Screen(ing)
text by: ikechukwu casmir onyewuenyi
[youtube-live]
It started with Jerry Saltz — we’re all digital’s bitches, right?[1] I wasn’t entirely sold. And I don’t think Saltz was either; there was some leeway in his harangue. With close to two-thirds of U.S. adults owning a smartphone or a least two digital devices—tablet, computer, smartphone—it’s safe to say that a large part of our society negotiates their everyday reality via the black mirror.[2] Even though American society is increasingly growing digital, we aren’t necessarily at the mercy of the screen and its proverbial iridescence. The screen’s importance depends, in part, on our level of engagement with it. In short, it’s our bitch too. And I think Saltz would agree that there is space to to re-read that bitch.
We can begin this re-reading with a return to the various iterations of the screen, the orchestrator of this digital divide. The very act of dividing takes us back to the screen in more ways than one. We’ve established above that the screen, as a material surface, divvies up our existence into a host of somewhat immaterial realities. However, to divide also introduces a semantic subtext to the screen as this double-edged agent. That is, from concealing to revealing, blocking to showing, the nomenclature around the word screen vacillates between exclusionary and egalitarian. With this back and forth in mind, we can see that screen, as a term, is inherently riddled with division—it protects and projects, pushes and pulls. Building on this, I would argue that it’s from this place of difference (and distance) that the digital divide emerges and exasperates.
And that was Saltz gripe—this deliberate distance cast through this new, digital landscape instantiated by the screen and, by extension, digital technology. Across Surround Audience, the 2015 New Museum Triennial, there was often a distance between wall text and screen, with the artists’ words never quite resonating with what was shown on the screen. Instead, these wall texts languished somewhere near the surface (tension) [3] of the screen, garbling the intrigue of the spectator. Artists aren’t alone in this misstep, with curators also running up against this overreaching, their lofty exchanges simply furthering the internecine nature of the screen. In truth, no single entity is at fault per se; all things being equal, overcoming this digital divide necessitates a togetherness or intimacy between artist, curator, and participant, with the screen as a fulcrum.
To this end, rather than speak beyond the screen, Screen(ing) speaks in and around the screen in order to explore the limits and possibilities of the screen as both a material surface and sorting mechanism. As such, this web-based exhibition offers a “transparent” curatorial approach: the viewer is asked to think through art and its practice through the lens of the screen, and vice-versa. By design, Screen(ing) is a rhetorical gesture: doubling as online exhibition alongside an audio-visual window into the practices of each artist. This virtual window—recorded studio visits and live streams of artists’ studio practice—is accompanied by an interactive component where viewers can pose questions to artist and curator alike. Through these multiple screens, participants arrive at a subjective reconsideration of how artists make art—a discursive window past the screen and into a screening.
Building on Saltz, the references for such a curatorial move began with the semantic subtext of screen/screening, and how this moves between the black boxes of cinema and the black mirrors of computers and smart phones. To wit, we often screen as a prelude to screening. The screen is a quick-and-dirty instrument, a preliminary to an end product. Some would say screening tends to take on more rigors, the back-end of the screen. With the advent of digital technology, our experience and understanding of art is generally relegated to a hasty screen, even more so when the very medium is a screen. The fading significance of the black box coupled with the ephemeral nature of the Internet present as key examples; we tend to give art a cursory glance when it exists in both modes. At this crossroads, Screen(ing) was an attempt to mitigate this fleeting screen, inviting art and its audiences into the screening.
The seven artists in Screen(ing) in addition to the writings of Elizabeth Grosz, Tavi Meraud, and Kate Mondloch also served as points of departure. The artistic practices represented in Screen(ing) run the gamut from video, photography, and site-specific installation to sculpture, prose, and collage through digital rendering. There’s really no unifying thread across the works (and I don’t intend to imply one). Instead, we can locate a willingness and vulnerability in each artist to experiment with the screen, and how its luminous and multifaceted qualities might connect their artistic practice to an online audience. Along these lines, it can also be argued that the artistic practices represented in Screen(ing) do not all neatly fit into the mold of “digital art” (if there is even such a thing), but rather virtuality. In fact, for many of the artists in Screen(ing), their work is best apprehended in a physical space, outside of the screen. However, being exhibited in an online context, mediated through the screen, these artists naturally enter into discourses on virtuality and how the virtual realm exists in opposition to the real. Grosz’s essay in Architecture from the Outside pushes this thinking a step further by suggesting that virtuality sits inside the real—not in opposition to or outside the real—and offers a window into futuring: “If virtuality resides in the real…this is because the real is always in fact open to the future, open to potentialities other than those now actualized.”[4] From this, we see that these artists in Screen(ing) are engaging virtuality—a subjective elsewhere—by opening up their practice and process to the audio-visual window and screen. Read this way, virtuality plugs the distance of the digital divide in that it offers up a re-reading of the screen, a narrowing between the realms of the real and unreal, the corporeal and the computerized.
