Projection, Phantasm, and the Image of Light

Thomas Zummer

Zummer:  I will try to make my talk into three parts.  The first part will be somewhat more formal.  I will read to you sections and lay down a principle to work on.  In the second part we’ll take it apart a bit.  The third part is questions and answers.  We’ll just talk very informally about topics, issues and problems that we’re raising today.  Also, I should say, don’t hesitate to interrupt with a question at any point.  That absolutely fine and allowed, this seminar is, after all, for you.  So if you have questions, don’t hesitate. 

In 2001 the Whitney Museum put together a rather adventurous and interesting show called Into The Light, The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, primarily at the instigation of Chrissie Iles.  It was a remarkable show and in a sense brought together reconstructed exhumed various works that hadn’t been seen for a very, very long time.  It was rather particularly difficult to see, particularly difficult to install, or even in many cases, to find.  So it was a rare opportunity to see a lot of works that had existed only as rumors or hearsay of the art world.  Important works.  Influential works.  At the same time it was not at all an unproblematic show.  Some very interesting problems came to light.  For example, when one would go to the initial appearance of these often site-specific works, you’d be at a dock in a garage in a loft outside in a public concourse and the first thing that would strike you would be the concatenation of technology--cords, wires, a Portapack whirling away on the ground someplace, projections--in other words a visible index of technology.  Most of that disappeared at the Whitney.  Finding a working Portapack or non-gelled, non-decayed, half-inch Portapack tapes is almost impossible at this point.  They have deteriorated.  They no longer work.  They’re archival in a great inert sense.  So everything was on DVD.  You no longer have the visible index of technology but rather something inscribed invisibly into the very architecture of the museum.  And not only inscribed visibly, but in close proximity to other works that may or may not have had affinities, interesting or otherwise.  So there’s a certain kind of spill – certain kind of bleed between works that sometimes is quite interesting in the case of Keith Sanyo’s work.  In some cases actually punctured and contaminated work in less interesting ways, nonetheless, a given condition of museums.  It is something that these works somewhat self-consciously and critically operated with at their very origin.  So, what I’ll do first then is read to you the first section of an essay called Projection and Disembodiment; Genealogies of the Virtual.  When I was originally asked by Chrissie to write the essay for this catalog, this by the way is the catalog by the way, I did what I have a bad habit of doing which is to have written some 16,000 words when, in fact, I’d been requested that I write 5,000.  We, of course, had to trim.  So what I will do today is inflict upon you a certain portion of the missing text.  Those things that have to do with specific works that was, after all, the preview of the other essay in the catalog, a very fine essay by Chrissie Iles.  So rather than have repeated that twice, I’ll give it to you today.  Did people have a chance to see that exhibit?  Anybody who actually went there and was able?  Ah!  Good, five people.  In that case I will give you the previews.  They’re all very specific installations; they’re all media works.  They jumped around, moved around, cranked around quite a bit, so trying to capture the essence of these works in slides is a bit of a frustrating affair.  What you see in the slides will be a poor representation at best, even though they actually are the archival slides from the Whitney Museum itself.  The point being, that these works are notoriously difficult to document.  So what we’ll try to do is build up a picture for you of these works, both in language and with the available images that we have.  I’ll read from the original transcript.

“Now I address a matter of great import

For inquiries, and I show that there

Exists what are called images of things,

Which as it were, peeled off from the surfaces

Of objects, fly this way and that through the air;

These same, encountering us in wakeful hours,

Terrify our minds, and also in sleep, as when

We see strange shapes and phantoms of the dead

Which often as in slumber sunk we lay

Have roused us in horror; lest perchance we think

That spirits escape from Acheron, or ghosts

Flit among the living, or that after death

Something of us remains when once the body

And mind alike together have been destroyed,

And each to its primal atoms have dissolved…

I say, therefore, that likenesses or thin shapes

Are sent out from the surfaces of things

Which we must call as it were their films or bark

Because the image bears the look and shape

Of the body from which it came, as it floats in the air.” 

That’s from T. Lucretius Carus’ De rerum natura. 

It is as if Lucretius were describing a dream, one that coincides, upon waking, with the world; a speculative dream through which resonance one reimagines the world, so that we may act as if we are still dreaming, bringing that world into a dream.  It is an apt description for the cinema, for a similar oneiric disposition is embedded in its history and its practices, so that one may well consider the cinema a waking dream, one that continues to haunt or possess us, even as we might possess and consume it.  Jacques Derrida, in “La danse des fantomes,” reminds us of the long history of spectrality inhabiting this medium: “When the very first perception of an image is linked to a structure of reproduction, then we are dealing with the realm of phantoms.” 

We return to this notion of phantoms and phantosmatic when dealing with media throughout. 

The next section is a section called “Imagining Things.” 

In as much as it shares certain characteristics with the dream, cinema engages us in the image of the world, and we react almost as if what is represented resides before us.  Our hearts may race, our breath become rapid and shallow, hair standing on end, uncontrollable spasms of laughter, all in response to the play of shadows and light.  Optical devises, says Gaston Bachelard, provide us with images to dream with, and cinema’s flickering sensibilia constitute perhaps the most replete and consuming instance of an interface for dreaming.  Still, we are less unwitting spectators than willing collaborators in this “artificial dream,” and we’ve retained and refined the capacity to pinch ourselves awake.  It is this, our ability to invest in the fantasy of projections--somatically, sensorially, conceptually--in conjunction with our commensurate ability to apprehend and partake in them at the same time as spectacle, that forms the contours of a complex prosthetic relationship between sense, memory, and technical mediations.  Technologies and bodies commingle in this configuration, and there exists substrates, underlying material conditions of reproduction and perception common to all projective phenomena, even to our apprehension of shadows cast on the wall of a cave, even to dreams.  Certain of these substrates, in the form of (cinematic) tropes having to do with pretense and recognition, the passage of time, and the presence and absence of phenomena, persist throughout the history of recording media, residing in unconscious memory.  They are the active, potential, and mutable preconditions of mediated experience, the habitus through which we form a primary interface with technological reproductions of the real. 

“Our organs are no longer instruments; on the contrary, our instruments are detachable organs.  Space is no longer what it was in the Dioptric, a network of relations between objects such as would be seen by a witness to my vision or by a geometer looking over it and reconstructing it from the outside.  It is, rather, a space reckoned starting from me as the zero point or degree zero of spatiality.  I do not see it according to its exterior envelope; I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it.  After all, the world is around me, not in front of me.” 

This is from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay called Eye and Mind. 

