This essay will try to present the theoretical-conceptual points of a research route which concerns cinema’s modes of being in the “wider field” of art, in the form that is ontologically most distant from itself and which, nevertheless, acts with an intense “cinematic” performative force and a high degree of “modelling” impact. It is a complex modality which manifests itself through the “format” of installation where “the cinema,” starting from the discursive nucleus of the installed “work,” triggers, among the heterogeneous and disconnected elements that it might be composed of (sculptures, photographs, videos, objects), a series of relations regarding which it maintains a double utterance location: “internal” because it is one of the compositional elements (among others) and “external” because through it the performative path, which implicates the critical action in the spectator-visitor, is activated and revealed.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Extended Cinema: The Performative Power of Cinema in Installation Practices
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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New Studies
2013-03-01
2021-09-06
2013-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Cosetta G. Saba
2013/03/01
Università di Udine
2036-461X
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Extended Cinema: The Performative Power of Cinema in Installation Practices
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16278/16869
13
Extended Cinema
The performative power of cinema in installation practices
Cosetta G. Saba, Università di Udine




  Abstract
  This essay will try to present the theoretical-conceptual points of a research route which
  concerns cinema’s modes of being in the “wider field” of art, in the form that is ontologically
  most distant from itself and which, nevertheless, acts with an intense “cinematic” performative
  force and a high degree of “modelling” impact. It is a complex modality which manifests
  itself through the “format” of installation where “the cinema,” starting from the discursive
  nucleus of the installed “work,” triggers, among the heterogeneous and disconnected elements
  that it might be composed of (sculptures, photographs, videos, objects), a series of relations
  regarding which it maintains a double utterance location: “internal” because it is one of the
  compositional elements (among others) and “external” because through it the performative
  path, which implicates the critical action in the spectator-visitor, is activated and revealed.




Issues

  The aim of this research1 is to contribute to the study of “cinéma d’exposition”2 or, as we shall
see, “exposed cinema” and especially to its most complex and least researched form, because
more distant and ontologically different from the cinematographic “dispositif.” It will investigate,
from an enunciative point of view, what, in its most radical and breath-taking form, relapses, in
many ways, thus becoming a structural operating principle, into the “materialisation” of a series
of phenomena that, according to Raymond Bellour’s interpretative perspective

  trouble toujours fatalement la projection de toute image en mouvement dans la situation d’exposition :
  tous les événements divers (mises en espace, degré d’obscurité variable, durées aléatoires, entrées,
  sorties, […] etc.) qui constituent une sorte de mise en volume, à l’opposé de la planéité propre à l’écran
  de cinéma.3

   Clearly, Bellour thinks of the “installation fondée sur la projection d’image en mouvement” both
through the qualitative distinction between the “dispositifs” of “film-cinéma” and “film-installa-
tion,”4 and in relation to the “passages composant ‘l’entre-image’.”5 The point of view adopted

Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIII, no. 20, Spring 2013                                                              123
Cosetta G. Saba

here, on the other hand, aims to examine the theoretical importance of a series of questions whose
complex evidence lies where cinema is furthest removed from its (production-distribution) “dis-
positif,” within an installation, where and when the cinematographic element (as “screen,” “film,”
“projector,” “feature film”) is only one of the many compositional elements, outside of “time-
based-media” display methods or not exclusively based on the projection/emission of “moving
images.” On the whole, as we shall see, the presence of “cinema” is achieved through the trans-
formations of the device that the artistic practices operate in the museum spaces (via the protocols)
both in the concentrated and immersive method of the “black box” and the unsystematic method
of the “white cube.”6
  Matthew Barney’s artistic activities are an exemplary case of enunciative construction under-
pinning the ways “cinema” is present in the installation. His “practice” – which was the subject of
a case study –7 has been chosen in this context for the complexity of the issues (also ideological)
that it poses (and resolves), also because it concerns the root of the mutation in statute of the con-
cept of “work.” Such as the DRAWING RESTRAINT (began in 1986 and in fieri). This project in-
cluded the presentation, in different exhibition contexts, of the constellation of works that formed
through Drawing Restraint 9 (2005-2006, film also presented at the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte
Cinematografica di Venezia and the Berlinale in 2006), amongst which Dejima (2005, complex
multi-channel video-installation). As with all the other works in the constellation, Dejima not only
places us in the peculiar experiential journey of the work but it also reflects the dynamics of the
DRAWING RESTRAINT project as a whole. In one of the exhibition variations of Dejima (fig. 1)
the screens are suspended on a large scale sculpture Cetacea (2005/2010, [fig. 2]) that defines the
multi-level principle of the narration in the film Drawing Restraint 9 (fig. 3).




   Fig. 1 – Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9: Dejima, 2005. Three-channel color digital video with
            stereo sound (12:20). Installation View: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2006




  Fig. 2 – Matthew Barney, Cetacea, 2005. Cast polycaprolactone thermoplastic, self-lubricating plastic,
  vivac 34 1/4 x 480 inches. Installation View: Kunsthalle Bregenz, Austria. Copyright Matthew Barney.
                                  Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

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                 Extended Cinema. The performative power of cinema in installation practices




 Fig. 3 – Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9, 2005-2006. Production Still. Copyright Matthew Barney.
                               Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

   In this variation of Dejima, Cetacea allows the spectator-visitor to experience its dissipative
process (the entropic collapse of the form into the material that the sculpture is made of), as the
diegetic precipitate of the narration that, in relation to the film, the three screens re-compose from
above. At this stage, as in others, the attention of the spectator-visitor can trigger the work, on dif-
ferent levels of complexity and he can explore its transtextual ramifications both in relation to the
specific situation and context that it is exhibited in and in relation to the artist’s opus. In Dejima,
in the sculptural extension of the video-installation, the dimension of time and space is no longer
the one of the film Drawing Restraint 9 (nor of the projection in the screening room, nor of the
cinematic narration). The time-space of the film is translated/transformed, inverted, extroverted
and extended in another dimension: of space-time of the installation, which in many ways is open
to, on the one hand, the variables of the situations and museum contexts that it takes place in and,
on the other, to the experience of the spectator-visitor. There is a definition of a “mental space”
that passes through the concept that seeing something involves this something in a sort of interior
experience and a sort of knowledge (in these terms a knowledge of Barney’s artistic opus is not
a prerequisite). The work does not ask to be completed, but simply activated at a sensorial and
attentional level.
   Nevertheless in Dejima what can be perceived of the installed work at first sight is an aggre-
gate of heterogeneous components (drawing, performance, cinema, photography, sculpture), of
different expressive series (supports, materials, execution techniques, disciplinary traditions); the
“work” manifests itself in a “plural form.” It does not seem to imply an outgrowing of the expres-
sive “specificity” of the languages and media used. Quite the opposite the definition of their use
employs their specific and different languages and media for their ability to create a differentia-
tion. The work seems to present itself as structurally divided-undivided, in a composition between
heterogeneous elements: the compositional elements are defined in their (reciprocal) difference
within the perimeter of the installation in relation to the “outside” of the museum space. The ex-
hibition act – which is part of the work itself – traces the relationship between the compositional
elements. Each component presents a strong inter-relational capacity and, due to this, is able to
change the form of another component and reveal the sense of the work so that it may be inter-
preted, which is where, from a paradigmatic point of view, the cinematographic element acts. This

