Lying in the Gallery* - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Lying in the Gallery*

PAMELA L. LEE

On the topic of burnout, recent art, and working remotely under condi-
tions of pandemic, I begin with a seemingly impolitic question: Why do we take
things lying down? Perhaps to some this will sound like an academic nonstarter—a
crude provocation, to say the least—but in posing the question I mean some-
thing at once more literal and technologically charged than the rhetorical blus-
ter suggests. Not so long ago, back when we routinely inhabited the physical
spaces of museums or galleries, we might have encountered any number of exhi-
bition arrangements that positioned the viewer’s body as a kind of flatness.
En effet, in black-box galleries from London to Berlin to Beijing to São Paulo to
Les anges, as the itinerary goes, viewers have been solicited not to take a seat,
as polite theatergoers do, nor stand, with arms folded and chins stroked, dans le
traditional posture of aesthetic contemplation, but to go horizontal. To bed down
in galleries and museums on cushions or beanbags; to commune with the floor;
to experience a compulsory intimacy—as well as collectivity—with strangers lying
in the gallery; to comport oneself in poses both vulnerable and supine, like new-
media odalisques: Why has this become commonly accepted behavior in the con-
temporary art world? What might these habits tell us about the recent stakes of
art, media culture, and the peculiar interface between liveness and digitization,
from the systems discourse of the 1960s, the historic moment that sets the terms
for these preoccupations, to lockdown in 2021? To the point of this thesis: Comment
do such practices model new relationships between leisure and work, body and
machine, gender and agency, in what the ethnographer Marcel Mauss called the
“civilization of latitude” nearly a hundred years ago?1

With thanks to Lucy Hunter and Eric de Bruyn for comments and assistance. This essay was
*
originally delivered as a lecture in several symposia: at the University of Basel; at the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam; and at Yale University. An abiding preoccupation with the relationship between current
and historical media linked all three conferences.

Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2, Non. 1 (1973), p. 80.

OCTOBER 176 Spring 2021, pp. 53–72. © 2021 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00426

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OCTOBER

Well in advance of the pandemic, burnout syndrome stemmed from the
enforced productivity of an already exhausted workforce, ever mandated to
labor and slog away, whether on the front lines of the health industry or from
behind the screen. Today that workforce remains exhausted, perhaps even more
donc. But the workplace as we once knew it (c'est, for those who enjoy the privi-
lege and security of remote work) has undergone a radical mutation, collapsing
the professional environment—the architecture of cubicles, conference rooms,
and water coolers—with the domestic scene. Taking the measure of such condi-
tion, this essay looks at the work of a loose consortium of artists, several of
whom exhibited at the 2016 edition of the Berlin Biennale, as implicitly thema-
tizing such interests. I treat such phenomena as both an allegory of and
rehearsal for modes of ubiquitous computing emblematic of the third revolution
of the digital age. As developed by Marc Weiser and others at Xerox PARC (Palo
Alto Research Center) in the late 1980s, ubiquitous computing departs from the
model of the desktop in generalizing computational power across disparate loca-
tion, platforms, and devices.2

The argument proceeds as follows. Considering the contemporary situation
on the ground, as it were, I gloss the historical interests of systems theory as a pro-
logue to our more recent preoccupations, seizing upon the rubrics of horizontality
in the art and criticism of the 1960s. The associated tropes of sleeping, reclining,
dreaming, and sex—oneiric, erotic, soporific—find their founding case study in a
work called She—A Cathedral (or Hon, 1966), a monumental collaboration between
Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt. This massive sculpture
of a recumbent female figure—in actuality an outsized, immersive environment
consolidating a range of media within its walls—establishes a model for thinking
through our current conditions of reception. Leo Steinberg’s famous thesis in
“Other Criteria” provides theoretical ballast, revisited for its uncannily prescient
implications for cultures of contemporary work.

The second part of the essay considers recent work that departs from both
Saint Phalle’s and Steinberg’s terms, and here I draw from Jonathan Crary’s for-
mative 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013). Crary describes sleep as
“an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism”
and analyzes the systemic incursion of working life upon our resting states.3 Such
temporal interests, I argue, advance a new “civilization of latitude”: a learned
attitude of the body that owes as much to Silicon Valley, ergonomics, and inter-
face design as it does to contemporary art. Burnout would appear to be both
symptom and motor of such developments. The widespread injunction to keep
working—to be as innovative as one is resilient—will prove continuous with new
technological affordances in which horizontality is colonized as productive space.
And “flatness,” in turn, will acquire a radically different meaning relative to its
art-historical genealogy.

2.
éd., Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing (Cambridge, MA: La presse du MIT, 2013).

