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Installation at the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis, 1996       Angels Mediator Screen for the Careless Art Historian Janson’s Screen Media88 Battlescreen White on White
Art Historical Topologies
Richard Vinograd

Among many kinds of reproduction, art history has had an especially strong investment in projections on screens, as pedagogical technology and in ideological terms. We most often treat screens as transparencies, to look through, but they are also, of course, concealing barriers and filters, and like pictures in that doubleness. Screens are also tabulae rasae, discomforting vacancies to be filled up or projected onto. Projections onto screens can be a kind of mapping, a re-placement into altered configurations; they are also replacements for emptinesses, which seem to penetrate and thereby cancel the concealments of screens. Like psychological projections, screen projections are cast onto a seemingly objective surface out there, away from the subject to a distanced site. Screen projections are also kinds of
ex-plane-ations, which despite their illusions of plasticity and penetration, end up as planar surfaces, with accompanying auras of legibility and explanatory effect.
Reproductions are intrinsically replacements, which combined with the re-placements of planar projection and the extreme displacements of cultural and historical formations in a standard slide presentation suggest an operation in a kind of hyper-space trebly removed from originality. Art historians, though exquisitely attuned to the subtlest nuances of artist-medium interaction, have been often inattentive to the qualities of the major vehicle of art-historical practice. To the unhabituated outsider, art historians still must seem chiefly distinguishable from others who commit academic acts as purveyors of magic-lantern show, apparitions in dark spaces.
Art Bulletin December 1994 LXXVI Number 4