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Cosetta G. Saba

occurs not only due to the effects of the “spatial aspect of the vision” implied, but also in relation
to the construction process of the work in which the installation consists. From this analytical per-
spective the installation, and the work, is intended as a variable format (aggregate of several mate-
rials) and as a technical viewing display, in its quality of exhibition device. In other words, both in
terms of the questions posed (and not resolved) by the umbrella term “mixed media,” and in terms
of the phenomenology of the “dispositifs” used in the installation practice, the investigative hy-
pothesis examined by the research is underpinned by the following assumption: on the one hand,
the installation “dispositif” is, in every specific occurrence in a given work, (re)invented or varied
each time (allowing for different spectatorial experiences); on the other hand, in its semiotic and
enunciative dimension, each installed work presents in its device a certain systemic recurrence of
forms whose linking or amalgamating factor seems to derive from the joint presence of “cinema”
(of “moving images”) amongst the other component elements.
   This assumption, which is the starting point of the research, concerns the complex significance of
“paradigm” assumed by “cinema,” as the reference context for processing operational instruments,
techniques and theories, in terms of the artistic practices and the reflections undertaken in the
disciplinary fields of cinema and art. “Cinema,” in relation to the processing of such operational
instruments, can be found with different definitions such as “archive dispositif,” “imagination,”
“symbolic,” “allegory,” “eye,” “movement of the images,” “situational model,” “thought model,”
“action scheme,” etc.
   It is a paradigm whose institutionalisation in museum locations is in progress and which pro-
gressively gives rise to the performative capacity that “cinema” exercises on the enunciative level
in the exhibition situation and the museum contexts.



“Disciplinary fields” and “de-territorialisations”

   In relation to the questions raised by “exposed cinema,” the breadth and extent of the inter-
connections of the subjects that must be specified by way of an introduction to the research, are
so many that they exceed this writing space – starting from the querelles on the “dispositifs” of
cinema and art8 and on the “equivalence system” and “homogenizing principle of commodifica-
tion”9 deployed by the installation practice (which cannot be examined here). Here there will be
an attempt to try to set out the theoretical references of the argumentative points that trace the
intricate journey of the research.
   The “querelle” will only be examined tangentially, as another point of observation has been cho-
sen. Starting from the coexistence of the different “dispositifs,” forms and formats of cinema and
art, the research will examine the way cinema is present in contemporary artistic practices; where
there is no “dilution of cinema in contemporary art,” but rather a complex “de-territorialising
extension.”10 This extensive process can also be found, although in different forms, in architec-
ture, music, performance and also philosophy, historiography, anthropology, sociology, archiving,
documentation and restoration methods, museology, etc.
   In cinema’s different phases of migration from the movie theatre to the museum11 there are
contingent “re-mediation”12 and “relocation”13 effects that force the cinema-art intersection, dy-
namically re-modulating the boundaries of the respective disciplinary fields.14 The discursive for-

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mations, the limits of the disciplinary fields of cinema and art and their identification regimes
are all rendered evident through the continuous ontological, epistemological and methodological
differences that contemporary artistic practices produce and focus on, from a radically de-territo-
rialising point of view (for example the work of Dora García and Pierre Huyghe).
   Similarly the current epistemological contingency is traversed by a process of “dis-identifica-
tion”15 linked to the crisis in the principles of autonomy and specific disciplinary positioning of
cinema and art.
   From this point of view the conflict of interpretations that the “querelle des dispositifs” – raised
by Bellour – due to a sort of internal illumination reveals (in general) a “singular-plural” defi-
nition of cinema that contains the discussions relating to the processes of transformation, that
in contemporaneity invest the disciplinary fields of cinema and art. A definition that on the one
hand highlights in the “querelle” what is at stake in terms of the identity of “cinema” and on
the other it follows the crisis that concerns in origin the dimension that Jean-Luc Nancy16 called
“singular-plural” of art and that, in the western cultural tradition, as Jacques Rancière observes,17
identifies the definition of art (of its autonomy) only by dividing it in various ways in the different
arts (that is by introducing divisions that identify the “proper” and distinctive traits of the different
arts). Significantly it includes the “aesthetic identification regime” of art (which cannot be exam-
ined here), which questions the continuous disciplinary reterritorialization inherent in its internal
aesthetic and political division, in relation to which “cinema” – in an apparently discontinuous
way – is in intersection.
   This intersection became clear at a formal and ideological level during the first part of the 20th
century, through the historical avant-garde and, between the end of the 1950s and the beginning
of the 1970s, with the neo-avant-garde revealing, as of the 1990s, a “shift towards the cinematic
in art,”18 a “cinema effect” on the works, practices and exhibition methodologies of contemporary
art.19 According to Philippe Dubois, there is an issue of “milieu de l’art” that repositions questions
of field,20 of the identity of cinema and of art and of reciprocal legitimisation, therefore of symbol-
ic power. If one looks at the issues from a disciplinary point of view, from the cinematic côté one
can note how the body of research and case studies on the intersection-interaction between cinema
and art has defined an area of Film Studies.21 From the artistic côté, on the other hand, there has
been an interposition of techniques and expressive and aesthetic forms, through which cinema is
disseminated and at the same time diffused “amongst:” video art, media art, net.art, software art,
installation art, but also performance art, land art, body art, archive art, etc. – in a splintering of
disciplinary interests employed and arranged according to a notion of media-specificity linked to
the medial vector. These interests, however, seem to be contradicted by the very methodologies
of the artistic practices for which any matter and type of material can be used; every type of “sep-
aration” of an expressive “medium” from its “media”22 (spreading and transmission support) can
be processed; as well as any crossbreeding between different production/post-production tech-
nologies (“old” and “new”) can be created; any type of conceptual or concrete operation can be
performed; all types of commitment can be assumed or considered from a critical point of view;
any disciplinary field can be involved and not just those related to the so-called “Fine Arts,” as can
be seen in the “trajectory” of Vito Acconci or Pierre Huyghe. This results, as will be seen later, in
a mutated and complex redefinition of the concept of medium-specificity.23
   Artistic practices include knowledge and theories (and are theory in themselves), have a dis-

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Cosetta G. Saba

cursive character, initiate from planning methods, put processes into action and are something
performed historically. The scope of their action is trans-disciplinary and it exceeds the traditional
notion of “work” (as an autonomous, unitary and self-enclosed, textually certified unit) to include
a complex operational method that results in projects revealed in paths within which the films,
videos, actions, performances, installations, etc. – (the “works”?) – are merely temporary points,
which may be repeated and changed, in transit. The statute of the “work” is therefore changed,
resulting in an “open” and multiple expressive series, somewhere between a planning dimension
and the in fieri collection of its punctual manifestations or temporary inscriptions. The “work” is
sketched as a point of immanence, a transitory precipitate, within a planning journey and it is no
longer reduced to the concretisation of a unitary and definitive outcome. The processes that lead to
the objects and the meaning are analysed and presented, as Nicolas Bourriaud finds,24 without the
exhibition representing a conclusive outcome; the protocols of the art system are deconstructed
and, peculiarly, the exhibition spaces too; in many ways, the work is performed on the limit be-
tween “art” and “not art,” eroding it. 25 In this scenario the complexity that – according to recurring
methods, from the 1990s to the present day – results in the release of the “artistic practice” from
the concept of the “work,” is the distinctive trait of extremely diverse artists such as, amongst
others: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tacita Dean,
Marthine Pascale Tayou, Dora García, Nathalie Djurberg, and Matthew Barney whose work was
mentioned earlier.



