[  Moving Through Images:  Spectatorship and Meaning-Production in Interdisciplinary Art Environments  ]

by Melanie Thekala Wilmink 

[ extracts ]

Chapter Two: The Space of the White Cube 

Our first steps in this journey begin in the white cube, where the ephemeral temporal flows of moving images and performance take on physical form. While the gallery does not have the long history of the theatre space, it makes sense to start investigating here because the gallery has often been a place of disciplinary intersections. Yet, within the supposedly neutral, geometric space, clean walls, and open floorplan of the gallery, the ambiance of visual art exhibition stages even non-art disciplines as “belonging” to the gallery, rather than their original contexts. The gallery frames the object into something “special”—so much so that the renowned artist and author Brian O’Doherty has suggested that the white cube, more than any single artwork, is the archetype of visual art.101 The material and conceptual forms of the gallery have intrinsically shaped Western ideas of what art is, and how we should interact with it. 

Throughout the following chapter, I will interrogate the conditions that are generated by the gallery as an exhibition context and its impact on the spectator’s meaning-production. O’Doherty’s writing on the ideology of the gallery is a key entry point into this discussion, which enables further exploration using the historical development of gallery architecture and my own analysis of how Montreal-based artist dominique t skoltz disrupts these conventions.102 While O’Doherty’s ideas offer a good starting point for this discussion, I aim to update his ideas for a contemporary context where institutional critique and site-specific artwork have become commonplace. Importantly, O’Doherty primarily introduces the way that the gallery develops spatial relationships between spectators and artworks, without addressing the complexity of its temporal and social conventions. I propose that while the gallery still prioritizes spatial conditions of spectatorship, contemporary artwork like that of dominique t skoltz materialize the ways that objects also act in time with spectators. In this way, gallery objects perform with viewers to co-produce self-reflexive aesthetic experiences. This argument is supported through discussion of performance theory by Peggy Phelan, Josette Féral, Philip Auslander, and Rebecca Schneider, who develop an ontology of “live” performance as a form of co-presence, and Chris Slater, who argues for the agency of non-living objects. Each of these theorists develop their ideas through their own disciplinary-specific lens, and my gesture of bringing them together enables their application to a situation that treads between visual art, cinema, and performance. skoltz’s exhibitions illustrate the frictions or paradoxes of seeing the conventions of multiple disciplines simultaneously; as a result, it becomes possible to demonstrate how Bergson’s attentive recognition unfolds in the tension between embodied co-presence and the distancing effects of aesthetic discourse and conventions of display. 

The display conventions of the gallery prompt viewers to circulate through the open spaces until they encounter an object, at which point they may look—but not touch—and then move on to the next artwork. As such, the space of the gallery abstracts into a series of positions rather than continuum of spectatorial experience. Spectatorship functions through mobility and spatial orientation, where viewers find the best position to look at an artwork before they move onto the next station, as the white space of the gallery cleanses the palate for the next aesthetic experience. During this momentum, the individual spectator controls their own pace and the duration that they spend with an artwork. Although temporal conditions are at play in the gallery—via moving image or audio artworks, the gallery visitor’s schedule, tours, and otherevents happening in the space—time is not the primary factor that shapes the viewer’s relationship to the artwork. Instead, it is the object arrangements, the atmosphere generated by physical displays, and the viewer’s selected points of interest that determines their trajectory and meaning-making. Close arrangements might determine a significant thematic grouping that is often reinforced by didactic texts, but space more commonly distinguishes one artwork from another as an empty buffer between destinations. Even in closely-arranged groupings, artworks will rarely touch or otherwise share space. This paradigm produces the reading of each object on its own terms. In the following chapter, I will trace how the gallery came to prioritize this spatial organization, and I will interrogate how Montreal-based filmmaker and visual artist dominique t skoltz disrupts the spatial conditions of the gallery through the introduction of cinema’s temporal forms. 

Unlike other moving image installations that simply immerse the gallery in cinematic darkness and scale, skoltz brings a more nuanced understanding of cinematic ontology into the space of the white cube. She pushes beyond the darkness, projection, and scale that usually characterizes the “cinematic” in the gallery; rather, she deploys the spatial conventions of the gallery to give physical dimensions to time. Her work treats the gallery as cinematic and performative, in order to change the viewer’s perception of both the artwork and the exhibition space that contains it. By merging the cinematic with traditions of sculpture and painting, the artist constructs a situation where the temporal qualities of cinema become embedded in physical objects, giving them the ability to perform as relational agents with the spectator. Here, the viewing situation functions performatively through both the gallery-tradition of Minimalism (acknowledging the relationship between aesthetic and human forms), but also through the performance studies definition whereby performance implicates the spectator’s experience of the real.103 Through close attention to skoltz’s media installations, this chapter will demonstrate how the artist turns against the abstracted space of the gallery by introducing performative temporal relationships between viewers and objects. This, in turn, implicates the spectator in the material conditions of the gallery and produces conceptual gaps that allows the viewer to insert themselves into meaning-production. In other words, by underscoring the viewer’s circumnavigation of temporal objects in the gallery space, skoltz turns the viewer’s attention back towards their own performance of spectatorship as relational. 

The y2o dualités_ exhibitions took place at Arsenal Gallery’s Toronto and Montreal locations respectively in 2015-2016.104 While both of Arsenal’s locations are traditional white-cube galleries, skoltz’s installations derive from her short, single-channel film, y2o (2013), which had previously screened at film festivals.105 Within this earlier iteration, the film version of y2o played out in cinematic contexts, as part of event-based exhibitions that showcased multiple short films strung together. In a normal cinematic context, audiences gather together in a darkened cinema (or a multi-purpose room modified for cinema-exhibition purposes). The films begin and end at set times, with short films usually strung together sans intermissions. This is entirely different than the gallery-based context where the linear-temporality of the short film functions in isolation, as a loop that individual spectators wander through at will. Yet, even in the single-channel format, skoltz treated the temporally-constrained and linear format of the single-channel film as a malleable material. Throughout the multi-year festival run of the short film, skoltz exhibited two versions y2o: one with a 29-minute runtime, and a shortened, 11-minute cut. This variation demonstrates the artist’s early manipulation of the body of the film that she would later articulate as sculptural, photographic, performative, and installation forms.106

The y2o film contains its action in a large tank of water, where a man and a woman float weightlessly as they push and pull against one another. Comprised of nine chapters (01_ link, 02_ noeuds, 03_ nerfs, 04_ bulles de silence, 05_ ce mortel ennui, 06_ SMS, 07_ unlink, 08_ lâcher prise, 09_ empty), the 29-minute film traverses the emotional arc of a romance through the movements of the two performers. As they are under-water for most of the film, there is no dialogue (there is an ambient soundtrack), but the figures’ gestural interactions serve to convey the tone of their relationship through each chapter. The water drags their physical movements into slow-motion as the performers’ hair and clothing drift around them, and water currents convey motion (and emotion) from one partner to the other. Starting with passionate embraces, the film traces the decay of the relationship until the final moments when the tank drains and the figures are left standing dripping wet and facing—but not touching—one another. In the catalogue for y2o dualités_, critic and curator Bernard Schütze explains that throughout the film, water acts as an affective force that connects the figures together. He writes that “…affect is not so much something that is in the protagonists, it is they who are enveloped in it, just as they are submerged in water… tellingly, the binding water is precisely what is drained away in the video installation’s final movement titled [empty] in a sequence that signals the relationship’s dissolution and a return of each to an individual, solitary sphere.”107 This push and pull between singularity and connectivity is what links the film and all of the artworks that are derived from it.

Where water operates as an affective medium in the film, the gallery installation portrayed this connectivity through the spatial relationships between artworks and the spectator. Air and water became synonymous, to function as felt presence that drew attention to the room between things. The tank of water made it clear that actions on one body rippled through this connecting force to affect the other, and viewers were meant to read similar forces at work in the air and objects contained in the gallery. The space functioned as stage for the live unfolding of relations between the viewer’s body, the art objects, and the space of the white cube.  

Klonk traces the rise of white as the background colour of choice in the early 20th century, with Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, who famously conceptualized white as an infinite space that also held connotations of purity, and Bauhaus artists who used it in exhibition contexts. The double-meaning of infinity and purity supported concentration on the objects, while also functioning practically as a neutral colour that worked for a large range of artwork.114 In the United States, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) took up white as the wall-colour of choice and is often referenced as the first “white cube” gallery. Klonk points out the influence of German museum architecture on MOMA curator Alfred Barr, and extends her reading to point out that Barr’s design of the gallery also echoed American department store planning—a gesture that essentially links the kinds of spectatorship needed for commerce and that of modern art. She explains that the new MOMA building was the first gallery to have a glass frontage on the street, and the entrance was conceived in a “funnel style,” after the ideas of renowned artist and architect Frederick Kiesler, who determined that such a shape most effectively drew consumers from the exterior to the interior of the department store.115 The interior of the gallery also notably included a reception desk and bookshop, with divided gallery spaces that operated like cells within a larger whole. All of this aligned with American commercialism, where “consumers could cultivate themselves, up-date themselves in matters of style, and recognise themselves as informed members of the consumer society that was then emerging in the United States.”116 

• 101 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 14. 

• 102 A reminder that I will maintain the artist’s desired lower-case style for her name. Additionally, I want to point out that this discussion in relation to skoltz’s work enables concrete application of dense philosophical ideas, while also highlighting an artist whose work is not widely recognized. As an established artist in Montreal, skoltz’s installation work has been shown at key local institutions, but her international presence is thus-far limited to her film-festival screenings, and there is limited writing about her films or installations. This chapter will contribute essential critical writing and expand the discursive context of her practice. 

• 103 See: Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part I & II,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 222-235; Phelan, “Ontology of Performance,” 148. 

• 104 Note that skoltz formats the show title with an underscore at the end, so I will retain that style. 

• 105 dominique t skoltz, “y2o_film,” dominique t skoltz, n.d., accessed 10 October 2019, www.dominiquetskoltz.com/y2o_film-2.   

• 106 Prior to the exhibitions at Arsenal, skoltz also exhibited iterations of the film as installations; she showed chapter “03_nerfs” (nerves) as a loop at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s Série Projections: Vidéomusique in 2013 before the final cut of the film was completed, and then later as a six-channel installation at Phi Centre (Montreal) from February 6 to March 16, 2015. 

• 107 Bernard Schütze, “Resonances of an Affective Field,” y2o catalogue (Montreal: dominique t skoltz, 2015), 5, http://www.dominiquetskoltz.com/new-page-5.  

Contextualizing the Architecture of the Gallery  

The gallery historically emphasizes spatial positioning above all other qualities, forging relationships between artworks and spectators through layout, object display, lighting, and the gallery architecture. By materializing the relational connections at play in the gallery space, the y2o dualities_ exhibitions created a gap between the usually dislocated spatial conditions of the gallery and the contingent interrelationships that develop by treating the gallery a performative space and time. Like a short film program, where each component connects to the next and reads as part of a trajectory, skoltz’s gallery space performed a continuity between objects, images, ideas, and bodies. Unlike the cinema or theatre audience, where the screen or stage directs attention toward a single focal point, here spectators still wandered around based on their own itinerary, making it difficult to create unified experience. Awareness of other spectators was unavoidable, since their bodies interspersed with the gallery objects; as such, they became legible as additional relational objects in the staged space and time of meaning-production.  skoltz’s material explorations of the y2o film produced a small selection of installations at the Toronto iteration of y2o dualités_ (9 September to 3 October 2015), and culminated with additional sculptural objects and installations at the Montreal location (6 November 2015 to 7 May 2016). Both Arsenal locations are situated in large former warehouses with very few windows. They are in many ways the ideal gallery space, with just enough industrial touches to add charm to the atmosphere but maintaining the concrete floors, white walls, open spaces, and high ceilings that are the epitome of O’Doherty’s white cube. Due to the limited windows, lighting in both spaces can be completely controlled, which was used for maximum impact in the Toronto location where skoltz’s work was installed in a darkened gallery that highlighted the cinematic luminosity the work. The much larger Montreal location consists of two main open rooms that can be subdivided using temporary walls, with ceiling-mounted fluorescent lights, and a few small skylights that filter soft daylight into the rooms below. In addition to these areas, Arsenal’s Montreal gallery also retains a windowless side room for artworks that require darkness. 

While there is variation in gallery architecture, the conditions at Arsenal’s Toronto and Montreal locations are typical of contemporary art exhibition spaces. The white walls, bright lighting, and open spaces allow for some modification to accommodate different display arrangements but is so standardized that the exhibition architecture itself often fades into the background during spectatorship. The walls, pedestals, lighting, and other display devices make up a seemingly neutral infrastructure that we take for granted as the natural setting for art. It is important to remember, however, that the white cube gallery is a recent construction, emerging only in the 20th century, and its infrastructure is ideologically driven by the cultural influences of the time, including: the expectations that the viewer encounter the work on its own terms with both physical and critical distance, that the work should be treated as a valuable commodity, and that the individual viewer ideally garners some form of enlightenment from the encounter. While there have been challenges to the material form of the gallery over time, the essential architectural conditions have remained stable, and continue to inflect even interventions with these paradigms of spatial and conceptual distance. 

The archetype of the white cube developed from earlier natural history museums that collected and displayed objects as microcosms of broader natural and human systems of order. Driven by enlightenment politics of scientific progress that intertwined with colonial expansion, these predecessors to the gallery functioned as a place to educate the public and build national prestige.108 The focus on collecting in early museums established initial conventions around the spatial conditions of the gallery, which in turn shaped the spectator’s relationship with collections of physical artifacts. In her book Strategies of Display, Julia Noordegraaf points out how every museum space operates based on a script that imagines the ideal relationship between spectator and objects.109 The gallery structures an ideal path of action for the spectator: through the placement of artwork on a wall or pedestal, installation near the lobby or deep in the bowels of the building, by arranging objects in a single space or in a sequence of spaces, or by providing seating, bathrooms, or cafes. These arrangements may be determined by the history of the collection (arrangement in categories or timelines) or thematic narratives, but the viewer’s body is key to playing out the institutional story-arc. The intentions behind these scripts may shift over time—from early enlightenment museums that displayed large collections to stimulate taxonomic comparisons, to post-World War museums that re-imagined reception based on unique objects that held autonomous and mystical power—but display practices inevitably shape the viewer’s body into forms of engagement that suit the institutional ideology at the time. 

