Installation and the Moving Image

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, explains Eisenstein, represent ‘the twelve stopping places that legend ascribes to the procession to Golgotha’, the dolorous route that Christ took, carrying his cross to the place of execution. The Stations of the Cross provide a closer analogy to installation than they do to film alone, because each ‘station’ is equivalent to the encounter with a screen, within an overall itinerary that may take in several such screens contained in the forcefield of an architectural space. The viewer or pilgrim constructs a story out of this sequence of stations, at each stop momentarily holding in abeyance attention to the physical space in which they are encountered, so as to ‘read’ the representation of a space-elsewhere in historical time. As in the progress of a pilgrim, a visitor to a moving image art installation enacts a cognitive doubleness. She has the ability to hold two narratives concurrently, the fictional or documentary narrative (by no means always a linear one) gradually building from the screen-based information and that of the space itself, drawn from a combination of kinaesthetic information derived from the activity of muscle and locomotion, as well as the primary senses of sight, smell, hearing and touch. As in a church or a traditional pilgrims’ way crossing an ancient city, the two narratives frequently intertwine. The surrounding environment of an installation may reflect the onscreen events through sound, lighting or related material elements gathered within the embrace of the work. A church, with its soaring pillars and celestial vaults, may also yield the smell of incense, the sound of plainchant or other devotional indicators that underline the sacred text of Christ’s passion gradually accruing through the ‘montage’ of successive Stations of the Cross.

GALLERY DESIGN

The grandeur of a space like the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London is nothing if not cathedral-like. Works such as Tacita Dean’s Film (2012), her monument to celluloid projection, and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2004) with its immense orange light suspended at the altar-end of the gallery like a burning sun, certainly induce a form of light worship in the art pilgrim. However, the Turbine Hall was designed for other purposes as were many civic buildings now repurposed as the new cathedrals of art. Where Tate Modern was once a power station, other galleries started life as libraries, industrial units or pumping stations. The Saatchi Gallery in London was until recently a military barracks and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, a railway station. However, many museums and galleries are purpose-built and the conversion of older buildings into art spaces follows certain principles of gallery design. The layout of a museum and the arrangement of displays encourage optimum circulation of individuals, whilst enabling visitor choice, based on a number of attractions registering in the visual field at any one time. The movement paths are structured by the architecture itself – galleries leading directly into other galleries or radiating from a central rotunda. The layout of museums creates ‘orderliness’ and enables ‘visitors to be objects of each other’s inspection’, a feature of gallery-going that became the focus of live relay video installations in the 1970s.¹⁵

Where nineteenth-century galleries followed a partitioned layout with exhibits isolated in individual rooms and visually inaccessible to the visitor on first entering the building, a new ‘open plan’ aesthetic was adopted by Mies Van der Rohe in his design for the New National Gallery in Berlin (1942).¹⁶ This radical exhibition concept did away with a cellular configuration and gave visitors licence to wander at will by means of an almost transparent structure. It provided visual access to the totality of the display, albeit as a series of partial views. In these circumstances, the curatorial logic behind a particular set of artworks or assemblages, accessed sequentially, would be lost and each visitor would ‘edit’ their own, personalised version of the exhibition. Moving image installations are similarly subject to the contradictory desire, on the one hand, to control the viewer’s cumulative, internal narrative of the work by means of a ‘stations of the cross’ approach with the paths of exploration clearly defined and enforced, and on the other, to release the viewer to follow their own, undirected itinerary within an open-plan design. Clearly, the former approach would create a degree of continuity between visitors in terms of their experience of the work, and the latter would give rise to an infinite variety of encounters and thus a greater range of interpretations of the installation as a whole. The control that is exerted over the order of encounters in the ‘stations of the cross’ layout also brings the work closer to the narrative convention of cinema, one that Stan Douglas both evoked and undermined in his installation Journey into Fear (2001). Two large screens displayed footage depicting theatrical sets in which characters, apparently at sea in a container ship, engaged in snatches of cryptic conversation. The fragments of dialogue were processed by a computer installed in the gallery resulting in random and infinitely variable combinations of the exchanges. The lack of narrative resolution created a contingent semantic precinct in which the viewer could imaginatively wander like Bruno Ganz’s angel in Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987), eavesdropping on people’s most intimate thoughts while they travelled to work. In both cases, the evocation of chance encounters with people, places, objects and stories is analogous to the experience of the visitor wandering through a gallery space.

