On Stage: The theatrical dimension of video imaged - Softcover

Roman, Mathilde

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783205806 ISBN 13: 9781783205806

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In On Stage, Mathilde Roman explores the resonances that fields of theater—stage, décor, space, gaze, and more—have in the practice of video arts. Using these notions of theater both as points of reference and as a prism through which video installation can be approached, Roman is able to concentrate on a number of questions often overlooked by art historians, theorists, and critics, but offering different points of view. These include questions of exhibition architecture, display, viewer experience, temporality, and the importance of the gaze. Each chapter is articulated around analyses of video installations created by artists of different generations, from Michael Snow to Maïder Fortuné, and Dan Graham to Laurent Grasso. With a preface by Mieke Bal, On Stage is an important contribution to the fields of art, history, and film studies.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mathilde Roman teaches at the Pavillon Bosio, Art & Scénographie, École Supérieure d'Arts Plastiques de la Ville de Monaco.

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On Stage

The Theatrical Dimension of Video Image

By Mathilde Roman

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-580-6

Contents

Preface by Mieke Bal, vii, 
Introduction, 1, 
Chapter 1: A Stage for the image: Occupying Space, Multiple Screens, 9, 
Chapter 2: 'inhabiting the Scene', 39, 
Chapter 3: Theatres of Projection, 65, 
Conclusion, 99, 
Bibliography, 105, 
Index, 109, 

CHAPTER 1

A Stage for the Image: Occupying Space, Multiple Screens

During the 1920s, the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, who taught at the Bauhaus, conceived spatial apparatuses in which painting and sculpture together reached beyond their assigned place to constitute total artworks, inviting the viewer to move around and manipulate them. In the spirit of the experiments being made at the same time by Vladimir Tatlin in his Konterrelief and Kurt Schwitters in his Merzbau, he created a new way of uniting the space of the work with the space of its presentation. The Abstract Cabinet (1927–28) that he created for Alexander Dorner at the Landesmuseum in Hannover was a revolutionary conception and art historical landmark. Its display gave spatial extension to the pictorial researches of Malevich, Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy, Baumeister, Van Doesburg, Gabo and Lissistzky, brought together by an enlightened curator. The visitor was confronted with works that defied the flatness of the wall, positioned within a display device (sliding panels) that he was asked to activate, thereby engaging with other modalities of reception. El Lissitzky's position was radical: 'Space: that which is not looked at through a keyhole, not through an open door. Space does not exist for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it' He sought to wrest viewers from their passivity with regard to artworks and make them active in the process of their perception. This project, which was also political in an age when capitalist society had started to anchor the individual in a consumerist relation to goods and images, has numerous echoes in today's world.

Artists have made abundant use of the immersive resources offered by new technologies to create artistic experiences pursuing the direction mapped out by El Lissitzky, inviting viewers to enter the space of the work both physically and mentally, to inhabit it for the duration of their visit, and even to activate it when interactivity is used. By affirming the connection between the stage and the exhibition gallery, video installation makes the viewer an actor who moves around between the works and whose experience of reception becomes performative. Entering the space of projection, we are immersed in an imaginary that, while constructed in and by the image, also exceeds the image. Walking around the screens, deciding to stop or keep moving, to sit or to stand, to look at one work or at several, to isolate or move the images round, to listen or to put the headphones back — all these choices allow the beholder to choose their perceptual position with regard to the works, while plunging them into an immersion that can often be destabilizing. Françoise Parfait has highlighted this aspect in her study of video installations, 'Disorientation is one of the stumbling blocks of the spatio-temporal experience offered the visitor, often beginning with physical disorientation and ending in a mental disorientation conducive to thinking about the conditions of perception and language' The structure of the video installation, with its ability to combine moving images, the spatialization of sound and architectural devices, offers a privileged space for thinking about our relation to representation. By peopling the exhibition space with works that go beyond the framework of the image, David Claerbout, Julian Rosefeldt, Ugo Rondinone and Sebastian Diaz Morales offer immersive, stimulating experiences of seeing that are constantly calling attention to the relation to the body and the gaze that is their underpinning. Through them there emerges a way of thinking about perception and a questioning of the relations to the world that subtend it.

David Claerbout: Porous Temporalities

Because of its aural dimension, artists and curators often prefer to show video work in closed, isolated spaces, commonly known as the black box, imitating the cinema. This immersion in darkness helps the spectator to concentrate by keeping out unwanted interference. By creating a projection space that, in contrast, allows light around the screen, and by letting the sound contaminate the general atmosphere of the room, David Claerbout (Belgium, born 1969) is one of these artists who are questioning our relation to the moving image.

Moving into a Claerbout installation, one is struck by the silence, the appearance of immobility, as if time were suspended. One treads more discreetly, not to escape but in response to the rhythm emanating from the work. The image inhabits the space, marking it with its distended temporality, in a coming and going between photographic fixity and the motion of video. There is something fundamental about the interstice into which this artist inserts his practice, in that it is all a matter of questioning and, above all, metamorphosing, the paradoxical impression that we have when looking at a photograph. The fixed image of a past moment is the sign that something has been, but this certainty also brings discomfort because of the gaping holes that, at the same time, we open in our memory's outer reaches. In his works, Claerbout offers to prise open the density of time, to reanimate dead things. We are far from the action of desacralization or, on the contrary, resurrection. The images chosen by the artist are not icons before which we lament their loss; they are resplendently banal: breakfast al fresco, a tree, a couple dancing, a motorway interchange. Each piece is autonomous, has its own alchemy of discreet movement and light allowing uncertainty to creep in with great subtlety. We are immersed in the movements of the leaves of a tree, arrested by the eyes of a little girl who turns her head and greets us, struck by the projected image of a man and woman dancing.

Experiencing the works is key to understanding how installations are never closed in on themselves. The exhibition space is porous, the installations open to one another, the partitions between them full of holes; these panels act not to separate but to create ricochets, playing on transparency and opacity in order to avoid the isolation of works that one would like to appreciate in their continuity and diversity, which is the drawback of the conventional display apparatus. This is how Claerbout describes the layout of his 2007 solo show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris,

Here [...] the spectator enters through a dark space painted black. On the way in they are confronted with one of the works in the exhibition, Shadow Piece, projected onto a translucent screen. When they pass through the screen, everything is in white, transparent, with no constructed 'cube' to disrupt the gaze.

The whole exhibition is thus conceived as a great stage on which projections are articulated. The picture walls/screens structure the space but do not close it, as they are always traversed by light. In the work that confronts visitors as they enter, Shadow Piece (2005), a film shows people walking past a glass building that they are unable to enter, whereas their shadows can. This visual effect created by means of two...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783205806
• ISBN 13: 9781783205806
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 120
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar