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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Recent Surveys on the Projected Image: A Look at Different Interpretations
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Thematic issue / Section thématique
2009-03-01
2022-12-16
2009-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Ariane Noël de Tilly
2009/03/01
Universiteit van Amsterdam
2036-461X
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Recent Surveys on the Projected Image: A Look at Different Interpretations
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19409/17267
9
RECENT SURVEYS ON THE PROJECTED IMAGE:
A LOOK AT DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS
Ariane Noël de Tilly, Universiteit van Amsterdam




   In 2005, the art historian David Joselit published an article in which he commented on
projection, now the most common spatial application of video. To describe the space in which
images are projected, Joselit renamed the “white cube”, the “light cube”1. During a round-table
on “The Projected Image in Contemporary Art”, the art historian Hal Foster argued that «film or
filmic effects are so pervasive in the art world that they have begun to reformat all kinds of other
practices»2. Joselit, Foster, and many other experts have discussed the omnipresence of projection
in contemporary art. Since the celebration of the 100th anniversary of cinema in 1995, this
phenomenon has also been greatly investigated by several institutions that organized survey
exhibitions on the relationship between cinema and contemporary art, and on how projection-
based works have been integrated in the museum since the 1960s. The exhibition Hall of Mirrors:
Art and Film Since 1945 presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, was the
first to reflect on the phenomenon3. Among the major surveys organized in the following years,
one can mention Cinéma Cinéma: Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience (Stedelijk
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven)4; Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977
(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)5; Le Mouvement des images (Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris)6; Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection. Films, Videos and Installations from
1963-2005 (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin)7; and Projections: A Major Survey of Projection-Based
Works in Canada, 1964-2007 (University of Toronto)8.
   As early as 1974, projection-based works caught the attention of curator Martin Friedman, who
organized the exhibition Projected Images at the Walker Art Center9. In the catalogue, the curator
underlines that the six artists selected for Projected Images conceived «film and video images
essentially in environmental terms – as dominant elements of interior spaces – and they [were] as
much concerned with the changing spatial and psychological relationships between observer and
image as with the character of the image itself»10. Right then, Friedman was able to pinpoint what
was at the core of the contemporary realizations of the artists. Some thirty years later, this emphasis
on the relationship between the viewer and the work, as well with the treatment of space is what art
historian David Joselit focuses on in his essay “Inside the Light Cube”. According to Joselit,
«projection reintroduces a more conventionally theatrical mode of spectatorship in which the
audience remains outside the media feedback loop rather than participating as actors within it»11. Two
effects are mentioned by Joselit: first, instead of having an active participator, as was the case in the
1970s when artists such as Peter Campus realized closed-channel video installations, the viewers are
given a passive role; they no longer have to interact with the artwork; they are only invited to look.
Second, projection creates this «new electronic skin that engulfs architectural elements»12.
   In order to study the effects described by Joselit, this article delves into the presence of

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projection-based artworks in the museum by looking specifically at two recent surveys covering
the same historical period: the 1960s until the present. The first one, Beyond Cinema: The Art of
Projection. Films, Videos and Installations from 1963 to 2005, was presented at the Hamburger
Bahnhof in Berlin from September 2006 to February 2007. The second one, Projections: A Major
Survey of Projection-Based Works in Canada, 1964-2007, was presented in four venues at the
University of Toronto in the Spring of 2007. One exhibition gathered works of international
artists, the other focused on works by Canadian artists. The main difference between these two
exhibits is the approach adopted by the curators: in Berlin, all artworks exhibited were moving
image works; they were all recorded on either film or video. In Toronto, the curator, interpreted
“projection” in a broader sense and selected a greater variety of media (such as slides), and went
so far as to include the works of artists who were merely inspired by the theme of projection, but
who did not actually use this technique in the making of their artworks. After describing the
context of both surveys and their aims, I will analyze how they bring different moments of the
history of projection-based works to the fore.


Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection
  Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection. Films, Videos and Installations from 1963 to 2005 was
organized by four curators: Stan Douglas, a Canadian artist who occasionally acts as a curator13;
Christopher Eamon, the Director of the New Art Trust and curator of the Kramlich Collection
(San Francisco); and two curators from the Hamburger Bahnhof: Joachim Jäger and Gabriele
Knapstein. In the catalogue, the curators wrote:

  No attempt has yet been made to relate current and historical works, and thus to enable
  comparisons between early experiments and contemporary works. In this spirit, the
  exhibition Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection is intended to broaden this horizon and
  point to the continuities leading from the film projections of the sixties to the complex film
  and video works of the present14.