Art historian Charlotte Klonk elaborates on these scripts in Spaces of Experience, as she describes how changing technology impacted both practical display and conceptions of spectatorship.110 Increased understanding of optics and colour theory, and the introduction of artificial lighting in the 19th century led to more adaptable displays that could be altered depending on the needs of individual objects, and subsequent advances in psychology turned attention from the needs of the object to that of the spectators.111 These shifts laid the groundwork for the 20th century conception of the autonomous art object, where art could speak for itself if the conditions of display were suitable—and if the viewer would only do the work to listen.112 Museum reforms in the early 20th century responded to this impulse by limiting overcrowded displays with more strict selection criteria. Institutions made up of multiple rooms ensured that each gallery was thematically unified and distinguished from other spaces in order to maintain the interest and focus of the viewers, and individual works were also more spaced out from one another to produce undistracted encounters.113  

Klonk traces the rise of white as the background colour of choice in the early 20th century, with Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, who famously conceptualized white as an infinite space that also held connotations of purity, and Bauhaus artists who used it in exhibition contexts. The double-meaning of infinity and purity supported concentration on the objects, while also functioning practically as a neutral colour that worked for a large range of artwork.114 In the United States, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) took up white as the wall-colour of choice and is often referenced as the first “white cube” gallery. Klonk points out the influence of German museum architecture on MOMA curator Alfred Barr, and extends her reading to point out that Barr’s design of the gallery also echoed American department store planning—a gesture that essentially links the kinds of spectatorship needed for commerce and that of modern art. She explains that the new MOMA building was the first gallery to have a glass frontage on the street, and the entrance was conceived in a “funnel style,” after the ideas of renowned artist and architect Frederick Kiesler, who determined that such a shape most effectively drew consumers from the exterior to the interior of the department store.115 The interior of the gallery also notably included a reception desk and bookshop, with divided gallery spaces that operated like cells within a larger whole. All of this aligned with American commercialism, where “consumers could cultivate themselves, up-date themselves in matters of style, and recognise themselves as informed members of the consumer society that was then emerging in the United States.”116 

Although much time has passed since the opening of Barr’s MOMA in 1939, it seems in some ways very little has changed with the white cube. Many of the standards that he proposed: modular partitions, bright naturalistic lighting, clean geometries, minimal architectural decoration, and the commercial habit of browsing objects, are all standard in galleries today. Many galleries are situated in well-trafficked urban spaces, with frontages and signage that echo the language of commercial business. Large glass windows offer street-side visitors a glimpse into the gallery—to preview the artworks that one might find inside—and once viewers step inside, the geometric spaces and white walls are still ubiquitous. While Charlotte Klonk frames a teleology of early anthropological museums as didactic, which then gave way to subjective, psychological, and finally consumeristic modes of viewing, it is important to note that each of these modes still shapes contemporary viewing experiences. The Museum of Modern Art still functions as a key example, with its mandate to collect canonical art objects and educate museum-goers as to their historic and cultural value. These works are displayed in clean, sparse galleries so that each work can be encountered on its own merits—yet, it is also part of a sequential display that carries viewers throughout the building only to empty out near the gift shop. Although not all contemporary galleries maintain all of these traditions quite so explicitly, these ideas exist as an undercurrent whether artists and galleries recognize it as such, or whether they actively utilize these dynamics to shape spectatorial effects. Additionally, even though there are alternatives to the white cube (including site-specific and outdoor art, as well as retrofitted spaces, or even artistic institutional interventions), those spaces are always still in dialogue with the white cube, as the model that is rejected or transformed. 

In Arsenal’s gallery spaces, all of these connotations circulate together. The artworks are on display in separated zones that clearly demark individual works from one another through through spatial positioning and display elements like frames or pedestals. In the Montreal exhibition space, the cinematic projection was even contained in its own room, so that it would be completely separate from the white-cube context of the more sculptural objects. The rest of skoltz’s solo show was presented on its own (contained with temporary walls), but was set against the adjacent room where Arsenal showcased a group of artists from their gallery roster. This meant that even as it was set up to be interpreted as a self-enclosed project, skoltz’s artwork was still connected to the larger context of the white cube through shared ceiling space, lighting, and audio transmissions with the other exhibits. The viewer could circulate the gallery at their leisure, browsing through a variety of interesting objects on display before entering y2o dualities_.117 Additionally, while the larger context of the gallery connected artworks as either part of the group show or skoltz’s thematic logic, the internal display staging for both shows separated objects from one another, so each artwork could be viewed on its own merits. By arranging artworks with space between them (through wall-hanging, frames, and pedestals), the displays emphasized the individual, autonomous meaning of each work, which individual viewers could unlock through the proper spectatorial labour. 

As shown above, the physical structures of architecture intertwine with philosophical conceptions of the viewing experience. Just as psychoanalysis shaped new display architectures by emphasizing the spectator’s interior workings, modernist ideas around the autonomy of art shifted the agency of meaning externally again. Artist and critic Brian O’Doherty articulates these paradigms in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, where he coins the term “white cube” as a descriptor for the gallery.118 This text offers one of the first explorations of the role of spectatorship in the gallery space, where he claims that the “white, ideal space… more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth century art….”119 He supports this claim by tracing the conceptual shifts that defined the “white cube” through the early twentieth century, and outlines key influences on the spectator’s aesthetic experience. It is here that he distinguishes first the disembodied “Eye” that takes up the critical position of the mind, and later the fleshly “Spectator” who acts as an individual, feeling subject in space, echoing the tension between the Cartesian mind and body. 

In the essay “Notes on the Gallery Space” O’Doherty introduces a politics of distance and closeness. Instead of the oscillating gesture of Bergsonian attentive recognition, where one would move in the space between distance and closeness, O’Doherty traces the history of the gallery through the polarities of the mind and body. Within this line of thought, the gallery establishes a panoptic view with a moralistic sense of distance: collecting objects to hold them apart from life.120 The material quality of the panopticon establishes a clear overhead map of the ground, but dissociates vision from bodily experience because it is not a natural point of view; it is always mediated by infrastructure like tall buildings, airplanes etc. This historical abstraction separates the gaze from the messy, unpredictable entanglement of a horizontal ground-level view. It is important to note that this “panoptic” visuality does not just play out from the overhead view but is also enacted through the linear perspective that has characterized visual arts spectatorship since the Renaissance. Linear perspective uses logic and mathematics to create an illusion of receding space that is generally contingent on the viewer taking up a single, proper, viewing position in relation to vanishing point(s) located in the image. If the viewer stands at an incorrect angle, the illusion does not function. The frame offers a stable anchor and instruction for how the viewer must arrange themselves in relation to the image, and again ensures visual separation between artworks that each require their own frontal positioning.121 As such, the relationship between the viewer’s body and the artwork is abstracted and mechanized by the artwork and exhibition space so that optics are given priority over other sensual ways of engaging with the art—touch, taste, smell, or sound, for instance—and the viewer must cooperate with the singular ideal viewing position of the “Eye,” rather than a varied, individual subject position of the “Spectator” who enacts bodily relationships with the image. 

Although he describes the ideology of the gallery as structuring these binary positions of mind and body, O’Doherty’s discussion of the Eye and the Spectator is useful because it goes on to elaborate a more nuanced history of spectatorship that fundamentally refuses the binary positioning of mind and body. It is valuable to note here that O’Doherty produced these ideas within the context of the 1960s and 70s art world, where Minimalism began to challenge the significant discursive power of formalism and disciplinary purity in American Abstract Expressionism. By drawing attention to the horizontal, close, and individually determined nature of art experiences, Minimalism and its related outgrowths focused attention on the presumed split between mind and body. Later practices of institutional critique exposed the administrative and bureaucratic structures that shape meaning in exhibition-making, and disciplinary bleeds by video, performance and new media have all questioned the strict boundaries between artforms.122 This kind of work actively intervenes with the viewer’s positionality to draw attention to previously hidden discourses and practices, creating new meaning as part of what O’Doherty might label a “gesture” in his final essay “The Gallery as a Gesture.”123 Here, the gesture acts as a rupture in expectations, a double-movement that both participates in the embodied and embedded nature of being inside an experience of institutional structures and, concurrently, of standing outside—at a distance—to see how those structures construct experience.124 The gesture places art into quotation marks, revealing both the image and the frame, and creating an awareness of perception.125 

O’Doherty interrogates aesthetic experience through a close tracing of spectatorship as it intertwines with the spatial workings of the gallery. Inside the White Cube explicitly frames gallery spectatorship as working within ideas of either autonomous or imbricated viewing and provides clear examples within exhibition practices. This allows us to consider the viewer’s physical position as linked to their conceptual meaning-making, either as an abstract authority, a relational entity, or some combination of the two. Although he does not use this language, in a sense he also establishes the spectator as a performer in the space. I use the term performer, because in O’Doherty’s framing, a successful gesture is one that turns against itself to look at the action while enacting at the same time. The viewer must produce labour that they are then aware of: they perform spectatorship for themselves, for the artwork, and for other viewers, following the scripts established by the hard and soft conventions of the exhibition space.126    

• 108 There are many authors who rightly point out the gendered, racist, and classist assumptions around how that public is determined, and who decides what is ‘good’ for them, yet the idea that the museum somehow serves a democratic purpose persists, as well as the notion that it establishes a consistent form of experience for all viewers. See: Emma Barker, “Introduction," in Contemporary Cultures of Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Mieke Bal, “The Discourse of the Museum,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 201-218; Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 80-112; Ivan Karp and Fred Wilson, “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 251-267; Gerald McMaster, “Creating Spaces,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 191-200; Suzanne Macleod, “Rethinking museum architecture: Towards a site-specific history of production and use,” in Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, ed. Suzanne MacLeod (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 9-25. 

• 109 Julia Noordegraaf, Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth Century Visual Culture (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004), 13-14.  

• 110 Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 

• 111 Ibid., 30-41. See also: A Dictionary of Film Studies, s.v. "magic lantern," (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), n.d., accessed 22 July 2019, Oxford Reference Online; Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, s.v. "optics," (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), n.d., accessed 22 July 2019, Oxford Reference Online. 

• 112 Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 55-61; Noordegraaf, Strategies of Display, 91-92. 

• 113 Noordegraaf, Strategies of Display, 92-93.

• 114 Of tangential interest here is Klonk’s suggestion that white became the colour of choice for Nazi exhibitions, because it suited the “…regime’s technocratic mentality,” and reduced individualism in favour of a totalitarian positioning of the spectator (Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 235). That the colour became the go-to-choice for all galleries is likely more driven by the flexibility and supposed-neutrality of white for a varied selection of work; however, the idea that the white space unifies all of the contents together under an ideological purpose is something that is still relevant to spectatorship within the contemporary white cube. 

• 115 See: Stephen J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 91. 

• 116 Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 149.

• 117 It is worth noting that Arsenal operates as a privately-owned institution that presents works selected by its benefactors, Pierre and Anne-Marie Trahan, while sharing space and operating alongside their commercial gallery, Division. This structure intertwines the commercial and public exhibition mandates, and I would argue that this makes the financial incentives of exhibiting an artist slightly more transparent than a public art gallery, while also enabling them to show more experimental artwork than could be supported solely through the commercial wing. It does, however, shape the kind of work that is exhibited in these spaces, likely leaning towards more commercially viable art objects and the taste of its benefactors. It may also limit access to the artworks, since the space charges an admission fee to the Montreal gallery (the Toronto location is free admission), and both spaces are located in industrial areas that would require viewers to plan their visits. Additionally, the industrial exteriors lack extensive signage, which could be daunting for first-time gallery visitors, particularly if they have not attended many galleries in the past. Robert Everett-Green, “Montreal’s Arsenal is ‘not a gallery, not a museum’,” The Globe and Mail, 6 February 2015, accessed 11 November 2019, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/montreals-arsenal-is-not-a-gallery-not-a-museum/article22837192

• 118 Published as a series of essays in Artforum in 1976, then released as a book in 1986 and revised with an additional chapter in 2000. 

• 119 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 14. 

• 120 Ibid., 13.

• 121 See also: Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).

• 122 Clement Greenberg’s writings about modern art—particularly regarding his ideas around the autonomy of art—were hugely influential, and Minimalism challenged these ideas by developing contextual artworks that drew attention to the spectator as a living body. See: Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148-172; Clement Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art (1959),” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 75-84; Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85-93; Allan Kaprow, “Untitled Guidelines for Happenings (1965),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artist's Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 709-714; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part I & II,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 222-235; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part III: Notes and Nonsequiturs (1967),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artist's Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 588-593. 

• 123 This essay was new in the expanded edition of The Ideology of the White Cube, published in 2000. 

• 124 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 88. 

• 125 Ibid., 97.           

The Ontology of Performing Objects  

In skoltz’s exhibitions, the viewer’s moves between the tactile materiality of the body and the abstraction of aesthetic discourse, in a way that makes visible the performance of the spectator’s body in shared time and space with the artwork. Importantly, this notion of performativity also extends to the artworks and architectures of the gallery, where the spaces act to produce the spectator’s reflective experience. While the conventions of the gallery necessarily require the spectator to arrange their bodies in the space around artworks, this by itself does not necessarily produce performative reflection. In both the Toronto and Montreal y2o dualités_ exhibitions, the introduction of moving images altered the spectatorial dynamic to produce performative effects and relationships between viewers and objects. In part, this occurred because of the way that skoltz re-purposed the y2o film so that each object literally referenced the others; however, because the artist deconstructed the material conditions of cinematic forms and reassembled them as sculptural objects, temporal experience also suddenly became visible as a tangible material within the space of the gallery.

