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The more the new media art, that is the art that operates with moving pictures, gains entry into the museums the more the feeling of an upcoming crisis spreads. This crisis of the institution of the museum is the result of media art. Some welcome this development and hope that the crisis will lead the museum to open up and become more attractive for a wider audience and thereby give up its outdated and implausible elitist claim. Others fear that the museum will lose its autonomy, become part of larger media networks and turn into a kind of Disneyland of sophisticated entertainment. On the one hand, hoping or fearing, these opinions assume quasi-automatically that the museum cannot withstand the media wave and will sooner or later dissolve. On the other hand it can be argued—with a more substantial claim—that the integration of moving pictures into the museum has become the triumph of the traditional arts system that the museum dominates. This movement proved to be effective competition for the movie industry and television. However, we have to ask ourselves, if in shifting moving pictures into the museum a new aesthetic dimension to these pictures was found and if an increased aesthetic value was produced. This question deserves to be looked at in more detail.
When we speak of media art in the arts system today, we mostly mean video or film installations that present, contextualize and assess pictures in a different way than the commercialized movie industry or television. In fact, if moving pictures are placed in a museum context, their perception is mainly determined by the expectations we associate with a visit to the museum in general. These expectations derive from the long history of our contemplation of motionless pictures, such as paintings, photographs, sculptures or ready-made objects, and are based on the time of such a contemplation.
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In the traditional museum—at least in an ideal situation—the viewer has total control over the time of contemplation. He can stop the time of contemplation at any moment in order to return to the picture later and continue the viewing at the point it was interrupted. The motionless picture remains identical throughout the time of absence of the viewer and is available for repeated viewing. It can be argued that the creation of this continual self-identity of the pictures on display is the real task of the museum system as such. The entire museological effort of storing, securing and restoring the "preserved" pictures serves to stabilize their identity—their unchangeable form that should be available to the returning attention of the visitor to the museum almost indefinitely. It can be said that the identity caused by such a museum preservation is an illusion—but it is this illusion that determines the expectation of the viewer.
Along this line it can also be said that this artificial creation of an identity—understood as the unchangeable, immovable picture in time—is made up of what we call "higher arts" in our culture in general. In our daily, "normal" lives the time of contemplation is dictated to us. We do not have autonomy over the pictures of life, we do not have an administrative power: we can only see what—and this only as long as it is shown to us—life decides to show us. In life we are always just coincidental witnesses of certain events and certain pictures whose course we cannot control. That’s why every art starts with the wish to capture the moment and have it linger for a long time—possibly forever. Only then the viewer receives the endless time he independently needs to decide on the time and rhythm of his viewing. The museum—in general every space of exhibition that displays motionless pictures—obtains its legitimacy mainly from the autonomy that is guaranteed to the viewer—understood as his ability to administer the time of his attention —by the system of museum preservation and presentation.
With the introduction of moving pictures into the museum the situation changes dramatically because these pictures begin to dictate the time of viewing to the viewer and steal the autonomy he is used to. All of a sudden the visitor to the museum is in a position that looks like life outside the museum, like a situation that is known to him as always missing everything important. In so-called real life one always has the feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When we cease contemplating a video or movie display during a visit to the museum in order to come back to it later, we do have exactly the same feeling that we missed something important and that we do not know what actually happens in the installation any more. Such a feeling does not occur in a movie theatre because the visitor to the movie-theatre has usually been robbed of his freedom and autonomy. From the beginning he has to get used to spending a certain time in the dark unable to move. In the movie system the motion of pictures is compensated by the immobility of the viewer.
