Installation and the Moving Image

Catherine Elwes

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231850803
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Film and video create an illusory world, a reality elsewhere, and a material presence that both dramatizes and demystifies the magic trick of moving pictures. Beginning in the 1960s, artists have explored filmic and televisual phenomena in the controlled environments of galleries and museums, drawing on multiple antecedents in cinema, television, and the visual arts. This volume traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Sound is given due attention, along with the shift from analogue to digital, issues of spectatorship, and the insights of cognitive science. Woven into this genealogy is a discussion of the procedural, political, theoretical, and ideological positions espoused by artists from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Historical constructs such as Peter Gidal's structural materialism, Maya Deren's notion of vertical and horizontal time, and identity politics are reconsidered in a contemporary context and intersect with more recent thinking on representation, subjectivity, and installation art.

The book is written by a critic, curator, and practitioner who was a pioneer of British video and feminist art politics in the late 1970s. Elwes writes engagingly of her encounters with works by Anthony McCall, Gillian Wearing, David Hall, and Janet Cardiff, and her narrative is informed by exchanges with other practitioners. While the book addresses the key formal, theoretical, and historical parameters of moving-image installation, it ends with a question: "What's in it for the artist?"

CHAPTER ONE

Architecture

INSTALLATION: IN THE BEGINNING…

The ancestry of installation art has been linked variously to the radical theatre and cross-media events of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s, and later, Black Mountain College (1933–1957) and, as I shall discuss in chapter two, to the trespassing of painting beyond the frame, following the Cubist fragmentation of pictorial space. An expanded field of painting joined the atomised remains of sculpture and together they metamorphosed into temporary art environments, assemblages and happenings by the likes of Allan Kaprow, Hélio Oiticica, Carolee Schneemann and the Fluxus artists. Marcel Duchamp has been credited with granting artists licence to put anything into a gallery and call it art, while designers of trade fairs and national exhibitions were often in the vanguard of technological and display innovation.¹ A notable landmark in the history of installation art is the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris where paintings and objects were combined into a total environment, itself conceived as a Surrealist work. At the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, Charles and Ray Eames provided film and slides for a multimedia ‘Information Machine’ in the IBM pavilion where a domed structure had been erected. Packed into a ‘people wall’, the audience was hydraulically lifted into the heights of the building where they were confronted with ‘a barrage of visual information simultaneously spread across the various screens’ fitted inside the vaulted roof.² In the 1920s, the constructivist El Lissitzky had already declared that ‘space does not exist for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it’.³ By the 1960s, Minimalist artists were developing a heightened sensitivity to the space in which a work was installed, and as Peter Osborne has observed, they ‘explored a four-fold relational dynamic between objects, their surrounding space, its architectural frame, and the body of the viewer, in which architectural form was a given parameter of the exercise (even when violated)’.⁴ The concept of an exhibition itself gradually shifted from a collection of discrete artworks to a total proposition and the orchestration of a series of disparate artefacts in the space of the gallery became the work itself, the ‘installation’ through which a spectator could drift and with which she could interact. Theodor Adorno drew a parallel between the gallery-goer and Baudelaire’s flâneur, the citizen who in leisure meanders through the streets and arcades of the city, sampling its visual and auditory delights.⁵ In the late twentieth century, this figure came to epitomise the newly mobile spectator of film who now consumed the moving image, not in the regimented architecture of a cinema, but installed in a variety of gallery spaces.

Another ancestral line for installation and the moving image comes down from the nineteenth century and its fascination with the optical toys, magic lantern shows, zoetropes and dioramas, the proto-cinematic gadgets that led to the invention of motion pictures. Early film itself, a phenomenon Tom Gunning has dubbed the ‘cinema of attractions’, emerged in the culture of showmanship associated with the social spaces of fairgrounds and music halls.⁶ Framed by the industrial revolution – the age of steam, electricity, optics and the daguerreotype – impresarios, entrepreneurs and pedlars of illusionistic marvels formed an alliance that developed an important strand of the culture of film exhibition, a topic I will return to in chapter five.

ARCHITECTURAL SPACE

When installation emerged as a defined practice from its disparate antecedents, the architectural setting became a major factor in the conception and execution of a work. The gallery determines the installation’s physical possibilities and indeed its limitations in terms of dimension and the likely disposition of elements within the space. The fabric of the building will legislate what materials can be used, the weights that can be applied to the flooring, what surfaces are available for projection, the permissible structures that can be built into the space, as well as minor but often crucial determinants such as ventilation, lighting and access. The architectural carapace provided by the gallery or museum also imprints on the installation the status it enjoys as a cultural emporium. Claire Bishop has suggested that works by artists such Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois, when installed in signature buildings like the Guggenheim or the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and supported by corporations such as Unilever, become ‘institutionally approved’.⁷ The art does as much to glorify the architecture and its civic sponsors as enhance the professional standing of the installation’s creators. Whatever the aesthetic merit of individual works, installation artists have increasingly come under pressure from funders to maximise ‘impact’, generally interpreted as popular appeal.