As noted previously, Arsenal’s Toronto location epitomizes the white cube, and it was this standardized context that enabled skoltz’s artwork to create ruptured expectations through the introduction of moving images. As a retrofitted industrial building in a residential neighbourhood, the building has high ceilings, controlled lighting conditions, pure white walls, and plain concrete floors. For y2o dualités_, the Toronto location blacked out the windows and turned off the usual fluorescent lighting so that the show could take place in immersive darkness that recalled the cinema. Despite the low-lighting, the installation was entirely like that of a traditional gallery show where objects were dispersed throughout an open space and lacked seating that might invite longer durations of spectatorship. Upon entering Arsenal’s Toronto exhibition space, the first thing I saw was a large self-supporting white wall—the kind that would usually separate a gallery space into separate zones and often carries some sort of introductory text about the exhibition—but this particular wall had been adapted as a screen to showcase the 29-minute, single-channel version of y2o (fig. 2). In a cinema, the screen object usually disappears into darkness. The projected image subsumes the flatness and texture of the screen, and even most gallery projections simply project the image onto a white wall that refuses attention. Since the monumental, three-foot-thick wall invited viewing from all sides, y2o dualités_ presented the film-image as an object. Remember that the action of the y2o film takes place in a large tank of water, so in addition to the unusual screen dimensions, the wall also incorporated a large ladder on one side, which implied that viewers could climb to the top and enter the virtual tank of water. Through this presentation, the screen literally took on the volume of the tank-image, yet viewers could recognize this dimensionality as an illusion since the flatness of the projection overlaid with the impenetrable form of the white wall and ladder leading nowhere. 

Once past this divider, it became possible to view a multi-screen installation of the film, where each of the nine chapters broke out into separate flat-screen monitors (fig. 3). On the white wall of the gallery, the nine segments played together simultaneously, queuing up through space instead of the normally linear filmic timeline. This nine-channel installation was one of the first ways that skoltz deconstructed the cinematic image into a sculptural form that distinctly referenced its liminal placement between the theatrical context of a film and the gallery context of visual art installations. By disassembling the larger narrative of the single-channel into its component parts, skoltz accentuated cinematic serial storytelling and montage that connects disparate shots or events within a holistic linear temporality. She accomplished this by removing the disparate parts of each chapter from their linear singularity and framing each as its own contained segment. Just as a film still represents a single part of the larger cinematic whole, the spatially separated chapters read as distinct fragments while maintaining the cinematic ability to flow through time. This display format drew attention to the ontology of cinema as a whole that is comprised of component parts: single frames, scenes, chapters, or acts, all spread out and held together in time. Rather than hiding the connections between the scenes by passing from one to the other in the duration of the film, here the scenes were laid out like a film strip. Each scene stood in relation to all of the other action simultaneously, as the chapters played out side by side. The installation simultaneously referenced the linear body of the single-channel film, which would ordinarily play out across a set duration, and gallery-based installations that install looping slices of time that can be encountered at any point, for as long as the spectator desires. It also called attention to the viewer’s ability to see the whole duration of the film at the same time, as the screens spread across the wall of the gallery. Since this was an unusual layout for a single-channel film, the spatialization of time produced a tension between the expected flow of of 87 cinematic duration as it collided with the viewer’s spatial experience of several different times unfolding at once. 

Restructuring the container of cinematic time emphasized the spectator’s pre-determined expectations of time as well as space. The space of the gallery made time visible by fragmenting the linear cinematic stream into discrete physical stations (fig. 4). In his discussion of the y2o film, Bernard Schütze described the film’s watery container as a kind of affective force, and here—through the introduction of the projected film against the faux-tank wall of the gallery—the white cube takes on the same connotations. The gallery space operated as an analog for the screen-image, by locating the viewer in both the virtual space of the film and the real space of the gallery simultaneously. The material objects of the gallery acted in place of the bodies on screen and implicated the viewer as part of that set of relationships. If the space of the gallery read as analogous to the water of the tank in the cinematic image, then it stands to reason that the materialization of image-time through the nine-channel installation also echoed the spectator’s now-fragmented temporal experience. The spread of the artwork across the wall called attention to the gallery’s relational positioning of the viewer and objects, while enacting a similar durational spread that prevented time from flowing forward invisibly for the viewer. Broken up into its disparate parts, the montage was no longer hidden in a linear trajectory. 

In the Toronto iteration of y2o dualités_, skoltz began to merge the cinematic with the spatial and performative potential of the white cube. The darkened space enabled the projected image to operate in the foreground as cinema, while taking on the object-ontology that the gallery so famously produces; however, by considering the aesthetic situation within the framework of performance, questions arise regarding what is meant by performance and who, or what, is doing the performing. I propose that the artworks and the space of the gallery themselves enact a kind of performance, where—although they are not living entities—their physical forms are still staged in a relational interplay that takes up time and space. My application of the term “performance” derives from theorist Peggy Phelan, who deems “liveness” as the key factor that distinguishes performance from other disciplines. For Phelan, the co-presence of living bodies “implicates the real,” in an aesthetic experience that can only exist in that space and time of the relational encounter.127 Once they separate, the performative gives way to memory and documentation. In a way, this metaphor echoes Bergson’s understanding of Pure Perception and Pure Memory, where experience moves from the immediacy of stimuli (a short time and space between body and perception) to the distance of memory (abstraction produced with spatial and temporal distance between body and idea). Phelan’s argument does not account for Bergson’s notion that memory is itself implicated in how spectators perceive in the present, creating a false distinction between the idea of experience and memory. Yet, the unfolding relational qualities of the live offer a keystone for how I have come to conceptualize spectatorial experience as a performative act. 

It is important to note that Phelan’s definition is not the only way to understand performance. Josette Féral links it to meaning that is developed during the manipulation of a body through space, and distinguishes performance from the theatrical, which constructs a pre-determined point of view that is then communicated to a spectator.128 Her separation of performance and theatricality distinguishes a disciplinary split between performance studies and theatre studies that is not of immediate concern here, but that I will address in Chapter Four.  

Nevertheless, it is important because Féral also categorizes two kinds of meaning: one that is produced through the encounter and one that is pre-set and communicated. It is an idea that resonates well with the earlier distinction of gallery spectatorship as either embodied and relational, or as critically distanced. As with the white cube and the black box, I argue that impactful spectatorship is not a matter of one or the other, but rather a push and pull between them. This idea allows us to come close into the moment of encounter while simultaneously stepping back to develop understanding. 

Performance theorists Philip Auslander and Rebecca Schneider take issue with Peggy Phelan’s insistence that liveness requires human bodies, by tracing how photographic documentation might itself act performatively. For Auslander the performer’s intention to stage an image for an audience—whether that is in person or for viewers who will only encounter an image—retains performative impact.129 Rebecca Schneider takes these notions even further to collapse all of these notions into the non-living object of a photograph. Despite merely being the image-trace of a subject that is taken out of time, Schneider notes that the photograph becomes live again through its interaction with the viewing subject. In their hands, and in front of their eyes, the viewer’s subjective interaction with the photograph has the potential to disrupt the pre-determined expectations of the image.130 This effect forces the viewer to reflect on their own experience and meaning-making, and consider the relational process between image and spectator that echoes the theatrical call-and-response of an actor expecting audience participation. Sliding alongside Bergson’s notion of attentive recognition, here we begin to understand the performative as something or someone that forges relational dialogue with a spectator in the space and time of a contingent encounter. It is live, not because the object itself is living, but because it reproduces the experience of live-ness, where an organism tries to understand the world around it through a temporal unfolding in space. Crucially, performance considered in this way is not just one subject acting for another, but both parties in conversation, developing meaning together. 

In his book Alien Agency, artist and researcher Chris Salter considers the value of non-human agency within the aesthetic encounter.131 His artworks operate as mute objects that possess their own living processes and contribute to the field of relationships that construct the world around us. Salter explores ways to enable these objects to communicate without human language, drawing on multi-sensory ways of knowing. He treats his artworks as things with agency that have “the potential to do something, but… might not, depending on what it is surrounded by.”132 These objects cannot communicate through straightforward linguistic means, but nonetheless possess their own ways of being in the world and potential interactions with the space and people that surround them. In one of his key examples, Salter discusses the use of acoustics and sound in his work.133 He notes that sound can never be separated from site and context since every surrounding surface alters tone and vibrations between the path of the object making the noise and the listener’s ear. I am interested in moving-image installations because they construct self-enclosed worlds; they control the environment to produce certain effects on the viewer, but this control is limited. As much as the space and form of the artwork stays the same, the temporal event of encounter with a viewer creates a unique relationship every time the work is viewed. In this circulation of potential agencies—from the space, the artwork, the viewer, the time and day spectatorship takes place, or the sequence of objects the viewer encountered before this final work—every aesthetic meeting is unique. The world performs with the artwork and the viewer, creating an art experience that is live and constantly in-the-making. 

The Montreal iteration of y2o dualités_ pushed these performances between objects and spectators even further. In the space of the white cube, skoltz reinstalled the nine-screen series, along with an aquarium-monitor (y2o Huis clos, 2015) from the Toronto installation—this time without the immersive darkness of the previous exhibition (fig. 5). In addition to these older works, the artist incorporated additional photographs and sculptures related to the y2o film. Under the bright light of the gallery, the moving images read even more as objects since the spectator could view the whole space and multiple objects with a single glance, as they chose their own path through the gallery and spent as much time as they desired with each work. Displayed in single-channel formats, multi-screen installations, photographic stills, and sculptural objects, the flexible and open time of the gallery automatically overrode the contained duration of the moving images, so that there was no start and end other than beyond the spectator’s encounter with artwork. In the larger installation space, spectators could take in the whole display at once, to see a variety of photographs displayed on the walls, with two sculptures, the nine-channel installation, and a screen enclosed in a fish-tank, all distributed equally around the room. This layout enabled all the works to relate to one another, particularly since many of the photographic images, as well as the sculptures, moved away from a re-presentation of the single channel film toward images more broadly inspired by the film. For instance, several large-scale photographs depicted still-life shots of fabric corsets, plastic tubing, and water, which echoed the female performer’s costuming in y2o but were not a literalre working as was the case with the moving image artworks. Other photographs included stills from the film, and a series of rusted and crumpled audio speakers that repeated similar forms found in three other speaker-related sculptures.134 Through these objects, the artist explored the tensions between words and actions, as well as the promises made and broken through the course of being with one another.135 The artworks connected conceptually as an exploration of the relationship between the two performers from y2o and echoed the same material qualities as the film installations. The photographs were all displayed in large clean shadow-box frames that pushed distance between the protective glass and the mounted image. They also demonstrated the same colour palette and textures as the film while establishing a tension between the slick, cold quality of digital blues, greens, and greys, and the organic textures of rust, frayed fabric, and peeling paint. 

Through both these conceptual and physical effects, the spectator became entangled in a relational back-and-forth between their own subjectivities and objects that seemed to be contingent on the individual spectator and the surrounding environment. This was not literal interactivity (although it could be), but imaginative, so that the viewer built a narrative based on the back and forth between the physical and conceptual forms of the object. The unfolding of meaning through this live encounter resonates with our earlier discussion of the performative, where a performance occurs through the relational entanglements between two entities in space and time. While the artworks are not living entities, Chris Salter’s ideas enable a consideration of the inanimate as something that still holds a certain kind of performative agency. Approaching the aesthetic object as performative provides an interesting way to consider how the object develops meaning in relation to a viewer. It shifts the meaning-making from a one-sided deposit of knowledge—the popular notion that a viewer is supposed to ‘get’ the singular meaning of the work—as it was determined by the artist—towards something that is more dialectic, or conversational. In a conversation with another human being, it would be impossible to fully know everything about the other person; we listen to words and body language as we encounter them and interpret based on how much we know about the person, their tone, the context, and what we are interested in hearing. Further discussion is determined by the back and forth between unknowable subjects, as both parties immediately react to what has been said and done by the other. This way of thinking may romantically anthropomorphize the aesthetic object, but it also underscores the idea that an aesthetic encounter is durational, relational, and contingent upon the circumstances of the situation.  

• 126 Hard rules would be those that are explicit (Do not touch! Pay admission. No photographs) versus soft rules that are more suggestive (architectural paths through the exhibit, benches that establish static positions in front of works, tape on the floor to indicate proper distance from the work).

• 127 Phelan, “Ontology of Performance,” 148. 

• 128 This is not dissimilar to Phelan’s idea of the live, since meaning is developed through a contingent encounter in a certain time and space. See: Josette Féral, “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified,” Modern Drama 25, no. 1 (1982): 170-181, accessed 9 February 2020, www.doi.org/10.3138/md.25.1.170.

• 129 Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” Performing Arts Journal: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): 1-10, accessed 29 October 2019, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4140006. 

• 130 Rebecca Schneider, “Still Living,” Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 138-168.

• 131 Chris Salter, Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). 

• 132 Ibid., 161. 

• 133 Ibid., 20-84.  

• 134 dominique t skoltz, “Collision no 01 & 02,” dominique t skoltz, n.d., accessed 23 October 2019, www.dominiquetskoltz.com. 

• 135 dominique t skoltz, “Union de Fait,” dominique t skoltz, n.d., accessed 23 October 2019, www.dominiquetskoltz.com.       

