On Stage: The theatrical dimension of video imaged
()
About this ebook
In On Stage, Mathilde Roman explores the resonances that fields of theatre – stage, décor, space, gaze and more – have in the practice of video arts. Using these notions of theatre both as points of reference and as a prism through which video installation can be approached, Roman concentrates on questions often overlooked by art historians, theorists and critics. 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, 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.
Mathilde Roman
Mathilde Roman teaches at the Pavillon Bosio, Art and Scénographie, École Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques de la Ville de Monaco. She is also the author of On Stage.
Related to On Stage
Related ebooks
The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInstallation and the Moving Image Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTransmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Theatrical Image by Clay and Krempel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Do Things with Art: The Meaning of Art's Performativity Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators: By Carolee Thea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Contemporary Art in the Light of History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBetween Memory and Document Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPractising the Real on the Contemporary Stage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsModern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLearning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Challenge of Modern Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStill Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTurn, Turtle!: Reenacting The Institute Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeyond the Happening: Performance art and the politics of communication Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThis Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Early Cinema Today: The Art of Programming and Live Performance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Lectures on Aesthetic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSurface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thomas Hirschhorn: A New Political Understanding of Art? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOn Art Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarking Time: Performance, Archaeology and the City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDysfunction and Decentralization in New Media Art and Education Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSubjectivity and Synchrony in Artistic Research: Ethnographic Insights Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsModes of Spectating Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Performing Arts For You
The Diamond Eye: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Macbeth (new classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Measure: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Robin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Town: A Play in Three Acts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sisters Brothers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Romeo and Juliet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Is This Anything? Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Sherlock Holmes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Importance of Being Earnest: A Play Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book: The Script Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Midsummer Night's Dream, with line numbers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unsheltered: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Count Of Monte Cristo (Unabridged) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hamlet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hollywood's Dark History: Silver Screen Scandals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Coreyography: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slave Play Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for On Stage
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
On Stage - Mathilde Roman
Preface
Two features make Mathilde Roman’s work exceptional, and particularly useful for scholars of contemporary art, critics and general readers: its theoretical angle and its critical precision. First, the special angle the author has chosen is the theatricality of video installation. This is partly a reflection on the medium’s specificity, partly, and more relevantly in my view, on the specificity of the practices of the medium as most frequently encountered today. Like the theatre, installation is characterized by space, time and fictionality. The spatio-temporality of video implies movement, comparable to actors’ movements on stage. Moreover, like a stage, installations are sculptural, their settings architectural. And due to the fictionality inherent even in documentary video, they produce an immersive effect. This effect is multisensorial, as the visitor or viewer finds herself both inside the scenes on the videos and inside the space of the installation. As an art historian, Roman draws on early-twentieth century precedents in experimental theatre to provide the contemporary medium with a history. As an active art critic, she provides it with concrete cases that bring the practices of the medium to the reader’s doorstep. This is the second aspect that makes this book so valuable.
Travelling through a wide range of cases, readers experience Roman’s first-hand immersion in the installations she has visited. The author’s skill in describing installations vividly with a minimal amount of words makes the book a joy to read. One feels almost present inside the installations she describes, places theoretically, and evaluates in one big sweep. Some of the most prominent artists of today are evoked and engaged with, while many less widely known artists join forces to create an epic tableau of practices some of which a reader may have seen, but more likely, can get to know through these wonderful descriptions. An astute critic, Roman writes in concrete, lucid prose, avoiding jargon and long theoretical developments. Her swift brush strokes make the reading extremely pleasant, without sacrificing depth to speed.
The way installations of multiple screens occupy space with their time-bound images of bodies orienting the viewer’s gaze, for example, is limpidly exposed through a close reading of works by David Claerbout and Julian Rosefeldt, two artists so different that any hasty generalization is skilfully pre-empted. Meanwhile, the issue of the body and its presence/absence is already introduced, to be further developed in a later chapter. The way video engages the theatre is explained along with acute evocations of artists whose work challenges traditional elements such as character and ‘real’ space. In video installation inhabiting a situation becomes inhabiting the stage, but the crucial verb is ‘inhabiting’, rather than, say, ‘watching’. I won’t go on to enumerate all the topics that the author introduces, almost casually, without didactic insistence but rather, through the practices that bring them alive.
