Attention, please. Negotiating Concentration and Distraction around 1970

Abstract

As has often been pointed out, museums and galleries have come to accommodate an ever growing number of moving image artworks in the past two decades. Contrasting the viewing conditions of conventional cinema and exhibition spaces, commentators have tended to emphasize the spatial parameters of installation works that allow the visitor to stroll freely, while spectatorship in the film-theatre traditionally means being fixed to your seat. This article suggests a reevaluation of this constellation by focusing on the different temporal protocols and regimes that the movie theater and exhibition spaces imply. Building on an essay by Georg Simmel and Peter Osborne’s concept of “distracted reception”, art exhibitions are characterized as places that confront the visitor with a multitude of options and synchronous stimuli, whereas the architecture of the film-theater provides, as Hollis Frampton claimed in 1968, “the only place left in our culture intended entirely for concentrated exercise of one, or at most two, of our senses”. Revisiting one of the canonical moments in the prehistory of “Artists’ Film”, the article investigates the early 1970s when Expanded Cinema and Structural Film suggested new answers to the question of concentration and distraction.