Two exhibitions separated by two hundred years. The first premiered officially in 1790s Paris—an earlier version had been staged in Leipzig—and spread to European capitals such as London. Part enlightened entertainment, part haunted house, the Phantasmagoria, like its descendant two hundred years later, refused categorization as mere magic lantern spectacle.

The second exhibition, Tall Ships (1992), an installation by the video artist Gary Hill, premiered in Kassel, at Documenta IX, and was soon shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York (1993) and other international venues. As in the Phantasmagoria, a “sepulchral” atmosphere pervaded the exhibition’s darkness. And the darkness, in turn, induced life-and-death encounters—“one couldn’t help intermittently fantasizing that these colorless, even wraith-like, yet curiously attractive figures were, as one imagines them, the recently dead, returning for some warmth of last contact with the living”—and, more crucial, fulfilled the technical requirement whereby the images abandoned the wall and entered, as quasianimate beings, the same space as the spectators.

Most critics failed to grasp the basic technical operations of Hill’s installation. Fewer still discerned the eighteenth-century precedent. And even the scant links established between Tall Ships and the Phantasmagoria are at once too general—phantasmagoria is made to stand in for illusion writ large—and too specific—tied solely to this strikingly analogous installation. The technical and historical lacunae are symptomatic of a broader deficiency: neither art history nor film studies recognizes phantasmagoria as a fundamental configuration of image and spectator—one with deep media archaeological roots and myriad contemporary manifestations. Focused on individual media, technologies, genres, artists, movements, styles, or subjects, scholars have largely failed to recognize the decisive roles played by the coordinated disposition of these disparate elements in relation to specific modes of spectatorship. Phantasmagoria is one such dispositif.

TO ACCESS THE FULL TEXT, PLEASE CLICK THE “DOWNLOAD PDF” LINK.