In our culture, we have two models at our disposal which allow us to gain control over time: the immobilization of the picture in the museum and the immobilization of the viewer in the movie-theatre. Both models fail, however, when the moving pictures are brought into a museum space. The pictures continue running, but so do the spectators. Viewing an exhibition, one does not sit or stop for a long time but continues to walk around in the entire space. One remains standing in front of a picture for a little while, approaches it or walks away, views it from different angles etc. This movement of the viewer in an exhibition cannot be stopped arbitrarily because it is constitutive for the functioning of perception in the art system. Furthermore, any attempt to force the viewer of the exhibition to see all video and movie displays from beginning to end is bound to fail right from the start. The time of an average visit to the museum would not be enough. A video or movie installation in a museum neutralizes the ban of motion that determines the viewing of these pictures in a movie system. Pictures and spectators are allowed to move at the same time.
Obviously this causes a situation of conflict between the contradictory expectations of a visit to a movie-theatre and a visit to a museum and puts the viewer of the installation in a state of doubt and helplessness. In principle, the visitor to the installation does not know what to do anymore. Should he stop and view the pictures as in a movie-theater or should he continue walking as in a museum, hoping that the moving pictures are not going to change as much as he fears? Both solutions are obviously unsatisfactory, actually they are not real solutions. However, one has to admit that there are no adequate and satisfactory solutions in this new situation. Every single decision, stopping or moving, is a bad compromise and has always to be revised later.
It is this fundamental uncertainty when the movement of pictures and viewers happen at the same moment that creates the increased aesthetic value. I mentioned the aesthetic value before when talking about bringing moving pictures to the museum. In case of a media installation, a struggle over the control of time of the contemplation breaks out between viewer and artist. The time of real contemplation has to be negotiated again and again despite that the complete clarity of the pictures can never be achieved. The aesthetic value of the media installation in the museum mainly consists of picking the confusion, the uncertainty, the missing control of the viewer about his time of attention in a museum exhibition—that used to give the illusion of total organization—as a central theme. I would like to remark that this is not the notorious "never ending creativity of meaning" of a work of art—the "intellectual" incapability of the viewer to explore a work of art in every detail—but rather is a purely physical incapability, due to time limitations, to grasp the material form of the work of art before any possible interpretation. This incapability is intensified by the increased speed with which moving pictures can be produced today. (1)
The outstanding investment of work, time and energy that was needed for the creation of a traditional work of art used to be in a favorable relation to the viewer regarding the duration of the consumption of art. Whereas the artist had to work hard and long on his art, the viewer was able to consume it at one glance. This explains the traditional superiority of the consumer, the viewer, and the collector over the artist/painter as a supplier of pictures that were created in laborious, physical work. Only since the invention of photography and the ready-made process are the artist and the viewer on the same level in terms of time economy. Now the artist has the opportunity to produce pictures instantly. However, the camera that produces moving pictures can also take these pictures automatically without the artist giving his time. Thereby the artist gains a significant surplus of time: now the spectator has to spend more time on viewing the pictures than the artist needed to create them. Once again: this added time of contemplation is not added in order that the viewer "understand" the picture. The viewer can decide freely and independently on the time of conscious contemplation. Rather it is the time the viewer actually needs to see a video or movie display in its entire scope that exceeds the time of the average visit to the museum. On different levels of time economy media installations force the viewer to make decisions in relation to his behavior of contemplation that, at the same time, will tend to not lead him to a final viewing.
Not only is the viewer of the media installation put into a difficult position by the conflict of expectations between a visit to the museum and avisit to the movie-theatre. Also, maybe mainly, this conflict is of significance to the artist when creating a media installation. The video art of the last decades tried in various ways to solve this conflict. A popular strategy was and is to make the individual video and movie sequences short and/or to capture the attention of the viewer with visual effects. That way the time spent viewing such a video or movie sequence would not exceed the time expected to be spent in a "good" museum. Thereby media art adapts successfully to the conditions of a museum presentation. Even if nothing can be said against this strategy, the opportunity for picking the uncertainty that is caused by bringing moving pictures into the museum as an offensive and explicit central theme is wasted. Such a theme is expressed much better through works of media that are—if I may say so—presenting explicitly boring moving pictures, that is videos or movies that show a certain picture that changes only very slowly—maybe not at all—and approach in this sense the traditional museum presentation of a single, unchanged picture.