There are certain preconceptions involved in the linking of the body to a register of instrumentation.  These are, to use a phenomenological model, the inevitable “pre-understandings” of the world via the forms in which experience is given.  The body’s senses do not encounter the world except in a culturally prepared subject (ourselves).  Sensory phenomena are interpreted by analogy or metaphor in relation to our own somatic memory: a microscopic view of the body is described as a “landscape,” individual hairs are like “the trunks of giant trees,” atoms are modeled as “miniature solar systems,” and molecules are constructed in tinker-toy fashion.  Such descriptions situate things in relation to the subjective and collective lived experience of the body’s contact with the world.  Strange microscopic things may appear charged with meaningful associations deriving from sensations of bodily proximity or familiarity, modified by conventional ways of reading, as we, inscribing ourselves into a relationship with things that are almost familiar, take possession of the image.  In much the same way, notions of inference and continuity, succession and consequence derive from the body’s physical/cognitive disposition in the everyday environment.  We do not encounter the world except as already embodied and already culturally embedded.  Moreover, the body’s perception of itself also constitutes a psychic substrate, and the unconscious somatic memory that organizes lived experience is, itself, modified by specific technologies.  These form still other, technical, substrates of unconscious memory.  Optical devices, for instance, alter the experienced scale of an observer’s body, while at the same time changing the apparent place of that transformation, affecting our ideas of spatiality and temporality, causing us to perceive things as closer, or larger, or more similar, in relation to our own perceived bodies.  Perception, linked to technological instruments, stubbornly apprehends different phenomena according to the most familiar tropes, habitual conventions of pictorial representation, and fundamental intuitions of the body. 

At this point are we clear?  Is everybody following along?  Is this making some sort of sense?  Good!

This history of scientific experimentation provides us with a number of examples of the relations between instruments and imagination.  Galileo, for example, considered the human eye as an optical instrument, although he considered it to be far from ideal.  He recognized that the eye is not an immediate source of information about nature, but that one’s conception of the physical world is dependent on the means--that is to say instruments--used to study it.  In fact, one of Galileo’s problems was to convince church authorities that as one looked through a lens that the perceptions were ones own perceptions and not an artifact produced by the devise.  In other words, the truth of what one would perceive was both tacitly and intentionally, from the point of Galileo, naturalized.  So again, that concept between naturalization and the reflex towards naturalization; when one looks through binoculars or telescope, you would never think it’s the devise that is perceiving--it’s you that’s perceiving.  It’s your vision, your sight.  It’s very clear and very natural and presumed.  It’s far from problematic.  So, again at the same time Galileo also had to persuade his contemporaries that the information provided by the telescope was not a distortion and that the depictions of phenomena produced by the apparatus were not artificial aberrations, but natural extensions of the body’s senses into the world via instruments.  Such supplements to vision as telescopes, microscopes, and photographic apparatuses are organized according to tacit conceptions wherein somatic inscriptions--of the body’s sensorium into instruments, and of prosthetic perceptions into the body--become naturalized. 

Paul Virilio said, “Machines for seeing modify perception.” 

What he doesn’t say is that they often do so quite invisibly and quite reflexively.  It is clear that there is an unavoidable perceptual bias in our relation to the instruments we devise.  For example, our senses register stimuli in logarithmic, not linear, increments, so that the systems and tools we employ--the acoustic decibel scale, the seismic scale for measuring earthquake severity, the magnitude scale for stellar brightness--are also logarithmic, in part because they reflect our propensity to perceive the world in that way.  Other scales and types of detectors may increase the range of human senses, but they also translate data back into familiar forms and intuitions.  The difference between the optics of the eye and of the camera is both marked and subsumed at the very moment that it is naturalized.  I remind you, “The camera,” according to Walter Benjamin, “introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”  We will again return to Benjamin a bit later.  The substrates of unconscious memory, technical or somatic, that is to say of the order of instruments or of the body, support an economy of translations between perceptions and instruments, such that “prosthetic” perceptions occupy the same cognitive space as bodily sensations. 

There are memoirs and personal accounts in the development of the scanning electron microscope in the mid 20^th century that sound eerily close to phenomenological descriptions of embodiment.  For the early scientists working with this technology, the microscope became, within limits, an extension of the operator in his or her interactions with the miniscule.  The microscope became a prosthetic sense-organ, and early microscopists were among the earliest forms of cyborgs.  Since almost all U.S. electron microscopists in the 1940s and 1950s used the same instruments, there was also a remarkable uniformity in their tacit and intimate understandings of their craft.  This in turn must have contributed greatly to the subsequent cohesiveness, even in popular magazine descriptions, of their accounts of research into the realms of the unseen.  It’s an interesting problematic: with optical microscopes resolution is limited by the wavelength of light.  Electron microscopes employ a beam of electrons operating well below the wavelengths of visible light, to form an image of very, very small objects.  This devise uses high-energy electrons associated with considerably shorter wavelengths allowing for far greater resolution.  The transmission electron microscope uses a sharply focused electron beam passing through a metallized specimen onto a fluorescent screen, where a visual image--which can be photographed--is formed.  The scanning electron microscope forms a perspectival image, although both magnification and resolution are considerably lower.  In this type of instrument, a beam of electrons scans a specimen, and those electrons that are reflected (along with any secondary electrons emitted) are collected.  This current is then used to modulate a second electron beam in a television monitor, which scans the screen at the same frequency, thereby building up a picture of a specimen. 

Electron microscopists, like the general populous, experienced themselves “transported by this instrument to an alien landscape,” and the habitual conventions of reading “landscapes” came into play in the representation of these invisible topographies by invoking and communicating common bodily experiences and pictorial conventions.  The interface of operator/machine/phenomena is modified--tuned--by both physical limitation and cultural presupposition.  The intuitive perception of the resulting micrographs as everyday landscapes is further supported by the fact that in order to be reflective, specimens were coated with a thin layer of metal atoms by spraying them from a low angle.  Microscopists uses the length of the resulting “shadow” (formed where a feature has blocked metal deposition onto the surrounding support) to determine the “height” of that feature, thus casting electron beam’s “illumination” at “noon,” rather than from the actual direction of metal deposition.  In this way the micrograph is constructed in such a familiar manner that it does not intrude on one’s intuitive perception of the image as a “landscape.” We simply live in this landscape.  In the process of refining the scientific apparatus, the observer’s lived experience takes up residence in--is sutured into--the machine, such that one “dwells” in the instrument, in an almost phenomenological sense, in a continuum of decreasing consciousness and increasing familiarity, consequently moving from alterity to embodiment. 

Cinema, one might say, is just such a lived technology.  In the interface of architecture, technology, perception, and habit, we spectators are intimately inscribed into the mediated imaginary, taking up residence--for a moment at least--within a phantasmatic technology.  Here we are an element of the dream, linked to a specular machinery where unconscious behavior, modifying and modified by the instrument, interactively constructs our experience.  In the long history of projective environments—from Ibn al-Haytham to Leonardo da Vinci, Athanasius Kircher to E.G. Robertson, Edison and the Lumiere brothers to today’s cineplexes, home entertainment systems, and virtual realities--the body persists as a common and inexplicable component of the apparatus, and familiar everyday perceptions are linked to a history of cinematic artifacts and behaviors in diverse, complex ways, so much so that even our recognition of the artifice is a culturally mediated form. 

Jacques Derrida in “Freud and the Sense of Writing“ wrote, “… if there is neither machine nor text without psychical origin, there is no domain of the psychic without text.” 