Medium

  When we refer to the “work” in contemporary artistic practices we refer to a dynamic set of
expressive methods that touch upon different disciplinary fields (cinema, music, architecture, but
also anthropology, sociology, philosophy, as well as physics, medicine, etc.) and take in other
“works” and “texts,” but also “objects,” “bodies,” “locations,” “concepts,” “actions,” “events,”
“documents,” “archives,” “media,” etc. The heterogeneous inclusivity of the “work” has trans-
formed the concept of expressive medium in relation to the idea of “medium-specific.” Declared as
“finished” in the modernist meaning, the idea of “medium specificity” 26 has changed and become
more complex to include “sites,” “situations” 27 and “actions” in which, and through which, the
artistic practices take place. The practices have on the whole become “impure,” able to produce an
“inter-media loss of specificity”28 that on the one hand assumes the aspect of dispersal and, on the
other, installs a process of enhancement. The critical reflection by Rosalind Krauss moves in this
direction and tries to extract, with progressive theoretical and critical lunges, from the modernist
discursive unit a possible redefinition of medium specificity that focuses, through the concepts of
“post-medium” and “reinvention,” 29 on the distinctive idea of “technical medium” (to define the
use of rules and conventions that derive from the language of the medium used as instruments of
communication, independently of the physical support) and of “expressive medium” (as the op-
eration of changing and modifying materials, physical substances and the discursive action). The
discursive space is broadened to include the concept of “medium,” starting from the modelling
impact of photography, cinema and video that, on the one hand, present intrinsically “impure”30
or “inter-media”31 expressive traits and on the other, they have technological and protocol32 traits

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related to complex mass communication devices. They are crucial and a fortiori aspects in a
cultural contingency marked by all media converging on digital platforms,33 where the logics of
re-mediation and of relocation, that transform the relationship between “expressive medium” and
“physical support,” have led to a detachment of the “medium” (technical) from its “media” (or
communication medium).34
   The reinvented “specificity” of the expressive media in artistic practices would work based on
a “logic”35 or according to an idiomatic method that includes all their differences and is inclusive
of stratifications of codes and conventions that, even though containing inscriptions and memory,
does not match the material properties of their supports nor does it disappear with the lack of this
materiality (in the persistence of “languages” and “perceptive modes”).36 Differently, Francesco
Casetti refers to a new geography of media, based not so much on the technological specificity
of an apparatus, as on the specificity of the forms of experience that an environment allows and
induces.37 In both cases the theoretical subtext, explicit or implicit, is defined through various
readings of Benjamin.38
   According to Raymond Bellour,39 in order to analyse the system of numerous variations of
“exhibition cinema” and to grasp the “mixing” processes that it implies, one needs to distinguish
between the specificity of the experiences made possible through the works. The reasoning,
however, focuses on the importance of the “sens de la singularité des expériences, en deçà et
au-delà de leurs mélanges,” starting from cinema’s unique aspect due to its historically certified
“dispositif” which, at an essential level, is defined by “la séance, la salle, l’écran, le noir, le silence,
les spectateurs rassemblés dans le temps,”40 regardless of its variability. The singularity of the
experience of cinema is provided by “time” that defines its “dispositif.”41
   From this analytical perspective, we are in a field of tensions, the dynamic intersection be-
tween cinema-art, rather than a tension between distinct fields, art and cinema. In fact it doesn’t
seem to be a structural ambivalence of the relation and boundary between different sectors that
would imply comparisons/contrast, appropriations/derivations of theoretical contributions, dis-
tinctive redefinitions of their own fields, institutionalisation processes, symbolic power, etc.42 The
interactive area between cinema and art produces mobile disciplinary limits that, at the points of
intersection, form temporary relational accumulations from which unprecedented or unresolved
theoretical questions can, and do, emerge. From this point of view research, in relation to artistic
practices, must undertake an additional inquiry in relation to the action that drives contempora-
neously different levels, methods and possibilities between languages “distributed” or “imple-
mented,” the one in the others, or their difference programmatically maintained, independently
of the supports, in all cases translated, subjected to a transformation process where the location/
space is a “between:” a passage, a movement that “de-territorialises” cinema and art in intricate
networks of relationships that are still looking for a shape or that are already sketching it through
“interactions.” Cinema’s presence in artistic practices is a set of discursive events and the event,
as claimed by Michel Foucault, is produced as the effect of, and as, a material dispersion (in a
sort of materialism of the immaterial, of the incorporeal).43 It takes effect, is the effect of and in
a “dispersion” that is not performed with a dissemination, loss, accumulation, but a “partition”
of possibilities and choices “left open.” What emerges, therefore, is a principle of dispersion and
divisions of “interactions” that evidently are not limited to cinema and art. Contemporary artistic
practices operate in this emerging arena.


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Cosetta G. Saba

Exposed cinema

   However, an examination of the “effects” of the shift towards the cinematic in art has to face up
to the complexities of the artistic practices and reassess – from a methodological and ontological
point of view – the concept of “work,” in the light of the change in statute, mentioned earlier,
that it has undergone in one of its latest phenomenological differences found in the installation44
format.45
   From this point of view, what we refer to as “work,” as the precipitate of a project, is manifested
in variable installation formats that include, in many cases, the spaces that it takes place in (not
necessarily museums), rendering the situation in which it is produced its condition of work open,
in differing ways, to the presence of spectators. This takes place quite clearly through the dialec-
tics that has invested the protocol of the exhibition space, between the logic of the “white cube”
– critically analysed by O’Doherty –46 and that of the “black box” – discussed in their medial
implications by Catherine David at Documenta 10 (1997), and subject of a dissenting analysis by
Krauss;47 along an historical trajectory – marked on the technical-theoretical level by the collage,
photomontage, assemblage, readymade, décollage, but also the form/format of the exhibition/
museum – and a progressive movement of the concept of installation from simply the method used
to mount the works in the exhibition space to a veritable artistic “genre.”
   Dubois has often pointed out how “large scale video projections and the creation of sequences
of images repeated ad infinitum,” as video has too, have “introduced the image-movement to the
world of art […] changing in one fell swoop many ‘habitual’ parameters, both in terms of film
and and video.”48 In terms of the interactive process between cinema and art, in fact, it is from the
1990s that the installation format – whose distinctive traits consist of site, space, time and spec-
tator involvement – has settled on an audio-visual point of view in international exhibition and
museum contexts, according to a protean method marked on the terminological level by a series
of definitions that refer to the specificity of the medial component. The typology of installation art
with a “video” component includes: the (multi)media installation with video, multi-channel vid-
eo installation, single channel video installation, projective video installation, video installation,
film installation, video sculpture, moving image installation, time-based installation, interactive
installation.49 But, once again from the 1990s, in an equally exponential way, the installation – or
“complex work” – presents compositional expressions where the audio-visual component is only
one of the elements and not necessarily the dominant one.
   As a “video” installation, the “work” arranges and discloses levels of manifestation in which
“cinema” is activated in an un-expanded, expanded or extended way and through which, in any
case, finds exposure, is exhibited (in varying sizes of single screens or multi-screens). From this
point of view the exhibition is part of the actual “work,” it relates to the issues of the way the
installation is exhibited. Un-expanded cinema is present in the installation as a “unified field,”
where the film is the dominant component as the cinematic medium, without any trace of the “de-
vice,” is its own medium and/or the subject of the discussion that it carries or that carries it – as
is the case, for example, with The Scene of Crime by Amar Kanwar, film installation, presented at
Documenta 13 (2012) or with The Clock (2010), by Christian Marclay. Expanded cinema in the
in progress definition by Gene Youngblood is cinema conceived as separate from its medium and
support (electronic signal or digital code) as the art of organising a flow of audio-visual events in

