I penned a book review for Rhizome.org, and another is coming soon. Teaser:
Cover of Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art by Kate Mondloch
Kate Mondloch’s first book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, is a welcome study of the cathode ray tubes, liquid crystal and plasma displays, and film, video and data projections that “pervade contemporary life†(xi). The author reminds us that screens are not just “illusionist windows†into other spaces or worlds, but also “physical, material entities [that] beckon, provoke, separate, and seduce†(xii). Most importantly, however, Mondloch’s approach is that of an art historian. She does not merely use art as a case study for media theory, but rather makes the contributions of artists her central focus in this, the first in-depth study of the space between bodies and screens in contemporary art.
Like Nicolas Bourriaud in his Relational Aesthetics, Mondloch begins in the gallery space, and is interested in creating a “discrete critical framework†(63) for a specific genre: what she calls “screen-reliant†art. Mondloch recognizes the import of “viewing subjects†engaging with “actual art objects†(xii – xiii) and attempts to apply a combination of post-structural theory and phenomenology to her study. Here she describes the relationships between virtual and actual, sign and material, involving the theories and philosophies of Lacan and Deleuze on the mirror stage and cinema, for example, but always including the screen’s inherent materiality in how art is experienced.
Chapter 1, “Interface Matters,†describes in detail Mondloch’s category of screen-reliant installation art, looking to the work of Paul Sharits and Michael Snow as examples of how artists of the 1960s were, for the first time, investigating the interface of the screen itself: “the multifarious physical and conceptual points at which the observing subject meets the media object†(2). Here she goes to great lengths to remember the differences between screenings of film, and screens in film and video installation. The latter are hybridized as spatial and temporal, akin to Minimalism in their approach to the body, but with the potential for entwined and confused narratives as the timeline of its materials unfold. Mondloch’s reading of Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story is especially poignant.
