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SPECTACLE AS CIRCUIT: today means to operate in a circuit of images (moving and still) that are
THE CONTEMPORARY NEXUS OF BODIES, IMAGES, AND MEDIA equally data. Amassed and analysed, these images constitute key elements
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of the process of value creation in contemporary networked capitalism.
Examining the contemporary spectacle might therefore proceed
Christopher Williams-Wynn through an analysis of those relations between images, bodies and media.
Hans Belting investigates the interpretative possibilities opened by
From the 1950s onwards, Guy Debord articulated trenchant dismay at the emphasis on this nexus of elements. He writes that the “self-perception
expansion of post-war consumer society and its dependence on a steady of our bodies (the sensation that we live in a body) is an indispensable
stream of images. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967) he terms the condi- precondition for the inventing of media, which may be called technical
tion as “spectacle” and characterizes it as a form of reification. Experience or artificial bodies designed for substituting bodies via a symbolical
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becomes commodity and capital becomes image. The “real world becomes procedure.” Embodied subjects produce and respond to images that are
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real images” and “mere images are transformed into real beings.” It is no conveyed by media. For Belting, the body serves as a kind of living medium
longer commodities alone, and commodity fetishism, that mask relations that is historically conditioned and bound to processes of representation;
between subjects. Rather, the spectacle is “a social relationship between “Representing bodies are those that perform themselves, while represented
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people that is mediated by images.” This image processing allows the bodies are separate or independent images that represent bodies. Bodies
logic of exchange to erode social relations while producing only “mere perform images (of themselves or even against themselves) as much as they
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representation.” Throughout his account of spectacle, perceive outside images.” While a useful model for considering possible
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Debord describes these processes in terms of conver- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, functions and states of the body, the division is too neat, and does not
sion, transformation or becoming. With this, he implies trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: readily account for processes of feedback facilitated by media technologies.
Zone Books, 1994), 43.
that it was still possible to occupy a position outside of 2 Such a framework must account for the conditions in which those bodies,
Ibid., 17. 12
it. As these spaces of art, or other resistant activity were 3 media and images are arrayed. There remains the need to examine how
colonised, those outside positions were converted into Ibid., 12. these aspects are disposed by techniques and technologies that are already
yet more images for circulation as part of the processes 4 fundamental to the operation of contemporary capitalism, without lapsing
Ibid.
of capitalist valorisation. Spectacle serves as both a 5 into rhetoric of control or causation. Media objects, David Panagia main-
process and result. By the late 1980s Debord would revise his tains, might be usefully conceived as “sentimental instruments that arrange
thesis in recognition that the space outside 13
Subsequent technological, social and cultural devel- had drastically shrunk. He declared the dispositions, attentions, and perceptibilities.” The capacity to dispose the
opments introduce new capacities into the spectacle global reach of an “integrated spectacle” body in its relations with media and images hinges upon
that had subsumed “almost the full range of 9
while also complicating this unidirectional relation socially produced behaviour and objects.” the contingency of relations between these elements. Jonathan Beller, The Message Is Murder:
5 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of Substrates of Computational Capital
between experience and representation. Already over the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London This conjunction of bodies, images and media lies at the (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 158–68.
35 years ago, Jonathan Crary posited the replacement and New York: Verso, 1990), 9. heart of contemporary interactive technologies. 10
of the Debordian spectacle by a flux of binary computer 6 From recent work with virtual and augmented Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New
6 Jonathan Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31,
codes. Today, the expanding “Internet of Things” of in Art after Modernism: Rethinking reality devices to endless location services, the body no. 2 (2005): 306.
comprises devices linked through digital networks that Representation (Boston: David R. Godine, becomes a conduit between experience within lived 11
1984), 287. Ibid., 311.