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                Extended Cinema. The performative power of cinema in installation practices

time.50 Peter Weibel includes it in a phenomenology of the image,51 which can be defined from other
points of view, in terms of migration or nomadic movement of the images between media. 52 It is
a movement that, by crossing different media, stratifies characteristics and traces that the images
hold, but the movement is also the condition and possibility that allows their “survival” (Foster’s
notion of living on)53 and “durée.”54
   Extended cinema55 manifests itself as “extended field,” assuming a complex phenomenology
– still being defined from a theoretical point of view and, as mentioned earlier, examined by this
research – in relation to which the film or video, that is the audio-visual component (single channel
or multichannel) is just one of the elements amongst other compositional elements (photographs,
sculptures, drawings, “objects,” materials, etc.). But it is also an element whose audio-visual
“content” extends, activating the network of interactions with the other elements placed in the
installed “work.” This extension implies the interpretative activity of the spectator and it is related
to a translation principle in time and space of the “filmic” dimension to the “non-filmic” dimen-
sion. It renders the installation of heterogeneous and disjointed components “a whole” and it does
it by folding, unfolding and re-folding (in terms of relations) the components as its parts. It acts
extensively between being in the “work” and being at “work.”
   Extended cinema manifests itself as the most indirect, most “conceptual,” form of inter-relation
between cinema and art, but it is also the way in which cinema becomes “paradigm” (rather than
metaphor) of the exhibitive action. Paradigm whose modelling action is much more powerful
when it is increasingly indirect; it is active where the film and/or the video are merely compo-
nents amongst others or even – by no means a paradox – where they are not physically present.
At the beginning of the 1990s Bourriaud defined this type of operating method that presents the
exhibition/exposition venue (by playing on the accepted meaning of this term in photography) as
a “filmless camera,” a sort of “still short-movie” in which it is the spectator who must move.56
This possibility was also noted by Dubois – “visiter l’exposition y revient à ‘voir un film’”57 – and
linked back to the condition of flâneur carried out by the spectator.
   The traits of cinema exhibited in an installation context emphasize the need to (re)define the role
of the spectator that also Dominique Païni traces back to the Baudelairean flâneur.58 The definition
given by Bellour concerns the spectator and his ability to see/observe a re-folding of the exhibition
space within “stratified spaces,” that is within the thickening and the duration of “gaze upon the
gazing” that the images consist of: the spectator becomes “stroller” in that he becomes more sen-
sitive to the passages between the images, also because his body at times passes through the image
and circulates between the images.59 In terms of the distinctive relationship between “cinema,”
“installation,” and “exhibition,” Bellour thinks of “au modèle spécifique de la situation de cinéma
par différence avec lequel les expériences et les configurations si divers d’image proposées par
tant des installations peuvent être situées et comprise.”60 In relation to the latter, for Bellour the
centre of interest is provided by the multitude of experiences within space and time that the in-
stallation activates, defining in a protean way the permutation and/or the connection between the
expectations of the “spectator” (observer) and the “visitor.”
   In thinking of the “in-between” dimension of cinema-art with regards to the “dispositif” fielded
by the installations, Bellour described an “explosion” or “dispersion” through what one thinks
cinema is or has been (if one accepts to look through its eyes) only to find it split, “transformed,
imitated and reinstalled.”61 According to Bellour, the spread of the sub specie imaginis installation

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Cosetta G. Saba

– as much a sign of the alleged criticalities in cinema and in plastic arts – begins with the invention
of the camera obscura and the projection, including the different exhibition devices of the moving
image from the phantasmagoria to the diorama, from “pre-cinema” to “cinema,” and, in the sec-
ond half of the 20th century, from the “installations-films” to the video installations. A genealogical
journey that, in any case, produces a discontinuity within the tradition of the plastic arts and within
the tradition of cinema. For Bellour, filmic installations do not present a “cinema supplement” in
the way they are presented, but rather they are related to cinema, even though they are not cinema.
   From this point of view we should consider cinema, in the historical and formal singularity of
its “dispositif,” as the “expansion” of an “other cinema,”62 where these types of installations are
finalised and completed63 in a condition of “aesthetics of confusion” typical of the contemporary.
As opposed to Païni, Bellour thinks about the type of spectatorial presence implied by the filmic
or video installation as the situation of “semi-show” achieved by the museum space that does not
recall the figure of the flâneur, but of the “visitor.” Then again Bellour adds “[…] there is no right
word with which to grasp this dissolved, fragmented, shaken, intermittent spectator.”64
   Considering cinema in the historical and formal singularity of its “dispositif” he maintains that:
“The strange force of these works is thus to open ever more clarity the indefinable expansion of
an other cinema, according to which the conditions of an aesthetics of confusion are clarified and
amplified. It is better to try to describe its nuances than to pretend to be able to escape them.”65
   According to Philippe-Alain Michaud: “Le cinéma ne se confond pas avec le spectacle que
permet la projection des images en mouvement: il est d’abord une conversion dans la manière de
penser et de produire les images, non plus à partir de la fixité et de l’immobilité, mais en repartant
de la pluralité et du mouvement.”66 He introduces – beyond the material presence of the cinematic
apparatus (film, projector, screen) – the production of a cinema effect in every art able to activate
“un croisement d’effects spatio-temporels” that extends within the exhibition space, changing the
presentation procedures of the works. As Michaud found:

  Il ne s’agit plus de donner à voir celles-ci dans leur isolement, mais de produire un effet de montage
  transversal. Ce dispositif muséal pensé comme un déroulé filmique laissera une trace durable tout au
  long du XXe siècle : dans Raum für konstruktive Kunst, la contribution de Lissitzky à l’exposition inter-
  nationale de Dresde en 1926, devant de murs rayés et modulables, des objets hétérogènes se déployaient
  en séquence progressive ; à propos de l’exposition « Road to Victory » qu’il présentait au MoMA, Ed-
  ward Steichen déclarait : « L’exposition est un film […] dans lequel c’est vous qui bougez et où ce sont
  des images qui restent immobiles … ».67

  Overturning the spectatorial condition in the context of the cinema projection room, the experi-
ential condition that Christian Metz has thematized in “Story/Discourse: A Note on Two Kinds of
Voyeurisms”68 and whose “device of confinement,” according to Michaud’s definition, has been
analysed by Dan Graham in Cinema 81 (1982).
  The subject deals with the practices and experiences or, more precisely, the experiential and
participative dimension of the spectator,69 implicated in the artistic action as phenomenological
“vector,” and the ontology of the installation. A problematic junction through phenomenology
(based on the teaching of Merleau-Ponty)70 that tends to conceptualise the presence of the specta-
tor, whose parallax visual trajectory can change the shape of the work. The latter is “triggered” by

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                Extended Cinema. The performative power of cinema in installation practices

the artistic activity, orientated to the context and by the perceptive experience (prehension of the
sensitive qualities of the compositional elements) and by the spectator’s attentive frame of mind
that activates it and is activated.



