to be shot in the arm. This is only one of many examples of the numerous performative approaches, which, since the 1960s, have provoked - in a very pragmatic fashion - actual physical, psychic reactions (between desire and fear, disgust and arousal) in the public.
Spaces for Projection and Suggestion
The connection between repetition, drama, and effect, which McQueen’s work stresses, defines the black box (as opposed to the contemplative clichés of the white cube) as a space for psychological, affective projection and suggestion. While recalling the affective characteristics of the white cube - «shadowless, white, clean, artificial—the space is devoted to the technology of aesthetics«
[17] – the metaphor of the black box consists in the return of the repressed. Enabled by means of the aesthetics of new technologies, this return is not only the product of an affirmation of the flood of images, common to popular culture, but in the compensation for and deconstruction of areas that are otherwise excluded and suppressed in commercial media aesthetics. Thus
the museum has become a new site for presenting cinematic experiments, since they are less and less frequently available through established distribution circuits. Film and video sequences in art installations develop their own visual dynamics by repeating themselves, like traumatic experiences, to the point of compulsion. Particularly when individual sequences are repeated, the motif of time is foregrounded as an aesthetic experience between excess and reduction — an effect produced by the refusal of narrativity.
Douglas Gordon
In his «re-makes» of films, such as Hitchcock’s «Psycho,»
Douglas Gordon has emphasized the refusal of narrativity by slowing down the speed of the film, so that it takes 24 hours to play disrupting the continuity of the film. In «
24 Hour Psycho» (1993), for instance, the almost motionless images are experienced as a series of stills; the medium is re-translated back into its original raw material, killing the narrative flow. The double meaning in the word «suspense» corresponds to the dialectic of meaning production inherent in Douglas Gordon’s process. Literally suspending the film so that the sound is also lost, Gordon stops the linear