Learning to Look Again—Challenging Spectatorship in Cinematic Art Installations

Watching movies may be a relaxing form of entertainment or an actually ground-breaking experience. To perform a kind of spectatorship that adequately responds to the moving images demands much more than just keeping one’s eyes open. This article explores what is at stake when cinematic works are exhibited in the museum. It focuses on different strategies to apply when it comes to inciting the spectator: by explaining artistic interpassivity, analogue virtuality, and preclusion of the gaze, as well as by introducing seductive deconstruction, this article offers several examples of how film installations can challenge the museum visitor and their ways of looking. The strategies are unfolded through analyses of three film installations by the Danish visual artist Jesper Just.