“Paradigm,” operating concepts

   Cinema, as well as being at the “margin” or the “middle” of certain thinking within philosophy
and aesthetics, as well as art, becomes a paradigm thanks to its constituent concept of “impurity.”71
The thematization of André Bazin,72 in fact, finds an argumentative radicalisation in Alain Badi-
ou73 and it is criticised by Jacques Rancière.74 Jean-Luc Nancy75 in turn reconsiders it through the
concept of “supernumerary art.” Giorgio Agamben too, even though he thought of certain cinema
as a “pure” medium “that does not dissolve in what it shows,” detects a “zone of indifference”
in contemporary cinema (in which the undecidability, both projective and mnemonic, between
the real and the possible, opens up).76 In various contexts, the plural acceptation of the cinematic
finds a definition in terms of multi-faceted specificity,77 in the “expanded” electronic and digital
dimension,78 in the extension in terms of the heterogeneity of its “apparatus,”79 and in terms of
the cinematic range of action80 implied in the installation action. This action, whose layout – the
installation – is subject to a disagreement in terms of interpretations, which cannot be examined
here, that reformulates the issue of the autonomy and heteronomy of art, on the one hand, finding
a real and symbolic cultural erosion process between “art” and “non-art”81 and, on the other, in the
opposite direction, highlighting the exhibitive-value82 (exchange value and equivalence system of
the serial production-commodification), mentioned earlier, that has become completely autono-
mous, to the extent of overpowering anything that is exhibited.83
   However the inclusion of spatialized forms of the installation in current practices – video, mu-
sic, theatre, etc. – indicates not so much the inter-medial loss of specificity (as the complex pro-
cessing of the instruments, materials and “dispositifs” of the different arts), but, most importantly,
as Jacques Rancière found,84 highlights a practice of art as a way of occupying a venue and to
re-distribute within it the relationships between “bodies,” “images” and “times” with radical po-
litical and aesthetic implications.
   And it is in relation to the installation methods, especially in relation to the re-definition of
the concept of “work” and “expressive medium,” that cinema has assumed, in various ways, a
paradigmatic significance. Starting from its direct or indirect presence as components (amongst
others) of installation constructions. What follows is a transformation process, a “metamorphic”
capacity, related to the “enunciation” of the work installed and the impurification logic (or the loss
of intermedial specificity) that concerns it, which affects the overall nature of the art, which can
no longer simply be ascribed to an internal shattering of the very idea of medium, as happened
with the media of “photography,”85 “cinema”86 and “video,”87 even if in a discontinuous way. It is a
transformative capacity that is stronger the more it affects the productive and exhibitive protocols,
as well as the network of relations between heterogeneous elements, that it finds its condition of
transitory possibility through the format of the installation in various ways and through various
paths. The discursive layout of heterogeneous elements, that construct and transform each other in
a network of relations, with the presence of filmic and/or video components, finds an extension as

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Cosetta G. Saba

a work. Their introduction in a specific spatial field, with the images that they carry, redefines the
“surrounding” and transforms it in a “space for a viewing experience.”88 This is also due to the con-
figurative action in relation to which the video or filmic component develops a complex function
of catalysis. The video and the film, starting from the discursive nucleus of the installed “work,”
can trigger a series of relations between the different elements in relation to which they maintain,
however, a location that is at the same time external, in that it contains the performative layout that
drives the spectator-visitor’s interpretive action, and internal, as they are compositional elements.
The way they are presented re-articulates the exhibition space, the points of attention of the screen
space, and in doing so they introduce “viewing/reading instructions” on the work installed and, at
the same time, they create a “world” that includes the spectator-visitor (further fictional and narra-
tive implication of the filmic construction). Video and film in the work installed trigger a process
that connects the “filmic” and the “non-filmic” dimension (installation dimension) and together
they activate the modulating and transformative capacity of the different expressive components,
the ones in relation to the others, in relation to the presence of the spectator-visitor. Resulting in
two inter-related operative methods. The first concerns the processing of the documental issue and
the second is related to the compositional process of the work.
   To paraphrase Fredric Jameson, on the installations of Hans Haacke of Nam June Paik, “none of
the component elements” of the installation “is in itself the subject of our undivided attention” in
which “only the most imprudent visitor of a museum would look for the ‘art’,” the sense is “in the
content of the video images in itself.”89 Amongst the other component elements – from this point
of view, not only through the moving image, but also through their “apparatus” and “dispositifs” –
“cinema” and “video” are involved twice: the first time as different compositional media, assumed in
differential terms; a second time through an “a posteriori implication” related to the meaning process
and the interpretative act that redefines the collection of media involved. The interpretative act begins
from a material occasion, that allows the spectator’s perceptive experience (that Claire Bishop traces
back to the key terms of “activated spectatorship” and “dispersed or decentred subject”)90 based on
attentiveness that implicates a complex spatialisation of time. And it’s through the spatial extension
and the spatial location that the installed “work” is returned to its heterochronic dimension, that the
“spectator-visitor” can engage, disengage and re-engage with at any time, and in moments that can
be re-formulated (by each spectator). The spectator-visitor is a vector that through “lulls” and “move-
ments,” in the re-formulation of their duration, builds his own path that is often narratively performed
(in filmic form), traced by a trajectory that transforms the temporal dimension – that is the process
of the arrangement of the compositional elements that temporarily inscribes the “work” installed – in
a spatial sequence of points. However by crossing, walking through and experiencing the exhibition
space, he/she also initiates a temporal movement in the space. But the interpretative action that drives
the spectator begins with acknowledging the impossibility of interpretation, based on the idea of
textuality centred from the “work” within the “work” itself; it opens, from a trans-textual91 point of
view, the presentation method of the mise en scène and the contextual dimension. Questioning this
impossibility means accessing the implied performative dimensions that invest the spectator starting
from the direct or indirect presence of cinema as a component, amongst others, of installation con-
structions. Compared to the other components, this presence can express a performative “force”92
aimed at “producing reality,”93 or a social object, in terms of the same operation/registration of the
work within the institutional context94 and the cultural situation that render it possible. This perfor-

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                 Extended Cinema. The performative power of cinema in installation practices