Nor, one might add to complete the symmetry, without machine.  Derrida’s implication of the relationship between unconscious memory and historically specific machine-metaphors reproblematizes issues of subjectivity and spectatorship relative to questions of ontology, technical reproduction, and virtuality.  If unconscious memory is coextensive with, and inextricable from, the various “technical substrates” given to it with historically specific technologies, then a complex series of problems concerning specularity, interactivity and mediation are rendered salient, and psychoanalysis and critical theories require another set of tasks.  That certain of these technical substrates are more closely aligned with, and even derive from, projective environments such as cinema, television, computers, telecommunications systems, and the Internet, is an issue to be seriously considered in any analysis of contemporary media.  What might the role of such psychic/technical substrates be within a more singular, reflexive, and critical model of media, such as was articulated in certain projective/interactive installations in the early 1970s?  While these works were enormously important and influential, they were also transient, localized, and somewhat marginal to the generalized interior technical unconscious of popular media.  Yet at the same time they were permeated by it, and a good deal of their critical impetus was directed toward a tacit “auto-deconstruction” of the canonical discourses/categories of objects and subjects, references, representations, and institutions.  These early seminal works dissolved traditional boundaries of territory and the body, transforming architectures into relays, passive reception into active engagement, data into interaction and connectivity, in a diffused topology that laid the initial traces of today’s digital mediascape.  It might be useful to examine some of the possible sights/origins of this transformation and to look at some of the cinematic substrates of unconscious memory that still continue to suffuse, constrain, and shape the contours of our perception and apprehension.

I’m going to skip a bit here if you don’t mind, and then I’ll show you some slides. 

“Those optical metaphors through which the gaze manifests itself most emphatically at a given moment of time will always be those which are most technologically, psychically, discursively, economically, politically and culturally overdetermined and specified.  However…each of those metaphors will also articulate the field of visual relations according to the representational logic of a specific apparatus.”

--Kaja Silverman, “What Is a Camera? or, History in the Field of Vision”

What happens when we go to the movies?  There’s a tacit engagement with all of the elements of cinematic technology, its architectures, its history, its articulations of subjectivity, our own body’s directed perception and history of apprehension.  The physical space, ambient light, projection apparatus, and bodily disposition together already constitute an interface.  You don’t have to learn a new grammar every time you go to the movies.  We interact with the one that’s already there, pretty much the same one that pervades subsequent media.  “The meaning of a camera,” Silverman notes, is “both extrinsic and intrinsic,” a consequence of its placement within a larger social and historical field and of a particular representational logic, a logic already inscribed--as an oedipal logic of narrativity, for example--in “spectatorship.”  In the movies, the difference between oneself and a projected “character” with which one identifies or interacts does not hinder the fantasy of involvement.  Rather, it is naturalized.  While you may never entirely forget this difference, it continues to circulate as an element of what one might call a technological unconscious, so that, under certain circumstances, our relation to these shadows is recuperable, not by opposing what is present to its representation (or to its referent), or by opposing effect to simulation, but in the recognition of the temporal aporia by which these categories are already spectral, as when suddenly we suddenly recover ourselves in that startling moment when the phantasmatic is no longer sustainable, or it simply ends.  And even though it might come back to haunt our memory, and we may not be entirely free of it, still we pinch ourselves into the recollection that, for all this, it is only a movie.  The space of the dream, of technical reproducibility, and of lived experience coincides as both coextensive and permeable, and we inhabit them all.  What we are, when we walk into a movie or turn on a television set, is already virtual. 

Let’s return for one moment to something that Walter Benjamin brings up in the essay on technical reproducibility. It’s been translated into English as The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.  In section 13 of that essay he talks about the camera introducing us to “unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”  A few sentences before that he says something, which to my mind is even more intriguing.  Very simple.  The camera does not see.  What it does, because it doesn’t see and because its interests are not our own at all, is it intervenes in that specifically human interactivity, particularly with regard to recognition of another.  Even when that other is a photograph.  You find a box of photographs and your great aunt Martha is in there and you recognize her as a little child.  Or you look at a photograph in a box of photographs, you pick it up and there’s somebody you don’t know, but there’s still a similar kind of reflex that kicks in--a kind of facial recognition.  In fact, it’s one of our earliest unconscious accomplishments.  Facial recognition is something, in fact, hard-wired within us.  Infants recognition of facial configuration of mother and a gradually widening series of others that intervene into its personal space, happen very early on.  There are a couple of other physical events that kick in at the same time.  Ivan Pavlov in 1923 described what he called “an orienting response.”  It’s a very curious thing with regard to looking at projected media.  When one looks at varying intensities of light, one reads them as substandard form.  Of course they’re not, but physiologically the small capillaries dilate, alpha waves in the brain diminish.  Like a movie.  And we find ourselves transported, carried away, by that reflex well before anything comes in.  So already, a very curious relationship we have to projected images.  It would account also for fantasy; our capacity to invest a desired belief or pleasure, in a complex and recursive order in projected phenomena takes places very readily.  How many people like to go to the movies?  Yeah.  Me too.  Or watch television.  Or play with a computer.  All those things.  There are some very deep, very passant technical substrates of ones own memory already kicked into place when one does that. 

Younger:  Tom, do you think that that takes more thinking?

Zummer:  It’s a different order of thinking.

Younger:  Is there some research on that?

Zummer:  Yes.  There’s a good deal of research on that.

Younger:  That might help us with what we’re talking about in the media; how we perceive television and the movies as opposed to reality.

Zummer:  Yeah, yeah.  It also addresses certain questions about simulation, dissimulation, why should certain kinds of simulations--if, for example, one has access only to a record, a technological trace of one sort or another, and the referent is at the very least inaccessible, one presumes a certain presence to have resided before that camera at a certain point.  The notion of the camera intervening in a specifically human interaction, with regard to recognition to an image to another, takes on a new kind of gravity, a new kind of input.  There are a couple of interesting examples.  When you look at television broadcast news, for example, and you see the little para-textual prompt on the surface of the screen--and there are many of them--the screens are cluttered up with all sorts of little prompts now days, but the most common one, and the one of most long-standing duration is the word “live.”  What does it mean? 

Audience:  That it’s being broadcast right now.

Zummer:  Does it? 

Audience:  That it was live when it was taken?

Zummer:  Yeah, that too.  It means that no longer is it a live presentation, meaning real time, basically what it means is that it presupposes a presence having been.  In other words, it’s a present perfect tense.  Not the present tense.  It is not a direct conduit to events that are occurring, but rather an index claiming the legitimacy of a relationship between media and the referent, which appears there, such that one takes for the truth.  Such and such has occurred in front of the camera at some time and is present now before you, marking and giving legitimacy to that once removed at some time to that present perfect tense.  Take a look at TV tonight and see how images are marked.  It’s really very curious.  How many of you watched the events of 9/11 on television?  How many times did you see those buildings come down?  It’s a simple exercise.  Count the times.

Audience:  My sister teaches and the little kids were just scared to death they were going to be attacked because of all of the planes that were attacking all the buildings.  They didn’t understand the language, that’s all that they got out of it.