  As the title indicated, the curators of Beyond Cinema had the desire to present a significant
number of works using projection, which were not presented in a theatre. In the catalogue, the
curators also wrote that «in contrast to classic narrative cinema, the art of projection increasingly
seeks to reflect on and consider the prerequisite conditions of the filmic, to test the effect they
have in space and ways of questioning habitual patterns of perception»15. The manner in which
the curators have done that will be discussed further in this article.
  Beyond Cinema was presented in a museum context, and to display the twenty-seven artworks, the
curators were granted an extraordinary space: the Rieckhallen of the Hamburger Bahnhof, which is
320 meters long and has an exhibition surface of 13,000 square meters. The artworks were borrowed
from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection in Hamburger Bahnhof, from the Kramlich Collection,
and from nine other different public and private collections. Beyond Cinema was divided into six
sections; six visuals axes, as specified by the curators, «leading to six central areas of the art of the
projection since 1960»16. The respective segments were given the names “Phantasmagoria”,
“Persona”, “Repertory Cinema”, “Body Double”, “The Liminal”, and “The Optic”.
  Rodney Graham’s Edge of a Wood (1999) was the first work one saw upon entering the
exhibition space. The Rieckhallen was turned into a real “light cube”, and indeed in the case of

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                                                        RECENT SURVEYS ON THE PROJECTED IMAGE

Graham’s work, into a “sound cube” as well, as the sound track of the work was striking. The
only light in the space was produced from the two projectors hung very high in the air. Edge of a
Wood consisted of two films projected onto two large screens. The two sequences displayed the
edges of a wood illuminated by a helicopter searchlight. The sound of the installation was the
recorded noise of the helicopter carrying out the search.
   The visitor’s journey in the dark began with Rodney Graham’s installation, as the entire exhibition
space was left in the dark and the light was provided almost exclusively by the projections. The
impressive exhibition space at the Hamburger Bahnhof allowed the curators to present projection-
based works on a large scale. However, these works did not invite the viewer to be active, even
though some of them were architectural environments (such as Doug Aitken’s 1998 seven-channel
video installation eraser). In many of these spaces, benches were provided to the visitors, inviting
them to sit down. Moreover, most of the projection surfaces in this exhibition were essentially flat:
they were either wall or screen projections. Only Tony Oursler’s Criminal Eye (1995) offered a
different projection surface: in this work, the detail of an eye is projected onto a smooth ball. For
the majority of the works presented in the exhibition, it was really the moving image that attracted
the attention of the viewer, more so than the effect that the moving image had on the exhibition
space. It would be difficult to argue, however, that the works could have been presented in a movie
theatre. For example, Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho (1993) was exhibited in the “Repertory
Cinema” section of the survey. Stretching Hitchcock’s 90-minute film over 24 hours, Gordon made
it impossible for the viewer to see his work in its entirety, as the projection continued after the
museum was closed. Other artists used multiple projections, but even then, the viewer was looking
at them and not moving in them. One can think of Pipilotti Rist’s Ever is Over All (1997) or John
Massey’s As the Hammer Strikes (A Partial Illustration) (1982) to further illustrate this point.


Exhibition projections
   The curator Barbara Fischer, also the director of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto,
organized the exhibition Projections: A Major Survey of Projection-Based Works in Canada,
1964-2007. In the booklet provided to the visitors, the curator wrote that «the works in this
exhibition exemplify why projection – using light, slides, film, video, and television – has become
such a compelling medium»17. Barbara Fischer put together a show presenting only the works of
Canadian artists in order to highlight that even if projection art is trendy internationally, Canadian
art is distinctive in the sense that it is, according to her, «much more spatial and more self-
conscious about the aspects that make up cinema»18. According to Fischer, «most international
film and video work is narrative, dealing with shifts in time»19. Barbara Fischer’s exhibition could
have been (or perhaps we ought to say should have been?) presented in a museum. The show had
the potential to be seen in major Canadian institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada.
However, Fischer received a grant to present in the four galleries of the University of Toronto:
the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the University
of Toronto Art Centre. Two of the venues were in downtown Toronto, and the two others were
outside of the city (in Scarborough and Missisauga, two suburbs of Toronto). The visitors who
wished to see the entire show had to travel in between the different venues. Since the main
objective of Fischer’s exhibition was to present a survey of projected-based works in Canada
from the sixties until now, the curator had to choose enough artworks to give an idea of the
diversity of projection methods artists used over that period of time. The curator divided the

