Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art

Mirror Affect Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art Cristina Albu University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Contents Introduction: Seeing Ourselves Seeing 1 2 3 Mirror Frames: Spectators in the Spotlight 1 31 Mirror Screens: Wary Observers under the Radar 109 Mirror Intervals: Prolonged Encounters with Others 155 4 Mirror Portals: Unpredictable Connectivity in Responsive Environments 203 Conclusion: Networked Spectatorship 251 Acknowledgments 263 Notes 269 Index 293 Introduction Seeing Ourselves Seeing The diverting of attention from that which is meant to compel it, i.e., the actual work on display, can at times free up a recognition that other manifestations are taking place that are often dificult to read, and which may be as signiicant as the designated objects on display. — Irit Rogoff, “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture” As we walk through art museums and galleries, more and more contemporary artworks enhance our awareness of belonging to a shared spectatorial space. We actively observe not only the objects on display but also our movements and the reactions of other visitors. Artworks that include mirrors, live video feedback, and sensors frame contexts for seeing ourselves seeing and acting as part of precarious collectivities. They call our attention to the interpersonal dimension of perception and invite us to develop affective afiliations toward other visitors concomitantly engaged in mirroring processes as they discover how their ref lections are encompassed in ininity rooms or how their movements expand the sensory potential of responsive environments. Under these circumstances, individualistic aesthetic rituals give way to interpersonal and collective modes of observation and behavior. What has led artists from the late modernist period onward to challenge the autonomy of the isolated, self-involved art viewer by highlighting the public character of the display context? Do works that stimulate mirroring acts simply deepen our passive immersion in visual spectacle, or can they actually 1 2 Introduction disrupt purely contemplative attitudes by cultivating interpersonal awareness and performativity? To what extent can they help us reconsider our position and limited degree of freedom in social systems? In this book, I seek to connect these key questions about ref lective and responsive artworks with current debates on participatory art while tying loose knots among minimalist sculpture, performance art, installation art, and new media. I suggest that a signiicant number of contemporary artworks with mirroring properties enable us to perceive ourselves and others as if from a third distance, intertwined in a complex social fabric that alerts us to the critical need for reconsidering who we are, how we act, and what consequences our choices have on others. Mirror Affect charts the historical trajectories of ref lective artworks and the emergence of increasingly public modes of art spectatorship across multiple media since the 1960s. My account starts with this decade because it is marked by an extensive use of materials with mirrorlike properties (e.g., Mylar, Plexiglas, stainless steel) and a irm contestation of modernist modes of art viewing that imply a relation of parallelism between an individual beholder and an autonomous art object, shielded from all external inf luences that might disrupt the privacy of the aesthetic experience. This idealized spectatorial relation is not a very long-standing convention, but it is a staple of the encounter with abstract expressionist and color ield paintings, which situate the viewer in a presumably neutral and secluded plane of optical absorption. Interestingly, on the occasion of the Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition of 2011, the Museum of Modern Art was so keen on reifying the aesthetic experience associated with this stylistic tendency that it asked staff members to adopt introspective attitudes in front of individual paintings for a set of photographs meant to accompany the New York Times review of the show. The documentary photographs were so clearly staged that the newspaper published a disclaimer a week later, announcing that it found this approach unethical and explaining that MoMA oficials had offered guidelines for the photo shoot.1 Yet modern art did not imply only introspective modes of engagement. The futurists organized events that provoked audience members into violent actions in order to make them abandon their roles as spectators and partici- Introduction pate in destructive actions that were no longer limited to the space of the stage. Similarly, the Dadaists were determined to denounce prevailing modes of spectatorship associated with high culture and take participants in their events outside their comfort zones. Their events at Cabaret Voltaire were purposefully aggressive toward the audience, as they were meant to disrupt and destroy social and theatrical norms. Although they were less intent on generating chaos and destruction than the Dadaists, the surrealists also took an interest in instigating public reactions through visceral and aggressive imagery. Well known are the unruly responses of cinemagoers to Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’or (1930) and the voyeuristic experiences envisioned by Salvador Dalí. Eager to erode both the boundaries between the conscious and the subconscious and the dif ferences between the public and the private, the surrealists often conceived modes of art spectatorship that placed the beholder in the limelight. For the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme of 1938, Marcel Duchamp came up with the idea of creating a system of lights that would switch on and illuminate the paintings as visitors approached them, hence setting the visitors on display along with the artwork. Continuities between these earlier challenges to aesthetic autonomy and the growing contestation of introspective modes of spectatorship in the 1960s and 1970s speak to the complex crisscrossing trajectories of modern and contemporary art, which defy all attempts to impose neat chronological boundaries. Recent contemporary artworks that gather large crowds around visual or interactive interfaces have been increasingly associated with the numbing spectacle of neocapitalism that subordinates individuals and perpetuates egotistic behavior. Accused of providing fake images of democratic consensus and serving the interests of service economies, they have been pushed outside the circle of participatory artworks, which take social relations as their main medium and usually catalyze communal ties based on verbal exchanges. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003), which drew large masses of visitors to Tate Modern to see themselves seeing while immersed in the light of a gigantic sun, was both hailed as a sublime landscape showcasing human vulnerability and condemned as complicit with art museums’ commodiication of sensory experience. More recently, Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present (2010) performance at MoMA and James Turrell’s Aten Reign 3 4 Introduction (2013) installation at the Guggenheim Museum were both accused of fueling the desire for spectacular encounters with others in the public eye without offering a potential for disruption or critique. Writing a book about mirroring processes in contemporary art in the midst of growing opposition toward perceptually engaging artworks that draw large public audiences has felt at times a self-defeatist task, encumbered by the unavoidable admission that such practices are indelibly connected to spectacle. Nonetheless, the simplistic equation of ref lective sculptures, video works, installations, and new media environments with illusionistic devices that lure the senses yet daze the minds has driven me to examine the complex interpersonal dynamics such works set on display and the implicit messages they convey about surveillance, consumerism, and social relations. Familiar with the spectacle of both communist and neoliberal countries (I am a Romanian citizen who has been living in the United States since 2005), I cannot entertain the illusion of complete autonomy from the society of the spectacle or the myths of individualism and collectivism that often underlie the criticism of artworks that incorporate participants’ images and kinetic gestures within their visual ields. Even Claire Bishop, the most fervent advocate of a deinition of participatory art in terms of artworks that take social relations as their privileged medium, admits that in order to maintain the necessary tension between aesthetics and politics, artists may need “a mediating third term—an object, image, story, ilm, even a spectacle—that permits this experience to have purchase on the public imaginary.”2 I will return to her views on the politics of spectatorship at a later point in this introduction in order to discuss the dichotomies that permeate the discourse of critics of participatory art despite their proclaimed desire to debunk modern binaries and acknowledge the signiicance of the nebulous ield of affective responses. This book presents the contingent relations spurred among art participants by ref lective art practices, which epitomize the growing uncertainty and complexity of the world we share with others. Far from liberating spectators from individual responsibility, these works encourage them to conceive themselves simultaneously as viewers and as active producers of a highly variable ield of ref lections and responses that eludes individual control. Rather