The Black Box Experience

Museum visitors who find the Black Box experience jilting from the white gallery walls of contemporary art spaces might find comfort in the knowledge that it is only human to be completely blind and confused upon entering the space.

Video art often finds its home in museum spaces in what is called the "black box," a permanent or temporary enclosed space with black walls to facilitate screenings, projections or videos. The name "Black box" comes from the tendency of modern and contemporary art galleries and museums to have completely white (or eggshell white if you prefer) walls in a space stripped of decor or ornament, referred to as a white box. So your black box often appears in a white box!



After spending sometime with an outdoor sculpture which will feature in tomorrow's gallery talk I was refreshed and revitalized with the warm and bright afternoon Chicago sun. On my way back to my desk I decided to view Pierre Huyghe's Les Grandes Ensembles (The Housing Projects), a work that had been up for a few weeks but one I hadn't had the chance to see it yet. I opened the door and turned the corner only to find myself blinded by darkness. My senseless eyes, not having the time to readjust to the light from having been outside, forced me to feel along the walls in the terror that I might accidentally grope an unsuspecting visitor. When I thought I had finally reached the black box area I stood and watched for a while. I could only hear the sounds of lo-fi electro music pumping away as the soundtrack. After a while I wondered why the video had not started or if the black screen for several minutes was part of the experience. A sudden light from the corner of my eye revealed that I had been staring face to face with one of the walls of the black box. I hadn't even made it around the corner.

My vision finally adjusted around the second loop of the film. The subject is almost fitting to the experience of my retinal rods lazily stretching their limbs in no hurry to come to my aid. One sees two buildings. The time is presumably dusk and the cityscape is stark, almost bleak. As the electronic music pumps louder and stronger lights flicker across the windows looking like a time-lapsed film. The setting is devoid of human forms, we have only the on/off of interior lights as an index to the human activity within. The whole film takes place in the dark at night. We follow from dusk til dawn (it was dawn that, appropriately enough, let me see the light--cue Sunday hymn) and the bustling of the goings-on inside the two buildings. We can only wonder as to what the night brought each of the building's inhabitants. The wind blows and rocks one of the trees at its trunk. One comes to realize that these aren't buildings at all but small models the artist has built and wired to give the flickering light patterns that dance up and down each story of the building.

In a way, the fact that no human figures are present in a film where for a good part we believe we are watching traces of their activity is fitting to the black box experience. Always a box, always black and always with the volume turned up, it cuts off all other visual stimulation to focus our vision and hearing on the piece at hand. It takes over our entire sensory experience. People spend more time with video pieces (if they chose to enter the black box) than with any other work they will have encountered in the museum. They want to see it through to the end. Maybe watch it again. The black box triggers the cinematic experience in us so we watch to see it from the beginning and sshhhh--! no talking! Our traces and activity are silenced like the figures in the film. We want to know what the people in the buildings are doing but not bump into, touch, hear or be aware of the humans around us--something one can never experience in the white box.

While I couldn't find a copy on YouTube, here are some stills.