Stan Douglas, still from Journey Into Fear, (2001). DVD, 15:22 min. per rotation, 30 dialogue track variations, total running time 7 hours 40 min. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

Creators of moving image installations have to consider the degree to which they might wish to direct visitors’ movements through the work by means of physical barriers and the funnelling of bodies down passageways. In an open-plan display, they must also contrive to contain both sound and light spillage between works and anticipate how this contamination might affect the reading of individual works and the character of the exhibition as a whole. This problem is considerably aggravated in group shows when inadvertent layering of soundtracks occurs, and the works engage in mutual antagonism.¹⁷ Those works that depend on narrative elements, dramatisations or interviews, or more formal works requiring silence are particularly susceptible to light and sound interference from other exhibits and as a result, more and more contemporary practitioners build bespoke, sealed cinemas in galleries.

The number of factors that can impact on a work are legion, not least the architectural frame in which a work is placed. This has led David E. James to remark that ‘contemporary moving image culture is realised architecturally’.¹⁸ James does not limit the fusion of architecture and the moving image to the interiors of individual buildings housing film and video displays, but, he argues, this structural alliance can be found ‘ambiently in the visuality of the city itself where, whether tiny or huge, screens are so ubiquitous that together they become almost as seamless as sound’; according to James, ‘everywhere the avant-garde takes place’.¹⁹ The modern city has incorporated a network of billboards and digital screens and Tokyo could be seen as the largest video installation in the world.²⁰ Perhaps it is the increasing saturation of the built environment with screen-based media that makes it so difficult to ‘see’ the moving image as anything other than another visual irritant making claims on our leisure time in a world dominated by ‘cognitive capitalism’.²¹ Jonathan Fanzen has identified a concomitant degradation of art and literature in ‘the infernal machine of technoconsumerism’.²² And yet, technological advancement has also been heralded as the source of universal empowerment and the liberator of personal expression. Vimeo, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are awash with the fruits of the citizen artists we have all become. I would argue that one of the benefits of moving image installation as a delimited, indoor phenomenon is that it enables us to ‘see’ the medium once again and consider the role of the technologies that support the moving image as both social phenomenon and creative tool. I believe that it is not so much the similarities and reciprocal quotation between life and art that makes art worthy of our attention –it is its separateness.²³ If art ‘is no longer distinct from the praxis of life, but wholly absorbed in it’, argued Peter Bürger, ‘it will lose the capacity to criticize it’.²⁴ Isolated from the clamour of the city, it is possible to create an environment where attention is once again focused on what the moving image can mean, culturally, aesthetically and politically. If, as Chris Darke and others have argued, the gallery has become the laboratory of the moving image, it is precisely within the mental and architectural space of the museum, the arena of ‘pure’ or perhaps ‘impure’ critical research that we may meditate on the history of the medium, develop its potential and participate in its future.²⁵

NOTES

1     For a broad account of installation’s pre-history, see Claire Bishop (2005b) Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate Publishing.

2     See Ben Highmore (2003–04) ‘Machine Magic, IBM at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair’, New Formations, 51, p. 138.

3     El Lissitzky ([1923] 1990) ‘Proun Space, the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1923’ in Frank Lubbers (ed.) El Lissitzky 1890–1941: Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer. London: Art Data, p. 35.

4     Peter Osborne (2001) ‘Installation, Performance, or What?’, Oxford Art Journal, 24:2, p. 149.

5     Theodor W. Adorno ([1981] 1988), ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 185.

6     See Tom Gunning (1986) ‘The Cinema of Attraction, Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle, 8:3/4, pp. 63–70.

