Notes on Television part II
TELEVISION, FURNITURE & SCULPTURE: THE ROOM WITH THE AMERICAN VIEW, 1984 - Vito Acconci
From the catalogue The Luminous Image, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Excerpt 13
Video installation is the conjunction of opposites (or, to put it another way: video installation is like having your cake and eating it, too). On the one hand, "installation" places an art-work in a specific site, for a specific time ( a specific duration and also, possibly a specific historic time). On the other hand, "video" (with its consequences followed through: video broadcast on television) is placeless: at least, its place can't be determined --- there's no way of knowing the particular look of all those millions of homes that receive the TV broadcast.
Video installation, then, places placelessness; video installation is an attempt to stop time. The urge toward video installation might be nostalgic: it takes airplane travel, where all you can see is sky, and imposes onto it the landscape incidences of a railroad journey. Video installation returns the TV set to the domain of furniture; the TV set, in the gallery/museum, is surrounded by the sculptural apparatus of the installation, the way the TV set, in the home, is surrounded by the furnishings of the room. The difference is: in the home, the TV set is assumed as a home-companion, almost unnoticed, a household pet that can't be handled and kicked around; the viewer doesn't have to keep his/her eyes focused on the TV screen, the TV set remains on while the viewer (the home-body) comes and goes, the viewer goes to get something in the kitchen and brings it back to the TV set. Once a TV set, however, is placed in a sculpture-installation, the TV set tends to dominate; the TV set acts as a target --- the rest of the installation functions as a display-device, a support-structure for the light on the screen (the viewer stares into the television set, as if staring into a fireplace).
The rest of the installation is in danger of fading away, the rest of the installation is the past that upholds the future (as embodied in the TV set), but the future wins. Video-installation starts out by dealing with a whole system, a whole space; but the field, the ground, disappears in favor of the "point", the TV set. The situation seems similar to wanting what you can't have; now that the TV set is camouflaged by the apparatus of an installation, an extra effort is made to find it, to "get the point". The reason for this might be that the conventional location for a television set is in the home; when it is come upon somewhere else, whether inside a gallery/museum or outside, in a store-window or a supermarket, the viewer is stopped in his/her tracks: the situation is like that of a visitor from another planet happening upon a TV set --- only in this case it is the "other planet" (the home, the living-room) that comes upon the viewer, seeing the TV set, is brought back home --- and here, abstractly, "home" reads the way it could never be allowed to read when surrounded by the customs of living-room furniture: "home" means "resting place", "the final resting place", the land of the numb/the still/the dead.