2004, "Staremaster," for Terminal 5, Sternberg Press


"The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than 'that which appears is good, that which is good appears.' The attitude that it demands is passive acceptance which it obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance."
-Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

There are moments when you pause and look, when you stop and stare. The moment a plane takes off from surface to air still captures attention. The view from the Terminal 5 waiting lounge serves forth just this, a perfect picture of the airplane runway. Installed in this lounge is Staremaster by Sean Linezo. It is here that Linezo asks us to wait and watch.

Vision is an essential privilege, yet staring involves a certain indifference combined with the decadence of wasting time. Staremaster prizes the stare, awards the skill of long term looking. It is the found object of Terminal 5, existing for years as a live performance and now presented as a conceptual project in the airport waiting lounge.

Staremaster functions like a game show. When Saarinen's airport terminal was built in the early 1960's, game shows were popular television, involving ordinary people in pre-reality TV. Game shows are based on suspense and capitalism, on challenge and champions. Linezo's work takes on these ideas - the everyday contestant, the excitement, the scene of winning, the sets of television - but his game requires patience and rewards stamina. Linezo asks us to evade TV distraction and endure.

Staremaster is a project about looking and to keep finding reasons to look. In his book The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov wrote of the pleasure in seeing, "I have realized that the only happiness in this world is to observe, to spy, to watch, to be nothing but a big, slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye." The Staremaster champion is the person who stares the longest, without a blink. The longer you wait, the more likely you are to win. But not only are Staremaster contestants required to stare, so are the audience and the judges. This collective staring is part of an airport, of passing time amongst strangers. It is also the ritual of an art exhibition and cinema.

Rick Moody wrote that Linezo's Staremaster "is about watching, what watching means, and as such it gets to the heart of cinema itself." Staremaster is founded on a model of the spectacle and includes a set of cameras and screens documenting the live event. You can watch the real thing or the camera's version. We watch the screen with all the love of the real. The theater of the screen engages us. We hide with a curtain, we show with a showgirl; we watch and wait for the real, for the fantastic prize behind door number one, for the answer, for the solution, for "it." We are witnesses, to both the real and the re-presentation, to beauty and tragedy, to love and death, to yesterday and tomorrow all with an indifferent stare.

But more than showcase the spectacle, Linezo recreates it. His live performance critiques "the event." Staremaster travels around, working through a college circuit and a nationwide tour, asking the anyplace audience to face a set without an actor, a prize without a reason. How else can we respond to the re-current rituals of looking? Another biennial, another awards show, another fashion week, another Olympics or Superbowl, TV show or competition to which we must travel, and stare. Or that which travels to us via the screen to be looked at. There is only a feeling-less satisfaction in seeing it first before another fabulous show. Linezo offers us a fabulous show about nothing that repeats the same way every time with the timelessness of the stare - and in this way we find the new portraiture in the collection of headshots that result.