Video in Relation to Architecture by Dan Graham

(Partial text from the catalog: the artist’s “features” are omitted.) An architectural code both reflects and determines the social order of public/private space and the psychological sense of self. This code has become increasingly modified and overlaid by the code of video/television. As cable television images displayed on wall-sized monitors connect and mediate among rooms, families, social classes, and public/private domains, connecting architecturally (and socially) bounded regions, they take on an architectural (and social) function. History of Television: The Postwar Suburban Family Television became widespread in the early 1950s after the relocation to suburbia of a large part of the working class, who now commuted to their jobs in the city by day and to their suburban homes at night. The once large and extended working-class family had changed into a small, nuclear unit, which had to be willing to pack up its belongings and move to another location rapidly as work conditions required greater mobility. The TV set, like the car and other modern appliances, was designed to be transportable. Products were built to allow the workers/consumers to plug in quickly to whatever location they might find themselves in. Television took the form of a centrally controlled transmission sent to the passive home viewer on a privately owned TV set for several reasons. The first is that television came into being as a commodity item that had to be cheap to reach a mass market and transportable enough to move with each family from residence to residence. Further, the passive, one-way nature of broadcast TV transmission provided non-involving entertainment removed from the pressures of a more technically organized work life. The private areas of family and home had become retreats for workers on their “time off.” Television programming allowed people in this private space to feel non-stressfully connected to the larger, public world, but free of its demands and sheltered in their home life. Viewed in face-to-face, intimate, family, or family-like groups within a home or in a homelike architectural container (the friendly neighborhood bar), TV took on the family as its main subject. TV as a Distorting Mirror of the Home and Family TV might be metaphorically visualized as a mirror in which the viewing family sees an idealized, ideologically distorted reflection of itself represented in typical genres of TV: the situation comedy or the soap opera. Where TV represents typical American families, it symbolically represents an image of the American family to itself. Other types of programs, while not overtly representing the American family, are organized as family-like structures. In the local (“happy news”) newscast, for instance, a “team” of newsmen/women “represent” an idealized happy family at their leisure—somewhere between work and play (or tiredness) just after work is done and where they can “be themselves.” They are a distorted reflection of many families at dinnertime or cocktail hour watching the news on TV. Video as Television: An American Family An American Family, produced in 1971 by Craig Gilbert for American Educational Television, was a twelve-part, weekly, one-hour video documentary that was shot and edited nine months prior to its airing. It dealt with the domestic life of the Loud family of Santa Barbara. They had been selected as fairly typical, experiencing all the tensions that seemed to be pulling the nuclear family apart. As a concept, the series perhaps owed something to Alan King’s CBS TV one-hour documentary, A Married Couple, to the camera style of Fred Wiseman, and to some of Andy Warhol’s theories and his intrusive but deadpan camera work. Craig Gilbert’s premise was that the series would function like an anthropological field study, but instead of documenting an exotic culture, it would study the viewer’s own culture at a time nearly concurrent with that of the program’s viewing. As Gilbert put it: “If I film any one American family over a long period of time, I will expose the myth, the value systems, the ways of interacting that are American and apply in some way to all of us.” The Louds would seem to be “representative” of the families the viewer saw most nights on TV. Horace Newcome, in TV: The Most Popular Art, noted: “The children are rock musicians, dancers, concerned with school, their friends, their pets. Their problems are with money, cars, and part-time work. To the degree that they see themselves this way, and to the degree that they play for the ever-present cameras, they become part of television’s fantasy world. As the eldest son puts it: ‘Everybody wants to star in their own TV series, don’t they?’” (This is a paraphrase of a statement by his hero, Andy Warhol: “In the future everybody will be a star for fifteen minutes.”) But as the series progresses we see more and more differences between the families of TV and !he families of reality. When the show first appeared, viewers had an adverse reaction. An idealization of the American family was placed in doubt: The Louds were thought not to be typically representative of the American family. The program or the Loud’s lifestyle was termed “negative”; the editing was considered biased. Initially, critics thought the show to be an attack on the “shallow, petty, and materialistic” aspects