On ubiquitous computing (“ubicomp”) and media art, see the essays collected in Ulrik Ekman,

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Londres: Verso, 2013), p. 10.

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Lying in the Gallery

Dans 2008, Monster Chetwynd exhibited Hermitos Children, the Pilot Episode
(2008) in the Tanks Galleries at the Tate Modern, Londres. This twenty-minute
film plays with the conventions of soap operas and detective serials to delirious
effect, variously referencing Pasolini and the Brazilian musician Hermeto
Pascoal. Content, cependant, is less at stake for my purposes than the peculiar stag-
ing of the narrative. Through a stack of some thirty-two TV sets curved just so,
flashing images pierce the darkness, a mode of display to which we’ve grown
accustomed for decades. From structuralist film to Nam June Paik to each suc-
cessive generation of media artist, putting the apparatus of time-based images on
display has anticipated what Erica Balsom calls “the cinema of exhibition” within
contemporary art.4 What is novel, on the other hand, is the literal platform upon
which spectators view Chetwynd’s work, an object that, in its material and fabri-
cation, seems at some remove from the slickness typically associated with media
installation. For on the floor in front of the screens, a massive, artisanal beanbag
chair colonizes a sizable portion of museum real estate. An island of funky patch-

4.
Presse, 2013).

Erica Balsom in Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam

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Monster Chetwynd. Hermitos Children, the Pilot Episode. 2008.
© Monster Chetwynd. Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ.

OCTOBER

work and gauche stitching, created, in part, from the costumes of the perform-
ers featured in the video, it solicits the spectator to relax into the experience of
viewing within the museum.

What associations does this peculiar object advance? Lying in the gallery, dans
a subterranean space of the Tate Modern, you might think you were being trans-
ported to the domestic scenery of basements, rec rooms, and family lounges
partout, where viewing is continuous with reclining, with relaxation, with tra-
ditional patterns of work and leisure that peg the realm of labor to the vertical
axis—upright and public—and that of leisure as continuous with the low-slung,
laid-back, private, and horizontal. This observation telegraphs the interests of
horizontality in our actual orientation as viewers to such work; the production of
meaning that horizontality enables; and the iconography of recumbence dis-
played in the gallery and, as it will turn out, everywhere else. For some, “horizon-
tality” might evoke the decentered and anti-hierarchic processes of signification
that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari famously named “rhizomatic”—a hyper-
linked and planar image of thought in contrast to arboreal models of subjectivi-
ty, root and branch.5 The difference here is that, rather than claim such viewing
practices affirm or reproduce a relation to leisure conventionally aligned with the
horizontal axis, I claim exactly the opposite. Lying in the gallery is, in fact, whol-
ly consistent with the technics of contemporary work; namely, our habituation to
its media platforms and the distribution of the network as an ambient and all-
pervasive resource. For the moment, in returning to the object at hand, I’d note
that these “chairs” are no mere adjuncts to Chetwynd’s art but central to its orga-
nization. As the museum’s wall text states: “To invite viewers to partake in the
experience, Chetwynd designed a bean bag seat that feels like an extension of
her film’s lo-fi, lumpy fantasy world.”6

Chetwynd is hardly alone in such endeavors. Beds also make repeated
appearances across the spheres of the contemporary art world. Take, for exam-
ple, In Bed Together (2016) by M/L Artspace, a New York–based collective formed
by Lena Henke and Marie Karlburg, featured in the 9th Berlin Biennale for
Contemporary Art (2016). Viewers watched videos of the group’s performances
and social gatherings from the comfort of a large bed, complete with cus-
tomized, screen-printed pillows and sheets. An airy canopy crowned the experi-
ence. The title of the piece flagged the literal intimacy of its spectators as it also
trafficked in metaphors of corroboration and complicity. A number of similar
exhibition strategies made their appearance in this iteration of the Berlin
Biennale, which was named “The Present in Drag.” As organized by Dis, the fash-
ion and art collective and online platform, the exhibition was crowded with rep-
resentations of digital anomie, where post-net life was telegraphed in images of

5.
En particulier, see the chapter “Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal” in Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Presse, 1987), pp. 232–310.

Wall label, Tanks Gallery, Tate Modern, Londres, 2008.

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Lying in the Gallery

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M/L Artspace. In Bed
Ensemble. 2016.

Image © Timo Ohler.

wan youth swiping listlessly at screens or dabbing whiteboards. The biennial
ostensibly registered the cynicism of the digital natives as a new cultural domi-
nant: Its unofficial mantra, coined by the PR firm commissioned to brand the
show, was “No critique, no discourse, no stakes.” What those stakes once were, ou
what they have become in the present, is a question we might obliquely raise at
the conclusion of this essay. The galleries, meanwhile, were a sprawl of bean-
bags, Fatboys, mattresses, and beds, alternately user-friendly, messy, louche, casu-
al, narcotic. What to make of these conjunctions?

