Sirens in New Pitches: Immersive Art and Violence

Matthew Barney, SECONDARY: commencement (installation view) (2024). Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects. Photo: Joshua White.

In writing for The New Yorker about the persistent bathos of immersive exhibitions proliferating across institutions in recent years, tech correspondent Anna Wiener cites art historian Janet Kraynak’s observation that “rather than being replaced by the internet, [the museum] is increasingly being reconfigured after it.”¹ Visitors become “users” in multisensory interactive spaces that are often “pleasurable” and “nonconfrontational” despite their aim to cultivate experiential intensity.² From erecting Instagrammable Gustav Klimt and Frida Kahlo experiences to enveloping light and sound environments like Random International’s Rain Room (2012), art institutions, many have recently argued, are curating content that reinforces a status quo of passive consumption, rather than serving as instigators of deep thought and reflection.³

Immersive art exists on a continuum but generally provides visitors with a nonlinear, multisensory experience. It is also historically contingent: TVs were once considered an immersive form of media, as they for the first time synchronized video with sound in people’s homes. In fact, the current lamentation that these types of immersive art exhibitions create passive, coddling experiences for the viewer recalls a famous insight by media theorist Mary Anne Doane about the mediated deflation of violence through live, onscreen news broadcasts. In her 2000 essay “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” Doane highlights the paradoxical impact of the immediacy and intensity of 24-hour live news coverage. This media can simultaneously create a sense of urgency—a feeling that crisis is everywhere, always—and a sense of detachment—a feeling of removal from violence—the way one might block out a droning siren if it plays for long enough.⁴

At its best, immersive art does not allay the siren but presents it in a new pitch. And while immersive art experiences may bring up questions of passive engagement, they also hold the potential to radically reframe a viewer’s perspective on the subjects they present. As exhibitions critiqued as cash cows on the content farm have proliferated, so too have presentations of immersive works that grate against expectations, attuning viewers to the shaping potential of immersive media. As writer and critic Chris FiteWassilak has noted, an immersive installation positions the viewer as a character within its world—a character either warmly ensconced in its environment or stuck within it, unmoored from the familiar.⁵

Some of the most striking recent examples return to the central problem of placation Doane wrote about 24 years ago, asking viewers to think about violence and media, and how the media through which information is communicated ultimately shapes the viewer’s experience of it. In the last year alone, several exhibitions across Los Angeles played with these ideas of violence and mediation via immersive installations, whether through the overt representation of violent events, as in Gretchen Bender’s recently closed exhibition at Sprüth Magers, or via indirect interpretations, as in recent shows by Matthew Barney and Paul Pfeiffer. Subject matter is estranged in all of these artists’ work. By sidelining visuality (Pfeiffer), disrupting narrative legibility (Bender), or protracting a violent event to the point of surreality (Barney), these shows addressed issues of immersion and mediation directly, engaging the viewer to think critically about what violence is and how it is represented, thereby resisting the numbing effect Doane described.

Matthew Barney’s five-channel video work SECONDARY (2023), on view at Regen Projects this summer, addressed the visual culture of a certain kind of violence—that of the sports arena—that is deeply ingrained in American culture. The work represents an infamous moment in American football history: the 1978 collision between Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum and New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley during a preseason game. Tatum’s hit severely injured Stingley’s spinal cord, severely and permanently affecting the 26-year-old’s mobility. Although the hit was ceaselessly replayed in media coverage, its representation appears only during the final stretch of Barney’s hour-long film. Most of the work depicts choreographed actors and dancers exaggerating the various elements of the scene that received less media attention—the players, the coaches, the fans—into absurdity on a turf field inside an industrial building. Dressed like Raiders and Patriots players, the slow-moving dancers mimic recognizable but enigmatic football-related movements while interacting nonsensically with substances like dirt, aluminum, and malleable polymers. Meanwhile, riotous Raiders fans are adorned in KISS-like makeup. Barney immerses viewers in a prolonged state of suspense, delaying the depiction of the central event for nearly 45 minutes.

