Xiaolian Lan
This essay aims to explore the research question by engaging with the practices of two representative artists: Bill Viola and Douglas Gordon. These artists bring together various elements combining performance, space and time, sound into the representation of artistic production. By encouraging visual and psychological engagement, Viola and Gordon’s art seeks a reflexive looking-relation with spectator to foreground their consciousness on what it is being seen and felt through the employment of installation, performance and time. Situating Viola and Gordon within a theoretical framework that is informed by the semiotic sign system discussed in Bal & Bryson (1991), and phenomenology informed by Heidegger (1962), and James (1886) perspectives on time: specifically, the concept ‘interval’ to analysis and explain the function and effect of time on viewer‘s consciousness. This essay begins its discussion firstly by drawing attention to the motive of using sign system in the video installation to create ‘metaphoric‘ spectacle which plays with the inner consciousness of viewers; secondly I proceed to focus on video performance to elaborate the relationship between performance in the video and viewer‘s self-conscious acts through the use of associative concept of retention and perception; lastly, the analysis centres around adopting slow-motion technique as an approach to investigate the spectators’ conscious of time. What I have concluded is that spectator‘s consciousness is activated through its engagement of sign, identity and perception of time. The employment of performance, installation and time is considered building a dialogue with spectators physically and mentally; their viewing experience and consciousness are also a reflection of the material and immateriality of video art.
Video Installation
In the late 1960s, Robert Morris introduced the notion of process and duration into sculpture practice, which was also a motivation to the early video artists (Kaye, 2007: 64-65) who started considering a new relationship with spectator through projecting video in the designated space. Along with straightforward visual engagement, the space put viewers in a constant negotiation with architecture, constructions, installation material and found sites; in turn, a very important part of the viewer’s consciousness towards the artwork was affected by their physical and psychological presence and experience.
Both Viola and Gordon view the space as a catalyst to evoke the spectator‘s perception and imagination to make an empathetic process possible, they also tend to use installation as an approach either transferring the exhibition site into spiritual space (Cook, 2002: 257) or, turning public viewing space a private meditational site (Young, 1997:65). Although their installations vary in terms of spatial dimension, material displacement and cultural context, Viola and Gordon’s practices depart from the notion of ̳metaphor‘, they create a new meaning based on the existing objects in the site, which naturally turn into visual symbols carrying multiple meanings within an open-structured installation. I will further apply the semiotic theory that contributes to the employment of ‘metaphor‘ in video installation below. In both cases, what they pursue is based on multi-meaning production through the creation of sign system.
I firstly examine Gordon’s early video installations, an experimental projection in the small conservative Catholic town of Munster in 1997 ‘Between darkness and light (after William Blake)’. It projected two films into one screen: one is the black-and- white film ‘The Song of Bernadete’ showing a virtue model referencing Joan of D’Arc; the other is ‘The Exorcist’ by director William Friedkin. By playing both works simultaneously, the spectator‘s mind set seems to be trapped and embodied by the darkness that generates increasingly tension within the space. For Cooke (2002: 258) this work was ‘literally and metaphorically acted out exhibition.’ These emotions echo the spectator’s consciousness through the perception of overlapping images and uncanny sound, but does this fully interpret Gordon‘s ambition? Feinstein (1985:176) argues that metaphor is regarded as a shield that impedes the truth—polysemy is the nature of metaphor based on semantics and the real thoughts are always hidden behind the appearance of an image, language, text or object. Using the underpass as a metaphor for purgatory, Gordon’s installation served as ambiguous ritual aiming to foreground the spectator’s spiritual consciousness through provoking their awareness and memory of religion. Moreover, the juxtaposition of darkness, sound, environment and the narrative sends the viewer into a retrospective and reflexive journey. They gain awareness of the coexistence of good and evil within oneself; the significance of such consciousness has gone beyond the pursuit of the spiritual sublime but concerns moral and ethics. Bal & Bryson (1991:176-177) expressed similar concern: a body of material is assembled and juxtaposed with the work in question in the hope that such contextual material will reveal the determinants that make the work of art what it is. Consequently, the spectator is conscious of the hidden message—the video installation functions as a process of decoding that leads to an explicit cause and effect in their awareness.