mative “force” pertains to the way (how, when and why) in which the language of art is being used
inside and outside its institutional context. The “performative” translates and transforms a situation,
it operates (as Derrida points out).95 The performative act organises and does what it states. It pertains
to the inscription of an in actu installation act, whose work starts where and when the network of
trans-textual relations unfolds, constructing the object of a viewing/reading through the traceability
of the meaning. It is an enunciative act that fields “an action” through the “enunciation,” with the
“enunciation,” producing effects on something and someone. In the case of the installation act, the
possible conditions of the capacity of this action concern the differential relationship between its
“meaning” and its performative “force,” that is the way in which the meaning that it conveys can be
interpreted, read and viewed by the spectator to induce the interpretation; by activating the interpre-
tation and orientating the trans-textuality of the installed “work.” The “work” is the way in which the
“text” acts96 and, we must add, makes the spectator act according to different intentions and methods.
In turn the spectator in a counter-action of attention and interpretation can detect in the “work” what
is unexpressed, but was planned and what was expressed unintentionally.97
    In the case of un-expanded and expanded cinema, the performative aspect relates to the exhi-
bition of cinema in a time based media,98 according to “black box” or “site specific” methods, but
also through the installation of the cinematic apparatus, often by using obsolete technologies, with
a more or less evident “sculptural” presence.
   The performative “force” provided by extended cinema concerns an installation method that
contemporaneously maintains (local level) and transforms (global level) the difference between
the expressive methods (including the “objects”), also in relation to the exhibition space. And
yet in the co-extension and co-existence of the compositional elements of the work installed (but
also if there is an occasional hierarchical order), as we saw earlier, the filmic and/or video com-
ponents trigger a translation process of the form from the “filmic” to the “non-filmic” (from the
image to the spatial, installation, sculptural activity) and, at the same time, activates the modu-
lating and transformative capacities of the different expressive components, in relation with the
spectator-visitor. This can be seen in exemplary fashion both in the exhibition Matthew Barney.
The CREMASTER Cycle, curated by Nancy Spector, in the version presented at the Guggenheim
Museum (New York 2002), and in the travelling exhibition No Ghost just a Shell (2002-2003) and
the correlative project No Ghost but a Shell, un film d’imaginaire, which consists of a complex
multi-authorial activity by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno and others.
   In conclusion, in relation to the production modes of the sense, the installation “dispositif”99
highlights a mutation of the statute of the concept of “work” (and the correlated notions of text,
cotext, context, situation) that affects the migration of cinema from the “movie theater” to the
“museum,” pertaining to its enunciative methods in the artistic context and includes a peculiar
interpretative action100 of the spectator-visitor. On the basis of this assumption, in relation to this
research, these “notes” aim to highlight how the non “time based media” installation method im-
plies on the performative level a “cinematic principle” able to extend within the “work” installed
and to extend the enunciative process, that is the web of relations that give it meaning in relation to
the “question” that traces it, amongst the heterogeneous and disjointed elements that can compose
it (sculptural, photographic, filmic, video or “objects”). From this analytical perspective the “shift
towards the cinematic in art” employs, in various ways, cinema’s “paradigm” significance.



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Cosetta G. Saba

    * Translated from the Italian by Robin Ambrosi.

1  The research refers to a series of studies dedicated to the possible (critical) definitions of the concept of
   “media art” (in relation to which cinema and video are in many ways “devices”) and it analyses the instal-
   lation methods in contemporary artistic practices, also in relation to the interpretation and analysis issues
   that these types of practices raise in connection to the activities of documentation, archiving, preservation
   and restoration. See Cosetta G. Saba, Media Art. Definizioni in negativo. Concetti, pratiche, teorie, Errata
   Corrige, Trieste 2013.
2 Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Pour un cinéma d’exposition. Retour sur quelques jalons historiques,” in Om-
   nibus, no. 20, April 1997, pp. 36-41; Id., “Cinéma d’exposition: L’Espacement de la durée,” in Art Press,
   no. 262, November 2002, pp. 36-41. Raymond Bellour defined it “autre cinema” (Raymond Bellour,
   “D’un autre cinéma,” in Trafic, no. 34, Summer 2000, pp. 7-12) and Pascale Cassagnau refers to it
   with the expression “troisième cinéma” (Pascale Cassagnau, Future amnésia, enquête sur un troisième
   cinéma, Isthme, Paris 2007).
3 Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – Installations, Expositions, P.O.L., Paris 2012, p. 51.
4 Referring to the first, in ontological and historical terms, a unique “dispositif” and to each concrete oc-
   currence of the second the invention of a specific “dispositif.”
5 The “passages” of the “entre-images” concern the “variations propres aux mouvements et aux fixités
   des images;” the “transformations de l’analogie photographique” and the “interpénération entre langage
   et l’image.” Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – Installations, Expositions, cit., p.
   50. An extremely relevant reflection, which opposes the indistinct “passage of images” in the processes
   found during the media convergence on computer platforms.
6 David Joselit, on the other hand, points out and introduces another analytical perspective involved in
   video projection. He maintains that: “More recent works of projection tend to hug the architectural en-
   velope rather than produce a second informational circuit within the container of the gallery. […] The
   eclipse of closed circuit by projection thus performs an inversion whereby video is transformed from
   an apparatus within a space to a new electronic skin that engulfs architectural elements.” David Joselit,
   “Inside the Light Cube,” in Artforum, vol. 42, no. 7, March 2004, pp. 154-159.
7 See Nicola Dusi, Cosetta G. Saba (eds.), Matthew Barney. Polimorfismo, multimodalità, neobarocco,
   Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2012.
8 See Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – Installations, Expositions, cit.
9 See: Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, The MIT Press,
   Cambridge (MA) 1996; Id. Design & Crime, Verso, London 2003; Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the
   North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Thames & Hudson, London 1999; Id. Under
   Blue Cup, The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 2011.
10 Luc Vancheri, Cinémas contemporains: du film à l’installation, Aléas, Lyon 2009.
11 See amongst others: Dominique Païni, Le temps exposé. Le cinéma de la salle au musée, Cahiers du
   Cinéma, Paris 2002; Id., “Should We Put and End to Projection,” in October, no. 110, Fall 2004, pp.
   23-48; David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” cit.; Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Cinéma d’exposition: L’E-
   spacement de la durée,” cit.; Tanya Leighton (ed.), Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, Tate/
   Afterall, London-New York 2008; Luc Vancheri, Cinémas contemporains: du film à l’installation, cit.;
   Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen, Intellect, Bristol-Chicago 2009;
   Viva Paci, La machine à voir. À propos de cinéma, attraction, exhibition, Presses Universitaires du Sep-
   tentrion, Lille 2012; Jaap Guldemond, Marente Bloemheuvel, Giovanna Fossati (eds.), Found Footage:
   Cinema Exposed, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2012; Sandra Lischi, “Film da percorrere:
   l’installazione ‘cinematografata’,” in Predella, no. 31, 2013, pp. 233-242; Dominique Païni, “Le Cinèma
   comme un art plastique,” in Predella, no. 31, 2013. See also: Julia Noordegraaf, Cosetta G. Saba, Barbara
   Le Maître, Vinzenz Hediger (eds.), Preserving and Exibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives,
   Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013.
12 Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, The MIT Press, Cambridge
   (MA) 2000.

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                  Extended Cinema. The performative power of cinema in installation practices