Zummer:  It’s interesting to--that’s a very good point because let’s talk about these kinds of presuppositions, not only the presuppositions that occur immediately as a kind of reflex in your engagement with media.  I’ll give one example, and then we’ll come back to 9/11.  I was watching somewhat half-heartedly with the events during Tiananmen Square occurred.  There was a news broadcast that broke into regular programming and it was, once again, a live feed.  It was utterly fascinating; I recorded it.  I have subsequently shown it, lectured on it, and written about it at some length.  It’s Dan Rather’s appearance, the first live broadcast from Tiananmen Square as events are literally going on and it’s remarkable.  What you see on the screen is a hallway--you see it for a very, very long time.  You see people moving in and out of the corridor. You see bits and pieces of the body of the technicians who are putting together a table, setting up the media, setting up the live feed, testing things, turning things on and off.  The off screen voice-over is basically ambient vocalizations, talking about waiting for Dan Rather to get there.  Where is he now?  He seems to be caught in traffic, he’s on his way for such and such a building, his route would take him very near to the square itself, we expect him at any moment.  Samuel Becket could well have written it.  But it’s remarkable because nobody knows anything, they are being as much as possible ethical about that, and yet still given over the very human speculation about, what the hell is going on?  Certain Chinese officials come in, tell him “you have to go, you have to turn everything off, you have to leave.”  And then they leave and they just turn things back on and it goes on for a very, very long time.  It was longer than I’m drawing it out in language.  Dan Rather finally arrives.  As he arrives, it is remarkable because lights go on, focus comes in, color balance is achieved, and all the apparatuses are sutured together almost immediately.  He doesn’t quite know what to say or how to say it, so what he does is he performs his hesitation brilliantly well.  In other words, he’s on camera and he begins to weave together a story, a narrative, about what’s going on in Tiananmen Square, and one of the first things that he does is introduce a particular oppositional configuration: military troops and students: students holding flowers confronting troops with guns.  Now where did this come from?  The 60s? Yeah.  It’s a troupe; that is to say, a rhetorical configuration arrested and active within the frame of the media.  What was Tiananmen Square about?  What was it about initially?

It was the issue of corruption and the issue of freedom, all of this figured and modified as it went on.  The enabling discourse of that event, let’s say, was about corruption.  So it’s a remarkable piece of footage because you get to see literally the framing, the way in which an event is framed and the way in which that framing of that event was continuously worked and re-worked and positioned.  As a matter of fact, I would say subject also to enumerable repetitions and rebroadcasts, that live sequence was rebroadcast as a kind of foundational gesture for the determination of those events over and over and over again, always with the recourse to that originating moment, one might call it a kind of spectacle of origin, wherein those terms were initially laid down.  That present is always promulgated, recast into our present; the two coincide.  It is a present perfect moment.  Once having been, it has always been the case.  You can readily see that that was far from unproblematic.  A lot of the works in a lot of different ways--some more successful, some less so, that appeared in the Intellect exhibition initially took up certain issues like this.  They picked up notions of anxiety with regard to technology and to media itself.  Most were reflexive in a certain way about laying down a certain critical frameworks for an approach to media, not as an historical object, not as even necessarily an aesthetic object, but rather as a kind of reactive formation.  Given that media is such, what does an artist do?  It’s not the simplest question that was posed at that time. 

Let’s take a look at some of the slides of the exhibit.  Again, it might not be terribly easy to make out what in the world is going on with these, and forgive me.  I will inflict upon you, with each image, another section.  Backwards, forwards, it doesn’t make any difference in the piece, as long as the feet are pointed toward the ground, that’s good. 

Okay, it’s pretty clear what that is.  It’s a woman in a shower.  It’s also a projected image of a woman in a shower.  It’s a real shower curtain.  There’s also a sheet of, for some reason, pink-tinted water flowing down the inside of the water curtain between the image and the screen upon which the projection resides.

All right, I’ll read loudly.  This is a piece by Robert Whitman.  Whitman is one of the earliest artists to employ a configuration of actual objects and media representations holding place for actual objects, and occasionally subjects.  Using projected images interacting with performers or sets and audience.  Like Yvonne Rainer whose early dance performances in works such as Lives of Performers, also included projected images in an interactive situation, which was also constructed as a spectacle with real bodies.  Many of Whitman’s works choreographed a relationship between bodies and objects and the reflections.  Shower Piece, from 1966, presented a real shower cubicle within which an image of a girl taking a shower was projected.  There was also a cascade of real water in the stall, which may have been tinted pink from time to time.  This piece enters into a relationship with certain sculptural and performative notions of a current at the time.  The work as an arrestment and depiction of everyday life, or the mixture and contamination of the real and staged, as was the case with happenings and some experimental theatrical work.  In fact, Whitman’s pieces often read as an environmental work or a performance, even though it presents itself primarily as a sculptural spectacle.  It is a work that inscribes itself into the phantasmatic via the most pervasive tropes of pretense and deferral.  It is a most interesting work for precisely this reason.  In the American burlesque, a very common sort of body spectacle involved a young woman, apparently oblivious to the darkened audience, coming out on state where there was a conveniently placed bath or shower installed, disrobing, and bathing.  At every point, the pretense, which was alone and unobserved, was maintained and shared by the audience in a mediated voyeurism.  This is not a trivial point.  Pretense is absolutely necessarily to the eroticism of this tableau and is not diminished through repetition.  Typical structures, which psychoanalysis defines as responsible for their organization of fantasy life, like the idea of a primal scene, are laid bear in Whitman’s shower piece, revealed as a construct within a simulation of that same construct, operating like a memory of a primal scene.  To the pretense of a real woman who is no longer present except as an image, we add the pretense of the spectator that “she’s really there” even though one knows that she’s not, and even if one recognizes the temporal nature; that she was really present, naked, in front of the camera at some time.  The mediated specular link to that last scene does not compromise the erotic charge.  Once having been, she always is, in a sense.  To the secondary voyeurism one might add some of the suspense in that other readily available representations, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, from 1960.  (The shower piece, by the way, is from 1966, so Whitman was well aware of Hitchcock.)  Whitman’s shower piece performs a remarkable task of revealing the co-extensiveness of the phantasmatic in the unconscious bodies either acting with the technologies and architectures.  Implicating the projection apparatus into a shared field of unconscious cause and effects.  Regarding the notion of an aura, Benjamin calls, in a very curious choice of words, the experiences of an object, whereas to say, what happens to an artifact, the impression of time, of venue, of discourse upon an artifact.  All of these things constitute the aura of an object, but again, I stress the point, the aura is something that resides always exterior to the object.  It’s always the object’s outside. 

Okay, let’s see which of these buttons work.  Okay, you’re much more adept than I.  Let’s go to the piece by Bruce Nauman and you have the basic white box room with overhead projection so they appear more or less corrected for perspective on the walls.  The four walls--on each wall you have this sort of fibrillating or vibrating reflective surface, but it’s not really a reflective surface, it’s a projection of a reflective surface because of the fact that it doesn’t reflect.  In other words, we don’t see anything reflected in the surfaces.  What small trace is actually there is an artifact of the production and has been obscured as much as possible by Nauman.  They’re silver ball bearings; highly polished chrome ball bearings.  They’re set to rolling and vibrating within a constrained space and they’re photographed.  The four photographs are then set up and blown up to a very, very large scale. 