7     See Claire Bishop (2005a) ‘But is it Installation Art?’, 1 January, Tate etc. 3. Available online: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/it-installation-art (accessed 5 August 2013).

8     The ‘Liberate Tate’ protests, manifesting both inside and outside the perimeter of the Tate itself, have systematically critiqued the funding Tate receives from BP, funding that is seen to be tainted by the environmental disaster following an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

9     See Jennifer Steinkamp’s website: http://jsteinkamp.com/

10   Simon Schama (1995) Landscape and Memory. Bath: HarperCollins, p. 540.

11   Gunning borrows Eisenstein’s notion of a ‘montage of attractions’ for his analysis of early film; see Tom Gunning (1986), op. cit.

12   Sergei Eisenstein ([1938] 1989), ‘Montage and Architecture’, Assemblage, 10, p. 3. Available online: http://cosmopista.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/eisenstein_montage-and-architecture.pdf (accessed 6 September 2013).

13   ‘Creative geographies’ is Fay Hoolahan’s term, in her unpublished thesis, ‘Creative geography: mappings of place via time in moving image art’.

14   See Giuliana Bruno (1997) Site-seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image. Available online: http://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/2314396/guiliana-bruno (accessed 6 September 2013).

15   Tony Bennett (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Oxford and New York: Routledge, p. 52.

16   See Ipek Kaynar (2005) Visibility, movement paths and preferences in open plan museums: An observational and descriptive study of the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum. Available online: http://kaynar-rohloff.com/papers/kaynar_SpaceSyntax05.pdf (accessed 5 September 2013).

17   In the 1980s, I took part in a show at the Riverside Studios in London. A number of my co-exhibitors regularly turned up the volume on their exhibits when the authors of rival works were out at lunch.

18   David E. James (2009) ‘L.A.’s Hipster Cinema’, Film Quarterly, Fall, p. 65.

19   Ibid. This is less the case in Europe where restrictions apply to the erection of moving image billboards close to heritage sites.

20   Many artists have projected onto the external surfaces of galleries, one of the more arresting examples being Doug Aitken’s SONG 1 (2012), in which eleven projectors wrapped the circular Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC in a mantle of moving images; see Annie Dell’Aria ‘Cinema-in-the-round: Doug Aitken’s SONG 1 (2012), the Hirshhorn Musem and the pleasures of cinematic projection’, MIRAJ, 3: 2, forthcoming.

21   See Yann Moulier Boutang (2012) Cognitive Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

22   Jonathan Fanzen (2013) ‘Rage against the machine’, Guardian Review, 14 September, pp. 2–4.

23   See also Tom Sherman (2002) Before and after the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment. Atlanta: The Banff Centre Press.

24   Peter Bürger ([1974] 2002) Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 50.

25   Chris Darke (2000), Light Readings; Film Criticism and Screen Arts, London: Wallflower Press, p. 163.

CHAPTER TWO

Painting

Painting … is a creature of duration insofar as the perception of it is something that must be developed. Its emergent properties come out only in the chemical bath, as it were, of sustained attention.

