Radiant Sites: Projection and the Mobile Spectator in Contemporary Moving-Image Installations
This dissertation examines contemporary moving-image installations that use projected images to expand and elaborate upon the cinematic experience. It focuses on works by Douglas Gordon (b. 1966), Jim Campbell (b. 1956), and the partnered artists Janet Cardiff (b. 1957) and George Bures-Miller (b. 1960), all of whom have reconfigured the classical cinematic system of viewing since the 1990s. Through their works, I trace the term “expanded cinema” as a literal extension of projected light from the screen into the open gallery and beyond. I argue that the term “projection” – as thrown light, mental anticipation, and moving bodies – brings together cinema’s apparatus, text, and reception as a cohesive experience. These artists transport their light-based images to the gallery, exposing the projected image to mobile spectators, as well as to lighting conditions less conducive to a clear picture. However, the works I will discuss also maintain an explicit connection to the theatrical projection of narrative film. As these artists expand the exhibition spaces of cinema from theater to gallery, they also converge numerous cinematic formats, including celluloid film, magnetic videotape, digital video, still photography, and dynamic audio. I offer “projection” as a term which tethers the myriad trajectories of cinema’s expansion back to its apparatus, and even to the mobile spectator. Beyond the light phenomenon, I also draw from psychoanalytic theories of projection, especially relevant given its foundational contribution to film theory since the 1970s by authors such as Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, and Mary Ann Doane. Furthermore, the “suture” theory of Kaja Silverman and others offers a link between classical Hollywood editing conventions and the spatial orientation of the gallery spectator. From these theorists, I ultimately offer a notion of the projecting viewer, a physically active version of the “embodied viewer” as conceived by phenomenological film theorist Vivian Sobchack. By observing their similarities to the common multiplex, art house, or even living rooms, these otherwise uprooted screens reveal in fleeting flickers traces of what we might intuitively call “the cinematic.”
History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology
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