Technology and Desire: The Transgressive Art of Moving Images by Gaafar Rania Schulz Martin

Author:Gaafar, Rania,Schulz, Martin [Schulz, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78320-166-2
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cinematic (re-)mise-en-scène

It is not surprising that the (media-)reflexive installation phenomena discussed in this essay should become more visible in a historical situation amounting to the high point of the society of the spectacle critically envisioned by Guy Debord in 1967. Debord’s prophecy of a world in which images increasingly replace visual relationships with the factual reality forecast a diminishing of the distinction between that which takes place in reality and that in the media.19 The methods of intervening in established structures of perception and habit used by the cinematographic installation are comparable with those already brought into play by the Situationist International movement, which, via its incommensurable praxis of dérive, sought to enhance reflection upon the totality of the everyday. And yet, the linkage of filmic material with the aesthetic of the installation strives neither to assert a new, intermedia cinematographic ideal, nor to advance the de-differentiation of the arts by synthesizing disparate aesthetics. With their structural insistence on time and space, however, the installation concepts reconfigure the raw material of the spatio-temporal parameters of the cinematic experience.20 Especially on a semantic level, awareness of the spatial dimensions as determinants of the cinematographic illusion clearly emerges, articulating itself as a principle: space and time prove to be plastic categories in artistic praxis. In cinematographic installations, the spatial framework aligns itself as a hybrid figure in which the formal structure of cinema combines with the spatial interventions of minimalist sculpture. This combination reveals a crucial difference between the cinema projection of a feature film and its restaging in the context of cinematographic installations. The former endeavors to neutralize media conditions within the complete referential illusion, and in this way negates its own materiality. The cinematographic installation, however, foregrounds the negated technical dimension of filmic space, which presupposes an image-fixated viewer mode by showing it to be an aesthetic experience: for instance, by underscoring the intrinsic sculptural value of the installation and/or the video, film, or slide projectors (from Bruce Nauman to De Rijke/de Rooij and Janet Cardiff); or thanks to the vivid presence of the celluloid strip that meanders through the installation space (as e.g. in the film installations of Stan Douglas, Rachel Khedoori, Rosa Barba or Rosalind Nashashibi, see colour plates, p. 7). The projections often beamed directly onto a white wall likewise point to a formal-aesthetic accentuation of an image-and-space connection that goes beyond the functional spatial references of cinema presentation, suggesting a removal of the boundaries of the picture area to create a visuality that shapes the space. Apart from the overall atmospheric impact, the projection aimed at the bare wall thematizes the institutional nature of the performance venue – the white cube – as the framework of technical presentation, and a field of discourse for forms of cinematographic expression expanded in this direction since the onset of the avant-garde. This aesthetic space that has no wish to simulate cinema but develops further the latter’s ‘numinous’ atmosphere as a dispositif condition of projection,21 on the one hand, serves to depict the material structures of the filmic apparatus.

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