appear to spread without end. The dominance of digital 7 reality and the virtual domain of technical images. This 12
communications does not spell the end of representa- Kyle Stine, “Critical Hardware: The Circuit condition of mediation is addressed in Adelle Mills’ Originally writing at the beginning of the
of Image and Data,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. (fig. 1 and fig. 2) twenty-first century, he remained hopeful
tion, or of images more generally. Rather the opposite. 3 (Spring 2019): 762–86. Stine responds to Moving Through Phone (2015) . To initiate that Internet technologies would allow
Given the scales involved and abstractions necessary, work that has tended to reject the funda- the work, Mills instructed each performer to improvise culturally specific forms of communication
mental place of images within computing. and representation to be maintained
images become essential to digital design and computer See, for example, Jacob Gaboury, “Hidden a set of movements to be recorded. One performer and developed. See Hans Belting, An
7 Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium,
production. A focus on images, though, obscures the Material Object,” Journal of Visual Culture then selected their own or the other’s recording. The Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (2001; repr.,
capacity for those technologies to dispose bodies. Recent 14, no. 1 (2015): 40–60. other performer held the smartphone, moving slowly Princeton: Princeton University Press,
scholarship on the transformation of the spectacle char- 8 around a nondescript interior space while the first 2011), 58. Such optimism is deflated, in part,
Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano, by the spread of protocols and standards.
acterizes it in terms of interaction facilitated by digital “From the Notion of Spectacle to Spectacle performer attempted to mimic the moving image. After See Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How
technologies, especially the widespread adoption of 2.0: The Dialectic of Capitalist Mediations,” the recording finished they swapped roles, so that the Control Exists after Decentralization
8 in The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
Internet-enabled mobile phones. Contemporary spec- the Context of Digital Capitalism, ed. Marco second performer mimicked the same recording that the 13
tacle operates as a digital circuit encapsulating images, Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano (London: first performer chose. Meanwhile, each performance is Davide Panagia, “On the Political Ontology
University of Westminster Press, 2017), of the Dispositif,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3
bodies and media. To inhabit the informational spectacle 30–40. recorded, and the final videos replayed simultaneously (Spring 2019): 716.
78 79
↑↑ fig. 1 Adelle Mills, Moving Through Phone, 2015, HD two-channel video performance, with ↑↑ fig. 2 Adelle Mills, Moving Through Phone, 2015, HD two-channel video performance, with
Lauren Burrow and Jimmy Nuttall, 12:08 minutes, installation dimensions variable. Lauren Burrow and Jimmy Nuttall, 12:08 minutes, installation dimensions variable.
80 81
as a dual-channel installation. Throughout the work the smartphone When the spectacle reaches across the everyday, art, as a site of
produces as much as it records events, resulting in an overlay of real-time illusory autonomy, becomes a form of refuge. By the mid-1960s, Yvonne
and recorded actions. Rainer was already writing and choreographing against the spectacle,
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The most immediately striking element of Moving Through Phone outright stating as much: “NO to spectacle.” Trio A (1966) works through
(fig. 3)
is the degree of focus on recorded images of the body. This fixation on the results of such a stance . Choreographed for a single dancer, it
the body is itself a long-standing aspect of video practice and criticism. comprises everyday actions, from walking to lying. In her analysis of the
Approximately ten years after Debord formulated his position on the spec- work, Carrie Lambert-Beatty notes that Rainer develops her model of
tacle, Rosalind Krauss argued that self-absorption defines video art. As dance at the same time as Debord was formulating his critique of the spec-
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a medium, she contends, video art is “a psychological situation, the very tacle. To register the kind of estrangement wrought by that condition,
terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object—an it is instructive to consider the bodily movements in each case. Where
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Other—and invest it in the Self.” The narcissism of video art lies in the Rainer’s dancers move continuously albeit mechanically, Mills’ performers
treatment of the recording device as a surrogate mirror for self-produc- punctuate their movements with pauses as they respond to the digital
tion. She focuses on works concerned with the “present” of the mirror, video. One might further reflect on the indexical charge by which Lambert
15 22
which evacuates history and isolates the self. Yet, as William Kaizen associates Rainer’s dance with the semiotics of photography. If Trio
argues, video is equally capable of undercutting the supposed immediacy A finds a complement in analogue photography, the structure and form
16
afforded by instant playback. By addressing the matter of its mediation, of Moving Through Phone finds an analogue in digital 20
it can focus instead on the formats and institutional structures in which recording. The performers’ pauses and hesitation, layers Yvonne Rainer, “Some Retrospective Notes
video is produced and consumed. Mills’ work points to a condition that of editing and potential for recombination parallel the on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses
Called ‘Parts of Some Sextets,’ Performed
combines elements of both accounts. The self-regard in Mills’ work iterative, discrete and modular qualities of the digital. at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford,
derives not from instant playback or reflection but from pre-recorded The performers are both observers and observed of their Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church,
New York, in March, 1965,” The Tulane
video. In turn, video is now recoded as a stream of digital information own bodies and images. Dependent on one another, Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 178.
and deployed in a recursive structure. Rather than maintain any pretence standing “behind” the screen, holding the device — the 21
Carrie Lambert, “Moving Still: Mediating
of immediate presence, bodies are thoroughly enmeshed in a circuit of other performer guides the direction of movement in Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A,” October 89 (1999):
perception and response, recording and replay. The reiteration of prior tandem with the pre-recorded video. 108.