Barry Schwabsky, 2001.¹

APPROACHES TO PAINTED SURFACES

If, as Eisenstein suggests, film and, by extension, moving image installation descends down one line from architecture, then another branch must necessarily proceed from painting, that other ‘creature of duration’. There are obvious continuities across both practices arising from formal considerations – both moving image and painting organise pictorial elements: shapes, textures, colours, light and dark into readable signs, for the most part defined by a frame, singly or in series. The orchestration of these components draws on compositional principles, forms of staging that were developed in painting; Paul Sharits, for instance brought ‘the act of presenting and viewing a film as close as possible to the conditions of hanging and looking at a painting’.² The viewer comes to installation with a trained eye for pictures, one that today is also well versed in the grammar of film, video and digital media. She can appreciate not only the maker’s skills in the deployment of forms and colours within a single frame, but also the artist’s ability to compose pictorial elements across multiple frames. The filmmaker choreographs animated, moving parts that evolve over time, accompanied by an audio track that may synchronise to the imagery or run counter to it, recalibrating the meaning of the screen content. Where film and video evoke movement, and produce sound in time, installation contributes a consideration of how the screen image develops a spatial relationship with other entities beyond its own frame. In common with a static image, a moving image, whether contained within the delimited frame of a monitor with what Briony Fer refers to as ‘sealed edges’ or spilling across a space onto a variety of surfaces, arrests the viewer.³ Once her interest is snared, she is beguiled into an engagement with the work, an encounter that might well include aesthetic pleasure as well as intellectual stimulation. In order to successfully detain the viewer, physically and psychologically, the author of a moving image installation needs to be blessed with a painter’s eye, an architect’s feel for space and a composer’s understanding of time and rhythm. Some of the tools may have changed, but the basic skills required for an artist working today were well established over five hundred years ago. The difference now is that more of them need to be united in any individual practitioner. As Schwabsky suggests, in both painting and moving image the spectator is required to make a commitment of time so that the deeper resonances of the work might become apparent.

Beyond the common artistry that unites painters and those creating moving image installations, further homologies can be found in the structuring of spectatorship around a fixed point of view in front of the image, an operational bequest from classical realist painting.⁴ This spectatorial anchorage assumes a universal subject and envelops the beholder in the logic of the illusionistic space depicted, organised by the rules of perspective, and provides an ideal, if not entirely stable, vantage point from where the viewer might seek to decipher the work’s meaning. A. L. Rees has observed that although single-point perspective was dismantled by Cubist painters in the early twentieth century – albeit for a stationary spectator – ‘Renaissance perspective (or some version of it) was directly taken over by the cinema and its apparatus’.⁵ Once film was re-consecrated as installation in the hallowed spaces of galleries, it often retained its frontal, perspectival roots in spite of forays into the domain of abstraction and the phenomenology of scale that would emphasise the immersive physical experience of the projected image over its representational readings. Melissa Gronlund has described the frontality of the moving image as equivalent to ‘the vertical plane of painting’ in which ‘the view onto the world represented in the picture frame corresponds to the erect human posture’.⁶ It is worth noting Rees’s postscript that while perspectival, Euclydian space addressing a standing viewer was reinstated in cinema, film also adopted the mimesis of photography. In the 1960s and beyond, experimental, avant-garde film and videomakers attempted to disrupt the verisimilitude of the image and what was regarded as the tyranny of perspectival space through their adventures into abstraction, fragmentation and repetition, a history that will be explored in due course.⁷ However, the appeal of illusionism proved almost irresistible to artists and pictorial approximations of reality, as well as the construction of imaginary realities, re-occur consistently throughout the history of moving image installation, with the viewer configured as homo erectus, an upright onlooker surveying the simulated three-dimensional scene from a ‘hot spot’ outside the frame.⁸

As in the discussion of the Stations of the Cross, the ideal viewing position can be applied sequentially to equivalent images in a string of related displays. This has led Briony Fer to propose a midway point between painting and installation in the tradition of the tableau vivant as evoked by Marcel Proust in his 1908–09 essay ‘Bedrooms’. Here the novelist describes a highly cinematic waking dream in which he is walking the streets of Paris at dusk. He peers, enchanted, into a succession of brightly lit windows in which ‘lives are performed … private rituals and intimacies have become only spectacle’.⁹ A visitor to a moving image installation may experience the same physical detachment from the scene that Proust describes, and share his voyeuristic enjoyment of spying on others’ lives. An arrangement of multiple moving image ‘windows’ provides the browsing spectator with the same momentary attractions as the illuminated casements in Proust’s dream, and later, the shop windows in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40). Such fascination as may be elicited from the viewer in the case of art depends, for Fer, on a work continuing ‘to perform a pictorial function’ and the link to painting via the tableau vivant, rearticulated in the context of moving image remains a robust feature of installed works of art to this day.¹⁰