An early example for such a movie is Empire State Building by Andy Warhol. Here we have a fixed picture that hardly changes over hours. Although a visitor to the exhibition who views this movie as part of a movie installation could not know—contrary to the visitor to the movie-theatre—whether the picture actually remained fixed throughout the entire time of the showing. That is the visitor to the exhibition is allowed to and should move around the exhibition freely, leave the space, come back, etc. Therefore the visitor to the exhibition would not be able to say—contrary to the visitor to the movie-theater—whether he saw a moving or motionless picture at the end of Warhol’s movie. It is this uncertainty that picks the relationship between moving and motionless pictures in the exhibition space explicitly as a central theme.
There are other examples of later work that deal with the moving picture in such a way. I cannot go into more detail at this point. (2) By all means it can be said that a relatively fixed moving picture that operates in the context of a media installation manifests the conflict between the expectations of a visitor to the museum and a visitor to the movie-theater in a consequential way. Such a fixed moving picture reminds us of the "normal" traditional picture of paintings or of photography that is displayed on the wall of the museum. This way the fixed moving picture fulfills the typical expectations of a visit to the museum: there is no exciting story, no dramatic action and no rapid movement that a viewer is supposed to watch continuously. At the same time the fixed, quasi- motionless moving picture is perceived in its own temporary instability because of its closeness to the traditional picture. Watching the projection of such a picture we expect that this projection will end at some point, will be interrupted or replaced by another picture. Time is experienced as an uncertain, problematic duration of the moving picture as such and not as the result of the movement within the moving picture. (3) The projections of the media—quasi-motionless—pictures in the traditional exhibition space demonstrate the precarious, uncertain, illusive character of every picture’s identity including the identity of the traditional motionless pictures that do have a "substantial" and "solid" carrier. In addition, this instability is picked as central theme through the changed conditions of lighting that are brought into the museum space by the media pictures as such.
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Traditionally, museum light comes from outside the works of art and thereby makes contemplation of these works of art possible. Usually, aperfect day exists in the museum, even if it is an artificial day. However, the media art—in the form of video or movie installations—brought dusk and dark night into the museum. The evenly dispersed, customer-friendly lighting of the modern museum has been extinguished. Light does not serve to create optimal conditions for the viewer of the pictures in the museum media installation. It does not offer a room in which the viewer can move around freely and safely and would be able to choose the best perspective for himself. The museum as a museum of media art is no longer the space of absolute visibility. In this museum the invisible, the darkness, the uncertainty of the space at night is also displayed. The placement of the bright and dark spots suggests a certain position of viewing to the viewer. As Heidegger describes in his philosophy of art, in a media installation the viewer walks to the clearing.
Most of all the museum light does not illuminate the works of art from the outside. Instead, now the pictures—video, television, movie pictures—themselves shine. One has to ask: is this light part of the work of art or not? In the past, the museum light was owned symbolically by the viewer: he saw the work of art with this light. Now the light becomes partially part of the work of art and is therefore created and controlled by the artist. The glance of the viewer is subject to this creation of light. Thereby, we have a significant shift of power over the lighting conditions in viewing pictures. Consequently, there is a shift of visibility in order to gain a new control over the glance of the viewer that is still not often considered. In a media installation the viewer not only loses the control over the time of contemplation, he is also stripped of the control over the light in which this contemplation takes place. The instability of the picture as such is experienced by the viewer more deeply.
The electrical light that all media pictures, on the one hand, present themselves with, and on the other hand, disperse, is a potentially endless light that exceeds the range of the museum space because the origin of this light is far outside of this small space. Certainly this is true of the standard electrical lighting in a museum; though this electrical light, originally from behind the viewer is not usually reflected upon. In case of the media installation the entire force of modern technical civilization shining on the viewer of a media work of art is manifested through the light of the picture. At the same time the fragile nature of this civilization is experienced in the form of an undeniable fear that this light will extinguish the next moment and it will be dark. The contemplation of media art is mainly a contemplation of electrical light, such as viewing the sun and the stars in the past. Or the attempts to see the third, divine light; to view the true picture in this divine light. It seems the prophecy of the famous mystery opera Victory Over the Sun (1913), by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matiushin, Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikor, has come true: the sun is extinct, and the divine light has become the artificial, electrical light that is in the symbolic hands of today’s art system.