This opening up invites another corporeal body—the viewer. How do we understand their role in this space of virtuality? Hearkening back to Saltz and his complaints, Screen(ing) is intimately concerned with this “outside” spectator and the possible challenges that may arise when experiencing work made of and through digital means. Slippages occur in the digital so much so that Saltz duly noted “the story [in the wall text] doesn’t add up to much or seem to be actually present in the work.”[5] To counter this, the audio-visual-interactive window in Screen(ing) instills agency within the spectator to: one, ensure the screen doesn’t further frustrate the somewhat impenetrable backstory of artistic production, and two, to include them in the intents of virtuality. This possibility for futuring and representation beyond the artist, the process, the artwork, and the screen requires a critical dialogue with the spectator. As such, turning to Mondloch’s chapter, “Be Here (and There) Now The Spatial Dynamics of Spectatorship,” she notes that the computer screen or smart phone emerges as this dialectical conduit through which viewers can simultaneously attend to the illusionist, representational space “inside” the screen and the space in front of the screen that inhabits their body.[6] Occupying the spatiotemporal space in front of the screen, the viewer shuttles between their physical location and that of a simulated one within the screen that is part representational, part informational. For Mondloch, the end goal of this “media(ted)” back-and-forth between the viewer and the screen is perhaps an earnest intimacy that alludes to Lacan’s mirror stage where “subjectivity [is] a fusion of the viewer and the viewed.” This Lacanian read on subjectivity coalesces with Mondloch argument, which is built around the work of Peter Campus’ closed-circuit video installation, Interface (1972) where viewers see themselves appear on a glass screen.[7] Although Screen(ing) doesn’t offer up a reflective mirror per se like Campus or Lacan, the virtual window (e.g., the artist-spectator dialogue through the live stream) serves as a sort of relational aesthetic through which we can identify aspects of the artistic practice and artwork we can relate to. This move to draw the viewer closer to and identify with the work answers to the “skin-deep, masturbatory” relations that Saltz noted when wall texts never rise to the occasion of the artwork.[8]
In thinking through the screen, virtuality, intimacy, and the symbiotic relations of artist and spectator, Meraud makes several telling insights in her text, Iridescence, Intimacies, on how we can negotiate these concepts. If we agree that the superficial sheen of the screen comes with layers of realities that further abstract us from the real, Meraud contends that intimacy seeks to peel through those layers by “naturaliz[ing] the other into a subject of our inner kingdom, to co-produce a trenchant reality, one that heterotopically blossoms in the “real” reality.”[9] To co-produce, to naturalize—the tense, as an active verb, implies a futuring, a working towards an end product. Both words also intimate a place that isn’t in opposition, a virtuality or “real” that is within a reality or shares some commonality to it. To coproduce or naturalize, curatorially, in this virtual sense, seeks to draw artist and spectator closer all the while acknowledging the fact that we cannot realize the haptic nature of the real—the screen is inherently a material entity that cannot be ignored when we experience art through it. Working from these ideas, Screen(ing) begins to recast intimacy as it relates to artistic practice and artworks that exist in this online, digital sphere, this virtuality or “real” reality that the screen agenda fashions. Crucial to this recasting is an unraveling of the logics of proximity and interiority as it relates to the screen and virtuality.[10] This raises several questions, key amongst them being: how can we be more proximal to the artist, their ideas, their process, and their inner world such that the surface of the screen is not as tense, exclusionary? Meraud intuits such proximity and interiority emerges in transintimacy or this electronic love born out of loving oneself through the screen and allowing others to similarly love on you. In short, to “survey…love through screens…and [to] bask in the glow of the screened image of my love.”[11] This idea harks back to Mondloch’s point that “a screen is a performative category.”[12] Hence, what we do within this round-the-clock performative platform stands to inform constructive, intimate relations between artist and viewer.
Screen(ing) takes a stab at transintimacy as a way to rethink the digital divide and to re-read the bitch in us all, screen included. This welcoming of techno-intimacy places the spectator in a somewhat similar seat to that of a curator charged with fashioning an online exhibition. By listening to the studio visit in all its rawness to peering in on the live stream, spectators can partake in the screening, love on the artist, and get closer to the artists’ representational space inside the screen. Re-reading couldn’t be more intimate.
Notes
[1] Jerry Saltz, “Digital Bitches’: The New Museum Triennial,” Vulture, March 23, 2015. Accessed October 8, 2015, http://www.vulture.com/2015/03/digitals-bitches-the-new-museum-triennial.html.
[2] Monica Anderson, “Technology Device Ownership: 2015,” Pew Research Center, October 29, 2015, accessed January 1, 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/29/technology-device-ownership-2015.
[3] Here, surface tension alludes to the strained or imbalanced social relations that may occur as result of the screen.
[4] Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 90.
[5] Saltz, “’Digital Bitches.’”
[6] Kate Mondloch, “Be Here (and There) Now: The Spatial Dynamics of Spectatorship,” in Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 72-74.
[7] Mondloch, “Be Here (and There) Now,” 74-75.
[8] Saltz, “’Digital Bitches.’”
[9] Tavi Meraud, “Iridescence, Intimacies,” e-flux journal 61 (2015): 10.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., 11.
[12] Mondloch, “Be Here (and There) Now,” 70.