<videovortex> Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art by Kate Mondloch

[geert lovink]

Screens

Viewing Media Installation Art

By Kate Mondloch

$25.00 paper

ISBN 978-0-8166-6522-8

http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/03/q-kate-mondloch-on-use-of-screens-as-in.html

Investigates how viewers experience screen-based art in museum

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.

"What is most provocative and original about Kate Mondloch’s approach  
is that she realizes that screens are both objects and ‘virtual  
windows,’ material and immaterial entities at the same time. Screens  
has not only the potential of being a major contribution to a pre- 
existing art historical field, but opening up the discipline to  
entirely new modes of critical enquiry." —Colin Gardner, University of  
California, Santa Barbara

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


208 pages | 32 b&w photos | 2010
Electronic Mediations Series, volume 30


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Acknowledgments

Introduction: Screen Subjects

1. Interface Matters: Screen-Reliant Installation Art

2. Body and Screen: The Architecture of Screen Spectatorship

3. Installing Time: Spatialized Time and Exploratory Duration

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

5. What Lies Ahead: Virtuality, the Body, and the Computer Screen

Afterword: Thinking through Screens