Redistribution of the Sensible. Spectator’s Itinerary

Here the visitors are more and more forced to follow a pre-determined itinerary; and the more popular the exhibition is, the more difficult it is to deviate from this itinerary. On the other hand, small “alternative” places that do not separate work and exhibition spaces, professional and informal interactions, embed the experience of spectatorship into other social processes. This is also characteristic for some specific situations such as an exhibition’s opening. In these conditions, the exhibition space is shared between artworks and other objects of attention, which alternately impact the spectator’s trajectory.

Taking into consideration such practices, we could ask: what sensible content can unfold in these itineraries? Today, many artists and curators look for possibilities to extend the spectator’s experience. However, not all of them include in their research focus and critical reflection those familiar (and, thus, banal) spaces and acts which one has to get through to become a spectator. 

Jacques Rancière argues that the deep effect of art does not consist so much in a transmitted message, but rather “in a bodies’ disposition, in a segmentation of singular spaces and times which define the ways to be together or separately, in front of or in the middle of, outside or inside, close or far” [3]. Thus, a sensible experience depends on how shapes, bodies, movements, narratives are embedded in spatial and temporal structures and are distributed within collective, shared practices. Which elements are activated in a sensible experience and under which circumstances? This question does not only concern a particular individual perception but also, and mostly, the dispositifs which operate in the culture and the social space. It is through them that a singular subjective perception of an individual comes into touch with the perception of other individuals, and together they influence the forms of collective life which reproduce old dispositifs of perception or produce new ones.

In the following, I would like to consider two cases where the authors re-examine and redistribute spaces and itineraries inside which the visitor becomes the spectator by meeting the artwork. It is symptomatic that these works are created on a crossroad of different artistic genres and disciplines sliding away from the established categories of classification. Their authors approach the problem of spectatorship not as an exterior entity, but as a specific sensible experience which becomes a part of the work and its demonstrative dispositif.

Prison Architect by Cao Fei 

The project Prison Architect by Cao Fei is born from the history of a place — its social role in the past and the present as well as from the imaginary worlds it engendered or hosted. This place is Tai Kwun — Center for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong where the project was shown [4]. Situated in a building complex of the former Central Police Station and the Victorian Prison, today this cultural center includes restaurants, shops, as well as exhibition spaces, dedicated to the contemporary art and the history of the place.

The project Prison Architect is, first of all, a film that speaks of the past and present dimensions of this place. The camera follows two characters: a prisoner and a contemporary architect. They wander around the same place but each of them in his and her own dimension. Their trajectories differ, but the poetics of the film makes them cross. The prisoner and the architect meet in a prison cell and an exhibition room of the contemporary art center, but also on the stairs, in the corridor and in the courtyard, that is, the spaces which serve the functions of the past and the present simultaneously.

The latter is the transitory spaces that allow us to see the inner logic of our itineraries, looped inside a particular type of culture. By revealing them, the artist addresses the questions of imprisonment and freedom as such. When we follow the characters’ movements and witness their struggle with space, we realize that the architect’s apartment in Hong Kong whose size and configuration are subordinated to the logic of the real estate market, the white cube of the exhibition room which has its own history of inclusion and exclusion [5], and the prison cell — they are spatial unities akin to each other. Cao Fei puts in the focus of her work the points and the axes of such conjunctions. Due to these, an exhibition room, a prison, and a living accommodation reveal in each other a space of imprisonment as well as the limit of freedom possible in each of them.

The artist locates these points and axes of conjunction not only on the way of her film’s characters, but also on the way of the film’s spectators. That is why when you follow the itinerary of a visitor of the center for contemporary art in Tai Kwun and when you become a spectator of the film Prison Architect, you start to feel yourself differently in the very same places that you have just crossed naturally, as a usual routine of visiting any art center. Cao Fei plays with the fact that the place of presentation of her work is, at the same time, the object of presentation in the work. Taking this fact for a starting point, the artist activates the themes of imprisonment and freedom not only in the imagination of the spectator watching the film but also in her bodily presence, in the trajectory of her movements in the given exhibition space.

