A Room of Its Own: Screening Space and Spectatorial Experience in Yang Fudong's Fifth Night and Omer Fast's Continuity

Museum-going, for me, is an edifying, occasionally electrifying experience, yet hardly ever capable of transporting me nearly so rapturously as my favorite films projected on big screen at cinema. When visiting a gallery or museum I instinctively gravitate to film and video installations (or, if those are not to be found, photography) rather than canvases and sculptures. Whereas contemporary film debates center around celluloid versus digital projection and movie-going versus home theatre, screen media exhibited in gallery spaces has become an accepted staple of contemporary art scene and may well constitute a last refuge for art film to be projected publicly. Nonetheless, as even casual museumgoer knows, our practice of watching, in teatro, a film in its entirety from beginning to end is by no means standard practice when viewing moving-image media in a gallery space. The more fitting analogy would be to movie-going of a bygone era, when screening programs comprised multiple short features and patrons drifted freely in and out, (a practice that Alfred Hitchcock definitively put a halt to with his mandate that no one be allowed into theatres showing Psycho [1960] after it had begun). As a way of thinking through relation between visual art and screen media and their respective curatorial and spectatorial practices, I will explore single pieces by two contemporary film and video artists of international note, Yang Fudong and Omer Fast, that themselves foreground temporal-spatial considerations in conceiving, exhibiting, and experiencing gallery-installed works of screen media. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Too rarely does one encounter a gallery-installed film or video work that seems ideally viewed within that forum, let alone works for which a meaningful experience necessitates precisely this spectatorial situation. Chinese-born, Shanghai-based Yang's Fifth Night (2010) is an example of such a work, and an exemplar of how rich an encounter with such a work can be. At a mere 10 minutes 37 seconds, it is certainly temporally convenient for gallery-goer. Far more significant, however, is Yang's accomplishment in creating a work with spatial and spectatorial requirements that a traditional cinema with its single screen and fixed seating would be ill-equipped to provide. So I could review piece to write this essay, Yang's U.S. gallery, Marian Goodman New York, generously sent me a screener of Fifth Night compiled as seven HD video files; viewing these sequentially on my laptop screen made for a far more stilted, less transporting experience than I'd enjoyed during my initial encounter with work at Vancouver Art Gallery. In that venue, Fifth Night was projected on seven separate but aligned, theatre-sized screens stretching along one wall of a cavernous rectangular space, enclosed and sufficiently dark that film's black and white images shimmered. Like this spatial configuration, title of piece places us in a dream space, the fifth stage in sleep cycle [being] a period when dreams are particularly lucid, a veritable magic hour for sleepers. (1) Movie-going, long compared to dreaming, is also conjured by film's production design and aesthetic qualities--shooting on backlot of a Shanghai film studio haphazardly filled with artificial-looking sets and stray props, in chiaroscuro tones of elegant epics, Yang clearly alludes to Shanghai's golden age of film production in 1930s. (The number 1936 appears prominently on a building's facade.) Reminiscent of uncanny quality of photographer Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) and of filmmaker Guy Maddin's evocative use of silent cinema-era techniques, Fifth Night presents itself both as paean to and parody of classical cinema both of China and of West. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Narratively, on any given screen, virtually nothing happens. A young man in a white undershirt flecked with what looks like bloodstains walks in a daze through a city plaza at night; two wide-eyed young men in neat but worn suits, struggling under weight of suitcases, gaze about despondently; a demure-looking young woman in a flowered dress wanders amid rickshaws and horse-drawn carriages that cross square diagonally. …

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