Video installation as a medium or genre in contemporary art is as richly represented on the art scene as it is poorly studied. At least, in the integrated theoretical and critical perspectives presented here. Therefore, Mathilde Roman’s study is very welcome in the international scholarship on the arts. There are some companions for it, but not much of the same calibre and angle. Among the few exceptions I can mention Janna Houwen, Mapping Moving Media, Münster, Germany: LIT (in press). This book is theoretically and critically very rich, but is less focused on installation per se. Its systematic comparison between film and video provides a very valuable backdrop for Roman’s positioning of the medium in relation to the theatre. My own book, Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila, London, UK: Bloomsbury (2013), offers theoretical reflections, anchored in Henri Bergson’s philosophy of the image as always already in movement, in dialogue with a single artist’s work. These two books can be considered a setting, to stay in this book’s vocabulary, upon which Roman’s unique text can move, and move us. That the book is a pleasure to read adds to its merit as a contribution to scholarship. For, what use is scholarship if it does not convince those who are the primary judges of art; the actual viewers who see, experience and assess the way the artworks change their perspective on the world.
Mieke Bal
Introduction
Outside the Frame
In 1961, the Brazilian artist, Hélio Oiticica, stated, ‘the age of the end of the tableau’ (…) ‘definitively begun’ by leaving behind the frame, because ‘painting had to leave the tableau, be completed in space, not in appearance or superficially, but in its profound integrity’.¹ He started making installations in which the painted canvas was part of a greater whole, filling space and freeing itself of the picture wall, moving outside what, for centuries, had been its assigned place. Oiticica was far from isolated in his approach. His direction was symptomatic of the movement affecting painting generally, shifting it elsewhere, upsetting its codes. More generally, the 1960s were a period characterized by the need to escape, symbolically or literally, the usual territories of art, to set out on a quest for new tools, new spaces and to question frontiers.
This was the period when artists started using video in an approach advocating a spilling over of established loci, especially those of television and cinema. There were numerous experiments in diverting and re-appropriating existing forms; and at the same time, other spaces were invented for the image. It was not long before, in Oiticica’s words, video ‘completed itself in space’, existing beyond the monitor. Artists addressed the question of reception by dealing directly with the space and temporality of the exhibition. Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, Dan Graham and many others intensified our relation to the moving image by integrating it into sculptural work, conceiving it for specific spaces, playing with what was out of the frame, dismembering the screen, opening the frame and creating multiple time frames. They thus worked towards the end of a certain regime of the image by inscribing the need to confront space within its ‘profound integrity’. The work escaped its assigned spaces, the wall and the base, and sought out other regimes of presence. Experiments took up the tradition of other efforts to extend beyond art, from Futurism and Dadaism to performance and Land Art. Video and artists’ films are forms that reach beyond the frame of the image, and it is their porosity that enabled them to become a major field of contemporary creation. The linkages and excesses that they affect concern, in particular, the exhibition and theatrical space.
