»That's the Only Now I Get« Immersion and Participation in Video Installations by Dan Graham, Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, Doug Aitken, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Sam Taylor-Wood
Ursula Frohne

Film is taken back to its basic structures and subjected to critical analysis a hundred years after the medium was born. Contemporary artists are now addressing the history of the cinema's impact. Its technical devices have become cultural constants within our receptive behaviour. They include the darkened auditorium with its ‹cinematic quality›, the narrative standard that captures the narrative flow in pictorial sequences. and film editing, without whose visible montage technique the illusion of being ‹true to life› would not be possible. Here cinema and film are not interesting primarily as a genre, but as a stock of visual raw material. Two general tendencies can be identified among the many working approaches. There are video installations that respond affirmatively to the illusionistic effects created within cinematic parameters by enveloping the viewer in a kind of hypnotic reality-camouflage. In immersive installations like kind, the central interest is addressing themes in the social mainstream. The other type of video installation adopts a different, more conceptually defined approach, and exposes the cinema and media culture as a constructed spectacle. Found footage and icons of film and television history are processed to become initial reflections on the nature of cinematic images and their meaning for our collective identification patterns. Both tendencies draw attention to the conditions of the medium itself and make the viewer's position the actual theme of the staging concepts. [more]

Dissolving the Picture Frame From the White Cube to the Black Box The Art of the Spectacle The Aesthetic of the Remake Representation as Visceral Experience Dan Graham Steve McQueen Spaces for Projection and Suggestion Douglas Gordon Doug Aitken Eija-Liisa Ahtila Framing the Viewer Sam Taylor-Wood