III

If what I’ve identified in contemporary art is to be of any consequence
beyond a catalog of random furniture or a scorecard of millennial affect, I need
to sketch the most basic rudiments of systems theory to chart the incipient inter-
ests of horizontality and media from the 1960s to the present. A capacious and
complex topic, systems theory has come down to us as a science of self-organiza-
tion and the ways in which such “organisms” might evolve in the adaptation or
progressive regulation of complexity. Among its many methodological preoccu-
pations, the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy described “the appear-
ance of structural similarities or isomorphisms in different fields.”7 He was

Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 33.

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OCTOBER

speaking, in other words, to analogies, struc-
tural equivalences, and the like—drawn
between ostensibly very different genres of
organisms, organizations, fields, and disci-
plines: biological, psychologique, économique,
linguistic, environmental, corporate, com-
putational, etc.. Whether such systems are
bodies or machines, brains, businesses, ou
governments, an emphasis on holism and
organizational processes sets them in iso-
morphic or analogous relation.

We might consider the links between
horizontality, media, and the art of the post-
war moment in the spirit of such investiga-
tion. To be sure, horizontality has assumed
a critical role in alternative narratives of
modernisme, as the phenomenological coun-
terpoint to Enlightenment, reason, et
progress incarnated by the virtual and literal
ascent of the human subject as upright
man.8 The art of this period is rife with such
contrarian props and iconography, inclure-
ing Claes Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble
(1963); Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955);
Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963); Yoko Ono and
John Lennon’s Bed-In (1969); and Hélio
Oiticica’s Eden (1967) and CC5-Hendrix War
(1973). Different as these works are in both
their formal as well as conceptual agendas,
all could be broadly classed as set pieces of
desublimation: a collective blow against ver-
ticality as the de facto stance of modernist
progress—and what that progress implies. In the case of Oldenburg, we see this
as both simulacrum and fetish of domestic intimacy; in the case of
Rauschenberg, as the inversion of portraiture, the anthropomorphic genre par
excellence. For Warhol, on the other hand, horizontality suggests a queer erotics
of media and duration, where nothing much happens save for the rise and fall of
a lover’s breath, mingled with the onanistic pulse of the frame rate. For Ono and
Lennon, meanwhile, horizontality advances a performative détente in which stay-

Robert Rauschenberg. Bed. 1955.
© Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Image © The Museum of Modern Art /
Licensed by SCALA /
Art Resource, New York.

8.
Par exemple, the work of Georges Bataille and the Documents group, for whom the notion of
informe and basesse represented a “low blow”—a desublimation—against Enlightenment philosophies of
reason and progress. On informe as it relates to art, see Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: UN
User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

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Lying in the Gallery

ing in bed means resisting the labor of war. And Oiticica’s installations, outfitted
with sleeping platforms and breezy hammocks, are directed to modes of leisure,
flouting Western capitalism’s imperial mandates to work.

For my purposes here, the foundational case study flagging such interests is
the immersive media environment known as She—A Cathedral. A collaboration
between Saint Phalle, Tinguely, and Ultvedt, it was installed at Stockholm’s
Moderna Museet, then under the directorship of the formative curator Pontus
Hultén. In the early chronicles of art-world spectacle, She proved wildly popular,
welcoming over ten thousand visitors during its summer tenure at the museum
dans 1966. Eighty-two feet long, twenty feet high, and thirty feet wide and weighing
in at six tons, She was based on Saint Phalle’s “Nana” figures, her ongoing sculp-
tural paean to femininity. On the outside, the work appeared as a monumental
female body, colorfully painted, flat on her back and with legs splayed. On the
inside, it was a dark space of interactive media housing what one critic called “a

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Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt. She–A Cathedral. 1966.
© The artists /Bildupphovsrätt 2018.

Image © Hans Hammarskiöld/Moderna Museet.

