James Turrell, Aten Reign (2013).

In 1980, American light artist James Turrell’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, “Light and Space,” reportedly caused “injury” not to one but to several spectators, resulting in two lawsuits filed against the Whitney. The first lawsuit was filed in Federal Court in 1982, by retired judge of the Oregon State Supreme Court Ralph M. Holman, on behalf of his wife, Louise, who charged that Turrell’s show created an “illusion” in which she became radically “disoriented and confused” and, as a result, was “violently precipitated to the floor.” The lawsuit sought an unspecified amount of damages from the artist. Also in 1982, a second suit was brought in front of the New York State Supreme Court by Mrs. Blanch Robins of New York, who charged that Turrell’s same exhibition caused her, after “stepping back against what she thought was a wall, to fall and permanently injure her right wrist.” Robins requested $250,000 compensation from the Whitney Museum. As extraordinary as these cases seem, they are not isolated incidents. In 1999, a pirated clip of Turrell’s artwork was inserted into a Pokémon cartoon which was then played on television in Japan, reportedly “setting off a rash of seizures and nausea that sent more than 700 people to the hospital,” many of whom were children and elderly people. Moreover, Turrell’s work with the medium of colored light is not alone in eliciting such responses.

In these examples, where does liability rest? Is the artist responsible for causing these injuries; the museum; or the spectator? The question is key not only because it forces a consideration of liability but also of the problems that lie at the heart of theorizing media aesthetics. Where and how do we begin to speak about media artwork? Where does it begin and end, and where and how does the subject fit into it all; extending from it (McLuhan), or rather, defining himself or herself against it? If a media artwork remains exclusive to a physical art-object, then one could argue that the artist or museum is responsible for the content they put on public display. But on the other hand, perhaps responsibility falls on the spectator, which is to say that art and aesthetics reside in subjective experience. Certainly this has been the answer for many in art and science since Goethe’s 1810 Theory of Colors.

Josef Albers, from Interaction of Color (1963).

These polarized positions delineate the two general ways in which color has traditionally been theorized in Western art and culture. On the one hand, it is argued that color inheres in things in the world, as an objective, physical, or quantifiable phenomena. For instance, “this oil pastel is yellow,” or “this apple is red.” Followers of this school tend to include theorists like Aristotle, the classical opticians (including Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton), factions of modern science, technology industries, chemistry, physics, and certain industrial color ordering systems. On the other hand, it is argued that color is a subjective phenomenon that alters according to the physiology of the perceiver. For example, in the above image from 20th century colorist Josef Albers, he showed how the same neutral brown changed its hue and value based on its surrounding colors. Traditionally, artists, modern philosophers (including Goethe), and certain sub-sections of modern science, like psychophysics and psychology, tend to follow this view.

At the same time, as a phenomenon of subjective experience, color becomes strange and estranged; inconsistent, unreliable, and, for some – a deceptive simulacra. Such a fear and distrust of color dates back to the origins of Western metaphysics. Sophists, rhetoricians, and painters – i.e., those who write with color – deemed “creator[s] of phantoms,” Plato argued; “technicians of ornament and makeup.” But by far the most poisonous of simulacra is color: a cosmetic and false appearance that, like the sophist’s “gaudy speeches” and “glistening words” seduce the listener with their ambiguity and sparkle, but unlike words, carry no representational value beyond itself. Color holds to nothing and to no one. This elusiveness has given numerous philosophers license for its romanticization, from Goethe to Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, and even Adorno. (Benjamin in 1914: “The imagination can be developed only by contemplating colours… pure vision is concerned not with space and objects but with colour”; Heidegger in 1935: “Color shines and only wants to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone”; and Baudrillard in 1995: “No analysis of the vibrations of light will ever explain the sensory imagining of colours…”). In short, the denial of subjective responsibility in aesthetic experience no doubt contributes to the problems with a theory of media aesthetics (not to mention legal liability).

From the “James Turrell Installation at Crystals” in Las Vegas, 2013.

Moving forward, Turrell’s work (alongside others in this genre that must be discussed at length elsewhere) embodies the paradoxical tensions between subject and object at the heart of media art. Many factors – an artist’s intention and conception, installation, audience reception, the relation to the museum architecture, the number of people in the museum, and the cultural and physiological background of the viewer, which shapes their perception and color vision – all count. All of these factors work together in what must be called “media aesthetics.” Future theories of media aesthetics need to note such ambivalences and crossovers.