When, while watching the film, you recognize, in one of the episodes showing the prisoner and the architect meeting, these stairs that you have just taken to arrive at the exhibition room, or when you distinguish the prisoner’s cell in that cozy corner where you have drunk a coffee in a break between two exhibitions, then your spectator’s trajectory suddenly gets stripped off the usual experience — the experience of visiting exhibitions as a form of cultural consumption or, if you want, of enlightenment — and starts to acquire new sensible content. The latter comes out of the overlap of various dimensions of the place where the spectator finds him- or herself. Designed by the artist, the axes of this overlap are put right on the spectator’s way as a part of the exhibition dispositif. 

Besides the film, the project Prison Architect as it was shown at Tai Kwun, also includes objects, installations, and performances which appear as a material and spatial extension of the film’s imagery. For example, the plank beds are put in the room where the film is projected, so the visitors can sit on them to watch it. At the entrance of this room, a guard wearing a police uniform sits at the desk and acts as if he registers the entries. Some rooms which, in the itinerary of the exhibition, precede or follow the film’s screening, are conceived to refer to the Victorian prison, such as a dark room with a desk, a stack of documents on it, and a portrait of the sovereign (the young Elisabeth II looks from it) on the wall. At the end of the exhibition, the space of the corridor and the stairs is decorated with avocado trees, while the avocado fruit appears as a symbol of liberation in the film.

While the artist founds her work on the real history of the place as well as on the reality of its immanent spatial logic which continues to function in the new context, she does not reproduce the literal facts, objects, biographies. Rather, she builds such a correlation between document and fiction that they resonate in each other and engender a specific sensible experience which belongs simultaneously to the real physical being at the given place and to the space of imagination. 

So, when you leave the exhibition, the courtyard you cross does not look the same anymore: you perceive it as strikingly different from the one you crossed coming here even if it is the same one. Indeed, now it appears in a new light, and it resonates differently, for in the film’s poetic narrative it occurs to become the place of the prisoner’s liberation.

Dau by Ilya Khrzhanovsky

Shown at the Théâtre de la Ville and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 2019 and recently released on a web platform, the project Dau by Ilya Khrzhanovsky presents a new format of visual work and, consequently, of spectatorship. I will not try to define this format but address only one of its proper aspects which characterizes the work’s immanent structure and directly concerns the question of the spectator’s itinerary [6]. 

As we know, the project Dau is born of an idea to make a biopic of the Soviet physicist Lev Landau but along the way it transforms into a work of a completely different nature and scale: 700 hours of cinematographic material filmed inside an “institute” which was built especially for the project recalling the soviet “scientific research institutes” where the actors, or rather the participants who were not professional actors (with a single exception), lived under a particular regime [7]. Considering the volume of the material, a question arises: how to present it to keep it integral and perceptible at the same time?

The dispositifs of demonstration chosen by Khrzhanovsky are based on the articulation of the fragments cut and assembled from abundant material. In the Parisian theaters, the full-length films were projected in various rooms, small and big, but always organized as a screening room, that is, with a big screen and seats for spectators in front of it. The visitors could join or leave the screening at any moment. Besides these rooms, both theaters had zones with individual booths where the spectator found him- or herself alone in front of a small screen. Multiple windows appeared on it announcing available episodes; by clicking on one of the windows, you could watch the corresponding episode as well as move from one to another at any moment.

Such a dispositif could cause frustration. Indeed, even if you had watched several full-length films, you would have still seen just a part of a certain whole. However, this whole cannot be embraced neither by the spectator nor by the author. It is symptomatic that Khrzhanovsky invites co-authors to make the montage and editing of the different episodes. As for the spectator, he or she can make an impression of the project only by juxtaposing episodes with one another as well as by correlating what has just been seen with what had already been known before (the author designates this principle as an “accumulable story”). Such a fragmentarity is not only fundamental for this project, but it also reflects the very principle of knowledge of the world. Indeed, we can only know the world through its particular manifestations, through certain fragments. And we conceive our judgments of the world on the base of these fragments, either we choose them as an object of knowledge or they occur to our perception accidentally. Thus, by its very structure, Dau reveals the fundamental impossibility to access the totality of knowledge.