Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism Rosalind Krauss October, Vol. 1. (Spring, 1976), pp. 50-64. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870%28197621%291%3C50%3AVTAON%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8 October is currently published by The MIT Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Mon Jan 22 19:34:29 2007 Video: T h e Aesthetics of Narcissism ROSALIND KRAUSS It was a commonplace of criticism in the 1960s that a strict application of symmetry allowed a painter "to point to the center of the canvas" and, in so doing, to invoke the internal structure of the picture-object. Thus "pointing to the center" was made to serve as one of the many blocks in that intricately constructed arch by which the criticism of the last decade sought to connect art to ethics through the "aesthetics of acknowledgement." But what does it mean to point to the center of a t.v. screen? In a way that is surely conditioned by the attitudes of Pop Art, artists' video is largely involved in parodying the critical terms of abstraction. Thus when Vito Acconci makes a video tape called Centers (1971), what he does is literalize the critical notion of 'pointing' by filming himself pointing to the center of a television monitor, a gesture he sustains for the 20-minute running time of the work. The parodistic quality of Acconci's gesture, with its obvious debt to Duchampian irony, is clearly intended to disrupt and dispense with an entire critical tradition. It is meant to render nonsensical a critical engagement with the formal properties of a work, or indeed, a genre of works-such as 'video'. The kind of criticism Centers attacks is obviously one that takes seriously the formal qualities of a work, or tries to assay the particular logic of a given medium. And yet, by its very mis-en-sctne, Centers typifies the structural characteristics of the video medium. For Centers was made by Acconci's using the video monitor as a mirror. As we look at the artist sighting along his outstretched arm and forefinger towards the center of the screen we are watching, what we see is a sustained tautology: a line of sight that begins at Acconci's plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projecteddouble. In that image of self-regard is configured a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre. Yet, what would it mean to say, "The medium of video is narcissism? " For one thing, that remark tends to open up a rift between the nature of video and that of the other visual arts. Because that statement describes a psychological rather than a physical condition; and while we are accustomed to thinking of psychological states as the possible subject of works of art, we do not think of V i t o Acconci. Centers. 1971. (Photo: Kathy Dillon.) [...].. .Video: T h e Aesthetics of Narcissism a double repression: for through it consciousness of temporality and of separation between subject and object are simultaneously submerged The result of this submergence is, for the maker and the viewer of most video-art, a kind of weightless fall through the suspended space of narcissism There are, of course, a complex set of answers to the question of why... But the condition of these works is to acknowledge as separate the two surfaces on which the image is held -the one the viewer's body, the other the wall-and to make them register as absolutely distinct It is in this distinction that the wall-surface -the pictorial surface-is understood as a n absolute Other, as part of the world of objects external to the self Further, it is to specify that the mode of. .. contains the projector Inside the room, the viewer is out of the range of the camera and therefore nothing appears on the wall-surface It is only as he leaves the room, or rather is poised at the threshhold of the doorway that he is both illumined enough and far enough into the focal range of the camera to register as an image Since that image projects onto the very wall through which the doorway leads, the. .. been performing the actions recorded on the tape, from within the coils of the camera/ monitor circuit, breaks through the parenthetical closure of the feedback situation to face the camera directly-without the agency of the monitor's rolling image If it is the paired movement of the video scan and the tape-reel that is isolated as a physical object in Vertical Roll, it is the stasis of the wall-plane... triangular field of the works, the viewer sees nothing but the large, luminous plane of one of the walls in a darkenedroom Only when he moves into the range of the camera is he able to realize an image (his own) projected onto the wall's pictorial field However, the conditions of seeing that image are rather special in both m e m and dor In the latter the camera is placed in the hallway leading to the room... forced to enter the video situation, and where that time is understood as a propulsion towards an end In this work access to a sense of time has come from fouling the stability of the projected image by de-synchronizing the frequencies of the signals on camera and monitor The rhythmic roll of the image, as the bottom of its frame scans upward to hit the top of the screen, causes a sense of decomposition... only parallel to the plane of the illusion, but continuous with it His body is therefore both the substance of the image and, as well, the slightly displaced substance of the plane onto which the image is projected In m e m both camera and projector are to one side of the wall-plane, stationed in such a way that the range of the camera encompasses a very thin corridor-like OCTOBER slice of space that... which Video: T h e Aesthetics of Narcissism 61 the zoom is included as one possibility) or by cutting And while it is true that Jonas has had to use these techniques in making Vertical Roll, the constant sweep of the image renders these movements invisible That is, the grammar of the camera is eroded by the dislocating grip of the roll As I have said, the illusion this creates is one of a continuous dissolve... video as a body centered between the parenthesis of camera and monitor Due to Vertical Roll's visual reference through the monitor's action to the physical reality of the tape, one side of this parenthesis is made more active than the other T h e monitor side of the double bracket becomes a reel through which one feels prefigured the imminence of a goal or terminus for the motion That end is reached... against the grain of those 525 lines of which the video picture is made Because one recognizes it as intended, the vertical roll appears as the agency of a will that runs counter to an electronically stabilized condition Through the effect of its constant wiping away of the image, one has a sense of a reflexive relation to the video grid and the ground or support for what happens to the image Out of this . tapes are another example of the double effect of the Vito Acconci. Air Time. 1973. 55 Video: T h e Aesthetics of Narcissism performance-for -the monitor others, the revivification of the pathogenic conflict and the overcoming of the resistance due to the repressions, cannot be effected with them. They