Sensuous Perception 

These performative effects were not just available when the spatial qualities of the gallery were foregrounded as a white cube. Rather, it also functioned through the material surfaces and structures of cinema as well. In the Montreal exhibition, the one concession to cinematic darkness was the exhibition of the single-channel film by itself in a small darkened room, segregated from skoltz’s main space by the lobby containing the Arsenal group show. In this darkened room, the film projection filled an entire wall, taking up a similar cinematic scale as it had on the dividing wall at the Toronto location. In addition to the obligatory bench seating that normally accompanies gallery displays of moving images in black-out spaces, the film was installed with a large pool of water that took up a similar amount of space as the projected image (fig. 6). As with the Toronto installations, this new display format for the single-channel film stepped beyond the flatness of the cinema screen to take up three-dimensional space in the gallery. Where the first iterations began to objectify the screen by turning attention to the material qualities of the technological interfaces of the image (the wall/screen, and the multiple monitors that distributed a single narrative along a horizon-line), this exhibition transformed the screen-image itself into a tactile object. The addition of the water not only focused attention on the space in between the spectator and screen, but also on tactile differences in the quality of the filmic image as it was represented on the wall and pool surfaces. While the wall-screen was a flat, white, surface that receded in favour of the image, a metal and concrete pillar on the left-side of the screen interrupted that flatness to call attention to the architecture of the room. Although the concrete and rusted metal contrasted against the white wall, the rough and worn quality of the pillar suited the filmic image quite well, as an extension of the rusted objects, worn wood, and peeling wallpaper that made up the set dressing. 

Similarly, the use of actual water created a sympathetic resonance between image-water and real-water. In the darkened room, the reflection on the liquid was slick and oily (an effect further aided by the black plastic liner that curled out from the edge of the pool). It was possible to see and feel the depth of the water, as the plastic lip curved into a shallow pond—yet the projection also reflected and covered this depth with the flatness of light. Depth and surface were revealed simultaneously. Additionally, the surface of the water acted as a mirror that displayed a twinned image of the performers floating in their own watery container. As a reflection the images necessarily moved together; however, the different textures of the screen surfaces distinguished the images from one another. They were the same, yet not the same, as the water somehow produced a sharper image that was more contrasted and tinted with a colour differential from the water-tarp-wall-light all overlaid. In the pond, the image became distorted (by the spectator’s overhead position, and by liquid and tarp ripples), and this distortion attracted the spectator’s scrutiny. In drawing and painting, mirrors are often used to see objects differently—to flip the artist’s perception so that they might look more closely. This process enables the artist to notice things that might have been previously overlooked because of shorthand assumptions about the object. Similarly, skoltz’s mirror image existed as an unfamiliar double, moving in reverse, and taking up space in an unusual way. The relation of the two same-but-different images prompted the spectator to reconsider the cinematic image. 

The disruption of the familiar through this act of mirroring enables the same process as Bergson’s attentive recognition. While skoltz’s presentation of the film did not literally ask viewers to insert themselves into the work, or to call upon their own specific memories, the material qualities of the doubled image engaged Laura U. Marks’ idea of haptic visuality. For Marks, this process can occur without literally touching the image; instead, by making the photographic image unrecognizable, the viewer must rely on their past experience to develop a new understanding of what they are looking at.136 The encounter requires a conceptual touching of the image—to come so close that that it becomes impossible to separate the form of the image from the spectator’s interpretation of it. The viewer only produces understanding by filling the gaps that are produced by the image with their own memories and experiences. Since skoltz presented the y2o film alongside its own mirror—that defamiliarized and changed the potential readings of the film—she forced the spectator to come close to the image and labour to build an understanding alongside it. In this situation the image was also capable of both optical and literal tactility since the viewer could reach out to touch the reflected image, feeling the water on their skin and interfering with the image by creating ripples or splashes (fig. 7). The disruption did not inherently change the image, but it created a space for viewers to perform an effect on it. 

The material implications of coming so close that recognition of the image disintegrates, and then stepping back for distance, can also be read through Sylvia Lavin’s description of the media artwork as being in a gesture of “kissing” its architectural environments.137 Lavin’s description brings together the conceptual grounding of Marks and Bergson, to consider the encounter as a conceptual process of knowledge production while also introducing the literal physicality of sensual experience. Lavin writes that the kiss brings together the solid permanence of architecture with the ephemerality of projection, where “[k]issing confounds the division between two bodies, temporarily creating new definitions of threshold that operate through suction and slippage rather than delimitation and boundary. A kiss puts form into slow and stretchy motion, loosening form’s fixity and relaxing its gestalt unities.”138 For Lavin, the gesture of the kiss brings two forms together so close that they touch and lose perspective, but they do so without completely discarding their original forms. A kiss does not permanently alter the two bodies—they still retain physical separation—but it brings them temporarily close to negotiate intimacy. The negotiation functions like Dwayne Conquergood’s dialogic performance, where conversant subjects must find a balance between total objectivity and blind infatuation in order to avoid power imbalances and achieve authentic dialogue. As with dialogue, a kiss requires the consent and participation of both parties. Neither can read the mind of the other and they do not become one entity. In a good kiss, neither partner would be so involved with their own desire that they ignore the reaction of the other party. Instead, both kissers push back and forth between their individual desire and what is being communicated from their partner. 

The action of the kiss is both immersive and distanced at the same time. We move back and forth between fleshy, sensual interactivity, and the distance of thinking about our own pleasure, our experience, and our next move. Lavin’s description allows us to think about the kiss as both a human relational activity, but also as a gesture that applies to non-human entities as well. If dominique t skoltz’s moving images can kiss the architecture of the gallery, and viewers can also participate in that kiss, what does it look like when we untangle that sensuous interplay? How do we trace the potential gaps that allow viewers to insert their own memories, for artwork to infiltrate, and for space to envelop? How do all of these elements work together to find spaces for “suction and slippage?”139 Lavin’s use of the kiss is an especially appropriate metaphor, because Laura U. Marks herself describes the gaps that are produced by haptic visuality as having an erotic quality. The spaces that are left between perception and memory enable the “…figure and ground [to] comingle, [and] the viewer gives up her own sense of separateness from the image.”140 

Crucially, my deployment of Marks and Lavin’s ideas embraces the sensual without becoming fully immersed. While these authors offer an intriguing way to introduce sensuality back into the aesthetic experience, if the viewer is fully immersed in their bodily experience, this fails to produce the gap, or moments of disruption that produce criticality. Immersive experiences that smoothly incorporate the viewer inside the artwork do not allow for the distanciation that allows for reflection, or recognition of how the viewer’s subjective perspective might assert agency. Considered through Bergson, being caught in the flow of experience means that durational pauses between sensory inputs and reactions are short—implicating the body in an immediate need to react through its short-hand understanding of the world. While this might culminate in either affective and unspoken reactions, or discursive ones (recall my earlier example of the tattoo, where one might jump away from the source of pain or shout “ouch”), these responses reduce complexity. On the other hand, extending the relational exchange with the stimuli through more time and space, means that the perceiver can compare the input to more versions of their past experience. For instance, that same pain stimuli might now transition from the desire to pull away, to leaning into the pain, feeling it transition into numbness, focus attention on a particular area of the body, or even turn into pleasure, all of which can be expressed through the body or through mental and discursive concepts. In this way, the spectator feels-thinks-feels-thinks through a spiralling set of associations, depending how much time and distance they have to compare memories and expectations to the original perceptual input. Now, while neither Marks or Lavin really advocate for a purely sensual experience, they do focus their attention primarily on the moments were spectators come too close, and personal perspective disintegrates. They do so to recover the perspective of the body in art historical discourse, but it is important to maintain the balance between this sensual, erotic closeness of bodies, and the distance of individual, subjective states because it is this in-between state that allows for complex perception and meaning-production. It is important to also recognize here that too much distance or time falls into the same fallacy as too-close experience, where the oscillation between the initial stimulus and abstract concepts become disconnected. In this scenario, the mere idea of pain as either good or bad short-circuits the perceptive input, produces an immediate response, and again limits the complexity of the experience. Marks and Lavin provide starting points for considering the transformative potential of embodied-being-with-artwork, but I am interested in artworks that do not merely structure a sensation of “presence” or co-mingling with the artwork, but that also turn attention back towards the constructed nature of that experience. By tracing the gaps that cause tension between the closeness of immediate perception and the distance of subjective memory, this project aims to show that criticality is not inherent in the mode of knowledge (i.e. body or mind), but rather in the process of reflection. 

If all experience is an oscillation between the immediate, bodily encounter with the world and the action that is produced by mnemonic recognition, then drawing attention to this process of distance and closeness becomes a key way to produce gaps that turn viewing against itself. As I noted in the previous chapter, John Dewey determined that aesthetic experience was marked by a beginning and end, with reflective attention occurring between those boundaries. While this experience is often intangible—it relies on the spectator to take note of their own attention and how it is constructed—skoltz’s artwork produces a physical analogue to the mental work that is being produced by the spectator. In viewing the nine-channels, one can both see the time contained and spaced out on the wall while encountering it as an experience of time—entering it at the mid-point in a loop but noting the start and end credits as they roll out on the screen at the start and end of the film. The gallery naturally produces an asynchronous viewing encounter, where viewers enter at their own time and encounter the moving image in-media-res. This is unlike a cinema space where one sits down before the start of the film and exits after it has completed its duration. The tension between the way the gallery enables access to the durational object of the film, and the way that the moving image was originally structured as a cinematic object jars the spectator out of the invisible flow of their own experience so that it becomes possible to take note of the time in front of the artwork. It becomes possible to see oneself seeing in the time spent with the artwork.     

• 136 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 127-193.  

• 137 Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 

• 138 Ibid., 5.

• 139 Lavin, Kissing Architecture, 5. 

• 140 Laura U. Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 13.   

The Materiality of Closeness and Distance 

skoltz’s unique installations of the single-channel version of y2o disrupt the surface and depth relationship between the gallery environment and the image in a sensual manner, using beautiful images, pleasantly textural surfaces, and the slick aesthetic of high definition video images. It is easy to criticize immersive media artworks for their populist draw and spectacular effect: to suggest that they merely activate the entertainment value of neat-looking environments, exploiting audiences’ desire for novelty, scale, and slick production quality, rather than creating meaningful critique through the self-reflexive qualities of the aesthetic experience.141 There is certainly a fine line between the two, which is heavily dependent on the viewer’s personal taste and background knowledge. The style of skoltz’s images reference commercial filmmaking, with clean, attractive images that could at home in advertising or in a narrative feature film. Yet, it would be short-sighted to entirely dismiss these works even if they deploy aesthetics in a spectacular manner. skoltz’s images are attractive and pleasurable—as is the material form of the installations, with their textural surfaces that beg to be touched and circumnavigated. Yet, it is precisely this invitation to touch, to draw close, and to perform a relationship with the work, where the installations in y2o_dualities_ draw their power.  The high-production value for all of her aesthetic objects—from the film to photographs to sculpture—conveys certain visual meaning. By referencing music videos or advertising, the images depict the financial and other resources that went into producing those images. High definition video is not cheap, and neither is the construction or rental of a huge aquarium, or the employment of professional dancers to perform in such a difficult environment. The editing and sound design process adds further expense, as does the elaborate final installations in the gallery space. Although viewers may not be consciously aware of these aspects of the image, it does produce a sense that the artist had professional skill and resources. This brings class and financial means into play, when the viewer reads the image as either natural or unnatural based on their encounters with similar images. The strong, pale-skinned and youthful bodies of the dancers, similarly resonated with advertising and cinematic images that have historically prioritized young, white, heterosexual, and beautiful bodies on the screen: a tradition that naturalizes these qualities and places any spectators that do not fit into those categories as outside of the norm. Yet in the y2o film, as these dancers pushed and pulled against one another, it became obvious that the male dancer wore a prosthetic on one leg. It never became a narrative plot-point, but the supporting liquid of the tank, the floating drapery, and the tubing that acted as props within the tank-environment all began to resonate with this difference, taking on new connotations. 

In a private conversation, skoltz explained that the dancer’s prosthetic had no specific relevance to the work, and that it was merely part of his body. She had worked with dancer and choreographer Jacques Poulin-Denis previously, and they collaborated well. skoltz acknowledges that the prosthetic may connote issues of broken-ness alongside the romantic dissolution, drawing an analogy between broken relationships and broken bodies. She explains that while she might not have intentionally created this meaning, it is still there.142 In addition to this reading of “broken-ness,” the prosthetic serves as an entry point for disrupting our ideas of  102 what “normal” bodies look like. Because the performing bodies seem otherwise normative (i.e. young, white, straight, attractive) from a Western cultural perspective, the dancer’s prosthetic becomes a rupture. For someone who is able-bodied, the leg-apparatus offers a moment of disrupted recognition that inflects all of the other artworks with the notion of prosthesis. This situation of the mechanical-object as part of a bodily experience also aligns with skoltz’s collapse of human and cinematic perception. It stimulated a reconsideration of my own expectations of normativity, both in terms of the performing bodies and my expectation of how I built a relationship with art objects. Yet, it is also important to note that my subjective position as able-bodied enables me the luxury of reading broader, abstract ideas into these images because I have never had the lived experience of wearing a prosthetic. For others, the prosthetic may take on more personal meaning-production, referencing their feelings of comfort or discomfort with their own bodies and supplemental apparatuses, their capacity for movement when compared to the fluid, weightless bodies on the screen, or how their own romantic relationships are impacted. All of these potential meanings may even clash with the bodily experience of the installation itself, which sometimes limited physical access to wheelchair users and presented challenges for visual impairments. 

These conceptual disruptions continued in less literal ways through the material interactions between spectator and art objects. The Montreal installation of the single-channel film with the pool of water is particularly relevant, since it invited touch while also delineating a large section of space where the spectator could not tread. In most galleries, there are unspoken rules about how close a spectator can come to a work of art, which sometimes become overt though signage, tape on the floor, alarmed sensors, or even a security guard. The pool of water literalized that protective zone for an image that would not ordinarily require such boundaries (a projected image does not require the same safeguards as a physical object), and simultaneously referenced the restrictive spacing of a theatre, where audiences are constrained to their seats and prevented from tactile interactions with the stage or screen-image. By revealing these apparatuses of positionality, for both gallery and cinema, skoltz underscored the distinct bodies of artwork and spectator, as well as the relationship of tension between the two. Like her floating figures, the spectator was implicated in a push-pull of affective meaning-making. In this gesture it was possible to interact with—but never fully know—the other party, in a kiss that came temporarily close but did not blur distinctions. 