13 Francesco Casetti, “Esperienza filmica e ri-locazione del cinema,” in Fata Morgana, Esperienza, no. 4, 2008,
   pp. 23-40.
14 The aim of the research is to investigate and study cinema in the artistic context. Further studies have
   yet to be undertaken on the rebound effect from the “museum” to the “cinema” and not only in terms of
   experimental or avant-garde cinema or so called art or auteur cinema.
15 Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Galilée, Paris 2004.
16 Jean-Luc Nancy, Les Muses, Galilée, Paris 1994.
17 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique, La Fabrique, Paris 2000; Id. Malaise
   dans l’esthétique, cit.
18 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism,
   Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London 2004. The “shift towards the cinematic in
   art” presents relocation processes that are not sic et simpliciter remediation methods.
19 See Philippe Dubois, “Esporre il movimento? Sull’‘effetto cinema’ nell’arte contemporanea,” in Bianco
   & Nero, no. 554/55, 2006, p. 21.
20 Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art, Seuil, Paris 1992.
21 See amongst others: Dominique Païni, Le Temps exposé. Le cinéma de la salle au musée, cit.; Id. “Should
   We Put and End to Projection,” cit.; David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” cit.; Jean-Christophe Royoux,
   “Cinéma d’exposition, l’espacement de la durée,” cit.; Luc Vancheri, Cinémas contemporains: du film
   à l’installation, cit.; Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen, cit.; A.L.
   Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, David Curtis (eds.), Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, Tate,
   London 2011; Viva Paci, La machine à voir. À propos de cinéma, attraction, exhibition, Presses Univer-
   sitaires du Septentrion, Lille 2012; Jaap Guldemond, Marente Bloemheuvel, Giovanna Fossati (eds.),
   Found Footage: Cinema Exposed, cit.; Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma?, VIRN, Paris 2012;
   Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – Installations, Expositions, cit.; Philippe Dubois,
   La Question vidéo. Entre cinéma et art contemporain, Yellow Now, Crisnée 2012; Marco Maria Gazza-
   no, Kinēma. Il cinema sulle tracce del cinema. Dal film alle arti elettroniche, andata e ritorno, Éxòrma,
   Roma 2012; Christa Blümlinger, Cinéma de seconde main. Esthétique du remploi dans l’art du film et
   des nouveaux médias, Klincksieck, Paris 2013 (2009). See also: Cinéma et art contemporain/Cinema
   and Contemporary Visual Arts, Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal (edited by Philippe
   Dubois), no. 8, Fall 2006; Cosetta G. Saba, Cristiano Poian (eds.), Unstable Cinema: Film and Contem-
   porary Visual Arts, Campanotto Editore, Pasian di Prato 2007; Cinéma et art contemporain II/Cinema
   and Contemporary Visual Arts II, Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal (edited by Philippe
   Dubois), no. 10, Spring 2008; Cinéma et art contemporain III/Cinema and Contemporary Visual Arts III,
   Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal (edited by Philippe Dubois and Jennifer Verraes), no.
   12, Spring 2009; Philippe Dubois, Lucia Ramos Monteiro, Alessandro Bordina (eds.), Oui, c’est du ci-
   nema. Formes et espaces de l’image en mouvement, Campanotto, Pasian di Prato 2009; Philippe Dubois,
   Frédéric Monvoisin, Elena Biserna (eds.), Extended cinema. Le cinéma gagne du terrain, Campanotto,
   Pasian di Prato 2010; Elena Biserna, Precious Brown (eds.), Cinema, Architecture, Dispositif, Campa-
   notto, Pasian di Prato 2011; Claudia D’Alonzo, Ken Slock, Philippe Dubois (eds.), Cinéma, critique des
   images, Campanotto, Pasian di Prato 2012; Cosetta G. Saba, Francesco Federici (eds.), Cinéma: immer-
   sivité, surface, exposition, Campanotto, Pasian di Prato 2013; Cosetta G. Saba (ed.), On Media Art: A
   Rewarding Anthology, Errata Corrige, Trieste 2013; Id., On Media Art. Definizioni in negativo. Concetti
   pratiche teorie, cit.
22 It is an operative definition that distinguishes between “mediums” as the English plural term for “me-
   dium” – in order to designate the technical and expressive importance of the medium – and “media” – as
   the singular name referred to the transmissive function of the “medium” within the system of the com-
   munication media. See Francesco Casetti, I media nella condizione post-mediale, in Roberto Diodato,
   Antonio Somaini (eds.), Estetica dei media e della comunicazione, Il Mulino, Bologna 2011, pp. 313-28.
23 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, cit.; Id. Un-
   der Blue Cup, cit.
24 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du réel, Dijon 2002 (1998), p. 54.


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Cosetta G. Saba

25 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible, cit.
26 See Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, Lukas & Stenberg, New York 2009.
27 See: Erika Suderburg (ed.), Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, University of Minneso-
   ta Press, Minneapolis 2000; Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site Specific Art and Locational
   Identity, The MIT Press, London-Cambridge (MA) 2004; Claire Doherty, Situation, Whitechapel Gal-
   lery-The MIT Press, London-Cambridge (MA) 2009.
28 It is a discontinuity, that affects the overall structure of art, already highlighted by Walter Benjamin in
   relation to photography and by Rosalind Krauss in relation to video. See: Walter Benjamin, The Work of
   Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version, in Id., The Work of Art in the Age of
   Its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, The Belknap, Cambridge (MA)-London
   2008; Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, cit.
29 Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 2, Winter 1999, pp. 289-
   305.
30 André Bazin, Pour un cinéma impur. Défense de l’adaptation, in Id., Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, vol. 2,
   Éditions du Cerf, Paris 1958-1962 (Engl. ed. In Defense of Mixed Cinema, in What is Cinema?, vol. 1,
   University of California Press, Berkeley 2010, pp. 53-75).
31 Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” in The Something Else Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 1, February 1966, pp. 1-6.
32 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, The MIT Press, Cambri-
   dge (MA) 2006.
33 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press,
   New York-London 2006.
34 See Francesco Casetti, I media nella condizione post-mediale, cit.
35 See Rosalind Krauss, Under Blue Cup, cit.
36 See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version, cit.
37 See: Francesco Casetti, “Esperienza filmica e ri-locazione del cinema,” cit.; Id., I media nella condizione
   post-mediale, cit. See also: Ruggero Eugeni, Semiotica dei media. Le forme dell’esperienza, Carocci,
   Roma 2012.
38 See Andrea Pinotti, Antonio Somaini, Introduzione, in Walter Benjamin, Aura e choc. Saggi sulla teoria
   dei media, Einaudi, Torino 2012, pp. IX-XXVII.
39 See Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – Installations, Expositions, cit.
40 Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs, cit., pp. 19-20.
41 Aumont’s reflection converges on this point, on a historical-cultural level, even though from a different
   analytical perspective. See Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma?, cit.
42 See Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art, cit.
43 See Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, Gallimard, Paris 1971.
44 The term “installation” is used to define: a) a “genre” or “art” (“installation art”) that lies at the edge
   between sculpture, architecture, theatre, performance and cinema, with environmental dimensions; b) a
   complex work that requires the use of both heterogeneous materials and expressive methods and diffe-
   ring techniques, placed in relation with each other based on a specific relational layout, and the corporeal
   involvement of the spectator/visitor in the space activated by his presence. It is a composition of hetero-
   geneous components that act: 1) by implying the distinct material properties of the objects and/or physi-
   cal media in which it finds temporary objectification; 2) translating the traits of one medium into another
   medium and thus reconfiguring the traits of one medium with other media; 3) releasing the material traits
   of the media involved in relation to which the “medium” is the actual productive action instanced by an
   interaction (between the concrete and the conceptual).
45 See Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, cit., pp. 135-136. The issue must be examined from a critical point
   of view also in terms of the ideological merit of the “exhibition value.” See: Hal Foster, The Return of
   the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, cit.; Id., Design & Crime, cit.; Rosalind Krauss, A
   Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, cit.; Id. Under Blue Cup, cit.
46 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Expanded, University of
   California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1999 (1976).

