On Mondloch’s Screens

I just finished reading UO colleague Kate Mondloch’s excellent new book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010, from the thoroughly excellent Electronic Mediations series); and while I’m not ready to thoroughly review it, I do want to take a moment to log a few brief thoughts.

It is clear within the first few pages that, though the focus is on artworks produced for, and installed in, gallery spaces, Screens is extremely important for any scholar who wishes to examine video games as media objects. Lacking a background in art history, I cannot evaluate the book with regard to that particular field. Happily, this work’s relevance clearly extends well beyond the art historical world. From the introduction:

The underlying proposition of Screens is that present day viewers are, quite literally, “screen subjects.” With this in mind, the book analyzes how certain artworks (re)materialize the neglected circuit between bodies and screens and, in so doing, posit alternate engagements with contemporary media technologies. In what is arguably our “society of the screen,” there can be no definitive external position from which to assess the conditions of media spectatorship. (xxi)

Heady stuff indeed. Key figures in Mondloch’s theoretical framework include Friedberg, Lacan, Deleuze, and Baudrillard, to name a few. The theories at work are complex, and the goal (if you’ll pardon my reductive paraphrasing) is to figure out no less than who, where, and when you are vis-à-vis the media screen. I’m trying to say that it’s ambitious; and my initial reaction is that it delivers the goods.

I want to give it another read before I write more about it, so for now I’ll leave off with this amazing passage, in which Mondloch quotes from Jonathan Crary’s Eclipse of the Spectacle:

“We must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer,” Crary argues, “and realize that this circuit is the site of a latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium.” (96)

Love it. More on this later.