Liminal Spaces at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, Thesis exhibition and text by Casandra Coblentz

New York based artist, Julianne Swartz, works mainly in sculptural installations that explore the materiality of light and translate the mechanics of the camera into a physical and spatial form that engages with specific architectural contexts. Her work activates layers of reception and interpretation. Swartz creates delicate images by transmitting events (arrangements of tactile objects, reflective tinsel, and fans) from one location to another; using light, lenses, and fiber-optic cables. Her use of the term "event" shows her reluctance to limit the work to material form alone. Objects in a non-disclosed space are transmitted as visual images to a different space in the gallery. Because her work investigates how images and light are transferred between spaces or locations, she makes such processes, invisible in our technological culture, newly palpable and experiential in the artistic sphere. In each of her installations Swartz places the traditional gallery space and a visually concealed space in a dynamic interaction. This structure reflects Swartz's interest in proposing a different kind of relationship to the traditional between viewer and work of art.

Presence in front of an image is a key component of Julianne Swartz's work. Swartz uses the architectural container of the museum building itself as both a camera and a screen. In this way she subverts traditional behavioral expectations of the spectator in their perception of actual space as apposed to represented space. In Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media Beatriz Colomina writes: "When we speak about representation we speak about subject and object. Traditional architecture is considered as an object, a bounded, unified entity established in opposition to a subject that is presumed to have an existence independent of it." Swartz takes a different position on the relationships between subject and object. She subverts the traditional distinction of an autonomous subject and art object by creating installations that consist of three distinct aspects that function to create a cohesive project that reorganizes conventional boundaries of time and space, challenging viewers' subjective experience of their presence in relation to the images they perceive.

Swartz refers to the first component as the event. The event is an arrangement of objects such as reflective pinwheels, tinsel, fans and light. The event is usually located in a non- disclosed space such as a closet, and is always moving and changing in order to produce the illusion of a moving image. The fans create a movement of air that effects the tinsel and pinwheels, which in turn create pulsating, flickering light. This light is picked up by a lens, which is embedded in the gallery wall. The lens focuses the light and the image on to sheet of frosted glass that hangs on transparent thread in front of the lens in the wall. This has the effect of a camera obscura capturing an upside-down image of the event on the other side of the wall onto a screen in the conventional gallery.

The fact that Swartz refers to the arrangement of objects as an event is significant because it suggests something happening in time. The event is the action of the objects moving that is then captured by the lens. Like a camera the lens picks up the image it is focused on, however, unlike a camera, the image is never suspended in time, interrupted or edited by any mechanical device. The image seen is simply the transference of objects reflected onto a glass surface, and is constantly moving, changing. The image looks deceptively like a film image on a screen. The glass "screen" is a smooth, matte surface that can be at first mistaken for a computer or film screen. Only upon closer examination does it become clear that the image has not been filmed. This allusion to the media screen is deliberate, as it provokes the same sense of visual pleasure we often experience viewing glossy high-tech graphics or images on a film screen.

The image also depicts space and is a spatially or sculpturally provided image. It takes viewers a moment to realize that the image on the surface of the glass is an inverse image of the space on the other side of the wall. The space on the other side of the wall is translated from three-dimensional space into a two dimensional image. By drawing the process out in the gallery space, Swartz illustrates how a camera manipulates and transforms perception of space. She actualizes in space the movement of an image through space and its metamorphosis in the photograph or film. In this way she activates the liminal passage of three dimensionality of an object or space as it is transformed to a two-dimensional image. In this way the wall or the building itself acts as the body of the camera, encasing the mechanics of image production inside of it.

The third component of Swartz's work is a fiber-optic cable that runs from the event to another part of the gallery space. A lens picks up light pulsations from the event and focuses the light into a fiber optic cable instead of on a glass surface. Swartz distresses the cable so the light, which would normally shoot through it is reflected out and can be see moving through the cable. The cable ultimately focuses pulses of light on a wall creating a small circle of white light. The use of the fiber optic cable to transport light in the space of the art gallery takes on a symbolic value. The fiber optic cable is an essential tool of media and communication. It functions to transmit codes of ones and zeros via incredibly fast pulses of light allowing for internet and telephone communication that we are so reliant on today. By distressing the cable, Swartz slows the transmission of light, but allows her viewers to see the light moving through the plastic casing of the cable. This alerts viewers to the process of transmission through space that the fiber optic cable makes possible. By making the cable and its functioning visible, Swartz calls attention to the faith we have in this technology, as well as to how little we think about what actually happens when we talk on the phone or send an email. The speed and efficiency of this process of transference is often beyond our scope of understanding, or experience; it is too fast and abstract.