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                  Extended Cinema. The performative power of cinema in installation practices

47 See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, cit.
48 Philippe Dubois, “Esporre il movimento? Sull’‘effetto cinema’ nell’arte contemporanea,” cit., p. 37 (my
   translation). See also Id., La Question vidéo. Entre cinéma et art contemporain, cit.
49 See Richard Gagnier’s presentation for the 2009 DOCAM Seminar, DOCAM Terminology, http://archi-
   ves.docam.ca/en/?cat=15, last visit 31 January 2013.
50 Gene Youngblood, “Cinema and the code,” in Leonardo. Supplemental Issue, Computer Art in Context: SIG-
   GRAPH ‘89 Art Show Catalog, vol. 2, 1989 (It. ed. Cinema and the code, in Marco Maria Gazzano [ed.],
   Steina e Woody Vasulka. Video, media e nuove immagini nell’arte contemporanea, Fahrenheit 451, Roma
   1995, p. 45, p. 48). In his 1970’s book, however, Youngblood examines large format audio-visual installa-
   tion “objects” and/or works with environmental/architectonic extension and thinks of a “plural” definition
   of expanded cinema, but within the audio-visual or, more precisely, the audio-visual flow events. Expanded
   cinema is defined from a technical point of view, to express the plurality of instruments used to produce “au-
   dio-visual flow events” where art can express its capacity to produce a transformation. See: Gene Youngblo-
   od, Expanded Cinema, Dutton, New York 1970. See also: Sandra Lischi, “In Search of Expanded Cinema,” in
   Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal, no. 2, Spring 2003, pp. 82-95; A.L. Rees, Duncan White,
   Steven Ball, David Curtis (eds.), Expanded cinema: Art, Performance, Film, cit.; Marco Maria Gazzano,
   Kinēma. Il cinema sulle tracce del cinema. Dal film alle arti elettroniche, andata e ritorno, cit.
51 Peter Weibel, Masters of the Codes, in Marco Maria Gazzano (ed.), Steina e Woody Vasulka. Video, me-
   dia e nuove immagini nell’arte contemporanea, cit., p. 64.
52 Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenchaft, Wilhelm Fink, Paderbon 2002.
53 Hal Foster, Design & Crime, cit.
54 See Georges Didi-Huberman, “Construire la durée,” and “Esquisse d’atlas,” in the catalogue of the exhi-
   bition Pascal Convert: Lamento (1998-2005), Mudam Luxembourg, 2007, pp. 25-51, pp. 199-203.
55 The meaning of “extended cinema” here refers to the performative aspect of cinema, its relational stren-
   gth and its significance as “paradigm.” The use of the expression is different to Daniel Birnbaum’s use in
   Chronology, Les Presses du réel, Paris 2005.
56 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, cit., p. 73. See also Id., “Un art de réalisateurs,” in Art Press,
   no. 147, May 1990, pp. 48-50.
57 See Philippe Dubois, “Un ‘effet cinéma’ dans l’art contemporain,” in Cinéma & Cie. International Film
   Studies Journal, no. 8, Fall 2006, p. 18.
58 Dominique Païni, “The Return of the Flâneur,” in Art Press, no. 255, March 2000, pp. 33-40. See also
   Ursula Frohne (ed.), Video Cult/Ures. Multimediale Installationen der 90er Jahre, catalogue of the exhi-
   bition, Museum der Neue Kunst, ZKM, Köln-DuMont-Karlsruhe 1999.
59 Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-Images. Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo, La Différence, Paris 2002 (1990).
60 Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositif. Cinéma – Installations, Expositions, cit., pp. 50-51.
61 Raymond Bellour, “D’un autre cinéma,” cit. (Eng. ed. Of an Other Cinema, in Tanya Leighton [ed.], Art
   an the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, cit., pp. 406-422).
62 Idem, p. 408.
63 Idem, pp. 407-408.
64 Ibidem.
65 Idem, p. 408.
66 Phlippe-Alain Michaud, “Le Mouvement des Images,” in Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies
   Journal, no. 8, Fall 2006, p. 183.
67 Phlippe-Alain Michaud, Le Mouvement des Images, in Le Mouvement des Images/The Movement of
   Images, catalogue of the exhibition, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, Paris 2006, p. 20.
68 Christian Metz, Histoire/Discours. Note sur deux Voyeurismes, in Julia Kristeva, Jean-Claude Milner, Ni-
   colas Ruwet (eds.), Langue, Discours, Societé. Pour Émile Benveniste, Seuil, Paris 1975 (eng. ed. Story/
   Discourse: A Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurisms, in Id., The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the
   Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1982, pp. 89-98).
69 See: Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Arts Yearsbook, 1965, pp. 74-82; Robert Morris, “Notes on
   Sculpture Part 2,” in Artforum, vol. 5, no. 2, October 1966, pp. 20-23; Michael Fried, Art and Object-


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    hood, in Id., Art and Objecthood. Essays and Reviews, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-Lon-
    don 1998 (1967), pp. 148-172; Anne-Marie Duguet, “Dispositifs,” in Communications, no. 48, 1988, pp.
    221-242.
70 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Gallimard, Paris 1945.
71 See also Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, cit.,
    pp. 35-36.
72 André Bazin, Pour un cinéma impur. Défense de l’adaptation, cit.
73 Alain Badiou, “Le Cinéma comme faux mouvement,” in L’Art du cinéma, no. 4, March 1994, pp. 1-5.
74 Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, cit.
75 Jean-Luc Nancy, Les Muses, cit.
76 Giorgio Agamben, Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Film, in Tanya Leighton (ed.), Art an the
    Moving Image: A Critical Reader, cit., pp. 332-333.
77 See Christian Metz, Langage et cinéma, Larousse, Paris 1971.
78 See Gene Youngblood, “Cinema and the code,” cit.
79 See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, cit.
80 See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, cit.
81 See Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, Tate, London 2005.
82 See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version, cit.
83 See the works of Foster and Krauss quoted above.
84 See: Jacques Rancière, Le Destin des images, La Fabrique, Paris 2003; Id., Malaise dans l’esthétique, cit.
85 See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,
    cit.
86 See the works of Bazin, Badiou, Nancy, and Rancière quoted above.
87 See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, cit.
88 Francesco Casetti, L’esperienza filmica e la ri-locazione del cinema, cit., pp. 30-32 (my translation).
89 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press,
    Durham 1991, p. 162.
90 Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, cit., pp. 130-131.
91 See Gérard Genette, Palimspestes: la littérature au second degré, Seuil, Paris 1982.
92 See John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard
    University in 1955, Oxford University Press, London 1962. See also John R. Searle, “A Taxonomy of
    Illocutionary Acts,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy Science, Language, Mind and Knowledge,
    vol. 7, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1975.
93 See Dorothea von Hantelmann, How to Do Things with Art: The Meaning of Art’s Performativity, JRP/
    Ringier, Les Presses du réel, Zurich-Dijon 2010.
94 See: George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1974;
    Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Board of Trustees of the
    National Gallery of Art, Washington 1997.
95 Jacques Derrida, Signature Événement Contexte, in Id., Limited Inc., Galilée, Paris, 1999 (1971), p. 37.
96 See: Gérard Genette, L’Œuvre de l’art, 1: Immanence et transcendance, Seuil, Paris 1994; Id., L’Œuvre
    de l’art, 2: La relation esthétique, Seuil, Paris 1997.
97 See Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe. Écrits, Flammarion, Paris 1975.
98 See: Pip Laurenson, “Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media In-
    stallations,” Tate Papers. Tate’s Online Research Journal, 2006, http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/
    fid/7401 (last visit 31 January 2013); Françoise Parfait, Vidéo: un art contemporain, Éditions du Regard,
    Paris 2001.
99 In the perspective in which Giorgio Agamben formulates and places – after Foucault and Deleuze – the
    concept of “dispositif,” he is able to include “anything has, in some way, the ability to capture, orientate,
    establish, intercept, shape, control and ensure the gestures, actions, behaviour, opinions and discourse.”
    Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è un dispositivo?, Nottetempo, Roma 2006, pp. 21-22 (my translation).
100 See Umberto Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione, Bompiani, Milano 1990.

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