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images points to the dispositive effect of visual interfaces which Wendy Ibid., 102–6.
Hui Kyong Chun identifies as a crucial mechanism in contemporary media
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technologies. Insofar as the specular subject produces itself, it also
depends upon the device. ←← fig. 3 Yvonne
The condition of self-constituting feedback can be further examined Rainer, Trio A, 1978
(choreographed
through reference to transformations of the spectacle. Although focused 1966), video (black
on formal elements of video, Krauss suggests that detachment of the self and white, silent),
10:21 minutes.
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is possibly indicative of wider cultural conditions. For his part, Debord
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notes the production of isolated individuals as part of the spectacle.
Accounting for shifts in critical perspectives on the
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nature and operation of spectacle can be undertaken Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of
through examination of performance and video, particu- Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 57.
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larly those produced around the time of Debord’s reflec- Ibid., 55.
tions on the spectacle. Examining such period work 16
William Kaizen, Against Immediacy:
offers a means to chart the shifts in approaches to the Video Art and Media Populism (Hanover:
forms and techniques of spectacle, illuminating how it Dartmouth College Press, 2016).
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might be interrogated. In particular, Mills’ work can be Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed
situated in relation to various practices from the period Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2011), 59–68.
that incorporate elements of performance and recording, 18
specifically Yvonne Rainer’s performances of everyday Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of
Narcissism,” 59.
actions, Dan Graham’s filmic installations and Bruce 19
Nauman’s performances for video. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle,
22–23.
82 83
Mediated apprehension and response were an integral component
of Dan Graham’s works. His Two Correlated Rotations (1970-2) is a perti-
(fig. 4) 23
nent example combining film and performance . While an initial
version in 1969 employed 35mm cameras, the 1970-2 version makes use
of Super-8mm Instamatic cine cameras. Each holding a camera, the two
performers begin circling one another in counter-spirals. Spiralling inwards
and outwards from one another, each performer maintains a continuous
fixed focus on the lens of the other, producing a feedback system of
interrelated recordings. When shown as a two-channel projection in the
gallery space, the films appear on adjacent walls, meaning they require
either fixed albeit peripheral attention, or continuously alternating
attention. Mills elaborates the feedback system by replacing the focus
of each performer with their own image, rather than the apprehension
of one another, turning the other into a spectator of self-spectatorship.
Apparently mundane activities of observation and apprehension are media-
tized, converted into electronic signals and routed through a self-contained
network in which real (as concretely extant) and virtual
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(as visually represented) spaces converge. For Graham’s notes on the work, see Dan
A focus on interactions between the body, envi- Graham, “Two Correlated Rotations,” in
Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings
ronment and video also motivate Bruce Nauman’s by Dan Graham on His Art, ed. Alexander
early performance pieces. Over the course of an hour Alberro (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999),
85–87.
in Wall/Floor Positions (1968), he adopts a range of 24
A version of this piece was first performed
different poses at the juncture of the wall and floor in 1965 and recreated for video in 1968.
(fig. 5).24 While the work functions partly as a corporal See Bruce Nauman and Willoughby
riposte to Minimalist objects, the form of the video is Sharp, “Nauman Interview,” in Please Pay
Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words:
particularly pertinent. Angled down onto Nauman, the Writings and Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak
single camera remains fixed on his movements, which (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 130,
note 4.
←← fig. 4 Dan
Graham, publicity ↑↑ fig. 5 Bruce Nauman, Wall-Floor Positions, 1968, video (black and white, sound), 60 minutes.
photographs Dan
Graham made
of rehearsal of
Two Correlated
Rotations, 1969.
Courtesy of the
artist and Marian
Goodman Gallery,
Paris
84 85
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