In the installation at Regen Projects, a screen demanded attention everywhere you looked. Each corner of the gallery’s ceiling featured a mounted screen, angled like those in a sports bar, and the center of the room featured a four-sided video screen resembling a jumbotron. Barney thus recreated the communal feeling of watching a game, either at the stadium or the bar. This mise-en-scène worked to counteract the potentially isolating, fragmented experience of individual immersion within the exhibition. Beneath stadium lights, a massive red, blue, and orange rug spread across the floor—it resembled an astroturf field but was accented with abstract shapes, including converging diagonal lines that met a lozenge shape near the center. Immersed within this arena-like space, visitors were left to wander from screen to screen, watching the cast of football players digging through mud, moving slowly through dance and calisthenics as though haunted by some unseen force. The videos on the various monitors would sometimes sync with one another, offering focal points within the installation, but more often, they offered differing perspectives on the characters. Trying to piece together the narrative threads across each character’s disturbing performance was frustrating and unsettling, in stark contrast to the immediate legibility, slow-motion replays, and ample commentary offered on channels like ESPN.

Sports coverage resembles Doane’s theory about how violence translates via the 24-hour news cycle, imposing narrative structure and creating urgency through endless replays and commentary. Instead of dulling the impact of Tingley’s violent injury through visual repetition, Barney intensifies its psychological, emotional, and physical elements, making viewers acutely feel the unnerving qualities of the violence. Gallery attendees even stood on the same rug that served as the set piece for the choreography. Barney reinfuses the disturbing elements of this violent sport, transforming it from commonplace entertainment into a deeply unmooring recreation.

Paul Pfeiffer, The Saints (installation view) (2007). Seventeen-channel sound installation; two-channel video loop projection (color, silent); single-screen video loop (black-and-white, silent); and LCD monitor; 31 minutes and 19 seconds. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2023–24. Image courtesy of the artist; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Similarly addressing sports culture and the media, Paul Pfeiffer’s immersive installation The Saints (2007), recently on view at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), dominated the space with the intense, almost belligerent roar of a crowd, enveloping viewers in a soundscape of collective emotions that oscillated between excitement and aggression. Presented in a cordoned-off section of the Geffen’s gallery space with stark white walls and alienating bright light, the work offered viewers minimal visual cues. Instead, it enveloped them in an intense, 17-channel audio installation of a screaming crowd that was loud enough to make the ground shake, making the experience haptic as well as aural. The overwhelming soundscape replicated the intense nature of communal fervor, creating a sense of unease and disorientation. The minimal visual cue—one small screen on the gallery’s anterior wall showing black-and-white footage of a soccer match—felt like a footnote. It anchored the experience of the space to a historical event while allowing the assaulting audio to remain as the central medium of the installation. 12 The immersive emphasis of sound over image disrupts our passive consumption of the often-violent spectacle of sports by foregrounding the visceral impact of collective emotion, akin to the active experience of the clamor of a sports event: Pfeiffer uses the immersive environment to allow viewers to feel what it’s like to be a player on the field. Still, by emptying the installation of both spectacle and imagery, the echoing roar of the crowd took on an ominous tone. By highlighting the aural over image, Pfeiffer taps into a sense of communal joy and aggression—the crowd as both a generative and constricting force.

To create The Saints, Pfeiffer, who is of Filipino descent, orchestrated screenings of the 1966 World Cup final in Manila, instructing the local audience to chant and cheer. Their reactions were mixed into high-fidelity surround sound that mimics support of England over Germany. Behind a back wall at MOCA, a discrete 2-channel video projection revealed the original game alongside scenes of the passionate Manila audience. In some, they stand in a dimly lit interior, creating a subtle disjunction between their performed excitement and the genuine emotions on their faces—a nuance only discernible to those attuned to the production process. Pfeiffer’s work operates on two levels: first immersing us in the overwhelming power of collective emotion with its inherent terror and potential for violence; and second, guiding us to reflect on the production of such media spectacles and the potentially sinister forces at play.

