by Benjamin Young With his installation _Reality Cinema/Live Video_, Jan Baracz turns Art in General’s storefront project space inside-out, or rather, outside-in. Most storefronts are arrayed with goods on display in the windows, facing outward, to be glimpsed from the street (the project space has been used in this manner as recently as last spring, when Fawn Krieger turned the gallery into an artist’s store, _COMPANY_, selling an eclectic panoply of handmade objects). Rather than an interior made outwardly visible for the delectation of passersby, _Reality Cinema/Live Video_ instead hides the gallery interior behind curtained windows, and folds the outside world into the space through a video feed projecting images of the street onto an interior screen. The installation reverses the relation between gallery and street, inside and outside, thereby transforming the means by which storefront architecture typically solicits attention. Passersby are now invited inside by two illuminated signs hanging in the windows, one announcing “live,” the other “video,” joined into a single phrase by the blue light they both cast over the curtains. Instead of the transparency of display, where passersby gawk at goods from the sidewalk, picking out a commodity through the moving gap of rumbling trucks and passing pedestrians, or sighting the object of desire behind their own reflection partly superimposed on the window glass, here streetgoers are met with the opacity of enclosure, dark curtains barring the view, and a doubled neon sign to indicate what might wait inside for the curious. The solicitation is indirect, even a little tawdry. The object is withheld, an offer is made without revealing exactly what’s at stake, what might be on view or for sale. The setup trades on dreams, fantasies, and desires, including the desire to see or to experience something as yet unseen, dark, or hidden. Like the scenario motivating a confidence game, or like a carnival barker pitching a magic show behind a curtain, an entry ticket buys you only a little wonderment on the way in and the lingering doubt that you got what you paid for on the way out. The combination of window, curtain and sign forms an architectural come-on that offers and withholds at once, a kind of promise, an offer, a secret, a gift wrapped in neon and velvet. Set apart from the glass and ironwork boutiques of SoHo, or the Canal Street stalls crammed floor to ceiling with multicolor kitsch and luxury knockoffs, this storefront recalls a different sort of commercial architecture, instead reminiscent of a now-defunct establishment a few blocks away at the corner of Church and White: a dark, squat building whose glimmering sign advertised “sTopless Go-Go Girls” instantly transformed into “Topless” ones by the on-off flicker of a red neon s, a winking hint at the ease with which a lady’s top might magically disappear. Perhaps the blue light of _Reality Cinema/Live Video_ reflects the glow of this local artifact, as lurid and playful as some of Bruce Nauman’s neon works, which had their genesis in his attempt to make use of the display windows in his storefront studio. Upon entry, the installation turns out not to be a commercial enterprise at all—there’s no cover charge, but rest assured this is a classy joint. Visitors entering the gallery encounter a screening room, with rows of empty chairs and perhaps a few other intrepid souls. There are no go-go girls to be seen, live, nude, or otherwise, in this space laid out for another, but perhaps not altogether different, sort of visual pleasure. It is also an institution from an earlier era, an institution also threatened by the recent wave of gentrification that aims to wash away all the seedy reminders of a life of the city other than that of tourism and luxury condos: the cinema. The visitor enters at the back of the space, eyes scanning the room, landing on the screen to find a movie already playing. To a viewer walking in off the street, it feels strangely familiar: haven’t I seen this one before? The picture consists of footage of the street from which the visitor has just retreated, shot by video cameras peeking out from within the gallery. The shot of the street, with static buildings and passing traffic, cuts to a different angle on the same scene, and then a third angle, by which time viewers begin to detect a pattern of alternating wide angle, medium, and close-up shots. The traffic passes in real time; careful observers, noting the light, weather, and details of the scene experienced moments before, will surmise that the footage is indeed “live,” even if they can’t directly verify it, since, with the windows blocked, venturing outside means exiting the room and losing sight of the screen. Yet, as recognizable as the street scene may be, it comes to them in a strange, new way, and not only because the exterior has been re-routed into the gallery. The “movie” is accompanied by an audio track that collages ambient street sounds together with cryptic bits of dialogue and electronic instrumentation. What strikes listeners as familiar in the audio track is less the muffled din of the city outside, than the rising and falling of a film score as it evokes various film genres, from action to horror to comedy. Despite the formal discontinuity between film score and documentary image, the soundtrack washes over the events on screen, investing them with new significance, whether comic levity or tragic weight. As the shifting audio tones color the scene with emotion and drama, any chance convergence between sound and screen incorporates the street into a larger film event, and this window on the everyday is transformed into a motivated, meaningful picture. Reality Cinema/Live Video offers the familiar in a new guise, asking viewers to look again at the everyday life of the street by splicing two divergent moving image mediums: the open-ended, improvisatory transmission of video with the constructed architectural and sonic environment of cinema. In opposition to the mixing down of different moving image mediums such as film and video into the same, lo-res consumer experience, formerly hosted on the television set and now on the miniaturized window of the computer screen, Reality Cinema/Live Video combines video and film in a way that contrasts their distinct organization of time, space, and vision. Here we find the structured, compressed time of film, where editing directs attention by choreographing the relation between shots, contrasted with the unedited, simultaneous, and unending time of video, the live feed indefinitely extended to embrace the empty time of the contingent event, where distraction replaces attention. So too does the built structure of cinema, which organizes the crowd and directs its gaze toward the screen, and whose interior accumulates the residue of repeated viewing in its worn seats, represent the institution and archive of film culture. This architecture of cinema contrasts