the boundary between the self and visual representation blurs. The museum itself is undergoing a metamorphosis, and is becoming a cinema in the process, in which, as Boris Groys stated, the necessity for darkness creates a state of invisibility that fuses with the structural impossibility of viewing a video work in its entirety. [2] This fundamental lack of visibility becomes a challenge for the observer: perception turns into participation. Paradoxically, however, the power that unfolds in Pollock’s action paintings connects the affective history of the «white cube» closely with that of its paradigmatic opposite, the black box. Since 1945, the reception of modern art has been inseparably united with the representative function of the «white cube» as a framing device; in a white cube, an object is dissociated from its real surroundings, and the power of this de-contextualization elevates the object to an artwork. For Pollock’s painting, the «intensified presence» of the evenly lit, «white, ideal space» [3] became the setting for the performance of an existential aspect of expression—the embodiment of the artist-subject in the image—revealing a practically

archetypical aesthetic effect. Hans Namuth’s visual characterization of the screen as a «stage» for the artist-actor, has evolved, in the contemporary context, into the black box, the new field of action for the public. The black box reacts to the experience of projected images and sound dramaturgies, and through the intensity of stimulated emotions, ultimately interacts with narrative structures and numinous scenes. Brian O’Doherty, a leading exeget of the white cube ideology, states that the white cube connects «some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory» with «chic design to produce a unique cult space of aesthetics.» If this is so, then the black box is the aesthetic correspondent to this space of modernity, which demands distance and embodies unity. The black box fascinates because its magic is of an entirely different order. Its power is won from the revival of stimulating aesthetics, which tend to make use of spectacle’s ability to engross, beckoning with the theatrical allure of the unknown and the immeasurable. Observers can step over the threshold of the black box and immerse themselves in the