This tension between materiality and conceptual distance carried forward in the white-cube portion of the Montreal exhibition (fig. 8). In particular, the sculpture Face à Face (2015), stimulated this oscillation through physical and conceptual interrelations between the spectator and other objects in the gallery. Within the larger exhibition space, Face à Face took up the most visible position in the show as a 2x3x1 metre metal sculpture in the middle of the gallery. Consisting of what looked like a bellows, or more accurately—two megaphones set face-to-face—the hollow sculpture constructed two opposing viewing portals set at approximately face-level for a standing person. skoltz notes that this sculpture enabled two visitors to speak through the structure, creating “a ludic space where words take on their full potential… a counter moment to our instantaneous communications that are always in movement. This resonates with the physicality and interiority of words.”143 skoltz demonstrated this performative potential during the opening night party, when she arranged for two performers to dance with the sculpture.144 In addition to this literal performance, the sculpture produced a rupture between the peripatetic movements of the gallery viewer and the large, static from of the sculpture, which invited the viewer to stand still, to speak through, and even touch the artwork (fig. 9). 

When I rested my hand against Face à Face, the cool metal slid along my fingers. I leaned into the void and said “hello,” and as the chamber resonated my voice the sound took on an oddly deep and ringing quality. This was not communication straight from one person to the other, but utterances that were mediated and altered. Although the stage had been set for a face-to-face encounter, the medium of the sculpture created drag and tension as my words passed through from one side to the other. The distance between one side of the sculpture to the other was not very far and would ordinarily produce an almost instantaneous transmission of sound. These reverberations stretched the sound out through duration, increasing the time it took for words to travel from the speaker’s mouth to the hearer’s ear. In stretching out sound through the time and space of the sculpture, Face à Face replicated the temporal conditions of film as sound was manipulated and transformed within the metal framework and returned to the viewer as an echo. Through the use of living spectatorial bodies to both produce and receive the sound, the sculpture enabled a clash between the spectator’s expectations that their live performance would be instantaneously received. Instead, the effect was distorted—as one might find in a film. The audio slowed down and deepened as the mediating device altered the material quality of the sound.145 Suddenly, the material quality of the sound itself turned the viewer’s attention towards the device that facilitated the experience.  

If there was no other person to interact with, the sculpture itself became the relational entity. At a human scale, the metal object automatically set up a frame of reference with the viewing body, and the ability to touch and peer into its form also established a sensual interactivity between viewer and work. Most poignantly, when peering through the portals, Face à Face perfectly framed the LCD screen of y2o Huis clos or the centre screen from the y2o nine-channel installation, depending on which side of the sculpture I stood at (fig. 10). With this positioning, the moving images of y2o took up the spot that would ordinarily be held by a human speaker. In this way, the artwork placed human and object relations onto the same spectrum. By creating active attention towards this dynamic, the installation disrupted the presumed dynamic of viewing just enough to reveal the processes that are occurring. Crucially, while bringing the viewer and the filmic images into relationship with one another, Face à Face also implied an ongoing conversation between y2o Huis clos and the 9-channel y2o works when there is no viewer present to block their trajectory. This gesture acknowledged the temporary nature of the viewing encounter and implied that these dynamics continued even when there was no one to observe them, while also staging conceptual comparisons between the bodies of the various artworks. 

This performance between bodies and objects in Face à Face highlights how y2o dualités_ more broadly took up a formalist expansion of cinematic ontology by intermingling moving images with sculptural forms. The multiple-channel videos, installations, sculptures, and photographs all took up the physical and temporal elements of the y2o film, in order to deconstruct it into something new that could only exist within a discourse that included the gallery, cinema, and performance, all circulating together. skoltz’s use of a single-channel film as the starting point for all the subsequent works was particularly interesting, because it allowed her to explore the material assumptions about the moving image as well as the ways that the temporality of cinema could be made spatial. 

Cinema is often criticized for its purely virtual existence, where the viewer’s body is ignored in favour of an image that cannot be touched or affect the physical realm. The spectator supposedly sits passively in darkness, waiting for the image to flow over them, and carry them forward in the temporal narrative. skoltz’s artwork skillfully utilizes physical materiality to push forward this play between the spatial object and conceptual discourse, but this is not the only tool that she uses to produce a tension between lived experience and the image. As we move forward, it is important to recall that the original y2o short film was constructed as a linear cinematic experience—with a beginning, middle, and end—and was intended to be viewed in a theatrical situation where the viewer would be carried along in the temporal flow. Although many galleries showcase moving image works, the context of the gallery does not enable the same encapsulation of the viewer in that duration. Often the starting times of the film are not posted, and viewers wander in and out of the narrative without fully experiencing the linearity of the experience as the filmmaker intended. As a film with a narrative focus on the decay of a relationship through the nine chapters, y2o was constructed with a particular progression in mind. Therefore, viewing the chapters out of order meant that the linearity of the original intention would be disrupted. Adhering to the original intentions of this film requires following along with a linear durational flow; however, skoltz cleverly deconstructed this approach to cinematic temporality by creating artworks that referenced other disciplinary traditions. This stood out in Montreal, where the darkness of cinema was literally positioned against the white cube by the physical separation of the dark screening room, and the light exhibition space for the other objects. Viewers were supposed to experience the cinema and the gallery as completely different contexts; yet, both spaces worked against the presumptions traditionally associated with them. Where in the darkened room, the y2o film leaked off the screen and into physical surroundings, the other artworks made the gallery space act temporally. 

In her nine-channel installation of y2o, skoltz broke out each chapter into separate screens so that the linearity of the filmic narrative could no longer be ignored as part of the duration of watching. Instead, it became visible as a physical progression across the span of the gallery (read from right to left, like a book). Film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein famously described how montage structures storytelling, where individual images do not simply act upon one another like building blocks, but rather clash dialectically, creating narrative through oppositions, rhythm, and balance. For Eisenstein, it is not the placement of one image next to another that creates motion, but rather the visibility of both superimposed and related to one another.146 In “Montage and Architecture” Eisenstein gestures to the physical applications of his montage theory, describing how the architecture of the Acropolis, the Catholic stations of the cross, and the satirical imagery woven into the coat of arms at St. Peter’s cathedral, all depict a larger narrative when the individual elements of the space are juxtaposed, or montaged, from key positions within the space they reside.147 In skoltz’s installation, the artist literally took apart her original edit, and displayed it across the wall. This display format also references the ontology of cinema as a series of images that produce the illusion of movement, whether that occurs in single frames or as montaged scenes. Although it would seem that this display might reinforce the idea of a sequential reading of the images, it is important to note that in the nine-channel installation, the viewer could examine all aspects of the time-line simultaneously. This resulted in the beginning of the relationship narrative holding the same weight as the dissolution—and everything else in-between. The narrative elements had to operate relationally with one another at the same time, compressing each of the chapters into a single shared point, superimposing time with the same gesture that it expanded across space. 

While the nine-channel installation fragmented the narrative into distinct intervals that had the potential for re-arrangement, y2o Huis clos slowed the single-channel film to a standstill. Exhibited as a screen trapped in a fish-tank, this display stretched the 29-minute length of the original film into three hours, resulting in an image that barely moved (fig. 11). By removing the obvious sense of motion through time, the sluggish image dwelled on the materiality of shots that passed much more rapidly in the film’s normal duration. skoltz notes that that in Huis clos “…time has been transformed into an infinite commodity, where the story line vanishes to be replaced by an endless succession of movements and utterances… Suspended outside reality, spectators are invited to lose themselves in touches, emotions and micro movements.”148 By showcasing this work alongside all of the other iterations of the film, skoltz made it obvious that she was using time itself as a creative medium, playing with all of the various ways a single image can be altered by adjusting its temporal qualities. In Huis clos the intervals of time stretched outside of the usual flow of human activity, calling attention to the construction of the image within a cinematic tradition, through mechanical devices that operate with super-human perception. Here, the spatial montage of the chapters was not laid out like the nine-chapter installation, but rather collapsed by refusing a sequential dialectic between images. This generated an effect where the separate image of frames and scenes were almost indistinguishable from one another. 

Through both y2o dualités_ exhibitions, dominique t skoltz framed human experience as residing in both the real space and fictional space of the artwork. The historical and ideological traditions of the gallery prioritize the visual and establish conventions that situate the artwork as an autonomous object detached from everyday life. At the same time, these scripts of space determine the physical nature of the white cube, including the bright white light, open floor plans, and separated display areas. Visuospatial apparatuses drive the ontology of the gallery by arranging individual viewing bodies in relation to singular objects, and moving images interfere with this convention by inserting the context of time. Through its reference to the viewer’s lived duration and performance of viewing, skoltz’s intervention made visible the spatial conditions of the gallery as part of the spectator’s act of looking. She accomplished this by establishing a kind of sensual duration that reached out to touch the spectatorial body, continuously implicating the viewer within the experience of the work. Placed into traditional gallery situations, the artist co-opted and transformed the space toward her own purposes—sometimes effacing the gallery space in favour of images that constructed their own realities, and sometimes underscoring how much these architectures of exhibition informed the understanding of the work. She created tensions that critique the usual spatial and conceptual qualities of the traditional white cube, to construct what Brian O’Doherty describes as a gesture where the “...spectator’s idea of art—is projected and seen.”149  

• 141 For Guy Debord, capitalist spectacle creates an endless cycle of images to be consumed and discarded in favour of the next new. Guy Debord, “The Commodity as Spectacle (44),” The Society of the Spectacle, 40.

• 142 dominique t skoltz, interview by Melanie Wilmink, 27 November 2015.

• 143 dominique t skoltz, “Face à Face,” dominique t skoltz, n.d., accessed 23 October 2019, www.dominiquetskoltz.com.   

• 144 dominique t skoltz, “y2o catalogue,” dominique t skoltz, n.d., accessed 23 October 2019, 66, 122-124, 131, www.dominiquetskoltz.com/new-page-5. 

• 145 One might compare this experience to that of listening to a vinyl recording, where the hisses and pops of the record mark the playback format, or the tinny sound of old speakers might distract from a movie-going experience.

• 146 Sergei M. Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film form; essays in film theory, ed. & trans. Jay Leyda, 45-63. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1949). 

• 147 Sergei M. Eisenstein, Yve-Alain Bois, and Michael Glenny, “Montage & Architecture,” Assemblage 10 (December 1989): 110-131, accessed 17 September 2019, www.doi.org/10.2307/3171145.

• 148 dominique t skoltz, “Huis Clos,” dominique t skoltz, n.d., accessed 23 October 2019, www.dominiquetskoltz.com.

• 149 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 97.        

Chapter Three: The Time of the Black Box  

The conditions that produce the experience of seeing ourselves seeing shifts as we move into a different discipline, with its own architectures for display and accompanying conventions. Although the gallery often showcases moving images, it always does this within the context of the white cube, which is often not amenable to the specific needs of the medium. While skoltz’s artworks germinated from the y2o short film, all of her gallery-based installations still read as products of visual arts, rather than as cinema, because the architecture of the white cube framed gallery-specific viewing conventions. The following chapter turns towards an artwork that explores the experiential distinction between the designation of “cinema” and that of the gallery. The micro-cinema of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Paradise Institute acts as an interloper in the gallery—structuring a situation where spectators are aware of both contexts simultaneously. Whereas skoltz’s objects began to perform, Cardiff and Miller’s installation drew attention to the material qualities of the ephemeral cinema object. While the distinction is subtle, I use this installation as a way to discuss the specific ontology of cinema and explain how its exhibition architecture developed as a direct result of the medium’s material needs. Throughout my investigation, I use the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and related theory by Mary Anne Doane and Pepita Hesselberth to articulate how the cinema image functions as an analogue to human perception, by framing experience as a series of visible and invisible fields that are articulated through the spectator’s physical and conceptual positioning against the image. Deleuze’s original discussion of cinematic ontology is quite abstract, and here I find concrete anchors for his ideas within the embodied experience of Cardiff and Miller’s installation. I leverage each of these philosophical discussions to trace the material effects of things that ordinarily create intangible impacts—the experience of time, the light and movement of the image, the dimensionality of sound, and the social relations inherent in being present with other viewers. 

Artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller construct immersive aesthetic experiences that overwrite both gallery and public space through cinematic means. Their 2001 Venice Biennale installation, The Paradise Institute, accomplished this most explicitly through the insertion of a fully-functional micro-cinema into the bright space of the gallery. This intervention produced what Roland Barthes described as a sensation of being “…fascinated twice over” by attention to both the experience of the film and its exhibition space.150 The intersection between gallery and cinema leveraged the object-oriented ontology of the white cube toward the more intangible nature of the cinematic—an effect which made it possible to feel and see the material qualities of evanescent experience. By enabling a clash between the conventions of the white cube and the black box, Cardiff and Miller made time and collective viewing palpable, producing gaps that located the viewer somewhere between the temporal image of cinema and the material space of the gallery. 

In the cinema space there is no physical object, and as such, it does not structure the viewer’s body around a rarified encounter. Although the screen and raked seating still produce a sense of distance between the viewer and image, the viewer does not have to perform physical labour to encounter the object on its particular terms. Walter Benjamin refers to this as the image “meeting” the spectator halfway, since it can be shown anywhere in the world with relative ease, and the cinema space seems to do the work to accommodate the viewer by establishing comfortable seating and ensuring minimal distraction through controlled light and sound conditions.151 Fixed seating establishes private mini-territories for each viewer, which should not be interrupted by anyone else, and guarantees similar sightlines for all viewers in the auditorium. Additionally, the image does not compete with other objects, as happens in the gallery; instead, the size and luminosity of the projected image acts as the focus for the spectatorial gaze. All of these elements support the spectator’s material comfort, enabling viewers to forget the physical nature of both their bodies and the screen-image. 