of the American family or of only the affluent California family. They saw the Louds as “all too typical but not like us” or totally atypical and a deliberate misrepresentation of the normal American family. It was difficult at first to separate viewer subjectivity as projected onto the program from the actual video screened. As no voice-over narration or story line was imposed on the images, it was difficult to establish a common “objective” frame of reference. A viewer could not easily identify with another American family so close to itself without the use of the objectifying conventions of “TV reality.” Identity is established more comfortably with an ideologically distanced/distorted image of a viewer/viewing family—in other words, an idealization. The images of the Louds were literally too close to a mirror image to establish an unproblematic identity or to empathize with. Another objection to the series was that it was an invasion of privacy—a pandering to the viewer’s voyeurism. This objection overlooked the existence of programs like “Candid Camera” or “The Newlywed Game.” It also overlooks the inherent voyeurism in the TV viewing apparatus: viewers are placed in the position of being concealed “Peeping Toms” in their relation to the one-way image. Many normally operative conventions such as a story line and various editing rules tend to conceal this voyeurism. Thus An American Family highlighted for viewers a self-consciousness of their own voyeurism. Typically video (and film) smooth over, camouflage, and conceal their manipulation of viewers’ psychological positions. The troublesome “closeness” of ourselves, as spectators, to the family, was dealt with, as the series progressed in time, by the birth of a cult of the family as stars. Their personalities were no longer “like” ours, but had an aura, which helped them sell various products for consumption (records, confessional articles, and books); they themselves became objectified as market commodities. Video as Definer of Urban Codes/Deconstructor of Urban Codes A 1976 work of mine referred to the (then) open possibilities of video as a present-time, architecturally deconstructive medium. It involved the use of two channels. In staging the typical local “happy news” program, the space of the stage-set is meant to represent fictionally both the interior psychological space experience of the viewer and the projection of the exterior livingroom space in which typical viewers are presumed to be enclosed. TV sells the notion of the idealized happy family. As simulated on the “happy news” program, it consists of the news anchor—the parent—his sons and daughters, uncles and aunts. The father or mother is a condoning figurehead who rests at home while the more active sons and daughters pursue (literally follow the action of) developing local news stories by traveling to their sites of origin. Although the news may not be good, the overall feeling projected is one of reassurance; news stories (no matter how grisly) are presented tongue-in-cheek, or may be subject to wry comments or even giggles by various members of the inner circle of the news “family.” A contrast is apparent between the “representation” of this on screen—into which members of the real families are transported—and the actual reality taking place (around—outside of—the space framed by the screen) in the real studio space and in the specific viewer’s real home life. The TV news program is a distorting mirror of the reality of the family group watching it. Actual local news is found, not in its “reflection” on TV, but in the home of its viewer(s). The time at which the “happy news” is scheduled corresponds to the time between work and relaxation in the family house before dinner; it is a transition point between the outside world and the “inner” world of private self-indulgence. As it is when the workers in the family come home from work, it serves as a transition period from the frame of public to that of domestic space. Like the cocktail “happy hour,” it has the socially important function of ritualizing the passage from public sphere to private sphere. TV news programs are often constructed in relation to immediacy, for the news stories that are their ostensive content are taking place simultaneously with the time/space of every viewer’s lived world. However, in the actual construction of a typical daily news program, unmediated immediacy is nonexistent; “action” news is planned in advance of the stories taking place so that camera, crew, and reporter can be “there when it happens.” In fact, most news stories are just that, stories, stereotypes repeated in slightly different forms each day and not very different from other fictional TV programs. They are, in distinction from other shows, isolated fragments, episodes, the assembled parts of each one-hour or half-hour show constituting a somewhat predetermined complete story. Public/Private Codes Public versus private can be dependent upon architectural conventions. By social convention, a window mediates between private (inside) and public (outside) space. The interior seen defines or is defined by the publicly accepted notion of privacy. An architectural division, the house, separates the private person from the public person and sanctions certain kinds of behavior for each. The meaning of privacy, beyond its mere distinguishability from