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The change in our perception of moving pictures is not limited to the fact that we started liking movies and videos for their aesthetic value; the same movies and videos we would consider boring when watching them in the traditional setting of a movie theater or in front of a television—videos and movies that are too close to the motionless picture, too short, or too long, etc. I would like to argue that the new artistic employment of moving pictures in the museum space liberates the moving picture from a certain zone of speechlessness as such and finds its way to a theoretical discussion of media. In fact, until recently there had been a certain speechlessness, a certain silence, regarding movies. Certainly, the criticism as well as the theory of movies has been successfully put into practice for many decades. There is an extensive literature on movies that brings up many interesting and correct observations. However, close reading of this literature reveals that all methods—including the methods of rhetoric—to analyze movies are borrowed from literary or art theory and perhaps, to a lesser extent, from music theory. Most of the time one does not have the impression of encountering a language that was born out of the specific media experience of movies. A language that would talk "about the movie" and not about something else. Such a language is suitable to describe individual aspects of the movie but the movie as such remains in a zone of speechlessness. Why is there this speechlessness? Why is discourse failing here?
The answer to this question lies in an analysis of the conditions that are usually applied to a movie, that is the conditions of the average visit to the movie-theatre. A visit to the movie-theatre puts the viewer in a situation of absolute helplessness, paralysis, and immobility. That also means a situation of helplessness regarding language and discourse. The movement of language, logic and rhetoric is a quasi-physical movement in the sense of a specific variant of movement. It is not a coincidence that Greek philosophy developed while going on a stroll: moving freely in a conversation, turning away or distancing oneself from the subject, coming back to this subject with a different perspective, etc. All these typical spatial descriptions of the process of thought and language are not just metaphors. The possibility to physically move freely is a necessary requirement for the creation and development of thought that can be put into language.
In the usual screening of a movie, however, it is the moving picture that moves and unfolds over time while the viewer remains passive. This way the movement of the moving picture replaces the movement of thought and language in the viewer. The viewer is immobilized physically as well as mentally. He is literally "in the movie" as Deleuze puts it, the viewer turns into an intellectual machine. (4) Most of all, in this regard the visit to the movie-theatre reminds oneself of the archaic and ascetic practices of pure contemplation. Of the visions that appear to the immobilized ascetic only few remain in his memory that are turned into icons later; or individual words that later function as prayers. However, the complete set remains unspeakable. Today’s visitor to the museum is the ascetic of the 20th century who pays for his visions with speechlessness. In a certain sense we can never speak about the movie as such because during the screening we have to be silent. Instead we speak of our recollections of the movie—afterwards, such as telling and interpreting a dream during a psychoanalytic session. It is not a coincidence that psychoanalysis remains very influential in the context of movie theory. Interestingly, the psychoanalysis of the movie is put into practice with a certain degree of disrespect for the passive spectators. (5) Paradoxically, the movie was invented and matured in a time when the active, pragmatic, creative and practical celebrated their greatest triumphs: in the context of modern theory—from Marx and Nietzsche until today—that definitely prefers pragmatic and practical issues rather than pure contemplation. The search for the true meaning of life is not conducted through a philosophical approach but through the dynamics of life: the political reality, the body, the sexual desire, the exercises of sport, the battle (of nations, classes, races and genders)—in general through the materialistic and physical reality and not through the passive contemplation of an ideational and quasi- spiritual world of ghosts. In modern theory, the traditional movie incorporates a passive, outdated and contemplated perspective that once was regarded as the highest form of life. Now public consciousness considers it a passive and miserable existence in the world of illusions.