The Theatricality of the Visual Work
Relations between the visual arts and the performing arts have always been complex, and their history is marked by a number of major collaborations, such as that of the renowned Ballets Russes in the early twentieth century, or, in the 1960s, the artistic undertakings around the Judson Church and Black Mountain College, but also by instances of mutual mistrust. The Renaissance principle of ut pictura poesis, after the formula by Horace, may have affirmed the richness of comparisons between the artists, but on this view, the value of painting lay in its relation to poetry. In the eighteenth century, Lessing analysed the difference between the two genres, their relation to the imagination and to the signs used for representation. Where painting is an ordering of bodies in space, poetry is composed in time. This conception, which creates a hierarchy of values, implies that attempts to create a dialogue between disciplines are debasing, or alienating. This model was forcefully rejected in the early twentieth century by the Dadaists, but the principle of mixing different arts was not really accepted until several decades later. According to the idea put forward by Hal Foster in his essay, ‘The Return of the Real’, which is based on the temporal conception of subjectivity in Freud, the history of art is ‘a continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts—in short, in a deferred action that throws over any simple scheme of before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition’.² Having emerged in the 1920s, the idea of the need to think the qualities of the performing and visual arts, to inscribe the museum-based artwork in a spatio-temporal dimension, was forgotten until it reappeared in the 1960s, and then became firmly established with the practice of the installation in the 1990s, once the traumatic moments of the encounter between the arts had been gradually digested. In a very illuminating article, ‘La colonne relevée’, Giovanni Parenzan focuses on one of these moments, in 1961, when a show by the Living Theater in New York ended with a Column by Robert Morris falling on the stage.³ This event, a strong precursor of the productive encounter between the spaces of the stage and of sculpture, was long untold, until it was re-appropriated by a whole tendency in contemporary art that asserted the theatrical dimension of the visual work.
If, today, this development is widely accepted, the appropriation of the qualities traditionally attributed to the stage by the visual arts initially met with intense criticism. The American art historian and theoretician Michael Fried was the emblematic figure of this opposition to the new tendency. In 1967, he critiqued the tendency of artworks to enter a regime of theatricality, which as he saw it was embodied by Minimalism.⁴ He inveighed against the ‘the same general, enveloping, infectious theatricality that corrupted literalist sensibility in the first place and in the grip of which the developments in question—and modernist painting in general—are seen as nothing more than an uncompelling and presenceless kind of theatre’, going so far as to assert, ‘The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre’.⁵ He rightly describes the Minimalist tendency as an art that is constituted around the time of the stage, that of duration, involving the beholder in an immersive relation that is psychological and sensorial. He contrasts this with the reflexivity of the modernist work, with its ‘present-ness’, its ‘instantaneousness’, and critiques its non-autonomous nature. By inscribing itself in the time of experience, in the beholder’s expectations, the Minimalist work engages a spatio-temporal reception that takes it far from the traditional status of the artwork. Fried’s article, which generated much enduring critical debate, went against the creative tendency of the day and revealed, above all, the direction that it was about to take, increasingly taking over the exhibition space as a kind of stage. For example, in his Bedroom Ensemble (1963), Claes Oldenburg placed objects together in such a way as to create a theatrical space, which visitors were then encouraged to move around in. The sculptural work was no longer isolated from its context but, instead, affirmed its temporal nature, its relation to the present, to history, in opposition to the classical definition of the ideal timelessness of the artwork. Writing of this development and the issues behind it, Patricia Falguières notes, ‘The conceptual moment of art in the 1970s is the coincidence of the subtraction of the artist (making into an effigy is a local version of the death of the author,
there are others) with an extreme theatricalization of the agencies of art. More than ever, art as either a genre or category is identified with a theatrical space. The field of art,
a sociological category, is approached theatrically, resulting in an ‘art of the stage"’.⁶
It is interesting to note, however, that for Fried there is one artistic form that is saved from this theatrical tendency. This is cinema that ‘escapes theatre—automatically, as it were’ and therefore ‘provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theatre and theatricality’.⁷ For Fried, this ‘automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge is a structural quality of the medium’ rather than a modernist choice. My argument here, however, is that the theatricalization of art is embodied in an artistic form that is directly linked to cinema: video.
The Video Installation: Closeness to the Stage
Installation is a word commonly used to designate a work that appropriates the space in which it is exhibited; a work in which a relation to its setting is an integral part of a formal proposition that carries a total aesthetic experience. By extension, the term video installation is used for a work combining a video with a sculptural proposition. It is an exploration of