Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art

by Kate Mondloch

Overview

Media screens—film, video, and computer screens—have increasingly pervaded both artistic production and everyday life since the 1960s. Yet the nature of viewing artworks made from these media, along with their subjective effects, remains largely unexplored. Screens addresses this gap, offering a historical and theoretical framework for understanding screen-reliant installation art and the spectatorship it evokes.
 
Examining a range of installations created over the past fifty years that investigate the rich terrain between the sculptural and the cinematic, including works by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Michael Snow, Kate Mondloch traces the construction of screen spectatorship in art from the seminal film and video installations of the 1960s and 1970s to the new media artworks of today’s digital culture.
 
Mondloch identifies a momentous shift in contemporary art that challenges key premises of spectatorship brought about by technological objects that literally and metaphorically filter the subject’s field of vision. As a result she proposes that contemporary viewers are, quite literally, screen subjects and offers the unique critical leverage of art as an alternative way to understand media culture and contemporary visuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816665228
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	02/12/2010
Series:	Electronic Mediations , #30
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Kate Mondloch is assistant professor of art history at the University of Oregon.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction Screen Subjects xi

1 Interface Matters: Screen-Reliant Installation Art 1

2 Body and Screen: The Architecture of Screen Spectatorship 20

3 Installing Time: Spatialized Time and Exploratory Duration 40

4 Be Here (and There) Now: The Spatial Dynamics of Spectatorship 60

5 What Lies Ahead: Virtually, the Body, and the Computer Screen 77

Afterword: Thinking through Screens 93

Notes 97

Index 123