Painting boasts another attribute that touches on this discussion; it embodies an intrinsic spatial dualism in the play between surface and apparent depth. This contradictory reading of surface versus pictorial recession came under scrutiny in the late nineteenth century with the Impressionists, and the Cubists in the twentieth, both of whom dramatised the enigmatic phenomenon of paint on canvas. This led inexorably to the reductio ad absurdum, or the ultimate statement in painting of Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square on White Background (1915). Some hundred or so years later, the paradox at the heart of pictorial representation captivated experimental film and videomakers in relation to the moving image, a topic I shall return to in subsequent chapters. For the moment, I wish to reiterate what Richard Wollheim described as the ‘twofold experience’ of painting, the simultaneous perception of reality and illusion which, for Wollheim, is ‘the centre of the understanding, and indeed the appreciation of art’.¹¹ However, the balance of verisimilitude to materialist disruption of functional representation needs to lean in favour of the image for the illusory world represented to be discernible beyond the impasto incidents of the surface. Too much patina and the picture disappears, as is easily demonstrated by steadily approaching a nineteenth-century Impressionist painting, say Monet’s Water Lilly Pond (1899) in the National Gallery, until, up close, all that remains of it are patches of pigmented viscosity, artfully congealed on a canvas surface.

For our purposes, the interest of these Impressionist paintings lies with their invitation to abandon the ideal viewing position and approach the picture. Visitors to painting exhibitions were already accustomed to moving freely among the exhibits, building a personalised narrative of the show, so they would feel no inhibition in electing to read the work at any point along a spectrum of legible mimesis at one end, and up-close surface reality at the other. This manner of reading paintings, the viewer playing up and down the scale of representation according to her movements towards or away from the canvas, prefigures the mobile spectator of installation art. An installation that includes the moving image replays the game of oscillating perceptions inherent to painting, but now in relation to the screen or screens. The ambulatory viewer can examine at close range cinema’s material substrate and distil the filmic image into its constituent, abstract parts: the flitting shards of coloured light that animate the surface of the screen in analogue film and in pre-digital video, the eerily glowing scan lines. There is a crucial technical difference between analogue film and video in that the material secret that is discovered on approaching the film image is revealed as a play of light on the inert surface of the screen. In the case of analogue video, the image is, or should I say ‘was’?, created inside the screen itself and the cathode ray tube behind it. Within an installation, the technical apparatus of film is separate from the image but visible should the viewer choose to turn her head and locate the projector; staring into a monitor she encounters the image-generating machine itself, whose workings largely remain invisible.¹² One was left marvelling at the effect of electron beams being rhythmically fired at the phosphor-coated inside surface of the glass screen, the rapid scanning of the alternating ‘fields’ discernable only as a slight pulsation in the image. Where the film screen is unmasked on close examination, the video screen only hints at deeper electronic mysteries. In the digital age, with nose pressed against the display, it is also possible to detect the pixellated armature of the image, hovering over an inactive white screen when projected – flickering just under or embedded in the fabric of the glassy face of an LCD or flat-screen plasma monitor. I will return to this issue of locating the screen in chapter nine, when I discuss expanded cinema, but for the moment, I wish to emphasise the congruence between the process of inspecting a painting and viewing a film in an installation environment. Within an open-plan moving image emplacement, the viewer, no longer restricted to a cinema seat, can choose to approach the screen, plunge into a vortex of abstractions by undertaking a forensic examination of the image or retreat to the ideal viewing position and immerse herself in the filmic illusion. She can also drift between these two perceptual states, exploring the pictorial threshold as she did when contemplating Monet’s Water Lilly Pond on an afternoon spent wandering the venerable halls of the National Gallery.¹³

