the space between artwork and visitor

Video Installation is wonderfully hard to define because of its integration of other art forms such as film, sculpture, conceptual, and performance. On top of its multiple-personality form of sorts, as Maia pointed out, installations really do need to be experienced in person. Margaret Morse put it perfectly when she said:

“Note that the artist vacates the scene in the installation per se. This allows the visitor rather than the artist to perform the piece. Indeed, she or he is in the piece as its experiential subject, not by identification, but in body.

This aspect of visitor/performer duality highlights the importance of first hand experience. This of course varies from piece to piece, some installations involving much more direct interaction than others, but to some degree most give implicate the visitor as both outside viewer as well as performer. The latter role as performer means that visitors are given a degree of agency and thus a participatory role as artist that those watching a record of an installation don’t have. The same could be said of sculpture, architecture, or really any other tactile art form

Experience of video installation goes beyond the duality of viewer/performer though, because as Morse points out, the difference between experiencing a video of a video installation and being in the space proper is our bodily perception. When Maia and I sit in classrooms watching Tony Oursler’s work, our bodies are sitting still in hard wooden chairs, our eyes are the primary form of experience. Phenomenologically there is a huge difference between our sitting and the active interaction of the people we see wandering through the installation videos. This is a bit of a digression, but talking about the necessity for human experience reminds me of how a few days ago I was chatting with my roommate about how the U.S. is pushing for a manned voyage to Mars because even though we have rovers there, nobody really cares. The reason I bring the Mars mission up is to point out that this urge for bodily experience is very much not exclusive to the art world. We crave experiential intimacy with that which we know exists outside its representation.

Our cravings for intimacy and immediacy I think are part of the answer to Maia’s open question of “why is the video an artwork, whereas a documentation of an installation or a performance is not (usually) art?” The act of documenting is one of distanced preservation, like freezing food, creating a space between viewer and artwork that inhibits creative engagement. To keep with the food analogy, I feel that this distance is similar to the difference between seeing a picture of a sandwich and eating that sandwich—in the former we let it exist distant and objectively, in the latter we take it in, taste, and digest it in relation to our individual sense-reactions. Video art is an artwork because the video format is how the piece was meant to be received, like tasting a sandwich or feeling the panic of a bungee jump fall, while pictures or other documents of these things are simply descriptions of the sensory event.

The reason Dan Graham’s “Performer/Audience/Mirror” felt more like a documentation than it did an art piece is because the piece was meant to implicate the viewers, especially when he starts describing them, because it creates a direct connection between the performer and audience that makes for unique, uncomfortable, reactions. When we watched the video of it, we did so some 40 years later, and in a way that removed our interaction. I think a “truer” experience of Graham’s piece would be re-enacting his performance with an audience because in this way we could have the same types of engaged reactions as Graham and the audience in the video did. This in mind, maybe we should start re-enacting some of these performances or re-creating some old installations to get a truer sense of them.