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Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art by Kate Mondloch. University of Minnesota Press 2010. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper, 130 pages
reviewed by DAVID STERRIT
Guy Debord famously theorized that ours is a society of spectacle, and Michel Foucault mapped a social order in which power, knowledge, subjectivity, and subjection are intimately linked. In her introduction to Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, art historian Kate Mondloch builds on Debord's analysis of alienation and Foucault's insights regarding docile, disciplined bodies, suggesting that contemporary media consumers are subjects in a "society of the screen," wired into a boundless circuit of exchanges-involving television, movies, computers, cell phones, you name it-whereby "screens literally and fi guratively stand between us, separating bodies and fi ltering communications between subjects."1
As persuaders, manipulators, seducers, and commanders of attention, Mondloch contends, screens have turned us into "screen subjects," interpellated without let-up by technologies of the visual and the virtual. But freedom is in the air, she continues. Critically aware viewers can learn to resist the passivity and isolation that these technologies promote, and can discover modalities, confi gurations, and practices that allow for what media theorist Jonathan Crary calls a "potentially volatile disequilibrium" in interactions between body and screen, thus opening a space for creative and autonomous spectatorship. 2 Artworks charged with critical intelligence can help this salutary process along, and Mondloch finds many such works in the underexplored domain of "screen-reliant" installation art.
Screens focuses on varieties of reflexive media art that foreground the "material, psychic, ideological, and institutional" modes of mediation that structure our daily screen-based experiences.3 These works accomplish their critical task by emphasizing the materiality of the screen and the embodied presence of the spectator-participant, thereby demystifying the former and liberating the latter from the passive absorption promoted by conventional uses of screen technology. This demystification/liberation can...