Descending again into the dark of ‘The Art of Projection' made me aware of how there is this split or war between projected works using light, and art using matter. With the light works we are paradoxically forced and funnelled into blackness, separated from the world by insulating curtains and corridors. Like wraiths in an underworld one then stumbles, until the eyes become accustomed, against other spectators until one then goes on to the next projection. Actually this work in its way, is looked at like paintings or sculpture, in the way that we are accustomed to look at art, unlike cinema which we also watch in the dark, we look for as long or as briefly as we want, and then walk on. The difference is that without a beginning or an end that one would wait for as in cinema, and especially because there are no seats or not more than a token cushion or a wall to lean against, one moves on having witnessed a fragment only. Of course a fragment does carry the integrity of the whole but it is a little like cutting out one of Cezanne's apples, there is not the satisfaction of an entity. That is part of the medium's withholding, (sadism I want to say), and its unique expression. Some works are too long like Douglas Gordon's Twenty-four Hour Pyscho', or Matthew Barney's ‘Crewmaster' series, but mostly there is unstructured ambiguity or repetition, without narrative. Marcel Broodthaler's ‘One Second of Eternity', a perfect if extreme example with, as I now discover, simply his signature initials O. M. flashing. Certainly this art of projection does reflect a lot that our collective lives have morphed into, being bound to our laptops day and night. In the museum shop I buy a Robert Crumb postcard of a trailer trashy lout at a computer: ‘How did I ever live without this thing'.