As such, the moving image becomes much more disposable. It can repeat at any point and does not seem to possess any particular material qualities that might change over time. It is not possible to hold or own the cinema image as an object, so the value shifts toward the experiential aspects of encountering the narrative. This is particularly true in the system of commercial cinema, where studios make money based on the distribution of the film as a linear, temporal product in a theatre (with pre-determined start and end times, set-up in a single screening room), or by selling an object that references the screening-event—like a DVD or digital file.152 This ephemerality means that the delivery mechanism of the theatrical venue is deeply intertwined with the form and content of the film.153 Since the theatrical context is so key to the valuation of the film as a commercial product, it is critical to point out that regardless of how much it seems like moving images subsume the cinema space, the ideology of the black box and its accompanying production system are always imbricated in cinematic meaning-making. While this imbrication is most obvious in mainstream commercial film, independent and experimental film traditions necessarily function within this same context, since it is mainstream cinema that most commonly trains viewers in the experience of watching films. 

As noted previously, the cinema is often conceived of as passive when placed against the scenario of the white cube. Although this passivity is not only due to the comparison of the two exhibition venues (film studies itself has often deemed cinematic spectatorship as passive and subsumed by the narrative as well as commercial ideologies), the discourse around moving images in the art gallery best demonstrates the false dichotomy.154 In many cases, the gallery leverages its spatial conditions to re-institute mobile and “critical” forms of viewing for cinematic work, where the static, seated position and set duration of the film no longer structure a unified spectatorial experience. Key exhibitions such as Chrissie Iles’ Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977 (2001) and the more recent Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 (2016) situate the moving image within a newly spatialized regime, where the ability to circumnavigate the flat surface of the moving image transforms the spectator’s experience of the a film. While I agree that the gallery enables a different spectatorial experience, which can oscillate between immersion and embodiment, this discourse is often contrived around the assumption that the viewer’s ability to move is automatically critical and that the inability to move automatically triggers an uncritical identification with the image. This kind of thinking ignores the history of experimental filmmaking, which regularly disrupts passive narrative identification with the image through a variety of means, including abstraction, non-linear storytelling, direct address, and even expansion into physical space. 

Cinema theorist Erika Balsom deconstructs how contemporary gallery exhibitions generally present cinema as either a valorized historical product, or as something entirely new—cinema-but-not-cinema.155 She recounts the desire to “save” cinema from commercial aims, and the treatment of the gallery as generative towards a new kind of cinema that refuses passive immersion. These notions conveniently forget that the gallery is often as much a commercial entity as mainstream cinema, and that physical distance does not equate to critical viewing.156 In Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, Balsom describes the markers that distinguish key tropes of the two forms. She notes that the theatre is associated with a pleasurable darkness, whereas the gigantic screen and rhythms of flickering images control the spectator’s attention. In contrast, the gallery creates a situation where bright light, visitor mobility, and social viewing lacks the absorption of cinema but gains respectability as “High Art” that is somehow detached from the crassness of mass culture.157 

By ignoring the historical specificity of cinematic traditions, the gallery does a disservice to moving image-based artistic practices. While there are many cinematic installations designed for the gallery—where the artist has provided specific installation conditions—Balsom rightly points out that in many cases cinema is presented in the gallery without consideration for its unique requirements. The gallery may occasionally build out an isolated space for the work, which likely consists of a darkened space and a bench, but quite often that space is not fully isolated from light and/or sound bleed, and the seating is not comfortable enough to spend a long period of time with the work. For films designed with a traditional cinematic linearity (beginning, middle, and end), the gallery often provides no indication of when the film starts or ends, and viewers must wander in and out of the narrative at random. Furthermore, the gallery distorts the scale of the image by projecting onto gallery walls that do not have screen-like dimensions or textures, or alternately, shrinks the image down into small television monitors. The peripatetic nature of the visual art exhibition creates a sense of distraction, since there is no reason to spend the full duration with the film when there are many other objects that would claim attention for a much shorter time. The ideology of the gallery trains the viewer to understand that the work is cared for and is presented in an ideal context for contemplation; however, the ideal context for objects like painting or sculptures is not the same as it is for cinema, and when the moving image is presented without regard for this distinction, the gallery betrays the original intention of the work in favour of new priorities that are centred in an art historical context, demonstrating a disregard or devaluation of the qualities that distinguish cinema. 

Most of the research in this area has focused exclusively on gallery-based installations of the moving image, which explains the emphasis on the value-add of the gallery to the cinematic. In this scenario, the gallery becomes the ideal space for viewing film because it contributes an aura of preciousness to an object that would otherwise be lost in the flow of temporal narrative. In his book Between the Black Box and the White Cube, art historian Andrew Uroskie offers one of the few readings of the intersections between the gallery and cinema from a cinema-history perspective, where he scrutinizes the expansion of the screen into three-dimensional space through the panorama and diorama, the spectacle of World Fairs, as well as mainstream cinema technology like CinemaScope (a wide screen image format).158 By approaching the development of expanded cinema through the lens of filmmaking, rather than visual arts traditions, Uroskie exposes the imbrication of image-making technology and commerce that I discussed earlier regarding commercial cinema. He points out that World Fairs were commercial and entertainment ventures that exhibited novel and cutting-edge products to convey the ideological narratives of global progress, international co-operation, middle-class prosperity, and nationalistic accomplishments. Within this context, the large-scale images and multiple-screens of expanded cinema are just as much determined by the exhibition context of the fair (often showcased in outdoor locations and temporary pavilions) as by artistic experimentation. This reading enables a reconsideration of contemporary artistic practices by linking the browsing, thrill-seeking spectatorship of the carnival to that of the art viewer who encounters expanded cinema artworks. His teleology also opens up the potential to discuss moving image artworks using the historical context of home-movie production and exhibition (that enabled anyone to make a film), as well as the entry of media into the private—or semi-private—spaces of the home and drive-in movie theatre. This reading is omitted when these works are showcased in the art gallery, since the private circumstances and personal baggage of the individual subject is positioned in opposition to the disinterested ideology of the art gallery. Uroskie’s writing adds nuance to the understanding how the black-box subsumes the viewer’s presence under the rubric of the film, and it enables discussion of cinema spectatorship as a collective activity. 

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller take up all of these complicated and conflicting frames of experience to centre the spectator within an unstable viewing experience that straddle the gallery and cinema simultaneously. Uroskie introduces his book with a description of The Paradise Institute, noting that: “[r]ather than remaining in its proper place on the far side of the screen, its fictional world seems to spill over into the space of the theater—crowding us out, leaving us with no escape.”159 The images and architectures of exhibition each tread outside of their usual containers, entering into spaces where they become visible as interlopers. Uroskie’s quote also points to the phenomenological effect of this transgression, where the images seem to come close to the spectator, taking up space that is usually private and protected, impinging on the viewer, and demanding a different kind of bodily and conceptual interaction. 

Renowned for developing multi-sensory immersive environments, Cardiff and Miller often work with binaural audio to create three-dimensional soundscapes that integrate into the spectator’s sense of “real.” References to their work often cite the idea of corporeality and “presence” as key attributes.160 Common descriptions of the work include reviews like that of Ken Johnson for the New York Times, who explains that the auditory illusions create an “almost embarrassingly intimate effect” that left him “feeling mystified and exhilarated,” and positioned the work as “the future of cinema.”161 Because the work pre-dates the rise of social media, there are few available spectator reactions online, but a few commentators describe the work as “outstanding” and “exhilarating,” denoting an audience effect that seems common across critic and academic reviews of the work.162 Cardiff and Miller’s work is usually sited in either the gallery space, or as a site-specific exhibit, which links form and narrative directly to the environment that informs it. For instance, the pair have regularly produced audio walks that ask the viewer to follow their narrative through the physical space of parks, galleries, and train stations, mobilizing the body and mind into simultaneously real and fictional situations.163 The intimacy of these situations brings the viewer and the narrative into close contact. It produces a slippage that leads the spectator to second-guess their perception, and that rewards the viewer’s willingness to suspend disbelief with moments that stimulate a potent awareness of how the world around us constructs perception. 

• 150 Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” 421.

• 151 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 1169. 

• 152 It is illegal to copy and publicly exhibit these works, as demonstrated by the FBI warning that was ubiquitous during the not-so-distant time of DVD and VHS rentals. One does not ‘own’ the rights to alter, trade or share the movie, but merely ‘rents’ the right to watch it at our convenience. A Hollywood feature film is financially worthless in fragments (or clips), or when mobilized outside of the studio distribution system, through online piracy where innumerable copies of the digital film file are traded freely instead of bought and sold. 

• 153 Theatrical release provides an income source for production companies, and attendance numbers function as an important reporting tool to prove commercial success to funders, sales agents, and broadcasters, and are leveraged to fund future productions. That means that the theatrical context is taken into account during editing and sound-mixing, adjusting visual and sonic levels for the architecture of the exhibition space, or designing narratives that play on the shared emotions of collective viewing, which can drive further sales through the early fan excitement.  

• 154 Marxist, psychoanalytic, and semiotic analyses of cinema spectatorship have largely focused on the ideological apparatus of the moving image, where the viewing subject is subsumed. In her book Cinema and Spectatorship, Judith Mayne provides a concise overview of early spectatorship theory that either treats cinema as an institutional apparatus (Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey) where the viewer is a passive voyeur that identifies with cinematic narratives or desire for the depicted subject, or alternately, as textual analysis (Raymond Bellour, Stephen Heath, Theirry Kuntzel) that examines micro-structures and symbolism of the text to support an understanding of cinema as an ideological project (“Paradox of Spectatorship,” 18). As Mayne explains, these theories conceive of cinema within a psycho-social dynamic that subjugates the spectator—or where the spectator allows themselves to be subjugated (Ibid., 28). Mayne suggests a more productive viewpoint, where cinema is not assumed to be so saturated with ideology that resistance becomes impossible, but rather where theory acknowledges a balance between spectator subjectivity, the influence of the apparatus, and the acknowledgement of multiple readings that are simultaneously possible and rub up against one another. It is from this understanding of spectatorship as relational and contingent that I deploy my analysis. See: Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (1993; repr. New York: Routledge, 2002); and Judith Mayne, “Paradoxes of Spectatorship,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 155-183; Jean-Louis Baudry and Alan Williams, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974): 39-47, accessed 17 September 2019, www.doi.org/10.2307/1211632; Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 342-352; Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981); Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film-Work 2,” Camera Obscura 5 (Spring 1980): 6-69, accessed 29 October 2019, www.doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2-2_5-6.

• 155 Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 37-38. 

  156 Although large galleries may operate under a non-profit model, with government funding, that income is usually supplemented with admission fees, private donations, and gift shop or restaurant sales. In order to sustain staffing levels, support permanent architectures, run programming, or expand any of these aspects, the gallery must either retain or increase funding from one or more of these sources. Securing any of these funding sources requires the gallery to prove its ability to draw audiences, which can affect the kind of programming that takes place. The distinction between the gallery and cinema is often accomplished by ignoring this dynamic of the gallery, while emphasizing the commercial quality of the cinema, which is often less profitable it seems on the surface and actually requires similar government support through grants and tax credits.

• 157 Ibid., 39.  

• 158 Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, 19-52.

• 160 See: Anamarija Batista and Carina Lesky, “Sidewalk stories: Janet Cardiff’s audio-visual excursions,” Word & Image 31, no. 4 (2015): 515-523, accessed 9 February 2020, https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2015.1053044; Atom Egoyan, “Janet Cardiff by Atom Egoyan,” BOMB 70 (April 2002): 60-67, accessed 9 February 2020, Ebsco Host Art & Architecture; Josette Féral,“How to Define Presence Effects: The Work of Janet Cardiff,” in Archaeologies of Presence, ed. Gabriella Giannachi et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 29-49; Jennifer Fisher, "Speeches of display: the museum audioguides of Sophie Calle, Andrea Fraser and Janet Cardiff, " Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine (April-June 1999): 24-31, Ebsco Host Art & Architecture; Yvonne Lammerich, “Cinema arcade: the 49th Venice Biennial of Contemporary Art,” Etc. Montreal 55 (Sept-Nov 2001): 70-76, accessed 9 February 2020, https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/etc/1900-v1-n1-etc1119485/35428ac.pdf; Eirini Nedelkopoulou, “Walking Out on Our Bodies Participation as ecstasis in Janet Cardiff’s Walks,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 16, no. 4 (2011): 117-123, accessed 9 February 2020, www.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2011.60605. 

• 161 Ken Johnson, “ART IN REVIEW; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller – ‘The Paradise Institute’,” The New York Times, 12 April 2002, accessed 12 November 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/12/arts/art-in-review-janet-cardiff-and-george-bures-miller-the-paradise-institute.html. 

• 162 See: @sandra_silbernagel, Instagram post, 9 October 2016, trans. Google Translate, accessed 12 November 2019, https://www.instagram.com/p/BLWW5NUhUr4; @bnc_bianca, Instagram post, 2 April 2017, trans. Google Translate, accessed 12 November 2019, https://www.instagram.com/p/BSYEZwBhdxI. 

• 163 Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, “Walks,” Janet Cardiff George Bures Miller, n.d., accessed 20 September 2019, www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/index.html.        

The Ontology of Moving Images  

The doubled situation of The Paradise Institute as a cinema within the gallery space created a paradox. The architecture operated as an object, encouraging the viewer’s physical relationship with the materials of both gallery and cinema-as-an-object; yet, the artwork simultaneously functioned as an immersive cinema-screen that subsumed the viewer’s body in favour of an image that flowed persistently forward. The collision of two disparate contextual traditions meant that viewing referenced both the object-form of the gallery and the temporal-form of the cinema at once.177 So, what kind of spectatorial experience is then produced by this paradoxical situation as both cinema and gallery? 