OCTOBER

number of highly ineffective [mon
emphasis] machines.”9

Our engagement with this work
hinges on its equivalence between a
horizontal body, gendered female,
and a multimedia environment pre-
sented as a space of interiority.
Visitors to the museum entered She
through the object’s vaginal “portal,»
in a kind of reverse birthing scene in
which the dark recesses of the body
were imagined as both social space
and media arcade. The animated
interior at once referenced a long list
of communications media and con-
tained several interactive displays,
including a crude mobile of a man
watching “television” and a bar where
you could stop for a drink and crush
the empty bottle in one of Tinguely’s
cranky machines. There was a cinema
featuring a Greta Garbo movie, and a
red velvet banquette for smooching,
complete with hidden microphones
that might broadcast such couplings to
a neighboring audience. Tinguely’s
Radio Stockholm—one of his many ran-
domized radio pieces begun around
1962—was also on offer. A pay phone was installed on site and outfitted with a plastic
bubble to dim the social interference. The museum’s press release, upbeat and cheer-
ful, issued its verdict as to the work’s significance, banking on the period’s affirmative
rhetoric of “art into life”: “SHE could be seen as a representation of our life, dans
anthropomorphic form. A synthesis of facts, dreams, actions.”10 Such language finds
visual complement in the images documenting its reception: photographs of children
gamboling throughout the art-installation-cum-playground. But while it’s hard to
ignore the ludic associations of such images and the air of innocence they project,
not all was fun and games. Lying in the gallery, She staged a disorienting and chaotic
experience, encountered through the figure’s spread legs and a womb pregnant with
dysfunctional media.

Saint Phalle, Tinguely, Ultvedt.
She–A Cathedral. 1966.
© The artists/Bildupphovsrätt 2018.

Image © Hans Hammarskiöld/Moderna Museet.

Pontus Hultén et al., HON—en Historia (Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 1967), page unknown.

10.
and the many reviews of the work, see Hultén, HON—en Historia.

For documents relating to the construction and reception of She, including the press release

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Lying in the Gallery

The tacit dialogue between She and the art criticism from the period prompts
further speculation. In his formative lecture delivered at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1968 and later published as “Other Criteria,” Leo Steinberg discussed one
of Saint Phalle’s and Tinguely’s closest collaborators, Robert Rauschenberg, comme
auguring a peculiar retooling of the humanist subject through the horizontal reg-
ister. Steinberg famously identified a structural movement in Rauschenberg’s work
that virtually desublimated the axis of nature to the calculating tables of culture.
He seized upon how the artist’s silk-screen technique reoriented the vertical pic-
ture plane—historically conceived as a perspectival window in the evolution of oil
painting—to the horizontal surface of a flatbed printing press, a field of inscrip-
tion and thus media. “The painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual
experience of nature but of operational processes,”11 Steinberg wrote. The art histori-
an’s emphasis on operational processes, with its techno-cultural resonances of
automation, computing protocols, and the management of information, prefig-
ures the language we’ll put to different use for recent art. On Bed, Steinberg notes,
“Perhaps Rauschenberg’s profoundest symbolic gesture came in 1955 when he
seized his own bed, smeared paint on its pillow and quilt coverlet, and uprighted it
against the wall.”12 Linking the orientation of the work to both its erotic and hyp-
notic associations, he further observes,

Là, in the vertical posture of “art,” it continues to work in the imagi-
nation as the eternal companion of our other resource [my emphasis],
our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, con-
ceiving, and dreaming.13

To apply this perspective to the discussion of She: The body assimilates such
operational processes as the figure’s interior life—internalizes them—but
remains supine and grounded, horizontal and unmoving. To what end? If the
work’s mainstream reception seized upon its invitation to play, an occasional
review identified something pernicious, even monstrous, at work. The critics
Arthur Secunda and Jan Thunholm, for their part, addressed the peculiar gen-
dering of the sculpture as something that perhaps only the proto-feminist Saint
Phalle was in a position to understand. “The interior ends up being a sort of
international bourgeois playboy club,” they note; it is “more revealing of the con-
temporary male than . . . the female.” They continue: “She is a double for us, lying
flat on our backs in a primeval position, passive, victimized helplessly, mauled
over, exploited and used.”14

11.
Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (Londres: Oxford
Presse universitaire, 1972), p. 84. Note also Steinberg’s other discussion of horizontality, if oriented in the
other direction (c'est à dire., the “verticalizing of the supine”) in “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44,
(Spring 1988), pp. 7–74.

12.

13.

Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. 89.

Ibid., p. 90.

14.
Historia, p. 150.

Arthur Secunda and Jan Thunholm, “Everyman’s Girl” (1966), in Hultén, HON—en

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OCTOBER

However melodramatic, the phrasing remains important as we edge toward
the present. Dans 1966, She was deemed “a passive receptacle and helpless life,” an
indictment of media culture at large in a work that otherwise appealed for its
entertainment value. The key word summoned here is passive. How is such lan-
guage inflected by the advent of an image economy, one that presupposes hori-
zontality as its first, hyperlinked principle—operationalizing such processes, to bor-
row from Steinberg? Steinberg’s thesis, as it turns out, would be cited by no less
than Deleuze on more than one occasion.15 So how do we contend with what
Steinberg describes as “our other resource, our horizontality” today, where the agen-
tic ratio between human and computer hangs in the balance, ever more submitted
to the logic of machine learning and artificial intelligence? Steinberg offers this
impacted and elliptical phrase in an essay filled with brilliant observations. If once
the isomorphism between the body and the computer was historically assumed as a
structural given—an equivalence—the word resource now triggers irredeemably
economic associations that can only unsettle the relation.

