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Explores emergence of proscenium stage as an aesthetic and conceptual locus of Expanded Cinema production in mid-60s New York, and the particular staging of the psychological dynamics of cinematic projection and reception made possible by this shift. The first section explores the evolution of Robert Whitman’s Prune.Flat. (1965) out of the artists imagistic reformulation of classical theatre within his early Happenings. While these early works dealt implicitly with psychological dynamics of projection and spectatorship, Prune.Flat. was his first theatrical work to explicitly engage the apparatus of cinema. Mixing live performance and cinematic projection, Whitman creates complex imbrications of on-screen and off-screen space illustrating the strong degree of spectatial complicity with the artiface of cinema. The second section details Stan VanDerBeek’s turn away from a successful practice in animated film towards a novel domain of Expanded Cinema performance. While the artist’s Movie-Drome has been the near-exclusive focus of scholarship in this domain, this section contends that the artist’s “Movie-Mural” for the John Cage / Merce Cunningham production Variations V was the most significant moment in the artist’s transition to Expanded Cinema, illustrating the crucial role played by his former Black Mountain College teachers in the genesis of his collaborative vision.

Explores the 1955 Movement exhibition in Paris as a early turning point in the emergence of the moving image in postwar art practice. The recovery of Duchamp’s interest in the 19^th century philosophical toy presented a model for artists wishing to engage the moving image at a critical distance from the specific conditions of the cinematic theatre to which it had become historically conjoined. Breaking the synthetic coherence of the motion picture into its component parts, Robert Breer’s folioscopes and mutoscopes of the ‘50s and early ‘60s mined the prehistory of industrial cinema to create works which functioned simultaneously as both film and sculpture. The revival of the philosophical toy allowed the moving image to enter the institutional space of the art gallery, where it could engage directly with the transformations taking place within late modern painting and sculpture. Concludes by situating the more canonical early works of audiovisually-mediated sculpture from Robert Morris, Nam June Paik, and Robert Whitman within this model of bifurcated aesthetic spectatorship and the challenge to institutional norms it necessarily entailed.