publicness, is more complexly connected to other social rules. For example: a private home restricts access to members of one family; a bathroom within that house is private as it allows usage by only one person at a time (whereas a toilet in a public place is public as it allows multiple access, but is gender restrictive); the individual bedroom of a child or adult member of the family may be considered to be private at certain times. Moral sanctions are attached to violation of these codes. There are areas that reflect transitional social change. The taping of private conversations for public law enforcement is one area of unresolved claims between private (including interpretation of the term private) rights and public rights to effect justice or knowledge. The widespread use of video surveillance cameras involves similar moral/legal issues. The use of video would have social-psychological implications for the family structure: for instance, children being continuously observed through the use of a video camera by their parents lose their right to be different in private, that is, to have separate public and private identities. Video and Surveillance Public corporate central-city atrium spaces built into lobbies of corporate headquarters in mid-town New York and in other U.S. cities that were rehabilitated in the late 1960s and 1970s are the new inner-city parks, plazas, and museum gardens. Ostensibly, these were attempts to humanize the areas adjacent to corporations’ inner-city high-rise towers with social, park, and shopping and dining space, which had been lost as the central city had become dangerous and sterile in the 1960s. Garden plantings and solar illumination in these greenhouse-like spaces demonstrated the image of the corporations’s responsibility to the environment. The atriums owe their existence to a trade-off with the city, an exchange of public space for an allowance of more square footage the city permitted the developer to build. As privately owned and maintained public sanctuaries, these spaces are kept under video and audio surveillance through the buildings’s (generally) hidden electronic systems, as well as by uniformed guards. The corporate atrium space became a way of competing with and paralleling the suburban shopping mall. As a large segment of the upper middle-class moved back to the city from the suburbs, the atrium design was extended to include shopping and dining facilities, and it came to reflect suburban forms. In the city, pure architectural forms are often modified or violated by applied verbal, pictographic advertising, or corporate signs. The meaning in architecture relates as much to the signage (or the sequence of signs along a pedestrian or automotive street facade) as to the building as a self-contained form. Anne Rorimer, writing in the Buildings and Signs catalog of my exhibition at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, in 1981, related Video View of Suburbia in an Urban Atrium to another work, Edge of the City: The insertion of the monitors into the Citicorp context has double-edged significance, considering the fact that televised information is principally associated with viewing inside the home environment. Here, at the “core” of the city in a multi-purpose situation, the Citicorp frequenter comes up against an image of the exterior of a private home. Whereas Citicorp brings the natural elements of the suburb into the concept of its interior design fabrication, the video imports the view of an actual suburban home. The video image showing a real house rings truer in this case than does the artificial nature of the surroundings. The video as representation assumes an independent reality within the framework of the given environment. Edge of the City, related to the Citicorp piece, derives its meaning from its public setting—here the Philadelphia train station where Graham installed three television monitors directly under signs saying “Stairway to Suburban Trains” in the station concourse. Like the signs with which they align, the monitors, with the image of a car passing by a row of new suburban houses, visually announces the destination of the trains and of the viewers. The work, set within a public station, and not within a traditional art environment, signals the viewer to “make connections” between the dichotomies and contradictions of his present existence. Signs in the Urban Environment/Video as a Sign Video functions semiotically as an architectural and cultural sign of the urban environment. Signs (Video) Atop Architecture One sees a row of signs in sequence. Each sign stands out from the signs preceding and following it, having a prescribed, separate meaning in relation to the other signs that surround (and define) it in terms of its position. For a sign to convey meaning, it must conform to the general code shared by the surrounding signs and distinguish itself from—establish its position relative to—other signs. Each sign depends ultimately for its meaning upon its position in relation to the others. Venturi and Rauch’s 1961–63 Guild Houses, inexpensive apartment house block residences for older people sponsored by the Society of Quakers, appear at first glance to replicate the exterior facade of ordinary glazed-brick, postwar, lower-income housing. More detailed inspection reveals applied ornamentation suggestive of the Renaissance