That horizontality might be extracted as a resource—something expedient
and commoditized, like gold or oil or information—dovetails with the thesis of
Crary’s polemic 24/7. Treating horizontality through this framework suggests the
dispiriting prospect of incentivizing sleep—unproductive time—through comman-
deering the horizontal axis as productive space. “The huge portion of our lives that
we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs,” Crary writes, “subsists as
one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary
capitalism.”16 Unpacking the insidious logic of the phrase “24/7”—the unerring
temporality not just of the news cycle but, more to the point, the digital econo-
my—he discusses how sleep may well be the last reserve of the subject in a culture
in which human agency is increasingly capitalized as work, réseau, and resource.
It is true that one might think that “begetting, conceiving, and dreaming,»
as Steinberg put it, rather than working, was folded into the experience of the
contemporary art at the center of this essay. Much of this art does seem to pro-
duce a phantasmatic and nocturnal ambience. Take the dreamworld of
Chetwynd’s black-box gallery, barely lit by a mosaic of flitting images, or the
holographic projections viewed from pillows in the uncanny, digital disfigura-
tions of Cécile B. Evans. Or consider the work of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzy Fitch.
Their videos, complete with an unblinking cast of distracted personalities, have

15.
Par exemple, “On the Movement-Image: Conversation of September 13, 1983, with Pascal
Bonitzer and Jean Narboni,” Cahiers du Cinéma 352 (Octobre 1983), accessed via Onscenes,
https://onscenes.weebly.com/film/on-the-movement-image; and Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold,” trans.
Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies 80 (1991), pp 227–47.

16.

Crary, 24/7, p. 10.

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Lying in the Gallery

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Cécile B. Evans. What the Heart Wants. 2016.
Image © Timo Ohler.

been exhibited with sleeping bags, as if the artists were throwing a millennial
slumber party. The multimedia artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, whose work
mines epic themes of history, myth, et culturelle, often with reference to his Thai
heritage, is exemplary in this regard. His video and painting installations promi-
nently feature customized beanbag chairs that are somewhere between Fatboy
and futon. At the Berlin Biennale, Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic exhibited
There’s a word I’m trying to remember, for a feeling I’m about to have (a distracted path
toward extinction) (2016). The work was screened on a tourist boat that plotted a
lazy course up the Spree River, although sightseeing was arguably the opposite
of what was intended. Plutôt, passengers entered a black-lit space belowdecks
evoking a subterranean cave, a murky interior complete with faux root-like vege-
tation hanging from the ceiling and mud-colored rugs on the ground. Mostly
the room was crowded with the artist’s signature beanbag chairs. Covered in a
pattern that recalls Jackson Pollock by way of batik, this unorthodox seating
compels the viewer to take in the work from a reclining position.

The video itself is a scattershot collage, a noisy, prosumer-ish mix of vignettes
of a wedding, a postapocalyptic wilderness, and a dinosaur theme park, among
other discontinuous scenes. Characters include giant rat-like creatures in laugh-
able costumes communing with human elders; a pop singer rapping, blingy and

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OCTOBER

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Top: Korakrit Arunanondchai. 2012–2555. 2014.
Courtesy of C L E A R I N G New York / Brussels. Image © Matthew Septimus.
Bottom: Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic. There’s a word I’m trying to remember, for a feeling
I’m about to have (a distracted path toward extinction). 2016. Image © Timo Ohler.

Lying in the Gallery

bombastic; and the performance artist boychild, playing God in a fetching blonde
wig and high heels. I confess I can’t tell you what the video was about: It touched
on something about the climate crisis. What stays with the viewer, on the other
main, is an encounter with images that come at you fast and furious, threatening
to override any coherent, or at least singular, narrative of the work. The encounter
begs further description of the ground-level optics the installation staged: what
lying in the gallery (or a boat, in this case) requires of its audience.

Here’s what happens. You enter the space and can opt to either remove your
shoes or slip on a pair of disposable shoe covers. If you leave your shoes at the
entrance you pad around in your socks, as if you were at home; otherwise the shoe
covers protect the floor within the boat, as if you were visiting a hospital. You then
negotiate relatively cramped quarters before stationing yourself on one of the pil-
lows. You bed down: You go from vertical to nearly horizontal. But there’s nothing
especially comfortable about it. The beanbags are marginally supportive, kind of
lumpy; the fabric is already shopworn, a little greasy. Best to avoid direct skin con-
tact; you shift about, ever conscious of the position you’re assuming. Horizontality
may be thought of as “natural” to sleep or sex—as inevitable, peut-être, as death—
but nothing about this situation feels “natural” at all. This is no organic extension
of the body. You confront instead the inescapable sense of an enforced intimacy
with neighboring viewers, which translates, paradoxically, into a sense of enforced

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Arunanondchai and Gvojic. There’s a word I’m trying to remember, for a feeling I’m
about to have (a distracted path toward extinction). 2016. Image © Time Ohler.