Every pre-modern civilization known to us had a contemplative class: a class that consisted of relatively few people whose occupation was to study and practice contemplation like shamans, monks, religious prophets or philosophers. This class was highly privileged in their respective societies. Traditionally, public opinion considered vita contemplativa higher than vita activa. Only in modern time the old privileges of the contemplative class were reduced. In order to gain recognition in society modern man has to be creative and not contemplative. He has to work more and harder than everyone else. He can also be charitable like the church that evolved from a contemplative into a charitable institution. We can say that the contemplation of modern times, in particular in this century, was devalued radically on all levels.
I think that this devaluation of pure contemplation was one of many crucial requirements for the emergence of the movie industry as we know it today. Technical inventions and developments are of only little societal and cultural importance. What is important is what a civilization can do and does with a technical invention. The movie industry can be seen as a grand parody of the devalued vita contemplativa because it saved the contemplative perspective by defining the transcendental subject of the classic philosophy of the Occident in new terms. However, it was saved as a devalued and underprivileged mass phenomenon, as cheap entertainment for the lower classes that are destined to be passive through their position in society. The movie system manifests the vita contemplativa in such a way that only its most radical critic—for example an extreme follower of Nietzsche—is able to see it. With the help of all known technical devices the movie system evokes a state of contemplative ecstasy that separates the body from the soul to grant the soul access to the pure spiritual world of ghosts. In former times it took decades of practicing asceticism and special training of mind and body to reach such a state of ecstasy. Today everyone is able to buy a ticket for little money that allows him to become a Cartesian transcendental subject for a certain time or even an Hegelian absolute spirit—under whose very eyes the entire cultural history of mankind is passing by endlessly.
Naturally we do not get to see divine visions in a movie-theatre, instead we see all kinds of trash, we all know so well, that is not worth describing. The ghosts of the movies are small and ridiculous and with the help of their shape continuously ridicule contemplation in a suggestive manner. The historical events, in case they are picked out as a central theme, are portrayed in a fashion Hegel would have hardly liked. As I said, we are dealing with a parody of a contemplative perspective. Something is offered for contemplation that traditionally is not worth contemplating: small time criminals and police officers who chase after them, boring love stories, simple minded humour, etc.
The conditions of contemplation as found in a movie-theatre confirm the worst fears of every true follower of Nietzsche. You are sitting in an uncomfortable seat that hurts the entire body, you are not doing anything, you are immobilized and you feel restricted. You are also sitting in an extremely oppressive atmosphere, the heads of others obstructing your view of the screen, with neighbors that eat, drink, whisper, go to the washroom or come back from the washroom at all times, and thereby ruin the true experience of getting in touch with the spiritual world of ghosts. At the end of the screening you are usually cast out through an exit that leads to a dark and smelly dead-end alley. In fact, you are landing on a dump: the immobilized body of the visitor to the movie-theater is disposed. Right from the start the magic of movies is put into an extremely down to earth context that does not really permit a true believing in this kind of magic. The contemplation is exposed as an illusion. The creation of this illusion and the act of contemplation are put in relative terms right from the start and the mechanisms of their production are revealed. At the beginning and the end of a movie we always see the empty screen. The movie-system is contemplation under the conditions of contemplation despised by society. The movie-system is a replacement that openly reveals its replaceable character and does replace the old, true and venerable contemplation.