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ARIANE NOËL DE TILLY

exhibition into four sections, each «focusing on a specific element of the cinematic projection and
its conceptual implications»: the screen, light, theatre of projection, and travel20.
   Within the given space, Barbara Fischer could not present many large-scale installations. In this
regard, Fischer presented works that were significant but that did not demand too much space. For
example, in the section “Theatre of Projection”, she displayed Janet Cardiff and George Bures
Miller’s The Muriel Lake Incident (1999), a miniature cinema. Had she been provided with a
bigger space, Fischer could have considered presenting Cardiff and Miller’s The Paradise
Institute, a replica of a small theatre in which the viewers can enter and watch a short film.
Nevertheless, The Muriel Lake Incident highlights in a subtler way the elements required for a
cinematic experience. In the small space of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, this work (which
only allows three visitors at a time, since there are only three pairs of headphones) provided a very
intimate experience. Another example in the same section of the show was Rodney Graham’s
Coruscating Cinnamon Granules (1996), which required a smaller physical space than Edge of a
Wood presented in Berlin. The installation consists of a rough construction of a small screening
room with five cinema seats in which the viewer can enter and watch a film showing cinnamon
granules burning in a visually spectacular manner on a stove’s burner coil.
   In Fischer’s show, not many works were projected onto screens. As E.C. Woodley wrote in her
review, both exhibitions, Beyond Cinema and Projections:

  Unlike the Berlin show – and its vast, all-but-invisible projection screens – the Toronto show
  constantly presented viewers with objects, “things-in-the-world” on which something was
  being projected. The projection medium was used as a tool within a larger narrative, one that
  suggested the critical importance of place in Canada21.

   As Fischer noted, the concern of the space was very present in the artists’ minds when creating
their works, Wyn Geleynse’s An Imaginary Situation with Truthful Behaviour, a series of seven
diminutive glass houses sitting side-by-side on a table, constituting an example. In one of the
houses, the figure of a naked man trying to break one of the walls of the house in order to get out
is projected. The projected man looks so real (even though he is only a few centimetres high) that
it is very tempting for the viewer to place himself in between the projector and the series of houses
in order to verify if the man exists or not. Geleynse’s work is not interactive, but it nevertheless
invites the viewer to walk about in order to understand what projection makes possible. David
Hoffos’ Scenes from the House Dream: Bachelor’s Bluff (2005) had the same effect. It is one of
the only rooms in the exhibition that was completely blacked out. Here, Hoffos created a diorama
into which he projected persons of different scales in specific settings. As the projections look
real, especially that of the human-scale lady, it is challenging to determine what is real and what
is illusory in the exhibition space.
   The exhibition space in Fischer’s exhibition was relatively dark, but it was not as dark as that
of Beyond Cinema. In Fischer’s show, the viewer was more aware of the sculptural space. The
works she presented often invited the viewer to move and to walk about.


The space and the viewer
   According to curator Chrissie Iles, in terms of their display in the exhibition space, video and
film installations have been through three distinct phases: a phenomenological, «performance

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                                                        RECENT SURVEYS ON THE PROJECTED IMAGE