THE PROLIFERATION OF PERSPECTIVES: CUBISM

When Cubism erupted on the cusp of the twentieth century, a new aspect of mobility came to light, this time articulated within the spatialised domain of the image itself. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque dismantled the single-point perspective of the High Renaissance and created fractured, unstable images suggesting multiple points of view, cumulative impressions such as might be gathered by an individual circumambulating an object or exploring the topography of a landscape, public building, studio or domestic space. In Picasso’s collage Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (1913) for instance, flattened partial views of everyday objects are arranged into a graphic, multi-faceted ensemble. Some objects, like the guitar and bottle of brandy, are depicted with great simplicity, conjured out of the sweep of a single line, while others appear as themselves: a scrap of wallpaper, a clipping from a newspaper, stuck directly onto the drawing. By imaginative extension of their incomplete borders, these fragments evoke the whole from which each was torn.¹⁴ Within the cubist aesthetic, such glimpses are rendered as two-dimensional, schematic maps of things, people and places, akin to the mental maps of reality we knit together from sequences of observations stored in memory. The eye scanning Picasso’s painting moves from one dislocated representation to the next, the brain seeking to match them to an equivalent set of associations based on experience. The meaning of the piece is constructed from an accretion of such deductions. Implied in these works is a further time and motion equivalence, in this case, between the time taken by the painter to travel around a subject as she builds a portfolio of views and the time required for a gallery-goer to make the same inventory as she scans the resulting work of art. The sense of treading the same path as the author of the piece, of engaging in a similar process of concatenating apperceptions anticipates the call to empathy, connectivity and sociality structuring many installations that we might encounter today.

Not only was cubist iconography portrayed as a mosaic of percepts, fused by the interpretive logic of the brain, but it also came to symbolise the disjointed, alienated experience of modern life, most intensively felt in the fast-paced environment of the industrialised metropolis: the factories, the shopping arcades, the docks, train networks and amusement parks of the machine age. As A. L. Rees has observed, cubist fragmentation ‘replaced visual harmonies with a series of abrupt glances that recall an exchange of looks on the street’.¹⁵ Film was thus seen to reflect the cognitive processes involved in vision as well as mirror the fragmentation and destabilisation of sense experience in the modern city, already signalled in cubist painting.¹⁶ Where we have seen Eisenstein cite architecture as a model for his own theories of montage, Cubism is widely believed to have made an equal contribution, with its model of meaning articulated in the juxtaposition of disconnected, but thematically linked perspectives.¹⁷

At the turn of the century, the proliferation of simultaneous viewpoints in Cubism and the perceptual flux of Impressionism implied a parity of the gaze in which any-man or woman’s cognitive capabilities was equally valid and this took on particular significance in the politicised environment of the 1960s. The authority of the specialist spectator – the Kantian connoisseur of art, the patron and the collector – could be challenged as well as the assumption of their exclusive access to universal human truths. The demotic multiplication of gazes resonated with the egalitarian principles of left-leaning ideologies circulating throughout the twentieth century while the rendering of dynamic locomotion was fast becoming the formal ambition of artists still engaged in easel art.

FUTURISM AND ITS LEGACY

The Italian Futurists in the 1910s and 1920s with their frenetic depictions of movement showed the first signs of artists straining to break out of the frame of painting and simultaneously expressed the desire to engage the viewer viscerally in the work; as Ardengo Soffici wrote in 1910, ‘the spectator [must] live at the centre of the painted action’.¹⁸ With an unusual touch of humour in an otherwise proto-fascist ideology, the futurist artist Giacomo Balla rendered a dachshund’s legs as a vortex of movements like a canine Catherine wheel in his famous painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). This depiction of overlapping, arrested stages of movement not only referenced the earlier experiments in motion photography conducted by Eadweard Muybridge – his consecutive images taken in rapid succession by multiple cameras led to the invention of film – but also anticipated the tracer effect that became a staple feature of analogue video editing in the 1980s.¹⁹ The revelation of the anatomy of movement also signals a fascination with unseen natural processes in the landscape that artists of the moving image have shared with scientists ever since the invention of film. This desire to witness the ‘breath of nature’²⁰ is evident in time-lapse works by artists such as William Raban, Chris Welsby and, more recently, Inge Lise