OCTOBER

collectivity in the watching. A heightened degree of lassitude mingles with a
heightened social dynamic, organized around the activity of fixing your gaze on
the screen. Together you’re certainly not sleeping, and you’re not really relaxing;
and you’re not really engaging the video as the act of an individual spectator.
You’re in an in-between state, with others who occupy that same state. The images
wash over you. You take them lying down.

The experience tells us something pervasive about contemporary attitudes
towards horizontality and the body within digital culture that are far from
unique to Arunanondchai’s efforts. Let’s acknowledge that there’s a technology
at work here. It’s a habitus and a complex of learned behaviors that are not
merely adjunct to the mediation of images set before us but serve, in fact, comme
their foundation, a physical substrate continuous with them, registered through
the body’s relation to the environment. Arunanondchai’s installation, like many
others by artists of his generation, is effectively reproducing these techniques.
Such encounters might seem cozy, intimate, and fun on the face of it: Ils
appeal to both individual and collective experience and offer a novel way of
looking at art as relaxation. Art becomes a casual hangout, an occasion for new
modes of sociality—with the caveat that such experiences cannot be universal-
ized across diverse demographics of artists and the imagined participants
engaging such themes.17 Indeed, as the example of She would suggest, ces
encounters are not without historiographic or thematic precedent in their tacit
address to mediation, let alone the ways in which media socializes. A literature
far earlier than Steinberg or Crary dramatizes these critical possibilities as a
matter of compulsory labor, perhaps even military conscription.

In “Techniques of the Body,” his storied lecture of 1934, Marcel Mauss
describes how the postures we assume to be given and natural are anything but,
perhaps nowhere more so than in the apparently neutral activities of resting and
sleeping. “The notion that going to sleep is something natural is totally inaccu-
rate,” Mauss writes, reflecting on the historical conditions framing sleep’s terms. “I
can tell you that War taught me to sleep anywhere, on heaps of stones, for exam-
ple.”18 In this instance, the ethnographer has been trained in a novel arrangement
of the body: a learned behavior born of wartime necessity. He will go on to distin-
guish between “societies that have nothing to sleep on except the floor” and those
that have “instrumental assistance,” from mats to cots, from rocks to pillows. Il
refers to the latter as the “civilization of latitude, 15 degrees.”

17.
Critique, these forms of sociality are not universal within contemporary art, particularly in
the relationship between race, repos, and horizontality. Par exemple, the installations of Black Power
Naps (Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa) create spaces of self-care for Black subjects; while Tricia Hersey’s
Nap Ministry examines the nap as a form of liberation. Voir, Par exemple, Hodson, “Rest Notes,” in this
volume, and Janine Francois, “Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest,” Vice (Janvier 18,
2019), https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3bbay/sleep-gap-black-slavery-reparations-black-power-naps.

18.

Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” p. 81.

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Lying in the Gallery

The “civilization of lati-
tude” today is necessarily con-
ditioned by new forms of
“instrumental assistance,»
none of which are natural
relative to the assumed hori-
zontality of the human body
sleeping. Such techniques,
we’ll see shortly, are endemic
of current techno-cultures.
But they are directed not so
much to when we sleep or
bed down as to where we work;
and where we work, for many
of us under the terms of pan-
demic, can be—even has to
be—just about anywhere.19 To
repeat my earlier formula-
tion on the spatiotemporal
complex we’ve been tracking
from the 1960s to the pre-
sent: The colonization of
nonproductive time that is
sleep is remediated in an
increasingly productive axis
of space that is horizontality.
On this point, take a
workplace reference that is a
hardened cliché not of the
art world but of Silicon
Valley. The activities of
reclining on the floor, get-
ting horizontal in groups,
and lying together in shared spaces dominated by mediated images is the de facto
posture of the digital workplace. Bien sûr, such arrangements are not restricted
to the campuses of Google or Facebook but are the ubiquitous furnishings of the
start-up world, where the profusion of such tools of “instrumental assistance” is
claimed to be necessary to foster innovation, collaboration, and creativity. As in

Top: Google campus, Dublin. Courtesy of Evolution
Design. Image © Peter Wurmli.
Bottom: Xerox PARC, ca. 1972. Courtesy of Xerox
Corporation and the Computer History Museum (CHM).