Audience:  Projected slides?

Zummer:  No, they’re actually, it was originally in 60mm film, and that was transferred probably over to a DVD copy for the exhibition.  It was originally a film installation.  Actually, many of the pieces that we’re going to take a look at today originated--60mm film was the most commonly accessible medium, professional medium, there were some super 8 things, but that really wasn’t quite as fashionable--and half is Portapack video stuff.  You see that with Vito Acconci and others.  But it was a matter of access.  So originally, 60mm film print, which by the way has actually a far greater luminous bounce than the DVD.  DVD projection, even though it is done in high definition mode at this scale, you still see lines, they’re still really quite visible, no matter what the resolution.  One has to think the relationship between resolution issues between cinema and video, even high-definition video.  Anybody have an idea what the resolution differential is?  DPI for a film frame?  Anyone have a guess?

2.4 million DPI film grain.  Some other formats have less but still, that really kicks ass on video, doesn’t it?  That’s an interesting thing to keep in mind.  So when you actually transfer the cinematic motion of film frames, 1/24 of a second to video interpolations, in other words you get something coming in at between 30 and 32 approximate frames per second.  You also get a very curious series of artifacts with that.  If you look on the projector you’ll see that in the movement every other frame is blurry.  You don’t see that when it’s projected; what it does is smooth the movement.  You don’t see that.  You’re not supposed to see that.  There are equivalents in video and in digital.

The figuration of the body as mediation goes both ways.  The inactivity of the spectator, unconscious or willed, becomes a point of focus for works, which assume forms of direct address, as this does.  In Nauman’s Spinning Spheres from 1970, the dissimilation of scale and motion produces a feeling of alienation and uncanniness.  One’s capacity for living in the machine, using the apparatus as a sensory prosthetic, is operating at a zero point and one feels profoundly dislocated without any overt or supplementary data allowing for the domestication of the situation.  One even lacks sufficient cues to identify this as an abstract film, or random transition, or an avant-garde performance.  Nauman’s strategy is as simple as it is effective.  The polished steel ball is set spinning on a plate in a white cubic space.  The ball is filmed, in color, in such a manner that the imagery is on one wall of the white cube.  The spinning ball takes up most of the film frame and four film prints are produced to be projected on the four walls of an exhibition space.  Since the scale in reference are minimal or indistinct, the camera reflecting the balls surface is hidden as much as possible and sense of room which is represented is not the room within which the representation occurs simulation becomes both a statement about a situation and a performance, acting within or as the situation itself at the same.  Our role as spectator becomes oddly suspended, outside the image we turn inwards, within the image of the reflection, we are outside.  Can we have the next one please?

This is called Echo and it’s, again, four walls, four projections.  It was also originally in another medium, filmed on video rather than DVD.  It’s very simple.  It’s a photograph of a hand slapping a wall.  The hand slapping the wall produced an echo, a hard bounce.  The secondary projection of a hand slapping a wall with the recorded phonic track of a hand slapping a wall when inscribed into another square white hard acoustic space echoes again.  In fact Echo is a very interesting term.  I will inflict upon you a little bit of etymology here.  Echo can be translated as a reply.  Reply is an interesting word. What does an echo reply to?  It replies to itself in a way.  A reply.  The root for that is the same as you find in a variety of otherwise distant words.  An echo is a fold.  This also continues into the English words replica, a copy, an image which folds back into an original image, and yet at the same time in that fold, differentiates itself; something which is both identical and yet different within the reason of those terms.  To replicate.  To copy.  To actively copy.  Echo, reply, replicate, replica, a copy, fold, and recursion, coming back in.  The play with identity and difference in the entomological breakdown of this word is very sustaining.  In a piece like Oppenheim’s Hand Slapping the Wall, that play of simulation, of a recorded hand at a large scale, slapping a wall with a recorded sound against a wall with the recorded sound bouncing off of that wall again operates in that same kind of folding into the event that’s in kind of echo, replication, and copy, ad infinitum, a play between simulation and dissimulation, a play between referent and artifact, all quite consciously staged.  In Oppenheim’s Echo from 1973, it makes no difference where you are.  Full projections occupying four walls increased the parameter of the screen so that it occupies 360 degrees in its original configuration--here they’re quite separate.  Rendering cinema a matter of one’s own choice and bodily disposition.  As Merleau-Ponty said in Eye and Mind, “The world is around me, not in front of me.”  It surrounds me.  So too with this.  It’s in front of you when you turn that way.  Of course it’s not as easy as all that.  One’s own shadow creates the image marking a fleeting position, rendering the observer intermittently both spectator and protagonist.  The roles are freely and rapidly interchangeable.  On the screens there’s a grainy, somewhat blurred image of a giant hand.  The hand continually strikes the wall, slapping it amidst a cacophony of constant random explosions and impacts.  In other words, they’re slapping at different times, so you have the pattern of different punctuations of echoes.  This view of the hands makes us feel too small, while the decibel level of recorded sounds makes us feel too close.  Again, the slides don’t do it justice.  Walk into this room and it’s really quite overpowering.  Also, one’s own disposition is immediately mapped into that, your shadow interferes with the projection quite purposely so.  So it’s as if large hands are hitting this shadow of yourself.  Next slide please.

I think I have three or four of this.  Next.  Next.  Once more.  Back to the first one.  Perfect.  What’s going on there? 

That’s a pretty good clue, as is that.  I’ll give you a few more verbal clues.  There’s a very interesting experiment by a physicist and he built with his research team a light box.  Not your plain, ordinary light box, but a box that is filled with light.  In other words, he used high intensity halogen bulbs and set up a particular pattern.  The idea was to fill the box with as much light as possible so that there are no material occlusions, no reflected objects--just light.  And then to put a point of observation for that.  It’s real interesting.  It’s a very interesting experiment because it’s about room size, which means that there’s enough room so that you don’t have any reflection from any of the walls of the room, and you have a privileged position of observation of this flood of light.  You look through this small aperture and you can see what’s in there.  What do you think it looks like?  Again.  Not a rhetorical question.  Anybody want to venture a guess?  Look into an aperture in a box of light.  What do you see? 

Audience:  A room?

Zummer:  Yes.  You have a room, a box filled with light.

Audience:  Looking at it from the outside?

Zummer:  You have a small aperture in that box.  It’s like a camera in reverse.

Audience:  What’s the material on the wall?

Zummer:  Doesn’t matter.  Could be reflective, could be foam core, could be drywall.  It doesn’t matter.  You can’t really see them anyway.  But, what do you see? 

You know what you see?  No?  You don’t see the box either. 

We don’t have all day.  It’s black.  You don’t see anything.  It’s a very interesting experiment.  It’s pitch black.

Look it up.  Z-A-J-O-N-C.  Look up the experiment.  It’s quite curious.  It’s also an interface, it’s not just an aperture.  You look through the aperture, but then you can actually move these, you can actually take a wand, basically a stick, and move it through your field of vision and what you see is the stick comes in, and all of a sudden it floods with light because one side of it is radically illuminated, and then everything coalesces and then you see what works.  You don’t see light.  Why do you think space is dark?  Among other reasons.  So that’s an interesting experiment.