and mannerist palazzo. There, an ornamental Greek and Roman mythological statuary was placed atop the roof, just above oversized entranceways. Similarly, above the Guild House, a large contemporary statuary was positioned on the roof above an oversized portal. This was an exaggeratedly large, gold-plated TV antenna. Its symbolism alluded to what Venturi saw as the major occupation of the residents inside; it also related to the usual ornament atop postwar houses. This ornament ironically undermined the neutral, functional, unadorned “box” then favored by international-style modernist architecture, in favor of the “decorated shed” of main-street vernacular building in which a sign was added onto the functional box to give it semiotic meaning. There was an expressionist, ironic pathos (akin to poetry) in the symbolism of the building’s main interior purpose for its users. Finally, the architect also wanted to acknowledge the real function of television in the cultural and family structure and as part of American domestic architecture and life. The TV aerial on the roof of the single-family house had begun to symbolize hearth and home as much as did the chimney. In the 1970s, environmental concerns had produced a new cultural ethos. Conservation of natural resources would only be possible if individual members of the public were educated about local and global ecological environments. Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown’s design for a science museum for a downtown location in Charlotte, North Carolina, responded to this need for popular, site-specific ecological information. The plan used the outdoor building as sign. The museum’s sidewalk display windows would have a living exhibition with a frieze “in the form of a moving electronic sign giving messages about ecological happenings in the world to passersby” just above the window display. The museum’s sides, entrance portal, and roof were all part of an enormously enlarged model—what, inside the usual museum, would have been a small-scale model of the geological strata of the surrounding North Carolina terrain. To the sides of the entrance, using the enlarged model of the strata as a simulated landscape, was what amounted to a small outdoor park. In one of the plans, a giant statue of a dinosaur, resembling “Dino the Dinosaur,” the performer symbol of the H. C. Sinclair Gas Company, was to be placed on the geological strata roof. The scale, height, and position of these signs—brought from what conventionally .would be an interior museum display to the main street of a small-scale city—underlie the message of the ecology movement: Smaller scale, decentralized concentrations of populations, and the move toward an information, low-energy-consumption political economy were necessary. The scale and position of the museum as sign gave the ecological information on the electric sign a great prominence, which effectively competed with commercial advertising displays meant to be seen from an auto. Video as Architectural Mirror and Window Video in architecture functions semiotically as window and mirror simultaneously but subverts the effects and functions of both. Windows in architecture mediate separated spatial units and frame a conventional perspective of one unit’s relation to the other; mirrors in architecture define self-reflectively spatial enclosure and ego enclosure. A mirror’s image optically responds to a human observer’s movements, varying as a function of his or her position. As the observer approaches, the mirror opens up a wider and deeper view of the room environment and magnifies the image of the perceiver. By contrast, a video image on a monitor does not shift in perspective with a viewer’s shift in position. The mirror’s image connects subjectivity with the perceiver’s time/space axis. Optically, mirrors are designed to be seen frontally. A video monitor’s projected image of a spectator observing it depends on that spectator’s relation to the position of the camera, but not on his or her relation to the monitor. A view of the perceiver can be transmitted from the camera instantaneously or time-delayed over a distance to a monitor, which may be near or far from the perceiver’s (viewing) position in space or time. Unlike the flat visuality of Renaissance painting, in the video image geometrical surfaces are lost to ambiguously modeled contours and to a translucent depth. Mirrors in enclosures exteriorize all objects within the interior space, so that they appear on the mirror as frontal surface planes. In rectilinear enclosures, mirrors create illusory perspective boxes. The symmetry of mirrors tends to conceal or cancel the passage of time, so that the overall architectural form appears to transcend time, while the interior area of the architecture, inhabited by human movements, process, and gradual change, is emptied of significance. As the image in the mirror is perceived as a static instant, place (time and space) becomes illusorily eternal. The world seen on video, by contrast, is in temporal flux and connected subjectively to (because it can be identified with) experienced duration. Video Feedback Systems I Through a videotape loop time-delay video feedback system, viewers can see their images replayed almost immediately on the monitor. Thus their self-images of their behavior are connected to their inner mental states of