This aspect distinguishes the movie-system in a radical way from the modern fine arts. The modern fine arts assume an active reflection upon themselves and conjure this up explicitly. The reader can actively work with a book. He chooses the space of reading, the rhythm of reading, etc. The book is an object that can strike someone or be torn apart. The viewer of the classically painted picture has the same liberty: as mentioned, he can move freely in the exhibition while the painting is hanging on the wall in a passive fashion. In the theater or during a musical performance the viewer normally remains passive, however, the works and the audience are in the same room. The audience has the advantage of blowing up the spectacle, for example, throwing tomatoes and oranges at the artists or chasing them away by booing. Such scenes of turmoil that blow a spectacle apart are often shown in a movie, for example, in the movies by Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers or the many Mickey Mouse strips. Another example is the famous scene from one of the Batman movies in which Penguin, the evil counterpart to Batman, paints over and destroys the pictures in a museum of art. The movie-system celebrates its true triumphs in these scenes, demonstrating its superiority over other media. The visitor to the movie-theater is not only bound to convention and the specific situation but is also ontologically helpless regarding the course of events in a movie. He may disrupt the screening but he cannot intervene with the story and blow apart the movie as such. In the truest sense, the movie is not a real object in a real place. When the visitor to the movie-theater battles against the movie, he battles against ghosts and ghosts cannot be harmed.
The situation eases to a great extent if the movie is not shown in a movie-theater but on television. In such a case the viewer has the liberty to move around freely in his living room. However, this situation of watching television is too private and too ordinary to start a public and analytic discussion of it. The video installation in a museum is of a different kind. It creates an ideal place for an analytic and linguistically-based reflection on video and movie pictures. It is not a coincidence that today’s media discourse developed parallel to media art and in particular to video and movie installations. The video installation secularizes the conditions of the screening: the viewer receives the opportunity to move around freely in a room where a movie is shown. He can leave the room, he can comeback, he can see all of the technical apparatus that is usually hidden from him. At the same time, the video installation tears away the video picture from the dullness of television and attributes a museum appeal to it. With different methods the media artist takes away the pathos of the supernatural of the movie and gives the viewer the opportunity to consume the movie in a different, more analytic and more diverse way. For example, the media artist breaks up the movie material and decontextualizes it in order to contextualize it in a different way later, he screens the movie over many different monitors, he has some fragments repeated continuously, or he puts the moving picture in relation with certain objects in the space it is shown in.
The free and at the same time analytic work with the movie and video picture, good media art performance in an exemplary fashion, causes the viewer to adapt the selective and analytic strategies of the respective artist and to become an active consumer of media himself. To repeat: in an ideal case, the viewer does not adapt the results of these artistic strategies so much but the strategies themselves. If the viewer applies these or similar strategies to his own consumption of media later, he might come to different conclusions than the artist of the installation. That does not change anything about the exemplary character of the artistic media consumption good media art is striving for and practicing. The viewer learns by example that all parameters of media consumption are variable and he begins to decontextualize, recontextualize, put into fragments, create newly, transfer, place differently in time, etc., the media pictures in his own way. He can learn from models such as the artists Nam June Paik, Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Nauman, Peter Fischli and David Weiss.
Today’s museum—as a museum of media art—has transformed into a place of permanent debate and confrontation of different perspectives of the viewer and the artist. Thereby the space of museum media installation distinguishes itself from the traditional museum space—where the view of the spectator is unchallenged—as well as from the average situation of media consumption, where the view of the artist tends to dominate by fixing the viewer’s attention to the media picture. In conclusion, one can say that the more an individual museum media installation picks the battle of these two perspectives as a central theme and reflects on it, the better this media installation is and the more it is a reflection of the space it is shown in. o
Translated from the German by Ulf Schuetze
1. Boris Groys "Die Geschwindigkeit der Kunst," Kunst-Kommentare (Wien: Passagen Publishing, 1997), 139–149.
2. For example: "Die Dauer der Bilder," Beat Streuli: City in Kunsthalle Düsseldorf exhibition catalogue (Ostfilder-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishing, 1999), 13–19.
3. Gilles Deleuze "Das Bewegungs-Bild," Kino 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Publishing, 1989), 22.
4. Gilles Deleuze "Das Bewegungs-Bild," Kino 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Publishing, 1991), 205.
5. Jean-Louis Baudry writes: "What emerges here (in outline) is the specific function fulfilled by cinema as support and instrument of ideology . . . creating a phantasmatization of the subject, it collaborates with marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism . . ." from Jacques Aumont, Alain Begala, Michel Marie, Marc Vernet Aesthetics of Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 216.
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