Stepping up toward the entrance of The Paradise Institute, I left the white cube gallery behind. As I walked through the doorway the familiar red-velvet theatre seats directed my body to its habitual seated position; however, unlike most cinemas this theatre also incorporated plush, over-the-ear headphones that hung over each seat, and the front of the room consisted of a plywood window that framed a dollhouse version of a cinema space (fig. 14). Peering through the window, the I could see tiny chairs that got smaller as the scene narrowed in a forced perspective, with elaborately carved balconies seeming to extend along the sides of the auditorium and past the periphery of my vision. A tiny stage platform contained a wide-format screen in a perfect illusion of a cinema auditorium. This space was not new—the gilded balconies, wooden folding chairs and stage all spoke to an older, but well-kept art house theatre—less elaborate than the picture palaces of the gilded age, but without the art deco lines of modernist cinemas or the slick aesthetic of commercial multiplexes. With soft, grey-blue lighting, the diorama space mimicked the way the projection alters the quality of light in a cinema, where darkness leaches away colour and physical dimensions only consists of what is highlighted by the cool, flat light reflected from the screen. The scene stood in contrast with the red-velvet warmth of the life-sized spectatorial space that I could both see and touch. In the spectator-space, the wooden plywood cut-out seemed to separate the diorama-cinema from the ‘real’ of my surrounding auditorium-area. Like a framed painting that demarcates the object as separate from the walls of the gallery—and also from other artworks—the hole in the plywood distinguished the miniature cinema from both The Paradise Institute’s audience enclosure and the external space of the white cube that housed it. of the artificial cinema space as the screen began to flicker. The film’s narrative unfolded non-linearly, with an international cast shot in black and white footage that loosely revolved around some sort of intrigue. The general sensibility of the production referred to what scholar Jim Ellis characterizes as “an arty European thriller,” with several characters working toward unclear motivations, narrative voiceover, melodramatic dialogue, seemingly unrelated scenes montaged together, and a soundtrack provided by a French lounge singer.178 The film clearly referenced an archetype of cinema that spectators had presumably encountered before. The exact narrative of the film was unimportant—just that it clearly read as something recognizably cinematic, but also as a kind of art-house cinema that resonated more closely with the “high art” aesthetic of the art gallery than the commercial one of more contemporary cinema spaces. Unlike the popcorn-friendly, superhero films of commercial cinema, the arthouse film connotes something that appeals to a niche audience, which requires more attention or challenges the conventions of filmmaking. Viewers recognize that they might have to work harder to follow the plot, or might require some historical or conceptual grounding in film theory in order to make meaning. 

As I settled in to watch the cinematic experience unfold, a cell phone rang directly behind my head. The sound jarred me out of the act of settling in, and immediately prompted feelings of annoyance and confusion that some other viewer would be so disrespectful. When I spun around to look at the offending viewer, I only saw darkness and a few other spectators who quietly listened to their own headphones. It was only a few moments later when Janet Cardiff shuffled through the aisle to sit beside me, whispering “[h]ere’s your drink” and offering some of her 

Spectators donned their headphones as the gallery attendant shut the door and the auditorium spotlights came down. Our bodies, and the space around them, disappeared in favour popcorn, that the fictional nature of the ringing became obvious.179 Cardiff and Miller record their sound using binaural audio-capture, by placing microphones into a dummy-head to capture a three-dimensional sense of sound. That multilayered soundscape was then relayed through the stereoscopic headphones so that it seemed to share the space of the spectator sitting within The Paradise Institute enclosure. Through this self-referential audio, the sound acted as framing device, akin to the screen and painting frames. It situated the viewer simultaneously within the fictional film, a separate audio narrative, the real space of the audience enclosure, and the larger space of the art gallery that contained all these other contexts. 

The Paradise Institute established a series of recognizable frames for the gallery, the cinema, and the spectator’s experience of the “real” to all rub up against one another. The entire space was constructed to bring into question the viewer’s perception and expectations of what would unfold under the particular circumstances of the environment and media that they were in the process of engaging with. By challenging the normative conventions of the space, the installation made the constructed nature of the scene visible at the same time as it made it unrecognizable. Considered through the lens of Bergson’s attentive recognition, the shorthand understanding of how the space should function was no longer appropriate, and the viewer had to labour in order to piece together a new understanding of what was happening. Within Bergson’s understanding of perception, personal memory is the keystone to all human understanding. The more stimuli are filtered through memory, the more complex the meaning-making that unfolds from that experience. This means that perception is rarely unbiased, and is in fact driven by each person’s subjective interests as well as their understanding of what is important about the situation. As such, perception is always centred around the subjective body, which takes up a privileged position and constructs a sense of interior and exterior based on that subject’s perception. Using their own bodies as the anchor-point, the viewer then discerns and interprets the relationships between their needs and the other things that share their environment. 

In the context of The Paradise Institute, the spectator was centred in the experience as the protagonist, wearing their headphones and entering the seemingly isolated viewing conditions of the film. Using disruptions like the ringing cell phone and Janet Cardiff’s arrival, the installation shifted the focus from the spectator’s internal world towards the exterior setting; however, because the exterior setting was an artificial environment (I knew that I was not in a real cinema because I remembered entering from the gallery space) the work added an extra layer of dissonance. In a normal cinema space, distractions like other viewers are often ignored by viewers, since it is deemed irrelevant to the movie. At worst, distracting viewers ruin focus on the narrative action or ability to see or hear the film, so it is in the viewer’s interest to ignore unnecessary interruptions. The antagonistic response to viewer distraction in the cinema creates a tension with the installation’s actual situation in an art gallery—where these same distractions do not matter as much since viewers can often simply move away from noise or bad behaviour. Friction arises in the contrast between the viewer’s reaction to the ringtone in the false-cinema, and the knowledge that the context of the art gallery designates the distractions themselves as the artwork. The Paradise Institute heightens the viewer’s natural experience of being on-edge and refusing immersion or pacification by the moving image—all things which go against an understanding of cinematic reception as something that subsumes the viewing body. Rather than ignoring these gaps between our bodily experience of the world and the fictional experience that is being presented, as might occur in a regular movie screening, Cardiff and Miller underscore those tensions. They asked spectators to dwell on the ruptured disciplinary conventions as a means to draw connections between the various fictional and real scenarios that operated part of the broader artistic experience of the Paradise Institute. 

Human phenomenology passes from one moment to the next, but cinema can structure different temporal forms. As with the physical clash between the situation of the art gallery and the cinema, it is in the disjunction between these two modes of viewing that experience turned against itself. In cinema, time can move in any direction, often through flashbacks, flash-forwards, and montage. Even in a linear filmic narrative, each moment weaves forward and backward simultaneously, referencing the start and end of the film so that interpretation can occur across the whole; however, the fragmentation of cinematic time does not prevent it from implicating the spectator in a phenomenological encounter. Although, it may not directly quote the experience of the spectator in “real-time,” these fragments still have the potential to produce gaps that allow the spectator to observe their own mental processes of recognition and meaning-making. 

Philosopher Gilles Deleuze makes a compelling argument for the phenomenological quality of cinema, which supports my interest in understanding the unique experiential qualities of the cinematic experience. In his books Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time Image (1985), Deleuze takes up Henri Bergson’s ideas to explicate cinematic phenomenology. He accomplishes this by forging a connection between filmic duration and perception, and by distinguishing three different modes of cinematic perception that evolve over the course of cinema history. He begins with the early-cinema image, which simulates the real in a cartoon-strip illusion of motion but does not actually embody human perception. Following that idea, he introduces the movement image, which comes closer to real-time perception by capturing slices of time that relate to one another as a succession of instants; this creates the illusion of real-time action but does not have the open-ness and contingency of actual experience. Finally, he introduces the time-image, which takes advantage of cinema’s temporal and spatial multiplicity to construct an experience that holds many different possibilities of experience simultaneously.180 It is this fragmented (or what he calls “crystallized”) perception that comes the closest to human phenomenology, enabling spectators to integrate filmic images into their own experience and build meaning through networked fields of information. It is this last category—the time image—that is most pertinent to my exploration of aesthetic experience, because it facilitates the conceptual gaps that are required for the spectator’s active and implicated meaning-production. 

Claire Perkins’ criticizes Deleuze’s conception of cinema as a “monstrous system” where cinema and philosophy are brought together without much regard for the specific histories of the forms, and which does not allow for application to the usual processes of cinema analysis. J.M. Bernstein similarly notes that Deleuze’s theory fails to apply to cinema, to determine “why movies matter to us.”181 In part, this is because Deleuze attempts to construct an entirely new “philosophy of thought and image,” but it results in something that has been historically overlooked by film theory because it is not grounded in the historical and practical approaches that structure how it is possible to think about cinema. In her analysis of Deleuze’s Cinema books, Perkins notes that Laura U. Marks’ haptic visuality begins to take hold of the theory in order to develop application and further cinema analysis. Perkins is correct in her criticism of Deleuze’s dense philosophy, which stylistically echoes his ideas in circular and often-paradoxical ways. He seems to write as he thinks, so that the language fractures into multiple possible interpretations. While it can be frustrating to read, this is in fact the thing that makes Deleuze so appealing for subsequent authors, all of whom take up his ideas and apply it through their own forms. The abstract nature of his ideas offer kernels, gaps, and entry points that can be leveraged through personal interest. This is perhaps not the most scientific, or concrete, methodology, but it is one that resonates with the poetic approach of art, where one image can mean different things to various people. 

For Deleuze perception is a matter of framing what is seen and unseen, where the “real” requires an open-ness and fluidity that is not possible through the segmentation of time. This idea brings together both the space and time of cinema, since the individual image frame sets spatial boundaries on the image and editing sets boundaries on the time. It is also not only what is contained in the frame, however, that takes on this relational existence. What exists outside of it also matters, and Deleuze notes that a sensation of reality is dependent on a frame that is open, with the potential to expand beyond its visible boundaries. The gaze of the camera selects a scene and designates everything contained within it as important. In early cinema, these scenes were often structured as artificial sets on soundstages, which literally do not contain any information beyond the edges of the scene. Anything within the set was designed to be photographed, and arranged for the filmic scenario, therefore there was no room for chance or change to unfold. Time functions similarly, where each segment of time is tightly controlled, and does not include any temporal conditions that might tread outside of the boundaries of the film object. Unlike a photograph that sets up the boundaries of a single image, the mobile cinematic image can constantly move through previously unseen spaces, making this framing of inside and outside more porous. The movement image constructs a sense of deeper time and space by binding elements together through the framing of the camera, the editing of the film, and composition of sound, but their flexibility is limited by the constraints of the narrative. The crystallized image (and time) can exist outside of what is depicted in the film. For Deleuze it is this play between the framing of closed and open sets that begins to echo the phenomenological experience of human perception, and it this framing that offers me the opportunity to draw concrete analogies between Deleuze’s experiential philosophy and the actual matter of Cardiff and Miller’s art installations. 

The movement image comes close but does not quite succeed at making enough space for the image to expand beyond its original boundaries. Since The Paradise Institute installed a traditional linear film into the immersive cinema set, it would be easy to dismiss the cinematic experience as a movement-image that only creates the illusion of human perception. Yet, at the same time, the installation shifted the frame of the spectator’s perception away from the filmic narrative, back outwards towards the cinema architecture, and even toward the viewer’s own body. What seems like real space (the physical environment that our spectatorial bodies inhabited), suddenly blurred with the fictional narratives, and the fiction seemed to slip off the screen. Placed within the art gallery, the structure became sculptural rather than architectural, encouraging the viewer to apply the gallery conventions of physical positioning, individual viewership, and critical distance to the act of meaning-making. The material qualities of the plywood were emphasized and read as something that one had to analyze as part of the work (as opposed to a cinema space where the architecture is often merely admired as decoration, or ignored as the portal to the actual artwork, not part of the work itself). 

Upon entering the institute, the conventions of the structure shifted. The plush seats positioned the viewers as an audience—grouped together, forward facing, and with the expectation that the architecture would soon fade out of view in favour of a projected image. The aesthetic of the seating was comfortable, yet highly specific—clearly referring to the viewing experience of the cinema, and not the hard bench seating of the gallery or the comfy couch of home viewing. The chairs could have been from a performance theatre, but the screen that was centred in our vision proclaimed otherwise. In this space, we could expect that once the house lights went down, all attention would be on the virtual, recorded images that projected onto the flat surface. There would be no live interruptions and no utilization of the three-dimensional space around us. We would ignore everything in the service of the screen. The artists underscored this in the first moments of the installation, as we heard recorded voices chattering to one another before the movie started: 

[laughing] Where is she? Who are you? Why are we here? [indistinguishable chatter and laughing] Shhhhh. It’s starting…182   

The lights went down, the music came up, and the chatter subsided so that we could turn our attention to the screen. After a minute of watching the movie, we were abruptly drawn out of the illusion by the loud ringing of a cell phone in the audience. The woman answered and quickly ended the call, but the distraction served to instantly remind me of my spectatorial body, and those of the others who shared the space around me. Ironically, this irritating distraction referenced another virtual body within the narrative of The Paradise Institute, not the live spectators who physically sat beside and behind me. Each of us heard the same thing contained in our personal headsets, experiencing the audience distraction in the same way as the screen centred in our mutual vision-space. These shifting and collapsing frames ensured that the relational fields of the artwork were in constant motion. Despite the fact that the artwork strictly controlled all of its visual elements, the implication of the viewer as part of the action contributed to a sense of shared presence between the space and time of the spectator and that of the film. The spectator had to do additional conceptual labour to both pinpoint the appropriate conventions for their viewing situation at the time (gallery goer, or cinema spectator), and then reconcile the new context when it abruptly shifted under our feet. We had to call upon our memories of what an appropriate performance of spectatorship looked like, and then adapt our expectations. 