The immersive environment, here, was anything but calming; it instead invited critical reflection on power dynamics, agency, and the blurred lines between participation and spectatorship in collective experiences. The porous boundary between communal joy and mob-like aggression expressed within the soundscape is often felt at sporting events, which sometimes turn violent and even deadly. By immersing the audience in this unsettling atmosphere, The Saints exposes the latent violence within seemingly celebratory communal events. The visitor, stuck in an auditory barrage that simulates the intensity of mob-like atmospheres, is the central figure in this tumultuous sonic environment, akin to players who stand amidst a stadium’s uproar.

While not focused on the spectacle of sports like Pfeiffer and Barney, Gretchen Bender’s exhibition The Perversion of the Visual, on view this summer at Sprüth Magers, focused on the ways that corporatized mass media inoculates viewers against the gravity of violence, as if directly engaging Doane’s idea about the constant drone of televised information. Dumping Core (1984) engages the viewer’s senses of sight, sound, and physical presence in a dark space filled with 13 cathode-ray television sets stacked on top of one another to form a glowing wall. This setup environmentally rendered the unsettling experience of watching TV, where real-world horrors and violent events are shown alongside frivolous imagery and corporate logos. Bender’s visuals shift from ABC or AT&T logos to news footage of military violence to computer-generated, abstract graphics created by Amber Denker in collaboration with the artist (of quasi-geometric forms, distorted faces, rotating dice, splitting cells, and flashing stars). By blending real war imagery with advertising and corporate symbols, Bender underscores the unsettling nature of media consumption, where the serious and the trivial are presented side by side. She adds playful animations to this mix, bringing the gravity of news media into a surreal, experiential terrain and thus pointing out the medium’s absurdity.

By immersing the viewer in this environment, Bender asks us to confront the unsettling reality of our daily media consumption, where the reality of violence is often masked by the glossy veneer of corporate and ancillary imagery. Bender’s MTV-like editing style delivers a maximalist visual experience. Her rapid, abrasive cuts and sweeping neon graphics cultivate an almost claustrophobic sense of ceaseless energy. Further, her soundtrack features gunshots interspersed with glimmering synth music. It feels as though violence were ventriloquized by the form of the installation—its abrasive sounds and visuals—rather than expressed narratively, as we so often experience when watching television. Bender therefore opts to express some of the shock and overstimulation that attends a violent encounter abstractly, making the brief images of actual violence—mangled or dead bodies—profoundly more striking than they would be on the televised news. These aesthetic decisions also underscore viewers’ distance from the lived reality of the violence appearing onscreen: We will likely never understand the experiences depicted by war correspondents across the globe, an impossibility embraced rather than resisted by Bender. For Bender, we ultimately cannot access violence felt by others, neither to empathize with its victims nor to normalize it via continual exposure.

A central issue of our current media landscape, nearly a quarter-century after Doane accounted for hers, is the growing indistinction between reality and its representations. Beyond the constant stream of live news broadcasts, the internet and social media have become even more totalizing forces that structure our daily lives. Now, life can feel as much like a movie (or a meme) as a movie can feel like life. The boundary between the real and the represented is slippery, uniquely positioning artists who create immersive environments to coax visitors into atmospheres distinct from their lived realities, ultimately revealing the constructs of the media itself. These interventions are particularly poignant when addressing violence, which we often experience in isolation, watching alone on our devices. Artists like Barney, Pfeiffer, and Bender use immersive techniques not to placate, but to challenge their audiences, confronting them with the mediated nature of violence and the complexities of collective emotion. As our lives become increasingly mediated, we will need more experiences that punctuate the unyielding drone of information.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 37.

Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core (installation view) (1984). Four-channel video with color and sound on thirteen monitors, 15 minutes and 21 seconds. © 2024 Estate of Gretchen Bender. Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of Sprüth Magers. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Isabella Miller lives and works in Los Angeles.

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