This is the third post in Antenna’s new series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. The first two posts were written by series guest editor Kyle Conway. If you missed either of those, they can be read here. Look out for regular posts in the series (most) every other Wednesday in December, January, and beyond.

Those with an inclination to stochastic will know that the chance of him predicting these eight games in a row correctly was 1 in 256 – a likelihood that does not require us to resort to the paranormal in the search for explanations of the accuracy of his predictions, considering we easily started off the World Cup with hundreds of animals (the homo sapiens kind included) being called upon to make such predictions. And if the proud parading of a rubber model of an octopus by the scorer of the only and decisive goal in the final, Andres Iniesta is anything to go by, Paul’s prediction had become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, too, further boosting the confidence of players having been predicted to be on the winning side.

What is more remarkable than the accuracy of Paul’s predictions, was the absence of compelling onfield stories and game play that allowed for Paul to become the major story of the World Cup. Paul is thus a fitting metaphor for the World Cup in the global television era in two senses: firstly, they are both kept in an artificial environment detached from their original context. For all the self-congratulation by FIFA officials of having hosted a World Cup in Africa for the first time, to most viewers, the only invasion of a sense of place and culture on the bland televisual stage of interchangeable football stadia was the Vuvuzela – one much maligned by television audiences outside South Africa – and the ever clichéd representations of local culture by media correspondents whose knowledge of South Africa perfectly resembled the tourist gaze in having arrived in the country only days, if at all weeks, before the tournament. FIFA itself kept the event in much of a vacuum from the local economy too, by making host countries’ acceptance of a tax bubble that exempts FIFA’s commercial activities from VAT and other taxes a precondition of awarding the tournament – leaving FIFA with a profit of more than a billion US Dollars and South Africa and its people with a deficit no smaller.

Secondly, Paul’s existence, like that of the World Cup, is grounded in spectacle, their apparent purpose being to be looked upon. Their attractiveness as an object is thus rooted in their extraordinariness. Yet is it’s the latter that seemed sorely missing from this year’s World Cup. Few will doubt that pre-tournament favourites Spain were deserving winners, yet scoring a meagre eight goals in seven games, Spain’s performance was tactically apt, yet anything but rousing. Indeed, the fact that the World Cup had to rely on a German team that had hardly been accused of providing particular flair to past tournaments for some of its most convincing attacking football reflects that, beyond all the hype, the 2010 World Cup delivered mostly football of a distinctly ordinary quality.

None of this is surprising. As football has entered a global era, the international structure of national teams no longer reflects the global spread of talent. The Bosman ruling by the European Court of Justice in 1995, the global televisual circulation of domestic leagues and continental club competitions and the emergence of a truly global labor market for professional footballers (and indeed other athletes) have transformed global professional football dramatically. Many of the world’s best footballers never make it to the World Cup finales, because they represent nations in which their talents are not matched by their fellow countrymen. Conversely, given the now global competition for places in the starting line ups of teams in Europe’s top leagues, almost every national team included players from lower divisions or players struggling to hold down a regular first team place at their respective clubs. A leading European clubs side, one suspects, would have easily marched through the competition – and indeed Spain’s success has been in many ways an extension of FC Barcelona’s recent successes.

In a global world, transnational club teams play football of a quality unmatched in international sides. The World Cup in turn has to rely on its nature as a media event, on hype and nationalistic hyperbole to attract its audiences. For now, it no doubt still succeeds in doing so – but the speed with which, for instance, the St. George’s crosses disappeared from cars on English roads following England’s second round exit, illustrates the inherently ephemeral nature of such spectacle as an increasingly hyperreal focal point of temporary jingoism– of an event as Jean Baudrillard (1993: 79-80) remarked two decades ago “so minimal” it “might well not need to take place at all – along with [its] maximal enlargement on screens”. As the row between fans in Germany and their national team in which some fans criticised the team for not holding another parade and street party in Berlin following their third place finish – whereas players felt they had little to celebrate – illustrates, audiences’ determination to celebrate (and drink) is now only loosely related to the competition: many German fans seem to feel that they did not want a lost football game to get in the way of a big street party.

In its ephemerality, the World Cup might still prosper long enough to support FIFA’s current leadership regime. Yet it has begun to become increasingly interchangeable with other forms of spectacle. With the end of the World Cup most professional football leagues around the world now embark on a six to eight week hiatus from the game; time to find different sources of entertainment – and to make that trip to the local sea life centre to visit the World Cup’s biggest star and his relatives.