Swartz's work provokes an awareness of this transference across space by ensuring that viewers are able to discover the event behind the wall. At the Center for Curatorial Studies the installation is executed in four areas. Behind all of the gallery walls there is an empty, narrow space. In the galleries of this exhibition, there are four slatted doors that provide entryway to these spaces behind the walls. In each one Swartz draws her viewer's attention to unique events in different ways. The slatted wood doors allow for some visual access to these spaces. By lighting the areas behind the slatted doors it is possible to see the events happening. Swartz will also prop two of these doors open and position mirrors to facilitate better viewing of the event. The type of lens Swartz selects for each installation contributes to the appearance of depth in the image as it appears on the screen. The lens can give the illusion that the event on the other side of the wall is closer or farther away from the screen. This provides a play on space that can be disorienting as the illusion of space and depth that appears on the surface of the screen can be different from the actual space it is possible to observe by looking directly at the event.

The first installation is done behind a large back gallery wall. The glass screen hangs centered on the wall. It is a fairly large piece of glass, the size of an average television screen. The gallery is slightly darkened so that the glow of light from the event behind the wall appears on the surface of the screen to be bright and vibrant. The corridor behind the wall is long, stretching along the entire length of the 40 foot wall. The slatted door, which provides access to this normally hidden space, is propped open. There is a small corner that viewers would have to peak around to be able to see the event. She placed one mirror in this corner providing access to the event by looking behind the door. Viewers are able to step into this space but will not have access to walk back directly to the location of the event. When they do step into the space their image appears on the "screen". Their image appears inverted on the screen, which allows viewers to realize the mechanisms involved.

In the other large gallery Swartz has created another installation behind the long wall. This installation is projected onto a small piece of glass that will not be centered on the wall but is more discreet and subtle that the installation in the first gallery. It is also smaller in size and will play with the scale of the gallery space as well as the depth of the space behind the wall. Swartz will also use a mirror to facilitate viewing of this event. The smaller screen will be positioned according to the other installations in this gallery, lower to the ground than the other installations.

Each component of this installation provides multiple vantage points and organizes various relationships between the image on the screen and the architectural structure, which is dependant on the technology of photography. Swartz's use of photographic mechanisms can be thought of in terms of historical understandings of the influences of photography on social conceptions of space. For (Beatriz) Colomina, an idea of space put forth by the development of photography has a direct relationship to the ways in which space is experienced in architecture. She writes: "Photography does for architecture what the railway did for the cities," that is, it transforms the world in to a commodity that can be transported and consumed by the masses. In discussing the explicit relationship between architecture and photography, physical limits become fluid, and points of departure and arrival are understood in terms of presence and absence. Swartz's installation articulates this relationship in sculptural and experiential terms. She uses the building itself to call attention to the ways in which the photograph frames our view of space and our understanding of spatial dynamics and communication technologies.

In all of her work, Swartz provokes a consciousness of perceptual processing on the part of the viewer. Moving the artwork through the barrier of the architecture that delineates the exhibition space, Swartz exposes her viewers to an area of the museum they would otherwise never have access to. This gesture acts as a subtle subversion of the power dynamic in traditional museum display that is often critiqued. By calling attention to our own perceptual processing Swartz challenges our typically unconscious experience of processing and receiving information in our daily interactions with media and communication. She draws out spatially the moment of discovery, the moment when we realize that a transference or transformation has taken place. This moment is a heightened kind lag between two states, the transition takes place in time and space and we process the work accordingly. The materials and techniques Swartz employs gives shape to a liminal experience so that perception can be located in space.

