The Booth 2

Presented to one viewer at a time, Booth 2 incorporates live performance with video feeds. Standing with her back to the viewer and in front of a full-length mirror, a woman moves suggestively and begins to remove her clothing. She is in a booth separated by a sheet of glass from the one in which the viewer is seated. Through the mirror the woman establishes eye contact with the viewer as do the characters whose faces appear on monitors at either side of her. On the right, a man glances longingly at the woman, licking his lips and raising his eyebrows, and periodically focusing his gaze on the seated viewer. His gaze acknowledges the pleasure which the nude woman incites. The monitor on the left depicts another man who exclaims his excitement and stares boldly at the viewer and the woman. Captured by a hidden camera, and appearing on a monitor next to this man is the face of the viewer. Between this monitor and the live woman is the final monitor which, via live camera, displays the face of the nude woman. At roughly five minutes, the woman turns off the spotlight which she has been standing under. The monitors turn off and the viewer is left in the small, dark booth.

 

Director & videographer: Dan Fine
Assistant Director: Andrea Mihalovic
Soundtrack: Gal Ziv
Actors: Rose Markisello
Melissa Myers
Yuri Lowenthal
Shlomo Efrati

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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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