Similar methods can be found in Viola’s video art at the beginning of 70s. Revealing a thematic and conceptual nature in production, his early installations were experimental and contained strong metaphoric meanings. ‘The Theatre of Memory’ (1973) was an ambitious work touching upon concerns of life and death, as well as memory. The video images were presented upon a wall through projection while a dead tree occupied in the dark space, covered by flickering lanterns, which blocked the view of spectator from certain angles, and further restricted their walking path through limiting the viewing distance with the projection. Standing within the darkness, the viewers were challenged both visually and psychologically as the images in the video all appeared in the form of pulse signals while the flickering of lights from the lantern reinforced a repressive feeling. In this exhibition, Viola employs water—a motif that frequently appears in his work—as the metaphor for the video medium. To be specific, he refers to the fluidity of video light as the flow of water that carries life for human and animals, and took darkness as a symbol of death. Aristotle points out that metaphors should be fitting, they must fairly correspond to the thing signified (Feinstein, 1985:28): so the spectator consciousness accepts the sign of life and death, good and evil that are logically reflected through cross reference between diversified objects and materials. Additionally, the way Viola interpreted his metaphoric ideas on electronic signals and human experience is situated at the controversial point of semiotic study. Regarding the semiotic system, Saussure suggests the meaning of a sign is determined by a static system. If based on this immobility of the sign system, the electronic signal in Viola’s experiment can only be understood as physical phenomenon within its own language context. On the contrast, Derrida recognises the dynamism of sign and insists that meaning arose as moving from one sign to another; the meaning of sign is contextual dependency. Accordingly, Derrida’s theory better responds to the polysemy nature of metaphor. With Viola’s installation, our consciousness on the metaphoric relationship between video electronics and the human brain is also fully valid and activated (Bal & Bryson, 1991: 177-178).
Video Performance
Viola uses performance to stimulate spectator consciousness via his investigation of human emotion and perception. The video ‘The Martyrs‘ commissioned by St. Paul’s Cathedral in London depicts four tortured scenes featuring four men and women suffering physical attack from earth, wind, fire and water. Their isolated bodies are either hung, burn or crashed against a black background, which highlighted the dynamic visualisation of the action, and the application of portrait lighting and austere clothing reinforced a sense of tension. This work uses the body to convey a spiritual sublime. Usually displayed in form of four large-panels, this straightforward presentation allows audiences to engage with the performers and their spontaneous action through direct gaze. Immediately, the viewers gain an impression of the idea of torture through the physical reaction and frustrated facial expression of performers. As the four videos are playing together as a whole, they form an immediate dialogue between each other, and the viewer could read the connection and relationship among them.
I view this video work as demonstrating a strong sense of our existence through the performance of the body. Based on Heidegger (1962), the body is utilised here as phenomena, an object to be seen and appearing in the perception of others, and Being as an entity is formed by these phenomena. Consciousness emerges as the relationship between phenomena and the spectator: in turn, the conscious act also makes the object explicit through perception, memory, retention and pretention. In an interview on his early video ‘Information’, Viola pointed out that ‘technology is only half the issue, and the other half was the human perception system’ (Bellour & Viola, 1973: 32). After this early period, Viola has fully pursued his investigation into human consciousness with a concentration and intensity that can only be termed heroic (Judson, 1995: 30.
For me ‘The Martyrs’ is the work that best reflects this line of thought—Viola’s engagement in phenomenology is quite straightforward. He intends to take control of both what can be seen by viewers and what cannot be seen through the manipulation of performance and related stage setting, having viewers committed to ‘phenomena and Being’ rather than distracted by hypothesis. This act highlights the body as authenticate object in the perception of viewer. Based on Shusterman (2009) the awareness of the object only makes the viewer’s consciousness stay at a basic level, and consequently the body is only the vessel without life. By taking this idea to the next level, Viola is trying to revive emotion from the audience through creating a tragic circumstance, which made the body dynamic phenomenon that is reflective but responds only to its own environment, and audience responds to this situation with a sense of sympathy. For Shusterman (2009: 133) the highest level of consciousness is when “we are not only explicitly conscious of the object but also conscious of how we are conscious of it” this is also explicit in Viola’s practice. I view Viola’s video as achieving this transcendent quality because its performance has reached a point where the body realised coherence between inner and outer experience. In the video ‘Martyrs’, each performance starts from stillness, and then goes through different stage of torture until they all return to a state of peace. Watching the performance on the screen, the performers turn their role into the victim while the audience sees themselves as the witness of the transformation. This redemption process initiates the inner experience and an self-reflexive awareness. The spectators are awakening by the outward journey conveyed through video performance, which motivates them to seek what they lack inside.
Time consciousness
Alongside these aesthetic concerns, the use of slow motion directly affects the spectator’s consciousness: the duration of time and perception of temporality through the encounter of ‘constant intervals’ in the moving image. It changes the viewer access to, and experience of, time that is different from a real time span. I would like to focus on Viola and Gordon‘s cases for both use slow motion as a methodology to alter consciousness of time and duration.