consciousness—to their intentions. This removes self-perception, as in the mirror image, from the viewing of a detached state image of self. Instead, feedback creates both a process of continuous learning and also the subjective sense of an endlessly extendible present time in flux, an interior time connected to an unfixed future goal and continuously reexperienced immediate past. Early video artists, such as Paul Ryan, compared the video feedback process to the topological moebius strip: A moebius strip is a model for the power video tape gives to take in our own outside . . . (and) avoid . . . servo-mechanistic closure. One can learn to accept the extension out there on tape as part of self. There is the possibility of taking the extending back in and reprocessing over and again on one’s personal time wrap. Soft Furniture Design and Video Feedback Soft, topological, inflatable furniture from the late 1960s paralleled, in the sense of body feedback and in the correlation of subjective and objective psycho-physiological states, the self-referring mental consciousness induced by video feedback. Pneumatically inflatable plastic furniture constructed from topological forms was thought to unite tactile body sensations and internal mental states. Soft furniture could function as a model of a new consciousness within, inside, or outside, or the separation of bounded individual ego from group experience: Consciousness might be invested in . . . soft control systems using plastic membranes where awareness is immanent in the structure and its relation to its users. A (topological) Kleinform couch is a possible way of moving in that direction. It could be built of strong polyurethane, filled with air. People might interrelate kinetically through the changes in the air pressure. Soft Furniture and TV Artist John Chamberlain’s exposed foam rubber couches have an effect similar to that of inflatable furniture; kinesthetic body sensations equate to the sense of the state of consciousness of the sitter. This feeling is distinct from the merely visual, traditional position of the viewer’s ego, observing the design or art form. Foam rubber has a humanlike feel. As it is usually used for the underpinning of chairs, mattresses, or couches, foam rubber is rarely experienced as a visual surface alone; rather, it is experienced as tactile, cool, or warm, by the body surfaces and internal musculature. By eliminating the usual leather, rubber, or cloth covering “skin,” and using raw foam rubber exposed to air, Chamberlain’s chairs and couches eventually flake off at the surface. This built-in obsolescence relates them to late 1960s pop art and architecture’s notion of the disposable. They ironically took the modernist aesthetic of reduction one step further. A Mies van der Rohe chair or couch, despite its look of having reduced itself to only its material means of support, still hides a body-supporting material (such as rubber) beneath its surface. The raw foam rubber surface of Chamberlain’s furniture reveals this. Unlike film, which is watched in a darkened space by viewers sitting on individual chairs, television is usually viewed in groups in a family or family-like setting, most commonly in the living room and most usually on a couch or comfortable chair. Chamberlain combined the television-viewing context with his foam rubber furniture in an installation for the large “Westkunst” exhibition in Cologne, Germany, in 1979. An oversized foam rubber couch with two televisions placed on opposite ends allowed groups of visitors comfortably to sprawl on the oversized couch/“sculpture” and watch a video program. Joining the TVs to the ends of the couch resembled the coin-operated TVs attached to chairs in the waiting rooms of many U.S. bus stations. The exhibition was a survey of the period in Western Europe dominated by American art from the end of World War II until the end of the 1970s. At first glance, the video images appearing on the screens of Chamberlain’s TV couch seemed “all-American,” fast-paced TV commercials depicting the good life of the“American Dream.” But this initial impression was ironically contradictory; on closer inspection, the viewer recognized that each of the TV commercials was an unusable “take” from commercials that had to be redone before being broadcast. Each “blooper” or bad take revealed, unconsciously, the ideologically determined conventions that construct the advertising industry’s artificially engineered version of the American consumer’s “dream.” Video as Social-Psychological Model Portable video equipment, which became widely available for university use in the 1960s, was used initially in teaching and research studies by psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Informal social groups were recorded and the results immediately replayed to give the subject(s) feedback of their behavior. Video feedback was also used in teaching psychologists and social workers about their skills in interacting with patients. Similarly, field anthropologists would take notes through video and replay these studies with (for) their subjects. At the same time, the anthropologists would be able to see their own behavior in terms of whatever cultural/scientific biases they imposed on the situation. Video replay enabled social scientists to discern the way in which their own “objective” observations actually