For Jonathan Crary in his recent book, Suspensions of Perception, Attention Spectacle and Modern Culture, contemporary modes of perception are largely influence by what he characterizes as a problem of conscious attention that arises in the nineteenth century with the advent of new technologies, such as photography and early forms of cinema that rely on a conceptualization of the perceptual experience as situated in an individual body. He argues for an understanding of perception that is necessarily durational as a process of actively processing and assessing information. Crary explains that in the nineteenth century knowledge about the behavior and makeup of the contemporary subject, both psychological and physiological, developed "alongside the emergence of new technological forms of spectacle, display, projection, attraction and recording." Crary is interested in the problem of attention because it allows for an exploration of perception that is not confined by questions of opticality, but addresses a broad range of social, philosophical and aesthetic issues. He uses the term "perception" because he feels it allows him to deal with a subject that can be defined beyond the single sense modality of sight. According to Crary the subject is more than just a spectator; a subject is an individual that is strategically defined by operations of power. The history of this perceiving subject can be traced back to the position of subjectivity Crary defines in relation to the camera obscura.

The mechanisms Swartz employs are modeled on the camera obscura. In Techniques of the Observer Crary states "it has been known that for at least two thousand years that when light passes through a small hole into a dark, enclosed interior, an inverted image will appear on the wall opposite the hole." Crary describes a shift in the subject position that occurred with the proliferation of the camera obscura. It became clear that the camera obscura transcended the "idea that optical device and observer are two distinct entities, that the identity of the observer exists independently from the optical device that is a physical piece of technical equipment." Swartz explicitly draws out this integrated subjective experience of perception and mechanism. For Swartz the artwork is more than just the image, but also the temporal experience of perception and cognition. The work can thus be read as functioning similarly to the camera obscura. Crary states that "the camera obscura is what Gilles Deluze would call an assemblage, something that is 'simultaneously and inseparably a mechanic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation,' an object about which something is said and at the same time an object that is used."

In Corridor Transfer 2 Swartz will install an event behind one of the slatted doors. Although the door to this space will remain closed, it will be brightly lit and therefore possible to view without opening the door. From this space Swartz will not transfer the image of the event onto glass but into a fiber optic cable. A lens is positioned between the event and the end of a fiber-optic cable. The lens serves to focus the light into the fiber-optic cable. The cable will run out from the closet space, around a corner, along the gallery wall. It will end in a gap between two edges of the wall. This gap is an obscure architectural detail of the gallery. Primarily a white cube space, the museum is separated out into six gallery spaces. There are three gallery spaces on each side of the building. These three spaces are separated by a wall that does not touch the exterior wall, but leaves a gap of approximately six inches between the two perpendicular planes of the walls. It is this in between space that Swartz wishes to occupy with her work. The light will be projected through the fiber optic cable, onto the surface of the end of the wall, creating a small circle of light that pulsates according to the movement of the event in the other room.

Swartz's work seems to push against a conception of the museum as a ridged fixed space, disregarding the boundaries of walls in some cases and calling attention to their status as boundaries in others. The fiber-optic component draws out in space different functions of walls, moving from inside of one wall out into the gallery to call attention to the walls that mark off the space of the exhibition. It becomes impossible to define exactly where the inside stops and the outside begins. The boundaries between inside and outside are blurred, the boundaries operate as liminal spaces. This is done carefully so as to refer viewers to their own awareness of these boundaries.

By activating the in between, Swartz makes the notion of liminality less abstract and more tangible. However there is a tension in this because while the transference does allow viewers to put the pieces together, this is not instantly or necessarily easily done. Swartz wants to provoke a moment of confusion, of disorientation; this is a moment of lag in understanding the transmissions she creates. It is this lag that allows for the possibility for awareness, where viewers are given an opportunity to reflect on how they perceive the world. Experiencing her work is different from perceiving media in the world outside of the gallery. Swartz's spatialization of the liminal articulates how difficult it is to give form to the to the transitions between surfaces.

Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media,, 14 Ibid., 47. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, Attention Spectacle and Modern Culture, 2. Ibid.,pg4. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge: MIT Press,1992, 27. ibid., 30-31.