In these politically correct days, the Whitney Museum brought in smoke machines rather than inviting smokers in, as was the original intention of Anthony McCall who made this piece, it was called “Line Describing a Cone.”  In its initial appearances, I was actually fortunate enough as a kid to have seen this stuff early on in a room full of smokers, and it’s because of the smoke that you see what you have here.  It’s a very, very simple thing.  You have the beam from the projector goes around in a circle.  As it goes around in a circle the cast is such that it forms from this point to the screen where the light is interrupted, stopped, within the smoke.  Within the medium of the smoke you see the line go around the circle and as it goes around and around fast it forms this exquisitely beautiful cone.  Nothing there but light and smoke.  For Anthony McCall, the spectator, in a sense, doesn’t matter.  Or more precisely, the spectators move to the perimeter of the event although from there it is still put under scrutiny.  While the ghostly contours of the cinema projection space are still present in Line Describing a Cone from 1973, there is no recorded information on the surface of the screen; nothing for an audience to interpret or believe in.  In fact, the screen itself is not necessary and the space occupied by any virtual screen, any wall whatsoever, is evacuated of information.  What takes place does so in the space between the projection apparatus and its architectural frame, whatever wall it happens to hit.  The image that takes place is in the light beam itself and the film begins as a single line of line and develops over 30 minutes into the form of a complete, hollow cone, a representation of  a basically ghostly after-image of smoke floating in the air, closing the gap between initial and terminal points of transmission.  The focus of the apparatus is dematerialized, transferring attention to the technological mediations of irreducible phenomena like the space of illusion is evacuated and the viewer is cast into a reductive state of the most basic sort of spectacle.  This is space, which is not just resistant, but opaque to desire to fantasy and to all the other investments by which one engage with the institution of cinema.  There is no fiction, no deferral, as cinematic duration coincides with real time precluding any reference or illusion to time.  The spectator reclaims the projection space only by recognizing itself as mere supplement.  If we could go to the next set.

Audience:  Can you walk into the space?

Zummer:  Oh, yes, absolutely.  You could walk into it and, in fact, once again the slides do it injustice because it is the most ethereally beautiful set of projection.  The smoke is animated and subject to all sorts of bizarre currents, and because you have machinery whirring away, you know, fans on decks, in some cases projection moving, you have a kind of ambient climatic structure that’s actually not visible otherwise, other than a kind of unnoticeable draft here and there, but when you walk into this room, they found in fact they couldn’t close it off sufficiently and have the smoke in there without it being affected by and contaminated by and contaminating other spaces.  So it was a constant beautiful ethereal piece.  One could, in fact, consider it to be a movie that intermittently lasted for months.  It was different every time.

Audience:  Did you walk into it?

Zummer:  Yeah.  Walking into it was remarkable, just like--the closest thing one has to experience of a corona of light depending on which way you’re facing.  It is quite remarkable. 

Audience:  I’d have to say I didn’t get it when I was there.

Zummer:  Why not?  Did you put your head in the cone?

Audience:  Yeah.  I didn’t quite get it--I’m really glad you explained it.

Zummer:  Well, it’s certainly not one of the more obvious pieces, and in fact, although a large part of this work – it’s a bit like peeling an onion, you sort of go as far as you want before bursting into tears, but there’s always a lot more to go into.  Dan Graham is a good example.  Again, this is such a tip of the iceberg here to try to tell what’s going on with Graham’s piece.  It’s a piece called Helix Spiral.  I’ll try to explain what goes on.  Basically, this was done a couple of times, it was done with I believe it was an 8mm camera at that point, so film strips are made.  You had one person standing in the center of a circle, a conceptual circle, another person on the perimeter of the circle.  The person on the perimeter of the circle would walk either clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on the whim of the artist around that.  As they would do that, they would hold the camera in a fixed position toward the center of the circle.  That is to say, towards the person standing in the center of the circle.  The person in the center of the circle also had a camera, holding it in a mobile position.  In other words, holding the camera facing inward on the person’s own body, and moving the camera, only facing inward, around one’s own body, in a spiral formation, hence the helix spiral.  So a spiral within a spiral.  The spiral of the camera pointing inwards to the person with the camera pointing inwards to the body.  The two films were played back and set up in a particular configuration so that what you see is a kind of coincidence and occlusion of these two spirals of film.  Well, of course, what this appears from that is the human body is a kind of evacuation which you have only surfaces and, in fact, there’s a very interesting thing that I came across from Oliver Wendell Holmes, of all people.  Bear with me a moment, it’s actually worth finding.  Therein lies the problem of writing too much stuff; you have to look for things for a very, very long time.  I don’t recommend it as a practice.  Well, we might just have to give it up or wait until later.  Oh, here it is!  Holmes says something very curious and very interesting and appropriate to our discussion.  This is from an essay called The Stereoscope and the Stereograph from 1859.  Holmes says,

“Form is henceforth divorced from matter.  In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer except as the mold on which form was shaped.  Given a few negatives of a thing worth seeing taken from different points of view and that is all a lot of it.  Pull it down or build it up if you please, every considerable object of nature and art will soon scale off its surface for us, and then we will hunt all curious beautiful grand objects as they hunt cattle in South America, for the skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.”

Compare that with Lucretius, who we began with.  Skins or films or barks cast off from objects, flitting around willy-nilly in the air.  I’ll continue reading.

Much of Dan Graham’s work reinscribes a subject interest through the mediations as a weak force, a problematic and unstable armature of and for technology.  The generalized human body is pluralized and its topographies are superimposed in Helix/Spiral from 1973.  With interaction of two camera operators with two Super 8 cameras in relation to their own and each other’s bodies constitutes the work.  A central stationary camera person holds the camera housing it to his body, moving the camera outward in a slow helical spiral.  With the lens aperture facing out, away from the body.  As the camera rotates, it records the 360 degrees of space surrounding the operator.  As the camera’s physical proximity records the tactile contours of the body, the resulting visual field is punctured by a hole.  The topological empty space occupied by the operator’s body, the beam around which the recorded projected image circulates.  This deferred/inferred absence is further modified by a second camera operator, who, navigating through the second camera’s viewfinder, walks inward in a gradual spiral towards the center position of the first camera operator.  The second camera is centered at all times on the first camera, which is focused on it in return.  Both operators adjust their movement’s orientation and the rates of speed are relative to each other in a feedback relation, which also produces two interior/exterior spirals.  Each projected view is the opposite 180 degrees of the other.  The exterior camera is the fixed eye mind of the second operator while the interior camera drifts across the surface of the body of the first operator.  Within the formal articulation of space, time, presence, and topology, the body that appears in the projected space is caught, standing in for the body that is evacuated from the cinematic field.  The two projections appear on opposite walls arresting the spectator between them.  The presence of the body and the projected images is doubly indirect; a phantom standing in the presence of a phantom.  A copy of a copy subverting the legitimacy of its model, of the spectator, and of you and I, yet another phantom.