19.
It is important to acknowledge two sectors of the working population that trouble the strict
binary opposition between verticality and horizontality as corresponding to normative categories of
labor, their assumed postures, and technologies of sleep: sex workers, d'un côté, and disabled
and chronically ill, workers who have long worked remotely, on the other.

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OCTOBER

the gallery, the workplace has now been laid low through a relaxed design sensibil-
ity incorporated by the so-called creatives. The once-upright carriage of middle
management, not so long ago stationed at the desk and the desktop, restricted to
one task, has now reclined into the low-slung posture of ambient intelligence.
While the aesthetic is immediately associated with millennial tech workers, its
roots are in the 1960s, as a photograph from Xerox PARC makes explicit.

Lest you think I’m drawing a simple parallel between lying in the gallery
and reclining in the office, as if the space of our media were so easily circum-
scribed and contained, reducible to the workplace as such, I’ll add that the cul-
ture of contemporary work has been generalized to the point that the “work-
place” itself has been flattened, rendered horizontal, partout. This stems
from a moment in which our relationship to the architecture of the interface has
become progressively generalized and cognition itself is increasingly understood
as a distributed or networked resource, as in, Par exemple, the everyday rituals of
crowdsourcing. Aujourd'hui, when so many of us are compelled to work from home (un
decisive privilege, it bears repeating, compared to the situations of essential
workers on the front lines, to say nothing of the nearly sixteen million
Americans without stable access to the Internet, let alone the millions more with-
out jobs), work itself bleeds out into the environment, such that no separation
between workplace and home obtains. Ambient is one term that names the gener-
alization of this workplace, not to mention other brick-and-mortar institutions,
schools and universities chief among them. Two related although not synony-
mous modes of computing—ubiquitous and pervasive—thus capture the exteriori-
ty of a media apparatus as environmental, as our daily surround. As theorized by
Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC, circa 1988, ubiquitous computing (“ubicomp”)
speaks to the constellation and embedding of networks in space—wireless sen-
sors, RFID tags, the Internet of Things, locative media, and so forth—such that
the historical interface is rendered increasingly invisible, in the background. Comme
N. Katherine Hayles puts it, this shift in network design represents “the move-
ment of computation out of the box and into the environment.”20 An informa-
tion-intensive environment is quiet, calm, and invisible. It’s not the buzzy if static
architecture of our hulking CPUs and PCs but is embedded everywhere and else-
où, at the periphery of our consciousness.

In this regard, the “civilization of latitude” today is at a striking remove
from standard histories of ergonomics and “human factors,” both of which chart
the efficiency of the body as an active and autonomous agent in the workplace,
from Taylorism’s time and motion studies to the phenomenology of the cockpit
at the dawn of the Information Age. Historically, when the balance sheet
between human and machine has been understood not in strictly isomorphic

20.
Information-Intensive Environments,” in Ekman, Throughout, p. 504.

N. Katherine Hayles, “Radio-Frequency Identification: Human Agency and Meaning in

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OCTOBER

termes, it has tipped in favor of the former such that the sub-
ject maintains presumptive control in “his” interactions with
such machines. That subject, in other words, is imagined to
stand as the ultimate arbiter in this relationship, ever alert
and attentive to manipulating such operational processes.
But the discussion of worker agency in the present acquires a
new urgency, paradoxically because that role has become
progressively non-urgent where the techniques of the body
are concerned. Notably, it is less the active comportment of
the deskbound worker than the passive figure of the recum-
bent laborer that emerges.

Take, as one such illustration, the “Global Posture

Advertisement for
Bluebeam
Logiciel, 2013.

Study of Systemic Interfaces” commissioned by the American furniture manu-
facturer Steelcase.21 The document describes a “human-centered design
process” accommodating a new workplace environment, re organized by ubiqui-
tous, mobile, and pervasive technologies. Nine “new postures” are identified,
tracking both the range of motion or relative immobility stemming from the
use of such technology. Several of these “new” postures represent the figure in
near-reclining states. The question the study raises is whether so-called human-
centered design is a function of information-enabled productivity advanced by
the human actor or by the machines progressively conscripting them, automat-
ing them, into service. More pointedly, we might also ask of the study: Is there
anything like an actual or stable center out of which such designs are generated?
I’ve discussed how the colonization of nonproductive time as rest or sleep has
now become a productive register of space in horizontality.22 The bed or beanbag is
not simply a new pedestal, not just a new device enabling spectatorship; rather, it
emblematizes a mode of working: the civilization of latitude in the age of ubiquitous
computing. If the medium is the message, as Marshal McLuhan long ago proclaimed
of a pre-net information era, the prostrate has now become the substrate. And it’s on

Steelcase released the study in 2013, which “observ[éd] plus que 2000 people in 11 coun-
21.
tries,” working in a range of settings. For the company’s discussion of ergonomics vis-à-vis the
increased use of laptops, tablets, and smartphones in the workplace, see https://www.steelcase.com/
research/articles/topics/wellbeing/posture-support-changing-workplace/ (accessed July 2016). Pour
the Global Posture Study, see https://www.steelcase.com/content/uploads/ 2019/05/global-posture-
study.pdf.