As noted earlier in the discussion of Henri Bergson’s attentive recognition, human perception is always framed by our subjective interests. We notice what is important to us in that moment and elide the rest. Cinema similarly frames visual elements for us, which we then further frame out based on our subjective interests and responses. The time that we take to stretch out this process—and the subsequent comparison to aspects of our own memory—is how we determine the relevance of what we’re seeing to our own experience. In a film the cinematographer positions the camera to include certain aspects of the scene while planning for bodies to enter and exit the composition in particular ways. When viewers watch the resulting image, we might all observe the same primary elements (the lead actor or actress that is centred in the shot), but perhaps not individual background actors, a painting hanging on the wall, or an airplane passing overhead. Some viewers may notice some of these elements, but that is dependent on the viewer’s interests or focus at the time of viewing. While we may not notice everything, in many films all of these minor details are carefully constructed and chosen for inclusion (or some elements are deliberately excluded). The more detail that is available in the frame and the more open the fields of the framing are, the more likely it is that individual viewers can find unique meaning-making in the image. Interpretation and meaning-making become attached to the viewer’s phenomenological experience of the image. In Bergson’s process of attentive recognition, the most complex reactions are created by a long duration of comparison, which has the potential for multiple outcomes. In this scenario, the shorter the time we spend with an image the less we will notice about it, or we may notice only surface-level references. The greater the gap between the original input and potential outcome(s), the more indeterminate the reaction. 

Since the movement image is constructed as a series of images and gaps, Deleuze draws attention to the importance of the intervals themselves (both cinematic and conceptual) as a means to extend and complicate the process of perception. Whereas Hollywood cinema suppresses the intervals in order to create an illusion of a seamless whole, it might be possible to construct an experience that is closer to actual perception by emphasizing the voids and fissures between the sequential images of cinema. In The Paradise Institute, these ruptures were visible even within the filmic continuity of the installation, through the timing of the cinema montage with the ringtone. On screen, a nurse spoke directly into the camera (“It’s time to wake up now…”) and when a blank slug occupied the next frame of footage, the image held on this blackness for several moments while the cell phone rang.183 In the next shot, the patient she was speaking to opened his eyes to look directly into the camera (fig. 15). Writing about this moment, film theorist Jim Ellis notes that: 

[w]e seem to see in the eyes of the character of Drogan the flicker of recognition and, perhaps, annoyance. We think we see the irritation of an actor distracted in performance, when what we are seeing is a projection of our own annoyance at being jostled out of the space of the filmic illusion and brought back into the space of the cinema. The initial identificatory relay has been interrupted, and replaced with a different one: we identify with the actor’s irritation, rather than with the character. In the context of the installation, we are given the further shock of turning in annoyance, realizing that there is no cell phone behind us, and recognizing that there is a further level of identification at work, an identification with the illusionary space of the cinema which has been created by the binaural soundtrack.184 

Identification with a character is at the heart of traditional spectatorship theory in film, whereby the viewer experiences the action through an on-screen proxy. The artists played with this dynamic of viewing the screen-image in order to reveal something about how we watch and how the image constructs our reactions though visual positioning. In this scene, both the Nurse and Drogan were shot in a close-up view that framed their heads and shoulders. This arrangement emphasized their gaze into the camera (and by proxy, into the eyes of the spectator). The characters seemed to look at us, but at the same time the montage arrangement of the nurse looking, and then Drogan looking, indicated that they actually watched one another. The spectatorial gaze slipped between the fictional and real space, which was then further underscored by the collision of a blank image and a ringing that seemed to occupy a three-dimensional space behind us. 

Unlike dominique t skoltz’s y2o film, The Paradise Institute populated the screen with more culturally diverse bodies. The audience members spoke with a variety of accents, and even in different languages, implying that the audience demographics may or may not be the same as the viewer. The main character of Drogan was played by an English-speaking, mixed-race actor, and several of the other on-screen actors spoke with accents. Yet, because the film was designed to read as an “every-film” in a generic reproduction of an art-film typology, their particular bodies did not seem to have particular relevance to the plot. As Cardiff notes in one of her asides: “I’ve read about this film. It’s based on a true story about experiments the military did in the 50s… Or maybe that was another movie.”185 In the film, the handsome lead was still accompanied by a pretty actress, and they were both entangled with ugly villains from an indeterminate Eastern European country. To a white, Western viewer such as myself, race and nationality did not seem to play a strong role, since there was nothing on screen that I would not recognize in a “normal” movie; however, for viewers of colour, or for someone from one of the nationalities referenced in the production, these representations might produce points of slippage. 

Seeing or hearing someone like yourself creates moments of recognition, that are then filtered through the artificial constructs of the aesthetic encounter. For instance, when the phone rings in the audience, a woman picks up and carries out a brief conversation in Italian—something which likely played well to the installation’s original audiences at the Venice biennale. 

In addition to this tension between fictional and direct forms of addressing viewers, the artists also produced sensual environments that implicated the viewer as a participant in the action. The material conditions of the cinema architecture functioned alongside perfect reproductions of more ephemeral qualities of cinematic experience, including three-dimensional sound, the texture and tempo of the moving image, the processes of editing, and other elements that would ordinarily go un-noticed in a traditional cinema space where attention is not as distracted as it was in Cardiff and Miller’s installation. The artwork made the spectator’s perception itself visible, highlighting how the artwork trained the gaze and the body to perform in certain ways, and in the service of particular effects. Through aberrant movement or altered temporalities, the time image can stimulate a longer process of attentive recognition by creating "disturbances of memory and failures of recognition."186 Where the sensory and memory images became indiscernible, they acted as crystallized images that refracted multiple possible perceptions simultaneously. This, in turn, created voids that the spectator had to fill with their own body and mental processes. The Paradise Institute underscored the gaps between images and incorporated the spectator’s own thinking-process into those spaces.   

• 176 Añulika Agina, “Cinema-going in Lagos: three locations, one film, one weekend,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 29 May 2019, accessed 28 December 2019, www.doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2019.1615871; Lakshmi Srinivas, “The active audience: spectatorship, social relations and the experience of cinema in India,” Media, Culture & Society 24 (2002): 155-173, accessed 28 December 2019, www.doi.org/10.1177/016344370202400201. 

• 177 Michael O’Sullivan, reviewer for The Washington Post also highlights this point, writing that “[a]s with any movie, we allow ourselves to be taken up by the action, but we are also constantly reminded that we are in a theater as well. Then, just when this dichotomy is driven home, we’re jolted back to the fact that we’re in a museum after all, and that the theater we’re sitting in is as illusory as the film.” Michael O’Sullivan, “The Corcoran Biennial: Dramatic License,” The Washington Post, 27 December 2002, accessed 13 November 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/12/27/the-corcoran-biennial-dramatic-license/40d836b8-7dcc-424d-97bf-4370439ae703.  

• 178 Jim Ellis, “Sound, Space and Selfhood: Stereoscopic Apprehension in The ‘Paradise Institute,’” Revue Canadienne d'Études cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 28., accessed 29 October 2019, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24405636.

• 179 Artist and blogger Michelle Aldredge writes that when she saw The Paradise Institute: “[t]he masterful sound editing had me peering over my shoulder on more than one occasion, convinced that someone was whispering in my ear or popping popcorn nearby” (Michelle Aldredge, “The Cleveland Art Scene: Prepare to be Surprised,” Gwarlingo, 4 April 2013, accessed 13 November 2019, https://www.gwarlingo.com/2013/the-cleveland-art-scene-be-prepared-to-be-surprised). Similarly, Tumblr user @meltedspinningplastic describes their experience where: “[a]s I put on the headphones extraordinarily detailed directional sound began flooding the brain before even the first flicker of image dances across the screen. The seats creak all around me as other members of the audience members [sic] settle into place amid coughs and bursts of laughter. Fighting the urge to whip my head from side to side so as not to appear a.) rude or b.) foolish, my eyes darted to the respective corners searching for any sign that my fellow attendees might actually be the source of this audio information. … Personally, I couldn’t help feeling a bit of kinship with those earliest observers of the cinematic art who must [sic] experienced those primitive reels of celluloid with something like 75% excitement 15% excitement [sic] and 10% abject fear” (Melted Spinning Plastic, “The Paradise Institute,” Tumblr, last modified 8 April 2013, accessed 13 November 2019, https://meltedspinningplastic.tumblr.com/post/47513864262/the-paradise-institute.)   

• 180 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1-11. 

• 181 Claire Perkins, “Cinephilia and Monstrosity: The Problem of Cinema in Deleuze’s Cinema Books,” Senses of Cinema, no. 8 (July 2000): n.p., accessed 13 November 2019, http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/book-reviews/deleuze; J.M. Bernstein, “Movement! Action! Belief?” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 14, no. 4 (2012): 78, accessed 13 November 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2012.747331.  

• 182 Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, “The Paradise Institute; 2001; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller,” Vimeo, 00:00:20-00:00:38, last modified 30 August 2013, accessed 16 May 2018, www.vimeo.com/73446251.  

• 183 “slug” is a colloquial film term for one or more black frames that create pauses between images. 

• 184 Ellis, “Sound, Space and Selfhood,” 33.  

• 185 Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, “The Paradise Institute; 2001; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller,” Vimeo, 00:03:16-00:03:30, last modified 30 August 2013, accessed 16 May 2018, www.vimeo.com/73446251.  

• 186 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 54.  

Conclusion  

Each of these case studies interrogated spectatorship as a relational encounter with the conceptual and physical materials of the artwork. Within these works, the spectator’s experience was treated as a critical and aesthetic medium that artists could wield as part of meaning-production. In the tension between multiple, simultaneously-deployed disciplinary conventions and the spectator’s unfolding sense of being-with-the-artwork, all of the installations turned critical attention towards the constructed aesthetic situation. My analysis of these selected case studies has outlined some of the material tools available to artists in the construction of reflective viewing encounters. Each work produced material and conceptual gaps between what was expected and the actual conditions of viewing, which were designed to stimulate attention towards the viewer’s lived experience of looking at art. This is true whether the artworks were physically immersive environments or implicated the viewer virtually. 

This tension functioned because the spectator could not simply fall back on previously held assumptions. In encountering an unfamiliar situation, viewers call upon a process akin to Henri Bergson’s attentive recognition in order to process new perceptual inputs and forge understanding. When we encounter stereotypes or clichés of experience, it means that we can rely on our conceptual shorthand to fill in the blanks. This shorthand offers an instantaneous reading of the situation but lacks the complexity that comes with recognizing the contingent or changeable nature of the stimulus. In treating an object of perception as uniquely interpreted though its interaction with the subjective viewer, it becomes possible to read nuance into the encounter. In Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms, this is the difference between seeing the image of an injured man lying on the medical bed, and looking down to see my own body overlaid with that Abu Abdu al Homssi, as Abu walked our collective physical and virtual selves through his personal story. By stepping beyond the generic image of a wounded man, Situation Rooms not only elaborated on the personal story of Abu’s trauma and refugee experience, but also connected my physical movement and memory to the unfolding of his narrative. My experience and his came close enough to touch. 

This example is useful because it clearly demonstrates how personal memory enriches readings of perceptual inputs. In Bergson’s attentive recognition, memory becomes a key way to extend the duration of contemplation, because inputs that are unrecognizable require spectators to turn inward to their past experiences to try to find something comparable. This process is not always as neat as the example above, where there are clear personal stakes and existing emotion. Rather, by disrupting easy recognition, the artworks design gaps that require longer contemplation and/or the insertion of personal memory in order to build understanding. These gestures are delicate, requiring a careful balance between making an image too stereotyped but also being careful not to make it too unrecognizable, since the latter may simply produce a situation where the viewer ignores or turns away from the work entirely. It is here that the case studies function particularly well, since they centre the individual experience of the viewer as a subjective being, and use the personal encounter with the work as the entry point into these points of rupture. 

In these spaces of disruption, artworks make space for spectators to generate personal meaning alongside the artwork. The more disruptive the gap, the longer the duration of contemplation, and the more complicated those mnemonic connections become, where spectators must dig deeper into their past experiences to find connections between what they know, and their present experience. In thinking about the interaction with art in this way it is possible to move beyond the idea that meaning is either delivered by the artwork, or that lies solely in the spectator’s reading. Instead, meaning becomes a process that is determined by the relational interaction between the artwork and spectator. The artwork retains its own subjective qualities, as a unique object set in a specific place and time, which prevents it from being simplified to a stereotyped reading. At the same time, the subjective experience of the spectator is required as an essential component of meaning-production. Through the spatial and durational encounters with the work, the spectator and the artwork forge aesthetic experience together. When applied to the case studies, these gaps become most visible as the ideological conventions of the exhibition space contrast with the interdisciplinary artworks that disrupt those traditional scripts. Since the architectural form of the exhibition venue is generally stable, it provides an anchor-point from which to investigate changeable, interdisciplinary forms.289 The physical structure of the building does not fluctuate very much and is designed to deliver a certain kind of experience—even though it is often presented as a neutral container. Exhibition venues are often expected to fade into the background in order to foreground the material and conceptual qualities of the artwork; however, in the examples discussed here, the artworks refused this invisibility. Instead, they foregrounded the very qualities that the exhibition space attempted to obscure. 

The case study of dominique t skoltz’ y2o_dualitiés exhibition demonstrated how the gallery’s emphasis on spatiality was disrupted through performative and cinematic interventions. Drawing attention to fragmented and tactile forms of time through a variety of screens, projection installations, and sculptural objects, skoltz created objects that acted in time alongside the viewer. In this tension between the viewer’s temporal experience of space, and the object’s performance of space and time, the viewing experience interrogated the spectator’s proximity to the work, as well as the role of the sensuous within their viewing experience. Meaning production became dependent on the spectator’s performance of their viewing labour in relation to the spatial and temporal objects, forging analogues between the viewer’s experience of seeing and the relational themes of the artwork. 

• 289 Although buildings might make minor tweaks to layout and the design of exhibition space, it is often expensive and difficult to chance spaces drastically from one show to another, and the contextual readings of the space as gallery, cinema, or theatre remain largely the same.