Susan Willis

Captured by the Screen

With every chapter, Gargantua serves up a concentrated dose of commodity images, most of these glossy and seen on a screen.* Under
Stallabrasss direction, the commonplace artefacts of our daily lives
impose themselves like actors in a technological drama. The computer
screen perched on desk or lap, captures our gaze and focuses our concentration in ways that no previously existing office technology ever
achieved. For instance, a typewriter imposes itself as a physical reminder
of work to be done; and it shapes the typists body, mental, and perceptual apparatus to fit the task. But it does not absorb the eye as does the
computer whose screen dances with a hypnotic space saver. Nor does a
typewriter impel us to work as does a computer whose menus and files
dictate choice as an obligation.
Like a giant contact lens, the screen has become a necessary prosthesis to
visual and mental functions. And we dont relegate it to work alone or
leave it in the office at quitting time. Instead, we bring it home for
amusement and for works after hours seepage into domestic life.
Computer games are marketed for fun, hence they are all the more fascinating and compelling. Actually, the fun belies the instrumentalization
of the gaze and the assimilation of everything that presents itself as random to the implicit program. The erasure of spontaneity progresses
apace as the game player hones hand/eye coordination. Amidst the
panoply of ever more slick and life-like game figures, Stallabrass bids us
recall the sketchy and imperfect ur-figure of video gaming: Pac Man.
The equivalent of Mickey Mouses Steamboat Willy, Pac Mans movements were halting and jerky. He could hardly be taken for real. By comparison, Stallabrass points to todays technologically advanced games
and game settings whose approximation of reality is only apparent in the
fact that the militarized superheroes never seem to have to bury the bodies of their slain victims. I, too, appreciate those moments when texts
reveal themselves as texts, when imperfections and disjunctions point to
the fact and features of their production. But we shouldnt be too quick
to resurrect antiquated video technologies as sites for critical leverage
into todays culture. As my students point out, many eighteen and
twenty year olds develop nostalgias for the technologies of their not
long distant youths. They collect Pac Man, Star Wars action figures,
even 8-track country music tapes. And they dont necessarily use these to
* Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua. Manufactured Mass Culture, Verso, London 1996, isbn
1859849415, 40 hb, 1859840361, 13 pb.
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develop critical insight into the objects they now consume. As Jean
Baudrillard suggests, nostalgia represents the desire for difference at a
time when any sort of distinction between past and present has already
collapsed.1 Thus, my students tend to describe themselves in terms reminiscent of the Silver Surfer. They glide across Netscapes and game sites;
and slide in and out of chat rooms. They plunge into the virtual; and they
tell me that they chart their own trajectories like twenty-first century
De Certeauian superheroes. Indeed, they see their prowess at resisting a
games program as a far more radical act than De Certeaus description of
pedestrians whose walking patterns cut the corners of the citys grid.2
Im sceptical of so much hubris. But, then, I dont play computer games.
Like a dinosaur of the pre-technological planet, I cant abide sitting nor
can I force my attention onto a screen.
But I agree that for a great many people in the United States and Europe,
the screen dominates the visual field and influences perception.
Stallabrass makes this abundantly clear when he suggests that the computer screen has the power to embrace, and in so doing assimilate to its
aesthetic, all other sorts of screens that pre-date the computer: most
notably, the television monitor and the automobile windshield. This line
of reasoning is analogous to the proposition in economic theory that once
capitalism came into being it redefined all concurrently existing modes
of productionincluding slavery and serfdomaccording to its market-driven logic. Similarly, television once had a life in a different cultural order. Initially viewed as a curiosity that brought six inch high,
black and white people into middle-class homes, it supplanted radio and
redefined auditory consumption as no longer primary, but ancillary to
the visual object. However, now, in the post-computer domestic setting,
television is an unremarkable site for talking heads, drama, and mayhem.
It plays to an often absent audience of ambulatory image consumers who
move from snack to snack and screen to screen.
Apprehending the home and office dominated and crowded with
screened images is nowhere near as disturbing as Stallabrasss reckoning
that the embrace of the aesthetic includes our last enclave of freedom: the
automobile, whose windshield is yet another screen. Ive spent the weeks
following my reading of Gargantua obsessed by the way my cars windshield frames the landscape and gives it back to me on its bug-encrusted
pane of glass. Towns, cities, farms: all have a four foot span; and like a
televised image, their denizens take on the quality of figures in a news
broadcast.
A World Become Disney
Frame and screen articulate the visual and the commodity form. Overly
abundant and densely omnipresent, the visual commodity object stuffs
us full like a society of greedy Gargantuas whose food is simulacra. What
we see and how we see it is part and parcel of consumerism. Stallabrasss
scrutiny of images portrays the diversity of our world collapsed into the
homogeneity of the visual commodity object. He produces a disturbing
1
2

Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, New York 1983.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984.
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look at a society choked by a surfeit of commodified images. Its a world

become Disney. Anyone who visits Disney World in Florida will find an
environment wholly devoted to consumerism whose landscape is carved up
in discrete units and presented to the eye already framed and camera-perfect. There are no panoramas at Disney World; no high point from which
to view the park as a whole; no map that renders its topography in anything but the most allusively mouse-like proportions, This is a visual field
where every object is presented as a commodity: Cinderellas Castle, the
epcot globe, the submarine lagoon. They emerge like items on the Wal
Mart self. Even nations are presented as framed landscape units. Japan,
Canada, Mexico: each is a packaged item whose encapsulation replicates
the plastic bubble wrap that encases the things we buy. At Disney World,
the visual landscape is inseparable from the commodity landscape. The
built environment and its horticultural accoutrements replicate the
Mickeys and Minnies in the shops. All are equally commodities.
As an art historian, Stallabrass recoils and casts his eye about for alternatives to the glossy but hollow images that fill our daily lives and bloat
and dull our senses. Besieged by aestheticized mass culture objects, he
seems poised on the brink of wishing to reinvent high art, or at least its
possibility to produce antithesis. Impossible, and not necessarily desirable, the high art impulse is relocated in more mundane figures and
objects. One of these is the amateur photographer who Stallabrass
depicts embarking with 35mm film and single lens reflex camera into a
world where frame, light, and object can be perceived as if for the first
time. This is the practitioner whose control over medium and image
does not yet preclude the unexpected and whose images may still speak
straightforwardly. The portrayal may be naive but I hear students using
the same terms to express their belief in video as a form and practice that
resists both the mass commodity and high art. Sadie Benning, who
began her career as an independent video artist with a Fisher Price toy
camera, is held up as comparable to the amateur photographer. What
makes the amateur interesting is not completely explained by the inbetween nature of the art (neither high nor mass) nor the technology of
the production (mechanical rather than computerized), but resides also
in the deformation of the legacy of genres that the amateur inherits but
imperfectly replicates. Moreover, amateur production is a practice whose
counter-hegemonic meanings are experienced in the process of doing
rather than consuming.
This is not altogether the case with graffitianother visual point of reference that Stallabrass sees as alternative to the mass culture object. In an
era devoted to privatization, tagging reclaims the public. At a time that
demands product clarity, its messages are often indecipherable. Moreover, graffiti makes no claim to a life-time guarantee; but like the reality
of our consumer objects, proclaims its built-in obsolescence. And contrary to the fetishized commodity object that negates its producers
hand, graffiti recognizes its author and the collectivity of its mode of
production. With 22 per cent of the children in the usa living in what
the government defines as poverty, graffiti may be the only means by
which excluded individuals can consume and circulate the culture.
Graffiti stands to benefit as globalization expands poverty in the First
World.
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Trash is Stallabrasss other example of a compelling visual image that