with the mobile recording and viewing apparatus of video, as it glances across all the competing image screens—billboards, ad signage, window displays, architectural façades both opaque and mirrored—scattered throughout the city. If cinema appears here as an architecture of interiority, narrative cinema makes use of that interiority to enable a certain kind of vision. Playing games of invisibility, narrative cinema allows viewers to forget themselves in the dark and to identify with another figure on screen, to project themselves into another place or time. In contrast, video might operate according to a principle of exteriority, its promised availability for use by anyone, to cover any event anywhere, taking it out onto the street to simultaneously record and broadcast the people it finds there. This ubiquity of the camcorder means that those venturing out into public are always potentially watched, confined to the surface of their own bodies, whether in the play of fashion, of seeing and being seen, or in the total visibility of surveillance. The intersection of cinema and video produces a contrast between projection and introjection, voyeurism and exhibitionism. For all the differences between cinema and video it highlights, Reality Cinema/Live Video upholds the disappearing institution of cinema as a counterpoint to the reign of video. For those willing to gamble with their time, if not their money, the sign advertising Live Video offers the promise of “liveness,” the enticements of instantaneity, the delight of experiencing an event—no matter which one—in the very moment that it happens. And, like the illusionist’s show at a run-down travelling circus, the promise may not live up to the viewer’s expectations. While consumers caught up in the blandishments of the “live” tend to overlook the mediating effects of video, Baracz’s installation reminds viewers that “live video” is a contradiction in terms. The phrase displayed on the façade has been split into two signs, suggesting that as much as viewers run them together, the terms remain distinct, if not directly opposed. The installation further undercuts the promise of “live video” by luring in viewers who expect a live look at an exotic elsewhere, but then projecting the quotidian street scene they just left. This letdown questions how the mechanism of display produces consumer desire, and how very deathly are those things held up to us as most alive. Still, when paired with the audio track, this setup may offer a new outlook on the life of the street, and possibly new pleasures to go along with it. Viewers may ask, to what extent does Reality Cinema/Live Video reconfigure existing modes of vision and urban experience? What survives in the twin inheritances of cinema and video from which it draws? For instance, does the project inherit any of the gendered division of looking predominant in mainstream cinema and, less formally, in the street, where it has been theorized that men look and women present themselves to be looked at? Or does the installation offer some new, possibly more equal, relation between the two? What new narratives does the work prompt the viewer to create out of the mundane stuff of the street? Set apart from surrounding commercial enterprises, Reality Cinema/Live Video aspires to open access: it can be attended by anyone who passes by and dares walk in. It offers a part in a movie to anyone venturing onto the street; to those inside it presents an opportunity to sit down, rest, and enjoy the show. The condition is that visitors choose between competing roles: they can be either an actor outside or a spectator inside, but not both at once. Of course, this distinction is not absolute; spectators are seen and act in front of other audience members, while those actors out on the street are also spectators in the public arena. Nevertheless, the project emphasizes the disparity between actor and spectator, and refuses to equate them in any simple or continuous way. It asks visitors to reevaluate the ways they inhabit these roles, and the ways they coordinate seeing and acting. The curtains foreground a split between interior and exterior, between seeing and being seen, and deny viewers the pleasure of seeing their image instantaneously reproduced in the window display or on the television screen. If visitors want to create their own performance using the means offered by the installation, it is clear they can’t do it alone. They need to assemble an audience, even a sort of public, to bridge the gap between inside and outside, and to engage in a different kind of appropriation and enjoyment of images. Transparency—not of display, but of dialogue—was one of the promises of early video. For guerilla video makers and proponents of community-based cable television, video surpassed even the portable film cameras and sync sound of an earlier generation in its promise to make image production, distribution, and reception more open and democratic. Not only would video decentralize the control and broadcast of television, it would allow anyone to make, criticize, and respond to the televised media they encountered. And in the rise of video art in the 1970s, Dan Graham explicitly linked video to the "two-way mirror" of the window display, suggesting both made use of a screen, visually transparent and reflective at once, whose two sides might be repurposed for reciprocal exchange, rather than one-way models of broadcast and consumption. The image of oneself reflected in the commodity behind the shop window, alienated and falsely reconciled at once, would be replaced by participation in a video feedback loop of seeing oneself seeing, and being seen, by other people, in a flexible, egalitarian, responsive relation to others. Graham had his own proposal to transform the cinema: an architectural model of a theater with a two-way mirrored glass screen and walls. Inside or out, those on the brighter side of the divide would be faced with a mirror. Those on the darker side would see a window, either onto the audience inside or those passing on the street outside. A roughly equal light level would allow both sides to see back and forth through the partially reflective windows and the screen on which the film was playing. Reality Cinema/Live Video instead allows viewers to question what became of that ideal of transparency and reflection, and returns to the old institution of cinema to challenge the continuum of visibility operating today. In an escape from the harsh exposure of the street, viewers are offered anonymity, interiority, and identification—the elements of narrative cinema and the cinematic apparatus most intensely criticized by film theory during the rise of video. The curtains blocking out the light, like the black bands of film stock wrapped around each exposed frame, enfold viewers in a dark refuge for daydreams and fantasies, protecting them from the light of total visibility to which we are increasingly subjected.