22. En effet, since this essay was first written and delivered as a lecture on multiple occasions over
the last several years, a new meme/phenomenon has emerged in the wake of the pandemic: “working
from bed.” Supporters of this trend claim working from bed enables efficiency, creativity, and produc-
tivity but otherwise accede to the “collective malaise” (pandemic burnout) that has driven them there
in the first place. As a journalist described working from bed, it is “a perfect metaphor of giving up and
giving in.” Not surprisingly, “working from bed” has been charged as a deeply privileged position, par-
ticularly as it appropriates the rationale of remote labor essential to disabled workers. Taylor Lorenz,
“Working From Bed Is Actually Great,” New York Times, Décembre 31, 2020.

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Lying in the Gallery

this note that I return to the historical example of She alongside an image from the
présent. The comparison shores up the widening gulf between this equivalence. Il
dramatizes, in fact, that any isomorphism imagined between humans and computers
has skewed radically in the ways of agency and control.

In the case of She, it is 1966, the Information Age, a pre-digital moment for
the artists involved. For some of the work’s contemporary critics, unconvinced by
its largely flattering reception, She was no fun house installed in the museum but
a monster. If She inaugurated a new moment of curatorial spectacle and audi-
ence participation, perhaps it was also because She was “a passive receptacle and
helpless life,” a recumbent female body presented as an assemblage of disparate
media technics, a cavity to be penetrated and enjoyed by thousands of art-view-
ing denizens. Lying in the gallery, She had taken up those technics at her core, comme
an interior dwelling. Media have here been internalized within and by a body
that has been deemed a passive, because gendered, objet.

More recently, consider an image from 2013, an advertisement for
Bluebeam Software. A strange, certainly disorienting representation of contem-
porary work, it pictures a young woman lying in bed, legs raised and propped
against a wall. We’re no longer in the gallery, and we’re nearly fifty years after
the fact of She, but we’re still in contact with what Saint Phalle communicated
way back in the 1960s, if now upended. The ad neatly collapses the terms of
sleep and work, of bedding down and booting up, of a crude sexualization of
media, agency, and control. That the advertisement feminizes this new relation-
ship between work, horizontality, and passivity is plain and embarrassing.
Something like an iPad or tablet assumes a vertical, indeed dominant posture
atop the horizontal body of a female model. Prostrate, barely clad, certainly
eroticized, she is a platform for the platform. She’s a new work surface in the
new workplace-as-boudoir. She’s both inverted and reclining—for media goes
anywhere. More accurately, it is everywhere. There’s no doubt many of us have
taken our laptops to bed, or at least our tablets and cellphones. But I’d be sur-
prised (or maybe impressed?) if any reader has ever assumed such a posture,
which if not quite requiring a contortionist’s skills at least communicates that
there’s nothing natural in the doing. Toujours, like a good press release, the posture
in this ad gets the job done. It returns the body to its formative role as medium,
which is the message. It incarnates the ubiquity of digital media in the waking
nightmare that is our contemporary work life.

The copy for the advertisement reads like a script for the new spatiotemporal
dominant this essay describes. “Collaborate in bed . . . or at work. Sometimes your
best work happens away from the office . . . easily collaborate in real time or any-
time.” What is the difference between real time and anytime, one wonders, if work
now happens anywhere? Just where the advertisement takes leave of our historical
example is that now such conditions are exposed to the clear light of day as pure

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OCTOBER

exteriority. The copy enjoins us to collaborate, presumably with another worker
lying elsewhere, maybe similarly upended. But the fundamental collaboration, dans
fact, reduces to the one between the woman, the network, and the tablet—to her
embeddedness within this system.

She had concealed a range of media within its body while lying in the
gallery as a passive receptacle. This advertisement, on the other hand, external-
izes such conditions, networked beyond the usual conventions of human agency
and their corresponding fantasies of interiority, subjectivity, and control. UN
question elaborated in the 1960s becomes a more pressing challenge for us
aujourd'hui, updated in the language of the posthuman and shattered by a pandemic
that would demand that we keep working, as if present circumstances were busi-
ness as usual, the capitalization of crisis, with so much left to innovate and pro-
duce. Returning to Steinberg, we need to ask: Has our other resource, our hori-
zontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, conceiving, et
dreaming, now become a Procrustean bed?