Between the Black Box and the White Cube EXPANDED CINEMA and POSTWAR ART Andrew V

Between the Black Box and the White Cube EXPANDED CINEMA AND POSTWAR ART Andrew V. Uroskie UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Chicago and London between the black box and the white cube Andrew V. Uroskie is associate professor and graduate director of the MA/PhD Program in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University, SUNY. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-84298-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-84299-8 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-10902-2 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/9780226 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Uroskie, Andrew V., author. Between the black box and the white cube : expanded cinema and postwar art / Andrew V. Uroskie. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-84298-1 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226- 84299-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN (invalid) 978-0-226-10902-2 (e-book) 1. Art and motion pictures. 2. Art, Modern. 3. Art—20th century. I. Title. N72.M6U76 2014 700.9’045—dc23 2013022931 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: From Medium to Site 1 1 RHETORICS OF EXPANSION 17 2 LEAVING THE MOVIE THEATER 53 3 MOVING IMAGES IN THE GALLERY 83 4 CINEMA ON STAGE 131 5 THE FESTIVAL, THE FACTORY, AND FEEDBACK 171 Epilogue: The Homelessness of the Moving Image 233 Notes 239 Illustration Credits 259 Index 261 INTRODUCTION: FROM MEDIUM TO SITE Framing Exhibition Approaching The Paradise Institute, a work by the Canadian artists Janet Cardif and George Bures Miller, we fnd ourselves in a doubly enclosed space. Already within the “white cube” of the gallery, we encounter a large, two-level plywood box complete with stairs and doorways leading in and out. Looking inside from a distance, we can just make out the plush sta- dium seating commonly associated with the multiplex theater. Yet there is nothing slick or manufactured about the surrounding plywood con- struction—on the contrary, it seems to have been practically thrown to- gether. Both the box and its interior seem out of place in a museum set- ting, albeit for diferent reasons. Figure I.1. Janet Cardiﬀ and George Bures Miller, The Paradise Institute, 2001. Approach. While the box is not without a certain minimalist aesthetic, it fails to hold our attention as form. Circumnavigating the work does not prompt us to refect on its structure per se, so much as it heightens our anticipa- tion to discover what lies within. The kind of theatricality invoked is not the phenomenological sense of the term with which Michael Fried des- ignated the pull of minimalist sculpture, but more the prosaic feeling of suspense with which we might await a fairground attraction or a theatri- cal spectacle.1 And as with such attractions, here one may not simply en- ter, but must frst obtain a ticket and wait in line for the performance to commence. Even at a distance, The Paradise Institute evokes a social space whose conventions are distinct from those of the art gallery or museum. Climbing the steps, we fnd headphones waiting on the seats. When we place them over our ears, the exterior sounds of the gallery are quickly mufed, and our immediate aural environment is swallowed up in the projected static of white noise. Darkness follows as the doors to the outside are closed. Simultaneously relaxed by the seating and made anxious by the claustrophobic enclosure (how would we leave if we needed to get out?), we wait for the show to begin. But as soon as the noise of our fellow audience members falls away, noise and conversation begin anew. Over to the left, and just behind us on the right, people are again talking—new people. Cardif and Miller recorded the audio for the piece using binaural technology, which gives a powerful sense of spatial location to the sounds we hear. While aurally isolated from the actual people around us, we hear the conversations of people who seem to surround us. There is a sense of uncanny doubling as real and recorded sounds overlap and coalesce. We hear people rustling in their seats, taking of items of clothing, and whispering to one another—all preparing for the movie, for the main attraction. A cell phone goes of and a woman quickly tells the caller, “I have to go, I’m in a movie.” Occurring in an eerily precise stereo sound and at seemingly discrete spatial locations, the experience is quite realis- tic—which is not at all to say that it is simply taken for reality. Even those spectators who might have been momentarily fooled quickly recognize that they are listening to an illusion. But far from ruining the work, the spectator’s double consciousness—her simultaneous experience of real and recorded sounds, and her ability to distinguish between them—is fundamental to the experience the work seeks to engender. For within The Paradise Institute, reality is not so much banished as redoubled, creat- ing a spectatorial environment distinct from yet coexistent with the physical space of the theater. [#2#] As the screen lights up, its glow falls on a miniature diorama of seats, a proscenium, and a balcony, at the far edge of which we might understand ourselves to be seated. Cardif and Miller have here constructed an alter- nate universe, a heterotopia in miniature. Gazing on this tiny diorama, int$oducti on Figure I.2. Janet Cardiﬀ and George Bures Miller, The Paradise Institute, 2001. Interior. seated comfortably on our full-sized chairs, we can give ourselves over to the spectacle because we are secure in the knowledge that it is a spectacle and that we are situated on the outside of that spectacle, looking in. The headphones we are given to wear—like the diorama before us and the makeshift theater in which we sit—draw attention to the staged char- acter of the illusion. Yet The Paradise Institute will not allow any secure boundary between reality and illusion to be maintained. If the apparatus is foregrounded, it is not for the purpose of dismissing illusion and main- taining a contravening reality, but rather so as to throw our demarcation of reality and illusion into doubt. Suddenly, we are addressed by woman’s voice just to our left: “Here’s your drink . have some of my popcorn.” In between distracting bursts of crunching, she says that she has heard of the flm we are about to see, that it was based on a real story, that the experiments carried out in it were done by Americans in World War II. But then again, she may be mistaken—that may be another movie. On the screen, the flm begins. But with this voice beside us, it is as if we have already been placed in the center of the fction, rather than simply before it. Dramatic elements are now erupting all around, and it is not clear they even belong to the same drama. Before us on the screen, we see a nurse approach a man strapped to a bed. His chest is bare. While he begs her to stop, she slowly bends down and presses her lips to his chest, kissing and then lightly biting him. The scene is emotionally charged, but like the voices, it solicits our [#3#] attention without grounding it in a coherent narrative. A voice from the audience behind us crudely interjects, “Now that’s nursing!”—distracting us again, pulling our attention away from the characters on the screen and toward those seated in the audience. At From Medium to Site several points, the woman’s voice beside us asks whether “you might have accidentally left the stove on at home.” As she does so, the flm cuts to scenes of a burning house, which feel completely exterior to the narrative space of the flm, despite the fact that that narrative space has not been fully established. This other scene strives to become “our” house, despite our conscious disavowal. And it is a house—as Freud once de- scribed the subject of the unconscious—of which we are an uncertain or absent master. “Do you want some more popcorn?” we are repeatedly asked, and it soon begins to feel as if we are choosing to answer with our silence. As repetition works performatively to assign ownership and re- sponsibility, we cannot help but feel implicated in the conversation. We leave the comforts of our typical, distanced spectatorship and begin to occupy an awkward space inside the fction. As the story evolves, the uneasy distinction between the two sides of the screen begins to break down completely. A diabolical man merely evoked in the narrative seems to become detached from it, crossing over into our space on this side of the screen. A sense of vertigo overtakes us as we are constantly thrust into new and diferent locations. As the suspenseful music builds and the screen goes blank, we lose all ability to discern where the fction is located. The diabolical man, now beside us in the audience, laughingly describes our predicament: “You thought you were pretty smart—playing both sides. How long did you think it could last?” We hear a crowd of people pounding on the plywood theater within which we are seated, demanding that we “get out!” As the crowd begins shouting a countdown, we see a burning house on the screen before the flm abruptly ends, the doors to the outside open up, and we fle out of the black box for the newly comforting light of the gallery.

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