Nevertheless, the physical environment created by the architecture, the volumetrics of a space, is the immediate consideration of any artist installing a moving image work in a museum or gallery. As I have suggested, the moving image has the capacity to both reiterate and dissolve the existing architectural boundaries of a gallery. Many practitioners throughout the history of installation art have found ways to draw out aspects of the space that were not apparent under normal conditions, or indeed render them uncanny, disorienting or even potentially dangerous to visitors’ perceptual and mental apparatus. Turning familiar spaces into halls of mirrors (Yayoi Kusama, Richard Wilson), magical caves (Cerith Wyn Evans, Ann-Sofi Siden, Isaac Julien), archives and libraries (Christian Boltanski, Theaster Gates), darkened dungeons and labyrinths (John Bock, Keith Tyson, Mike Nelson) or even working stables (Jannis Kounellis) are just a few strategies of occupation that artists working with a range of mediums have adopted.

There are also works that address the building directly, its history, its current affiliations⁸ or simply its architectural features. In We Have Art so that We Do Not Perish by Truth (1991), Marie-Jo Lafontaine contrived to render the Glyptothek in Munich transparent by pasting photographs of flames into the recesses of the dome, thus creating the illusion of looking through apertures in a building that is being consumed by fire. Jennifer Steinkamp turns windows and doorways into frames for abstract, optical works reminiscent of the paintings of Bridget Riley and Agnes Martin. Her pulsating video imagery softens the rigid ‘masculine’ geometries of the space with roiling vortices of line and colour, rumbling like some anarchic feminine unconscious threatening the pure classicism of the building.⁹ In Window Piece (2012), Simon Payne similarly drew on the tradition of trompe l’oeil, so beloved of Baroque interior design. He projected a mosaic of slowly changing blocks of colour, precisely stitched into the arched panes of a large bay window at the Camden Arts Centre in London. While there was no attempt here to convince the viewer that this electronically-stained glass window was part of Arnold Taylor’s original design for the gallery (then a library), the precisely drawn bursts of mutating colours in an otherwise whitewashed space drew out the intrinsic qualities of the window, the solidity and gothic symmetries of the Victorian architecture.

The work of Payne and Steinkamp depend for their effect on an ambulatory spectator coming upon these architectural transformations as they navigate the space of the gallery. Any built environment facilitates the movement of bodies through space, from the shopping malls and railway stations of Augé’s ‘non-places’ to the manicured parks and bustling streets of the metropolis. City planners do not so much facilitate as orchestrate the circulation of its citizens who are not always the main beneficiaries of mobility. In the case of Second Empire Paris, the movement of troops was the priority driving Haussmann’s plans to open up wide boulevards in the heart of the ancient city. Where the layout of a metropolitan precinct or of an individual building transports the visitor according to a social purpose (retail consumption and social control being the most common), an installation provides a cultural experience with sufficient appeal to induce the spectator to tarry awhile at designated points of interest, and possibly return another day. In common with pleasure gardens and seaside promenades, the aesthetic experience of installation art may seem to court purposeless aesthetics, as did the follies, fountains, ‘hellfire caverns’ and fairy grottos of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century estates, places that delighted visitors with what Simon Schama described as their ‘unapologetic artificiality’.¹⁰ However, like department stores, fairgrounds and arcades, a moving image installation, in spite of its high art credentials, usually has a commercial obligation to its host, whether a private gallery or public institution, and whatever course is charted through the work itself, all paths lead the visitor inexorably to ‘exit through the gift shop’. Here the more modest pocket can stretch to a cheap souvenir, whereas museum functionaries are on hand to transport the serious investor to the inner sanctum of the director’s office, generally enjoying the best view of the river.

Simon Payne, Window Piece (2012), 14 min., site-specific looping video projection. Installation view, Camden Arts Centre, London. Courtesy of the artist.

ARCHITECTURAL MONTAGE

Whatever commercial concerns underpin the aesthetic points of interest leading the eye and mind through a gallery space, the trajectory undertaken will have been structured by the building itself and here a direct link to film can be established. Sergei Eisenstein identified classical architecture as a precursor to film in its creation of a ‘montage’ of impressions that were both cinematic and spatial and that depended on an ambulatory viewer.¹¹ In his 1938 essay ‘Montage and Architecture’, Eisenstein asserts that ‘it is hard to imagine a montage sequence for an architectural ensemble more subtly composed, shot by shot, than the one that our legs create by walking among the buildings of the Acropolis’.¹² The wanderer stops periodically and takes in a view, and the entire experience of the building complex is made up of an accretion of perspectives, ‘from the point of view of a moving spectator’ whose explorations were anticipated and artfully engineered by the architects of antiquity. Film has the ability to conjure for an audience vaster geographical and more diverse architectural spaces than could be experienced on a single outing to the Acropolis. These ‘creative geographies’ are constructed on film out of a collection of fragmented vistas drawn from any number of different sites (and indeed multiple temporalities).¹³ Filmmakers sequentially assemble the fragments to create coherent geographical or architectural spaces woven together in the spectatorial imagination through the common grammar of film, as I will discuss in chapter five. Town planners and architects construct space to enable the peripatetic citizen to similarly juxtapose and process disparate impressions, and this leads Giuliana Bruno to conclude, like Eisenstein, that ‘film inherits the possibility of such a spectatorial voyage from the architectural field’.¹⁴

Eisenstein also finds the seeds of montage in the Stations of the Cross, the sequences of linked paintings or bas-reliefs that commonly line the walls of the nave in a Catholic church. These, e...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Architecture
• 2. Painting
• 3. Sculpture
• 4. Performance
• 5. Film History
• 6. Film as Film
• 7. Structural Film: Detractions and Revisions
• 8. The Dialectics of Spectatorship
• 9. Expanded Cinema
• 10. Sound
• 11. Video Installation
• 12. Closing Thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index
• Color Plates