The Mobile Spectator: the Exhibition of Artist Film as a Bodily Experience (original) (raw)
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The mobile spectator is a familiar figure in theorisations of moving image installation, recurring in various accounts of the differences and continuities between the cinema and the museum as spaces of exhibition and reception. Some of these accounts are concerned with the role of mobility in enhancing, or undermining, critical reflection. Jeffrey Skoller, for example, rejects the notion (advanced by several curators) that the mobile viewer's "critical awareness is heightened by choosing his or her own degree of attentiveness", claiming instead that transience undermines the modes of reflective engagement potentially enabled by cinema. 1 Others envisage mobile spectatorship in the gallery or museum as a point of connection with historical or contemporary modes of spatio-temporal experience. Giuliana Bruno, for example, argues that the forms of mobile recollection elicited by moving image installations in the museum are crucial to understanding the historical, cultural and architectural linkages between the museum, cinema, and many other sites of public intimacy, ranging from the memory theatre of the Renaissance era to the picturesque landscape, panoramic and dioramic stages, window displays and painting. 2 John Osborne, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of exhibitions that, instead of seeking to block out distraction, actually engage with new configurations of attention and distraction through the exploration of spatio-temporal rhythms, including those associated with the prevalence of the computer screen. 3 Hito Steyerl's research offers a somewhat different perspective on mobile spectatorship, as it emphasises the labour of moving image consumption. Noting that several former factories (as well as churches, train stations etc.) have been repurposed as art museums, Steyerl highlights the work performed in these spaces by "crowds" of people "bending and crouching in order to
Systems of Viewing: The Spectator Interface in Media Art
Within the systems of artistic curation, it is generally agreed that there is a shift taking place. It is a shift in the roles of the curator, artwork, and viewer, which are increasingly intertwined and inter-mediated. With the advent of hybridized artistic activities, the definitions of art, artist and curator are being blurred and therefore we must fundamentally reconsider traditional exhibition practices which would isolate them into separate activities and order them into hierarchies. In order to understand how to address this shift, we might begin with the work of Architectural theorist and critic, Sylvia Lavin. In her text, Kissing Architecture, Lavin describes the root of the shift as a reaction to Clement Greenberg's style of modernist contemplation where the "spirit of modernity was revealed when the viewer's response to an object was purely and laboriously cognitive without affect" (18). When the world began to recognize the biases inherent in that style of aestheticism (namely its hierarchical patriarchal and imperialist tendencies which ignore alternative viewpoints), there arose a need for a different type of approach. With Greenberg's Modernist aesthetic epitomized by architecture, Lavin suggests that this new approach may be connected to characteristics of media art-primarily in its ability to layer and create "slippage" with older forms of practice. Introducing this premise, she writes:
Engaged observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film
Studies in European Cinema, 2019
Artur Zmijewski’s Democracies (2009) is a video installation (screened as a 20-channel piece at galleries across Europe and as a single-screen film at London’s Tate Modern) that brings together 20 different public assemblies – ranging from funerals to marches, protests and celebrations. The film provides a microcosm of contemporary European nationalism, exemplified in the convening of citizens in public spaces. This article analyses Democracies in order to unpack its technical approach to the bodies and spaces it documents. This involves two key points of departure. First, a phenomenological reconsideration of the observational documentary mode, which simultaneously critiques one of the foremost forms of representing reality and reignites its potential. Zmijewski’s observationalism is freshly engaged through the use of counter-intuitive framing devices and highly evocative proximity to the body throughout, encouraging the consideration of the aesthetics of assembly in contemporary Europe. Second, I turn to the site of exhibition, questioning the historical tendency to locate radical art in the museum. I situate Democracies in debates around ‘socially engaged art’, arguing that its form of engagement is one not of healing the ‘social bond’, but of immanent critique, holding to account institutional complicity as much as the producers and spectators that partake in textual meaning.
New Materialist Spectatorship: The Moving-Image-Body, the Mockumentary and a New Image of Thought
In this article I propose to rethink spectatorship as analytic category within cinema studies. Through an engagement with new materialist theory I shift the conversation from the locked positions of spectator and text towards an acknowledgement of the spectatorial event as a becoming increased or decreased in capacity to affect and be affected. By doing so I argue that what is effectuated in the event of spectating is in fact the production of a certain body, what I call a moving-image-body. This, I claim, develops in connection with different so- called spectatorial contracts, contracts that produce different agential conditions. An examination of some examples from the realm of the mockumentary, notably I’m Still Here (Affleck, 2010), leads me to discuss the core of the issue as one pertaining to the potential production of new realities, and my methodological proposal as a way towards mapping, not what the event of spectating means, but rather what it does.
A New Way of Seeing: Redefining the Spectator-Artwork Dynamic through an Interdisciplinary Approach
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This thesis contributes to the ongoing discourse on the aesthetic experience of the spectator in contemporary exhibitions through a dialectical engagement with disinterestedness and immersion. Investigating the shifting paradigm of aesthetic experience, this study questions the compatibility of the Kantian aesthetics with the immersive display techniques. Scrutinising the concepts of contemplation, isolation, distance, and immersion through an ocular-centric object-subject dichotomy, it explores the changing perspectives of art history and curatorial practices in relation to museum typologies. The aim is to critically evaluate the interplay between the spectator and the artwork within a novel paradigm that is conducive to both the essence of aesthetic experience and current perspectives. Utilizing empirical aesthetic studies, including neuroaesthetics, the study seeks to deepen our understanding of the complexities inherent in the evolving paradigm of aesthetic experience through an interdisciplinary approach. The study proposes embodiment and peripheral vision as a new paradigm that can offer a way of seeing to the viewer by dismantling the object- subject dichotomy.