In this one, the one that I should have been talking about, you have two camera operators, one spirals walking in slowly around to the other one, while the person in the center focuses the camera on the person walking in the spiral, so they’re basically spiraling around each other in inverse shapes.  Is that clear?  I’m sorry for the confusion, my apologies.  Next slide please.

This is a piece by Peter Campos.  A very, very simple piece.  You walk into a space, your image is recorded, the recording is projected, it’s a live-time, real-time, real duration piece, but you’re upside down.  And it’s very interesting to encounter, it’s almost like--however common place and every-day it is looking by the use of two mirrors at the back of your own head, it’s always a slightly startling experience.  It’s not what you ordinarily see.  It’s something outside of habit, so catching yourself upside down is, for a moment, startling.  So, Peter Campos.  Images of people have a long, strange complex history and we recognize, even in the most extreme forms of portraiture, representations of ourselves.  What is indicated is not a relationship of identity, but of identification.  Even when we see ourselves in a mirror, we know that we’re not there.  I would suggest that the field, within which certain configurations coincide, operates in some pretty strange ways.  There’s complicity between the self and the other as we are caught up in the mediations of our own image, which arrests us, transfixing us in the space by boundaries and demarcations that are irresolute.  It is a space of the uncanny; of the eruption of the unfamiliar within the familiar as familiar; a duplicitous misregistration of our apprehension of science, things and images.  Like looking too closely at a mirror and losing ones self.  Or finding ones self in a very different relation to ones self, like the very first time you saw the back of your head or heard a recording of your own voice. 

Again, this doesn’t do it justice.  This is double screening.  It’s a projection of Andy Warhol’s Lupe from 1965 and 1966.  I’ll read you the description.  Warhol’s Lupe is a minimal para-narrative, improvised and constructed around Edie Sedgwick where she “plays” the role of actress Lupe Valez who committed suicide in her Hollywood mansion in 1944.  Valez had devised an elaborate spectacle where she wants to have been found in elegant repose in a bed surrounded by flowers and candles--a narcissistic sleeping beauty, the embodiment of the cliché of live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse.  Things went awry and she was found dead with her head in a toilet, a grim reminder of the limits of our control of the image.  Warhol made three films, which were based on such Hollywood scandals.  In addition to Lupe, there was More Milk, Yvette.  It improvised opera loosely inspired by the stabbing death of Lana Turner’s boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, by Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, and Hedy, inspired by the tabloid account of the arrest of Hedy Lamarr for shoplifting.  Warhol disregards the obvious camp appeal of such sordid and banal stories and deals with something much more strange and fascinating--the actress as a virtual person.  She’s an armature for the cinematic image, perfect and ephemeral, a shift in illusion from substance to concept.  The image of Lupe Valez is projected onto Edie Sedgwick.  Some are like props, random coincidences setting up relationship between Edie hanging around, doing what she ordinarily does, and Lupe, probably having done the same things that she did.  The only concession to the narrative demise of Lupe are the silent shots of Edie slouched on a bathroom floor with her head in the toilet are affixed to the end of each reel.  Lupe is shown as either a single or double-screen projection.  Here Edie occupies a zero point of acting, and her pretending to be Lupe operates as an indexical marker remapping itself back onto her own image, that would be Edie.  As I said, the very first person to stage his own death as a kind of media spectacle was a fellow who composed an image of himself pretending to be a corpse, drowned, half-naked, hands and head blackened and discolored, and the photograph was seen presenting it with an accompanying explanatory text.  It is in this moment that fiction inscribed itself into photography, which until then had been of a documentary nature; a natural recording apparatus of poses and still-lives, light and shadows. Next one please.

This is a piece by Michael Snow called Two Sides to Every Story.  It’s from 1974.  Again, it’s obvious what’s going on here, but basically you have a screen suspended in the middle of a room upon which projection on each side are projected images that were taken in a studio by placing another screen, a transparent plastic screen, in the center of that room, so one which is transparent to both cameras, and having an actor and actress operate on both sides of the screen and play/manipulate with the screen.  Since both sides were photographed by both cameras on opposite sides of the room, when that’s reconstructed both images are projected onto a second stationery screen in the image of a second room.  Is that clear how that happens?  Okay.  Michael Snow often tampers with projected machinery using isomorphism, verbal and visual puns, to exercise or implicate illusions in the cinematic body.  In Two Sides to Every Story, 1974, two cameras face each other, recording each other in a simultaneous shot/reverse shot configuration, which is then projected onto both sides of an aluminum screen suspended in the middle of the room.  It’s a bit unnerving.  The privileged position of the viewer is both mobilized and frustrated.  The physical armature is not a cinematic frame, but something more like sculpture. Snow uses a combination of visual and verbal paramasia.  Paramasia is a rhetorical troupe, it means puns which are not quite puns, and to use a pun which is not quite the correct pun, or a slightly off pun, does something very curious, it evokes or calls into place the correct pun so that both the correct and incorrect pun sort of occupy the same space.  Nothing is lost; both are occupied.  How are we time-wise? 

Younger:  We’re getting pretty late.

Zummer:  Okay, I’ll finish Michael Snow and than we’ll do Yoko Ono and then we’ll go through the slides and then we’re done.  How’s that?  Okay.  So Michael Snow.  Snow’s installation, like many of the projection installation works, harkens back to a certain developmental stage of cinematic or tele-visual technologies and to unconscious presuppositions that we harbor with regard to the mediated image.  A woman walks into the center of the space and when she reaches it, the center point is not discernable in the projection.  She demonstrates its presence by pressing against the clear plastic sheet, which had hitherto not been visible.  This event is represented synchronously in the two opposite screens.  She marks herself with her green spray paint, secluding her body from one viewpoint and the painted field from the other.  The man enters on the opposite side of the membrane from the woman, slits the sheet, and steps through to her side as she switches places and crosses over to his.  The green stain is gone, and she now holds a rectangular board, blue on one side, yellow on the other (green therefore), and the two cameramen possess transition sheets in yellow and blue, making the yellow and blue affectively green.  Snow himself occupies a position on the screen, sitting in a director’s chair, script in hand, conducting the scene.  “Now yellow,” he calls, and the cameraman holds a transparent yellow sheet to the lens focused on the blue side of the rectangle, moving from the represented to a performed articulation; from perception as vision to perception concept vision.  Two Sides to Every Story spins out story after story after story, pluralizing reference and reflex, reflection and recollection in an elusive string of events.  Let’s go through the slides to the end and then take questions if time allows, and we’ll call it that.

So, you can see main points in the narrative arc or trajectory of Michael Snow’s story.  This is Yoko Ono.  It’s called Sky TV from 1966 and it’s very, very simple.  The camera is mounted on the roof, it points at the sky, and it has a live feed coming into the museum.  This was set up with the camera on the museum’s roof.  Again, it’s remarkable how the flood of associations and connotations, comes in after 9/11, with the camera pointing at the blank blue sky.  It really becomes quite poignant and quite stark.  We’ll go on. 