Gordon’s ’24 Hours Psycho’ (1993) is a study on how artists interpret the relationship between time and the spectator’s consciousness. In an interview, Gordon commented on two major aspects of the work’s production. The first concerns the using of dream-like effect as a stimuli of viewer‘s awareness and memory; the second is a reflection of the temporal nature of video art, and further posited a question on how time should be perceived: is it either a sequenced events or various temporality happened simultaneously (Røssaak, 2014). William James introduced the concept ‘the specious present’ which recognised the original intuition of time as “a constantly conscious duration… a combination of shorter segments” (James, 1886: 377). To be specific, the continuous of consciousness is formed by the retrospective and the prospective sense of time. Time sensitivity is basically the perception of the succession between two ends, and this brought up the idea of interval of time. Both materialism and immaterialism of video determine the moving image can only run within certain span of time. The first video art by Nam June Paik was recorded on a reel-to-reel machine with maximum recording time of one hour, which was considered a video of “real time” (Elwes, 2005: 4). The ’24 Hours Psycho’ rearticulates the original film of Hitchcock in a peculiar way which slows the rate down to one frame every two second. Unlike the Nam June Paik, Gordon manipulates time by interrupting and dividing the space of presentness and extending the individual time segments; then every movement made by protagonists is clearly observed through a series of sequence of images. With the slow-motion, the “presentness” is the interval of time with doubled length comparing real time. It is an effect fixed in the mind of spectator in the form of the recollection of number of changes through retention. Philip Merlan (1947, 25) summaries retention as: “an object of a perception of a temporal event is bound to become an object of a corresponding retention.” It supports Gordon‘s idea on ‘human being can coexist on various levels simultaneously’: if people caught 10 minutes of 24-Hour Psycho, they might remember that it was still happening (Rossaak, 2014: 89).
Gordon‘s experiment of slow-motion created déjà vu in the mind of spectator. His examination of the being of consciousness is based on a series of consecutive retention of a given interval of time. This idea is also evident in the work of Viola (Bellour & Viola, 1985:96-101) ‘consciousness is revealed through a successive event.’ However, what differentiates Viola from Gordon is his intervention on time is realised through manipulation of movement of attention. The awareness of attention is partially created by the residua in the perception. Viola‘s early work ‘The Reflecting Pool’ (1977-80), a man jumps into the pool except his body frozen in the mid-air for a long period of time before disappearing into the background of forest. This situation led to the distinctive moment that is vividly retained in the mind of viewer in the form of residua. The gradually fading image allows viewers to pay attention to the action of the man rather than the consequence which draws attention to the time-distance emerged during the slow dissolve. Viola signifies three separate time: the continuous time which is the perception of reality; the recoding time and edited time; he regards that times are not dependent on the absolute time of the videotape machine (Bellour & Viola, 1985:96). Therefore, by editing and recombining the level of time in the frame, the spectator’s attention toward the interval of time shifted and changed along with the reconstructed sequence of events.
Viola’s concerns on time and successive events in his early work came from his interrogation of the fixed recording time of videotape. After the technology evolved into digital, Viola’s practice of time also moved from action to emotion expression. The work ‘the Quintet of the Astonished’ (2000) is a group of five people are seen standing close together as they undergo a wave of intense emotion that threatens to overwhelm them. The five individuals experience the rising emotional energy independently: the extreme slow motion makes visible the smallest of details and subtle nuances of expression, and creates a subjective, psychological space where time is suspended for both performers and viewers alike (Hanhardt & Viola, 2015: 184). In James (1886: 376) ‘all consciousness is in the form of time, or that time is the form of feeling, the form of sensibility.’ Viewers’ attention and emotion are particularly directed to the deliberate change of movement in gestures and facial expression; in slow-motion, this vividness is exaggerated, the viewer’s consciousness constantly oscillates between retrospective and the prospective sense of time. The continuity then makes time observable. The spectator does not always play a passive role in the contemplation but their inner experience usually starts their own sequence of the events; accordingly, their consciousness is motivated by these intensity of movements.
Conclusion
In summary, I pursued my investigation into the relationship between video and spectator consciousness with concentration on examining three key elements: installation, performance and time based on artists Bill Viola and Douglas Gordon. I identified that both explores viewer’s spiritual and mental potentials by employing metaphoric symbols in the construction of projection space. Regarding the difference between them, I began the description with Gordon’s early experimental installation in 90s, his practices on metaphor work through transformation between media: turning the abundant site into a spiritual space and making it part of the overall artwork, then making viewer a participator instead of a passerby. Whereas, Viola’s installation directly works with sign system to shape viewer understanding between appearance and truth. Additionally, I gave a thorough review of Viola‘s reputable video ‘Martyrs’, which takes the body dynamic as catalyst to evoke spectator ‘awareness and self-reflection. Finally, the essay draws attention to video technique ‘slow-motion‘ which controls consciousness through manipulating time. The analysis uses Gordon‘s ’24 Hours Psycho‘ as a starting point to expose viewer‘s time sensitivity that is decided by the succession of events and interval of time. As in Viola’s case, his works identify that viewer’s emotion and retention of image is shaped and lies in the reconstruction of video time.
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