escapes the commodity aesthetic. As consumers in league with nature,
we are its collective author. Looking in gutters, along roadsides, and in
abandoned urban lots, Stallabrass waxes poetic. He beckons us to see
trash before the artists hand seizes it as the raw material of a ready-made.
Mud-smeared plastic, tattered pages, discarded toys, bits of brand names
and vegetal matter: this is the stuff of a visual field no longer organized
by the commodity aesthetic. Only the rude presence of trash casts back
into our eye the obverse and contradiction of our cultures bounty.
Herein lies Stallabrasss dilemma. As art historian and critic, he writes
from the point of view of the creator or receiver of the work of art.
Gargantua marks a long overdue and theoretically stunning assessment
of the commodity aesthetic not attempted since Wolfgang Haugs
Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, written in the early 1970s.3 However, the
analysis, grounded in the idea of art, tends to isolate the objects under
scrutiny from the contexts of their use. A more optimistic assessment of
the culture awaits the ethnographer who, cognizant of Stallabrasss aesthetic definition, will cast these visual objects in larger systems of relationships where practice engages the aesthetic. The paucity of contrary
visual objects has also to do with the notion of art that underlies the
choice of examples. Is it a commentary on our world or the analysis that
the ebbs and flows of trash are the only instance where the visual exceeds
the contours of the commodity?
Pac Man and the flneur
As for the consumer, Stallabrass sees us as not entirely passivebut distracted, nonetheless. Semi-conscious, semi-critical, the consumer winds
a pathPac Man stylethrough commodity bombardment. Where
Walter Benjamin saw distraction as a tool for criticism and the means by
which audiences resist absorption into mass cultural imagery, Stallabrass
sees the distracted consumer mired in visual glut and unable to act as an
agent of choice or perception. Beavis and Butthead, two mtv anti heroes,
typify the distracted audience. Known for their raunchy appearance and
behaviour, they flaunt bad taste and ignorance. Less obvious to many
viewers is their graphic depiction of distraction. Eyes always cast in the
least consequential direction, ears misapprehending most of whats said,
they draw inappropriate conclusions and are, thus, the brunt of jest (provided the tv viewer is not distracted to the point of missing the faux
pas).
In an essay that outlines An Ontology of Everyday Distraction,
Margaret Morse scrutinizes some of the same cultural artefacts considered by Stallabrass: the freeway, mall, and television, and draws some of
the same conclusions.4 As she puts it, distraction is the result of an
attenuated fiction effect promoted by the way malls, television, and
freeways place us in realms of mobile privatization. This creates a dislocation between what we know to be real and what we perceive as a repre3

Wolfgang Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, Minneapolis 1986.

Margaret Morse, An Ontology of Everyday Distraction, in Patricia Mellencamp, ed.,
Logics of Television, Bloomington, in 1991, pp. 193221.
4

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sentation. Even the real world seen through a clear glass windshield,
shop window, or screen has a way of being psychically coloured and
fetishized by the very glass which reveals it.5 How do we break the
fetishism of the visual commodity? Morse reminds us there is a heterogeneous world of local values outside the scope of the screen.6 Perhaps
these haunt local expressions of trash and graffiti. But, she, like
Stallabrass is hard pressed to suggest how these local values might penetrate the disengaged ambience of consumer distraction.
To break the zombie spell of distraction, Stallabrass summons up a version of Brechtian estrangement that occurs whenever the stifled and
glutted First-Worlder travels to a part of the world less richly colonized
by commodities. His account of a train voyage from Bucharest to
Munich and his description of the streets of Havana have the effect of
lifting the bemused reader out of the commodity aesthetic and demonstrating that it is itself a localisable phenomenon.
Of course, theres always the Brechtian effect of natural disaster. I happened to read Gargantua during the week following Hurricane Frans
romp through North Carolina. Six days without power or water produced a more dramatic estrangement than a trip to Bucharest or Havana.
Stallabrasss evocations of computer graphics, tv, malls, and the world
seen through the windshield had for me the quality of science fiction. In
my world, fallen trees blocked practically every road. Many cars lay
smashed where they had been parked. Malls were either flooded or closed
for lack of power. And every screen in town was blank. For a week, tvs
and computers cluttered domestic space like a bunch of vestigial toes
reminiscent of a highly advanced society that was no more.
I cite natural disaster not as a solution but as an example of another way
of looking at our world. The culture that engulfs us is altogether precarious. The necessary technological and economic infrastructure that supports it is as simple as its manifestations appear to be inviolable and
complex. Too often our work as critics is determined by the objects we
study. In a world dominated by the commodity, we search for instances of
rupture, phenomena that penetrate the glossy image, or practices that
disrupt fetishization. It might also be useful to bear in mind that this
world is produced, and that fetishization bespeaks the contradiction of
its dependence on maximizing the accumulation of wealth and resources.
We need not wait on Mother Natureor even acts of sabotageto
demonstrate the fragility of a system whose slick images are financed by
speculation and gambling and fuelled by ever dwindling resources.

5
6

Ibid., p. 203.
Ibid., p. 213.

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