phase»; a «sculptural» phase; and a «cinematic» phase, which is the current trend22. As noted by
Iles, the video and film installations produced in the mid- to late-1960s show two different
philosophical approaches to space: first, the expanded cinema events during which artists were
showing «large-scale projected environments involving film and 35 mm slide sequences», and
second, «an emerging body of video work with a rigorously conceptual approach to viewer
participation and social space»23. On one hand there were the spaces where the «large projected
film images transformed the space into a three-dimensional image, a kind of communal dream
space, or metaphor of expanded consciousness»24, and on the other, the video spaces in which the
real-time feedback property of video was being used to invite the viewer to take part in the artwork.
Examples of the first phase defined by Iles could be found in the exhibition Beyond Cinema: The
Art of Projection. The other example of “Expanded Cinema” chosen by the Berlin curators was
Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973), a thirty-minute film presenting the drawing of
a large circle onto a wall. In this artwork, the viewers are invited to walk into the projection
trajectory in order to grasp a key element of the projection technique: light. Line Describing a Cone
is a work that takes place in time and space and is all about being experienced. Also created in
1973, Valie Export’s Adjungierte Dislokationen, a triple projection, served to illustrate how artists
used the camera as an extension of their body. In this work, Valie Export used three cameras: two
of them were attached to her body and the third was filming her. The end result is one large
projection – from the film of the third camera – juxtaposed with the two projections, what the two
cameras tied to her body recorded. Peter Campus’ Prototype for “Interface” was also exhibited in
the section “Persona” of the show Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection. In 1999, Campus
reconstructed his early closed-circuit video work Interface, first made in 1972. When walking into
the space, the viewer can see a camera, a large sheet of glass and a projector. The camera records
the movements of the viewer, which are projected in real time on the large glass. Here, the visitors
were invited to interact with the artwork and to move into the space. In the exhibition Projections,
Michael Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story (1974) can be cited as an example of this first phase25.
Snow’s work consists of two synchronized films, each projected on one side of an aluminium
screen hung in the middle of a room. The two films are projected from opposite sides, each
projection presenting one side of the same story. The visitor is invited to constantly shift from one
side to the other; by changing views, he/she sees the projection from the opposite angle, and will
never be able to see the two points of view at the same time.
   When looking at the selection of artworks gathered by the curators of Beyond Cinema, the
presence of works from the 1990s is striking. Twelve of the twenty-seven works presented in the
exhibition were made during that decade, eleven of which were supported on a video format. This
can be explained by the fact that video projectors became more accessible for artists in that decade.
As stated by Chrissie Iles, a new cinematic form of video installations appeared in the 1990s where
a «major shift ha[d] taken place, away from the object and towards a more internal, psychological
experience, in which space is no longer tangible and theatrical, but illusory and filmic»26. Art
historian Hal Foster shares this point of view: «The pictorialism of projected images today often
doesn’t seem to care much about the actual space»27. By projecting moving images in the
exhibition space rather than displaying them on television monitors, the artists freed the image
from its frame. To quote Iles again, «[t]he boundary between the physical object and the projected
image has disappeared»28. The absence of the physical aspect of what used to frame the image also
contributed to the loss of sculptural aspect of these works. As the curators of Beyond Cinema were
interested in highlighting how artists have considered the prerequisite of the filmic in their works,
it explains why more works from the cinematic phase of video and film installations were selected.

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ARIANE NOËL DE TILLY

   As mentioned earlier, almost half of the artworks presented in Beyond Cinema were made in
the 1990s. In Projections, only two artworks from the 1990s were selected: The Muriel Lake
Incident described above, a work that doesn’t include a projection as the short film is displayed
on an LCD screen, and Rodney Graham’s Coruscating Cinnamon Granules. The latter work
consists of a rough construction of a small screening room with five cinema seats in which the
viewer can enter and watch a film showing cinnamon granules burning in a visually spectacular
manner. Both works consist of constructions – a miniature cinema for Cardiff and Bures Miller,
and a small projection room for Graham – meaning that the architectural elements are at the core
of the works. With Fischer’s selections of artworks in Toronto, the sculptural phase of video and
film installations is extremely present. The space remains very tangible. The projection-based
works that she selected almost always combine a projection with other objects. It can be
concluded that Fischer’s exhibition didn’t focus on the cinematic phase of video and film
installations as defined by Chrissie Iles as in fact, no large-scale wall or screen projections in dark
spaces where the architectural elements are blacked out were presented.
   In conclusion, as much as the approaches of projection-based artworks adopted by the curators
in Berlin and in Toronto can said to be different, they brought dissimilar aspects of the history of
this medium to the fore. The curators of Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection chose a thematic
approach and focused much attention on the cinematic phase of video and film installations. The
curator of Projections followed a more conceptual and technical-based approach, resulting in an
exhibition which presented a wide inventory of all the variations that the technique of projection
allows. Assuredly, both exhibitions illustrate the formidable venture attempted by museums and
art institutions to dig into the question of the place of the moving image in the museum.



