Pepón Osorio. Face to Face, 2002. Installation view. Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Photo: Aaron Igler. 80 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 When Video Does Foster Care: Pepón Osorio’s Trials and Turbulence KAREN BECKMAN I. In recent years, as artists and critics have struggled with the question of how contem- porary art can avoid becoming just another form of entertainment in this society of spectacle, the use of video has been treated with increasing skepticism. After com- paring Bill Viola’s He Weeps for You (1976) with the video work of Laurie Anderson and Vito Aconcci, for example, Ann M. Wagner writes: Now we know why Gary Hill calls video, with thanks to Robert Smithson, “the non-site of t.v.” Television, in other words, is the site—vast, unmapped, unedited—that video and its attendant mediated performances picture and articulate by negative reversal, as a broken piece of an absent whole. Does this mean that when these new media begin to offer pleasure and entertainment their critical dimension is lost? This is a question we might reasonably put to Bill Viola, as to any other practitioner of video and performance in the present day. For what is missing from Viola’s spectacular meditations on life and death and transience is any built-in mistrust of his medium.1 David Joselit usefully furthers this consideration of the contemporary video artist’s relation to “entertainment” in his comparison of Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day Follies (2003) with a range of earlier video installations by Dan Graham, Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman, and Joan Jonas. He notes that while in the 1970s, which he describes as the medium’s “first official decade,” viewers usually encountered video through the closed-circuit apparatus and were free to wander among the feedback loops of live cameras and monitors, their own images often appearing on screens within the gallery or museum space, in the last few years the practice of projection on the wall of the gallery or museum has become increasingly common. For Joselit this move toward wall projection constitutes a move away from video’s radical Grey Room 19, Spring 2005, pp. 80–101. © 2005 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 81 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 potential as a medium.2 He writes: Projection undermines one of the most progressive effects of the closed-circuit apparatus: its conceptualization of spectatorship as interactive, even if the interaction afforded is the arguably passive one of inserting one’s body within a media circuit in order to view it relayed back to oneself. Projection rein- troduces a more conventionally theatrical mode of spectatorship in which the audience remains outside the media feedback loop rather than participating as actors within it. In video projection the viewer is made more passive both in her consumption of spectacular imagery and in her ability to intervene within the space of the screen.”3 Haunting these statements, of course, is the specter of the art museum as cinema, a symptom of the growing fear that in the age of advanced capitalism, art galleries will offer only entertainment, helping to foreclose the possibility of a nonconsump- tive mode of looking. While Joselit allows that some forms of projection depart from and disrupt the norms of Hollywood cinema, either through the practice of fracturing the projected image across several screens or by varying the pace of editing in order to disrupt the smooth flow of coherent narrative, in his discussion of Streamside Day Follies he expresses a basic (and understandable) suspicion of “video projected cinematically onto just one surface.”4 Although I agree with Joselit that recent pro- jections, which “hug the architectural envelope,” evoke the “growing practice of treating building façades as flickering surfaces of advertising,”5 we need to be wary both of collapsing the entire tradition of cinema into Hollywood narrative film and of dismissing narrative film per se, including Hollywood film, as having no critical potential, as if commercial narrative necessarily and inescapably positioned spec- tators as passive consumers of the image. Numerous scholars throughout the 1980s and 1990s drew attention to precisely this tendency in film theory, and the current discussions within contemporary art about the use and exhibition of video and film might benefit from attending to film theory’s evolving conceptualization of the rela- tive activity or passivity of the cinematic spectator. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” bell hooks’s important 1992 essay, constitutes a key interven- tion in film theorists’ thinking about the reception of narrative film, not only because it draws attention to the fact that, like much of contemporary art theory, “film theory as a critical ‘turf’ in the United States has been and continues to be influenced by and reflective of white racial domination” but also because it moves us beyond Laura Mulvey’s formulation of the female spectator as trapped and passive, drawing attention 82 Grey Room 19 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 instead to the way the mass media can be, and has been, strategically appropriated by those subjects who go unrecognized and unrepresented by it.6 hooks writes: Black female critical thinkers concerned with creating space for the construc- tion of radical black female subjectivity, and the way cultural production informs this possibility, fully acknowledge the importance of mass media, film in particular, as a powerful site for critical intervention. Certainly Julie Dash’s film, Illusions identifies the terrain of Hollywood cinema as a space of knowl- edge production that has enormous power. Yet, she also creates a filmic narra- tive wherein the black female protagonist subversively claims that space. Inverting the “real-life” power structure, she offers the black female spectator representations that challenge stereotypical notions that place us outside the realm of filmic discursive practices.7 Though Joselit’s discussion of Huyghe tends toward a homogenous view of narra- tive cinema, elsewhere, in a discussion of Michael Shamberg, Joselit emphasizes the need to avoid reductive dismissals of commercial culture, stating, It would be easy enough to describe Shamberg’s shift from political documen- tary to palliative entertainment as a simple instance of selling out, but I think this would be unfair. In other words, instead of scoffing at Archie Bunker as an effective social critic, perhaps we should hold open the possibility that commercial culture can carry oppositional content.8 As we evaluate the status of video in the contemporary art world, we need to find ways of critiquing those works that seem to sustain or encourage passive and uncrit- ical spectatorship without reductively invoking narrative cinema and its usual exhi- bition modes as a negative foil against which all “progressive” noncommercial film and video practices can be measured. Such binary oppositions of the reception of cinema and video art not only resist complex thought, productive interdisciplinary exchange, and almost thirty years of feminist, black, queer, and postcolonial film theory, but also prevent us from inventing and recognizing the alternate possibili- ties of commercial culture. In the pages that follow, I will explore Pepón Osorio’s use of video in his recent work, an installation in three parts: Trials and Turbulence at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The installation was the result of Osorio’s three-year artist-in-residency at the Department of Human Services (DHS), also in Philadelphia. I will examine how this multimedia installation, which includes an example of Beckman | When Video Does Foster Care: Pepón Osorio’s Trials and Turbulence 83 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 “wall-hugging” video projection, uses video to activate a critically engaged, self- reflective, and participatory spectator; and how Osorio productively responds to what Hal Foster has recently called contemporary art’s “condition of aftermath,” which involves living in the wake “not only of modernist painting and sculpture but of postmodernist deconstructions of these forms as well, in the wake not only of the prewar avant-gardes but of the postwar neo-avant-gardes as well.”9 In trying to formulate alternatives to melancholia in a world where it has become increasingly difficult to see how art can “live on” or make a difference, Foster identifies four key features of relevant contemporary art, all of which I think we can see at work in Trials and Turbulence and the effects of which I will try to trace in the course of this essay: (1) an engagement with traumatic experience; (2) a consideration of spectrality or “place haunted by absence” (a component that is closely linked to the medium of film); (3) the staging of “nonsynchronous forms”; that is, the process of “making a new medium out of the remnants of old forms, and [holding] together the different temporal markers in a single visual structure”; and (4) the juxtaposition of different spaces, the “strategy of the incongruent.”10 II. In 1975, Pepón Osorio moved from Puerto Rico to New York City, where he trained and worked as a sociologist and as a preschool teacher before becoming a social worker at the Human Resources Administration (Bureau of Child Welfare) in the Prevention Division of the Child Abuse and Abuse Victims Unit. Throughout this period he was actively involved in a community of artists and performers, an involvement that eventually drew him into a variety of artistic projects, including a number of col- laborations with Merián Soto, with whom he still collaborates today.