into the light

Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977

A recent exhibition that situates the historical intersection of visual arts and cinema at the point of installation is Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, held at the Whitney Museum from October 18, 2001 to January 6, 2002. [25] Curated by Chrissie Iles, Into the Light claims itself as the first exhibition to explore the history of projected installations. Featuring one work each by nineteen different artists including such mega-watt stars as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, the exhibition delineates a period of American art when the gallery space was being transformed by Minimal and Conceptual Art into a perceptual field. The exhibition reflects the Whitney’s ongoing commitment to the scholarly reassessment of critical moments in the history of American art, culling together video art pieces (by Ono, Gary Hill, William Anastasi, Beryl Korot); dance and holography (Simone Forti); multi-screen films (Warhol, Snow, Sharits, Nauman, Dan Graham); film sculpture (Robert Whitman, Anthony McCall); audio art (Keith Sonnier); photography (Mary Lucier); performance (Joan Jonas); and other multidisciplinary projected image and sound works (Peter Campus, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Morris, Acconci).

Upon entering Into the Light, the first piece most visitors would see was Robert Whitman’sSHOWER (1964), one of four film sculptures that he produced from 1963-64. Whitman was also one of the earliest participants in multimedia Happenings, incorporating Super-8 film projections into his classic performances. In SHOWER the image of a woman showering is projected into a real shower stall, creating a three-dimensional film environment. The looped sequence has an ambiguous duration; although it insinuates suspense, suggesting Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), the film lacks both development and closure. Andy Warhol’s LUPE (1965), one of the artist’s first double screen films, similarly thwarts narrative expectations. According to Warhol’s distribution instructions, LUPE can either be shown on one screen at 72 minutes, or on two screens at 36 minutes. By constructing a film that can be exhibited in multiple ways, Warhol disrupts narrative logic. The film is ostensibly a recreation of the last hours before Hollywood starlet Lupe Velez’s suicide, but without action or drama. The characters perform a series of domestic banalities and clichés of mainstream fictional films. By creating structures built on uncertain and/or shifting durations without climax, both SHOWER and LUPE can be considered deconstructions of narrative film language.

Conversely, many of the pieces in Into the Light attempt to deconstruct the cinematicexperience by investigating film’s unique and irreducible properties and operations. By foregrounding projector, light beam, screen and frame, Snow’s TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY (1974), McCall’s LINE DESCRIBING A CONE (1973) and Sharits’ SHUTTER INTERFACE (1975) tempt participatory viewers with their demystifying treatment of light, time and space. In TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY, a woman performing various activities is filmed from both sides. Each film is projected onto opposite sides of a metal screen located in the centre of the room, requiring the viewer to circumnavigate the screen in order to perceive the whole piece. LINE DESCRIBING A CONE is a 30-minute film that sculpts the projector’s beam into a three dimensional cone with the aid of space-visualizing fog. Because of its ephemeral tactility, LINE DESCRIBING A CONE enthuses audience participation and exchange. Viewers can hardly resist reaching, stepping or leaping through what appears to be a solid cone, thereby entering into others’ personal experience of the piece. SHUTTER INTERFACE is one of many multiple screen “locational” film installations that Sharits produced in the 1970s. The two-screen version presented at the Whitney (a four screen version also exists) projects two overlapping film loops that cycle through various colour permutations, creating a percussive composition.

Two of show’s simplest yet most sublime pieces, Yoko Ono’s SKY TV (1966) and William Anastasi’s FREE WILL (1968), demonstrate video’s impact on the shifting engagement between the audience and the space of the gallery. SKY TV, Ono’s only video work, places a closed-circuit camera on the museum’s roof, which transmits a live feed of the sky onto a television monitor placed within the exhibition space. In FREE WILL, a camera on top of a monitor is trained at the right-angled corner between the floor and the wall, whose black and white image is relayed onto the monitor screen. Imitating surveillance mechanisms (to humorous and/or contemplative effect), both video sculptures draw attention to aspects of the museum that are rarely observed—the sky above and a corner below, respectively. Through video technology these works negotiate new relationships between art object (SKY TV exists as a set of instructions), spectator, and public space, while anticipating the more current experiments in virtual reality.

All of the above works subvert passive spectatorship and bring to light the hidden play of seduction, twin elements of the classical motion picture apparatus, by shattering narrative illusion and suspense and/or by accenting the machinery of representation. Rather than films or videos in themselves, they function as reflections on the projected image, drawing cinema’s one-sided, author-spectator relationship into question. In these pieces, the idea of cinema—the cinematic—supplants cinema proper.

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