The Booth
d live performance, presented to one viewer at a time. The viewer walks through a black curtain into a small, dark booth. As soon as the viewer is seated, an extreme close-up of a young woman’s face appears on two large monitors. At the same time, a light is turned on revealing an enclosed soundproof stage between the two monitors, directly in front of the viewer. On this stage, a naked young woman stands with her back to the viewer, moving and touching herself seductively. The face on the monitors begins a monologue, contouring a script to the individual viewer. The woman says that she can see him or her, and asks direct questions about the experience of watching, and being watched. It becomes evident that the woman on the monitor is the naked woman facing away from the viewer. Her face is being shown on the monitors in real time as she watches the viewer on a hidden monitor. Soon after her performance begins, an elderly woman with a grave expression appears on a monitor to the viewer’s left. She sternly criticizes the viewer, the young woman, and the entire project. In contrast to the young woman, her monologue is pre-recorded and always the same for every viewer. The experience continues until the young woman decides to end the show (about four minutes). She turns off the monitors, the booth goes dark, and the viewer exits.

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Visuality and the booth

Dan Fine
Video installations
“Visuality and the Booth”
By B i l l A r n i n g

Inspired by the strange architectural inventions of New York’s sexual undergrounds, Fine looks not at the sociosexual behaviors of these spaces, as have most artists who have dealt with this material.
Rather, the artist has treated the spaces as unintentional yet rich experiments in scopophilic pleasure, akin to museums. Fine takes all the complications of sight that occur when we look at pictures of other beings – our eyes move swiftly between face and body, and they will appear either to return our stare or be unaware – and he has cubed this complexity. His projections appear to be conspicuously aware of our stares, respond to them, and provoke them. When there is more then one human in the room and more then one projected actor, I calculate the different voyeur-to-viewed combinations at 64. This would be true if his figures were merely sitting fully clothed, hands folded in their laps. But Fine wants this to be more anxiety producing than such an academic
exercise would have been….
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