Looking With the Whole Body: Video Installations
The three video installations curated by Sally Couacaud and shown at Artspace – Shigeko Kubota's Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase (1976), Meta-Marcel: Window (1976), and Jill Scott's Life Flight (1988) – all present, in their interesting multifaceted ways, some of the more critical aesthetic and theoretical configurations of a video installation. More to the point, all these works pose the same question: what is a video installation? Are we any closer to knowing what a video installation is, since Wolf Vostell's environment Dark Room (German Point of View) first appeared in 1958?
Both Vito Acconci and Anne-Marie Duguet have commented on how video installations present the viewer with a multiplicity of positions and possibilities, and how we are inevitably concerned not only with what they are saying to us but also how installations operate.1 This means, essentially, the necessity for us as viewers to be placed within a video installation's architectural space, which also acts as a cognitive problem-field which unfolds a critique of representation. In this regard, whether it is Kubota's or Scott's work it does not matter, for in all three instances what we experience is a constant questioning of our own problematical perceptual relationship to the object. All three works point to some of the more basic issues of video as installation – namely, questions of space, perception, staging, multiplicity, mise en scene, process, and the shifting complexities of viewer/object relationships.
Kubota's installations are not only distinctive for their evocative haiku-like formal properties, but also for their playfully stimulating references to the humourous minimalist conceptualism of Duchamp, and her subtle, well-integrated Bergsonian perspective upon time and space.
Duchampiana's self-reflexivity takes two forms: not only is
Shigeko Kubota, Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase, 1976. Video installation.
