Space,” begins by examining Vito Acconci’s work and proposing that selected pieces used various media to separate Acconci from attendants to his performances while simultaneously creating an increased sense of his presence. Kaye makes his argument by following the implications Weber and others have teased out from Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura,” which Benjamin described as “a unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be,” that depends on a person’s or object’s singular location (quoted in Kaye, 111). If the experience of “aura” rests on an operation of difference between object and viewer, Kaye reasons, this distance provides the possibility that separations between performer and attendants may do less to victimize “presence” than to produce it. As examples, Kaye offers pieces such as Seedbed (1972), where Acconci placed himself under a ramp on which gallery-goers walked while he masturbated and spoke to them from below, and Claim (1971), where a monitor...