This is particularly difficult to tell what’s going on.  This is Vito Acconci and it’s a piece called Other Voices for Second Sight, it’s probably one of the more complicated pieces in the show, which is multiple projections, multiple rooms, and audio tracks.  Let’s flip through the next four or five.  It’s based on a faux radio studio, again all sorts of things happen.  I’ll refer you to Chrissie Iles’ description of the piece in the catalogue to get a better sense of what it is.  It’s almost impossible to make out what’s going on in the photographs.  Next please.

Vito Acconci again.  Again, it’s dealing with sort of public/private spaces, access, you’re sort of denied from one space to another space. 

This is Joan Jonas.  Jonas’ pieces are kind of accretion of performative traces, the body of the performer, drawings that she makes, erases, remakes, theatrical props of various sorts, tapes that are reinscribed into other works and an almost constant working and re-working of imagery that goes on.  It’s a remarkable body of work, performative, “artifactual” at a point where the two meet and are indistinct; you can’t really make a determination.

Robert Morris.  This actually is called Finch College Project from 1967, and this piece was actually reconstructed from basically a recipe by the Whitney Museum.  It was a series of photographs.  Photographs were taken, mounted on the wall, photographed in a panoramic scan, and then they were taken off, and the adhesive was left on the wall.  So this is reconstructed at the Whitney, the spots of adhesive left on the wall, and then the re-projection, or the projection of the photographs that had been there occurs over the surface as a kind of imprint of the works that had been there but had been removed.  If you could flip through the next four or five please.  And it looks like that.  You have a devise in the center, a projector.  The projector slowly describes a circle and the projection beams are the pictures that had been on the wall.  It moves slowly around the room.  Go ahead please.  This gives you a pretty good idea of what it looked like. 

This is Simone Forti’s Striding Crawling from 1977, and it references Pepper’s Ghost, which are eyes and basically smoke and mirrors to produce a reflection in a place where logic tells you one shouldn’t appear.  This actually is a hologram, and as you come in around the piece and look around and stoop and bend trying to find the best optimum viewing position, you find yourself, in fact, repeating the motions of the figure in the glass.  Next one please.

This is a piece called Dachau, by Beryl Korot from 1974, and basically it’s a series of films of the concentration camp that are then subjected to a very complicated editing strategy.  Basically they’re woven together metaphorically in order to operate like a thread or textile.  It’s a constant, flickering inter-weaving of these images.  For all that, it’s a very poignant piece for its starkness.   We can talk about it afterwards if you want.  Next one please.

This is basically taking a photograph and zooming in, re-photographing, zooming in, re-photographing, zooming in, re-photographing, zooming in, so you also at the same time that you’re going into smaller and smaller increments, we’re also going generation after generation; a photograph of a photograph of a photograph, and when that’s reconstructed you have in the same projected space, a blow-up of a fragment, a blow-up and a blow-up and a blow-up, so it gets larger and larger and larger and the resolution becomes more and more abstract.  It’s really quite stark and beautiful.  Next one.

This is Paul Sharits’ Shutter Interface.  In the version reconstructed by the Whitney, there are two projections. The original pieces’ projection films have been lost.  This is all that exists now.  It’s a remarkable, rhythmic track.  I believe they actually had warnings about looking, you know, for people who have subject to pulse/rhythm configurations, epileptics, that sort of thing.  It’s a very intense sort of work.  Last one.  We’ll slip that under the wire of our timing, yes?

This is Keith Sonnier’s Channel Mix and it’s an interesting thing to actually end on because like we talked about earlier, if you have an installation, a site-specific installation and you do it in 1974 in a particular configuration, and then it is warehoused for 20 years and then you do it at a museum and it’s different.  The media is different, the place is different, the context is different, the audience is different, and the times are different.  Is it the same work?  Is it the same work with each iteration?  Is it the same work every time it’s presented or is it different?  Or is it some strange hybrid of the two?  I’ll leave that as an open question. It’s a very interesting question.  It was brought to the fore in Sonnier’s piece, which involved basically live mixing that had a configuration that actually had a sort of haunting imagery.  I think a good place to begin a question what precisely an installation is.  A site-specific piece.  What is its terminus, what is its end, what kind of artifact is it?  We’ll have time for one or two questions and then we’ll go.

Younger:  What I was thinking we might do is have them take a break out in the hall and we could meet out there in the hall.

Zummer:  Yeah, anybody who wants to further subject themselves to this can.  Yes, we’ll do that.

Younger:  Thank you so much.

(Applause)

Zummer Analysis

by Henry Tsang

Thomas Zummer presented the Whitney Museum’s 2001 exhibition, “Into the Light,” curated by Chrissie Iles.  He read and spoke about artistic and historical moments that employed the projection of light and the change of our perception of the world during that period between 1964 and 1977.

Since the late 1960s, our definition and perception of reality has become increasingly mediated by tools and machines.  Zummer likened this phenomenon to prosthetics.  For example, the photographic lens, used for either imprinting, recording or projecting, functions as an extension of the human eye. Machines, such as the electronic microscope, have allowed us to imagine and construct worlds that never before were imaginable.

But we now can live consciously within a dream space, such as the one produced by cinema, which has created a blur between reality, fiction and memory.  We are in fact so easily deceived that we sometimes have to pinch ourselves while watching a deeply moving film to make sure that it’s only a movie and not reality.  In his historical contextualization of the period in which these artworks developed, it is notable that the work of neither Marshall McLuhan nor the work of continental structural theorists were included in the wide-ranging and sometimes breathtaking references, which ranged from Lucretius, Kaja Silverman, to Jacques Derrida. Perhaps strategy was to dislodge the specificity of the moment in order to open up a broader scope in which to consider how technology has contributed to significant shifts in the way we perceive the world around us.

Zummer also referred to Walter Benjamin who once wrote, “the camera does not see.”  In other words, it intervenes in the activity between humans, or between what the photographer sees and what is being seen.  Does this displacement of the “original” change the relationship of the viewer and thereby encourage a sense of passivity, which then results in a shift of roles?  The photographer suddenly becomes a spectator and no longer a participant.  On the other hand Boltanski was more interested in how the technologies of light projection are emblematic of the interface, which is “a permeable membrane constituting a mediating instance between the architectures of the museum, gallery, movie-theater, and public concourse, with their respective histories, desires, and dreams.”  However, the question remains: Where do we physically fit in?  Where do our bodies go?  How do we interact with the interface?

Zummer also spoke about the presentation of the artworks, many of which had been exhibited only once.  The original experience of many of these pieces included not only architecture and a society that was notably different, but also the means of presentation are different.  After 30 years, what does it mean to re-install a site-specific work?  Is it still the same piece?  How does the transferring of film to video affect our perception? How has our perception been affected by the media development and bombardment of the past three decades? Do these works operate as the vanguard of explorations, which have become common vocabulary in contemporary video installation/projection work? Or do they mark the end of the glory days of the modernist project, when minimal, conceptual and structural aesthetic frameworks were interrogated in earnest, and divorced from the vulgarities of everyday life? Zummer explores different approaches in regarding and perceiving how the spectator interacts with the spectacle, the architecture and the light.