Field of Gaze

..and installation art!

Jonathan Borofsky

While reading this week's assignments, Sturken and Cartwright’s chapter considering “Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge,” as well as Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” I was intrigued by the idea of field of gaze, and the unconscious processes that are unknowingly experienced within. I have always been intrigued by how installation art can have the ability to take you outside of yourself, outside of your notions on reality, beliefs, and bodily container. For a brief moment, common sense is put on pause and everything revolves around this “new world” that you’re being exposed to. With it comes a narrative that provides new notions on reality, belief, and common sense.

Olaf Bruening

Nils Nova

In installation art, we are given images (at times text/sound/video) in order to interpret this “new world”, or in referencing the pictorial turn, “read” the artist’s implied meaning. While considering this all, what we are not aware of are these mentioned unconscious processes Sturken, Cartwright, and Mulvey express. In installation, there is a large field of gaze that the spectator can easily step into. “Large” here does not refer to size, but a multi-faceted psychological space where we are placed within a field of meaning production, in which we are only one fragment. This production of meaning is formed through recognition, mimesis, taste & aesthetics, cultural
background (basically, chapter 2).
 

Film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry explains the field of gaze that is entered through the cinema (parallels can be drawn here from cinema to installation). The change in atmosphere, “the darkened theatre and conditions of watching a mirror-like screen invite the viewer to regress to a childlike state.” He goes on to describe the viewer’s temporary loss of ego as they identify with figures on screen. Mulvey expresses the repressive state that the viewer experiences in the cinema, as they are positioned underneath a massively brilliant screen and forced to look up to the figures throughout the movie experience.
 



Kara Walker

Eva Hess

The field of gaze is of course entered through all forms of artwork, both commercial and fine. However, it seems that installation art seems to cater to the idea of the audience being an integral part of the art piece as well as viewing experience. Some installation art cannot live without an audience, but a painting can live just the same on wall that is left unviewed, collecting dust. This special viewing experience that accommodates the audience is probably the spark of my interest in installation. Although I am a drawing and painting major, I have been sketching out ways to make my art more like an installation. Not to objectify the artwork, but merge the space from which my two dimensional figures live, and from where it is viewed. So far, I have enlarged my figurative work and have been planning pieces where the surface extends out to the viewing space. Unfortunately, I cannot elaborate on this idea more at the time, however suggestions are welcome!