1  David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube”, in Artforum, vol. 43, no. 7, March 2004, pp. 154-159. Joselit
   makes allusion to Brian O’Doherty’s essay Inside the White Cube published in 1976.
2 Hal Foster, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art”, in October, no. 104, Spring
   2003, p. 93.
3 Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film since 1945, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 17-July
   28, 1996 (curator Kerry Brougher).
4 Cinéma Cinéma: Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum,
   Eindhoven, February 13-May 24, 1999 (curator Jaap Guldemond, in collaboration with Marente
   Bloemheuvel).
5 Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, Whitney Museum of American Art,
   New York, October 18, 2001-January 6, 2002 (curator Chrissie Iles).
6 Le Mouvement des images, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, April 5, 2006-January 29, 2007 (curator
   Philippe-Alain Michaud).
7 Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection. Films, Videos and Installations from 1963-2005, Hamburger
   Bahnhof, Berlin, September 29, 2006-February 25, 2007 (curators Stan Douglas, Christopher Eamon,
   Joachim Jäger and Gabriele Knapstein).
8 Projections: A Major Survey of Projection-Based Works in Canada, 1964-2007, University of Toronto,
   Toronto, April 8-June 17, 2007 (curator Barbara Fischer). The exhibition was presented in the four art
   galleries of the university: Doris McCarthy Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
   and the University of Toronto Art Centre.
9 The exhibition gathered the works of six artists: Peter Campus, Rockne Krebs, Paul Sharits, Michael
   Snow, Ted Victoria, Robert Whitman. Even though it was a small exhibition in terms of the number of
   artists selected, the variety of projective media used was striking: closed-circuit video projection, camera
   obscura projection, laser, super 8 synchronized sound films, and 16mm films.
10 Martin Friedman, The Floating Picture Plane, in Projected Images: Peter Campus, Rockne Krebs, Paul
   Sharits, Michael Snow, Ted Victoria, Robert Whitman, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 1974, p. 6.

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11 David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube”, cit., p. 154.
12 Ibidem.
13 Stan Douglas notably organized the exhibition Samuel Beckett: Teleplays in 1988 at the Vancouver Art
   Gallery.
14 Stan Douglas, Christopher Eamon, Joachim Jäger, Gabriele Knapstein, About the Exhibition, in Joachim
   Jäger, Gabriele Knapstein, Anette Hüsch (eds.), Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection. Films, Videos
   and Installations from 1963 to 2005, Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2006, p. 11. It could be argued that Beyond
   Cinema: The Art of Projection was not the first exhibition to do this, as the aim of Hall of Mirrors: Art
   and Film since 1945 presented in 1995 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was «to map
   the social and aesthetic issues that have shifted painting toward cinema, film toward the visual arts, and
   have fused the two together into hew hybrid forms». See Kerry Brougher, Introduction and
   Acknowledgments, in Russell Ferguson (ed.), Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, The Museum
   of Contemporary Art/The Monacelli Press, Los Angeles-New York 1996, p. 13.
15 Ibidem.
16 Ibidem.
17 Brochure of the exhibition Projections: A Major Survey of Projection-Based Works in Canada, 1964-
   2007, cit.
18 Quoted in Leah Sandals, “Unfolding Frames”, in National Post, June 17, 2007.
19 Ibidem.
20 Brochure of the exhibition Projections: A Major Survey of Projection-Based Works in Canada, 1964-
   2007, cit.
21 E.C. Woodley, “Projections”, in Canadian Art, vol. 24, Fall 2007.
22 Chrissie Iles, Video and Film Space, in Erika Suderberg (ed.), Space, Site Intervention: Situating
   Installation Art, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 2000, p. 252.
23 Ibidem.
24 Ibidem, p. 253.
25 Michael Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story was created for the exhibition Projected Images (Walker Art
   Center, 1974). It was also included in other surveys on the presence of projected image in contemporary
   art: Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945 (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995) and
   in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977 (Whitney Museum of American Art,
   2001-2002).
26 Chrissie Iles, Issues in the New Cinematic Aesthetic in Video, in Tanya Leighton, Pavel Büchler (eds.),
   Saving the Image: Art after Film, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester 2003, p. 132.
27 Hal Foster, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art”, cit., p. 75.
28 Chrissie Iles, Issues in the New Cinematic Aesthetic in Video, cit., p. 135.




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