Andrew Uroskie

In the closing pages of his fine book Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art, Andrew V. Uroskie delivers a vivid explication of Ken Dewey's multimedia project Selma Last Year (1966). With this work, Dewey proposes to redefine the social character of media through sophisticated interrelations of technology and live performance contingent to a viewer's presence: "the act of spectatorship itself [was] staged" (226). The stakes of this staging are evidenced in the work's radical reconfiguration from its first to its second iteration. The work was initially conceived as an exhibition of photographs of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, which was a major media event of the Civil Rights Era. Dewey's installation was presented on the one-year anniversary of the march in the First Unitarian Church in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, imbuing it with a reverential poignancy. This sentiment would turn to pointed class critique in the work's second formulation for the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, New York. "In contrast to the relatively diverse early audiences in Chicago," Uroskie observes, "the audience at Lincoln Center would be disproportionately white and affluent. Dewey describes wanting to 'break through' the 'self-satisfied nature' of those largely insulated from the harsh reality of the civil rights struggle and rapidly becoming inured to its images of suffering" (219). In a new component to the work, viewers could watch an 8mm rear-projection continuous loop of violence committed by the police against civil rights activists in Selma on "Bloody Sunday." Set next to this repetition of widely circulated images, Dewey presents another screen, this one a television depicting viewers as they appeared eight seconds prior. The constitutive force of the work is generated in a split attention, a psychophysical tension between the process of recognizing one's own familiar image and the urgent, existential stakes of enfranchisement exemplified in the brutal crackdown of state power against its citizens.

"Dewey was less interested in the creation of objects than in the production of situations" (203), Uroskie argues. Selma Last Year utilizes the disjunction of multimedia presentation as a means by which to concentrate on social disjunction in the mid-1960s. For these ambitions, Dewey is a central figure in Uroskie's argument for a situational rather than ontological preoccupation in multimedia experiments of the 1960s.

The care and nuance Uroskie devotes to Dewey's work is characteristic of case studies presented throughout Between the Black Box and the White Cube. In taking as his object the idea of cinema in postwar art, Uroskie offers a model for future scholarship on the complex, multifarious activity collected under the term "expanded cinema." His achievement rests in part on his lucid discussion of the etymology of "expanded" in a broader context of postwar art. Uroskie posits "not what is cinema?" in Andre Bazin's fundamental question of film studies, but "where?" The idea of cinema is inextricable from its contingent sites.