reflected their “subjective” observation points and positions as interacting participants. The goal was for both the subjects and the scientists to use the experience through the mediation of video feedback as a learning process. Various early video works of mine were presented informally in art schools as part of teaching situations as “performances” involving the largely student audience. I used socio-psychological models as underlying schemata. These “scientific” models also referred to art and art-critical positions often cited as theoretical supports for art-making methodology at the time. Lacanian psychology, feminism, and phenomenological description were examples of such theoretical positions. Video Feedback II When observers see their image immediately, continuously replayed on the screen through videotape loops, their self-images, by adding temporality to self-perception, connect their self-perceptions to their mental states. This removes self-perception, as in the mirror image, from the viewing of a detached, static image. The feedback creates both a process of continuous learning and the subjective sense of an endlessly extendible present time in flux, but without a fixed future or past states. In general, feedback was defined (by von Bertalanffy) as ”a circular process where part of the output is monitored back, as information on the preliminary outcome of the response, into the input, thus making the system self-regulating . . . a feedback mechanism can ‘reactively’ reach a state of higher organization owing to ‘learning’ information fed into the system.” In the situation of watching/being part of a video feedback loop, there is no longer any split between observed (self) behavior and supposedly unobservable, interior, mental intention. When the observer’s responses are part of and influencing his or her perception, the difference between intention and actual behavior as seen on the monitor immediately influences the observer’s future intentions and behavior. Two models of time are contrasted in Present Continuous Past(s), the traditional Renaissance perspective static present-time, which is seen, in this work, as the (self) image(s) in the mirror(s), and the time of the video feedback loop. Use of video time-delay in conjunction with the mirror allows the spectator to see what is normally visually unavailable: the simultaneity of his or her self as both subject and object. As Huebach has noted, a spectator realizes himself/herself as acting and acted upon: In causing a reflection and at the same time finding the self reflected, he/she divides into subject and object, into an awareness and an image. The image separates the individual, but is it he/she who forms the image or is it the image that describes him/her? A premise of 1960s modernist art was to present the present as immediacy—as pure phenomenological consciousness without the contamination of historical or other a priori meaning. The world could be experienced as pure presence, self-sufficient and without memory. Each privileged present-time situation was to be totally unique or new. My video time-delay, installations, and performance designs use this modernist notion of phenomenological immediacy, foregrounding an awareness of the presence of the viewer’s own perceptual process; at the same time they critique this immediacy by showing the impossibility of locating a pure present tense. Future in the Just-Past Memory of the past (in the present) is dependent upon each unstable moment’s projection of an anticipated future. This future is not certain or determined, but only a set of changing probabilities. The present moment is nothing but a series of fragmented memories of the past that gain meaning by their projection into a possible future. There is a link between futurology and archeology. Past/Future/Split Attention is a performance exercise related to R. D. Laing’s theory of the “divided self” (current in 1972) and an extrapolation of the effect of the video feedback loop in a videotaped performance situation. Historical Memory My goal in recent video works, such as the 1983–86 Rock My Religion, is to restore historical memory. My intention is in opposition to the historicist idea that everything we know about the past is dependent upon the interpretation of the fashion of the present. In historicism there is no real past, only an overlay of interpretations or a simulation of the past. In opposition to this notion of history as a simulation, there is possible the idea of an actual, although hidden, past, mostly eradicated from consciousness but briefly available in moments not obscured by the dominant ideology of newness. This myth of evernew is linked to the role of the commodity. Commodities produce a dream of eternal newness—which devalues and makes antiaphrodisiacal and amnesiacal the period of time just prior to the newest present. It devalues and cuts off connection with the implications (of unfinished ideas and projects) associated with the commodities of this just-past period. The mythic dream produced by the new commodity—the dream of eternal “progress” in the near-future—is never achieved, for it is always superseded by the next “new.” Back to catalog page Galleries Directory | Levy Gallery Artists Registry | Publications & Artists | Email Moore College of Art and Design

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