what
is installation art?
Introduction
“I just wanted to find out where the boundaries
were. I've found out there aren't any.
I wanted to be stopped but no one will stop me.”
Damien Hirst (born 1965), British Installation Artist
There was a bit of a fuss one day at Tate Britain. A
woman was hurrying through a large room which at that
time was housing “Lights Going On and Off in a
Gallery”, Martin Creed's Turner prize-shortlisted
installation in which, yes, lights go on and off in
a gallery. Suddenly the woman's necklace broke and the
beads spilled over the floor. As some visitors bent
down to pick them up, one man said: "Perhaps this
is part of the installation." Another replied:
"Surely that would make it performance art rather
than an installation." "Or a happening,"
said a third.
These are confusing times for the growing visual art
audience. More and more gallery and museum space is
devoted to installations but yet nobody has managed
to come up with a definition of installation art that
satisfies everybody. Installations share only a small
set of essential characteristics. Some will demand audience
participation, some will be site-specific, some conceptual
gags involving only a light bulb. Installations, then,
are a big, confusing family with little in common.
Towards a Definition
“Every man is an artist.”
Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986), German Installation
Artist
What are installations? “Installations,”
answers the dictionary, “are multi-media, multi-dimensional
and multi-form works which are created temporarily for
a particular space or site either outdoors or indoors,
in a museum or gallery.”
Wikipedia provides its readers a more elaborative attempt
to define installations: “Installation art is
art that, through the use of sculptural materials and
other media, seeks to modify the way we experience a
particular space. Installation art is not necessarily
confined to gallery spaces and can refer to any material
intervention in everyday public or private spaces. It
is a genre of Western contemporary art and came to prominence
in the 1970s. (…) Materials used in contemporary
installation art range from everyday and natural materials
to new media such as video, sound, performance, computers
and the internet. Some installations are site-specific
in that they are designed to only exist in the space
for which they were created."
Essential
Characteristics
“All in all, the creative act is not performed
by the artist alone, the spectator brings the work in
contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting
its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution
to the creative act.”
Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968), French/American
Installation Artist
Essentially, installation art takes into account the
viewer’s entire sensory experience, rather than
floating framed points of focus on a “neutral”
wall or displaying isolated objects (literally) on a
pedestal. This leaves space and time as its only dimensional
constants, and it promises to engender or at least embrace
a comprehensively critical mode of experience. This
implies dissolution of the line between art and life.
The
conscious act of artistically addressing all the senses
with regard to the viewer’s experience in totality
made a resounding debut in 1849 when Richard Wagner
conceived of an operatic work for the stage that drew
inspiration from ancient Greek theater in its inclusion
of all the major art forms: painting, writing, music,
etc. In devising operatic works to commandeer the audience’s
senses, Wagner left nothing unobserved: architecture,
ambiance, and even the audience itself were considered
and manipulated in order to achieve a state of total
artistic immersion.
There
is a strong parallel between installation and theater:
Both play to a viewer who is expected to be at once
immersed in the sensory/narrative experience that surrounds
him and maintain a degree of self-identity as a viewer.
The traditional theatergoer does not forget that he
has come in from outside to sit and take in a created
experience; a trademark of installation art has been
the curious and eager viewer, still aware that he is
in an exhibition setting and tentatively exploring the
novel universe of the installation.
The
installation artist articulates the spatiality of a
particular site through a conceptualised process of
placement and inscription. The artist interacts with
the site's inherent physical qualities and architectural
features, and engages the cultural significance of the
site itself as an active element in the interpretation
of the work.
The expectations and social habits that the viewer takes
with him into the space of the installation will remain
with him as he enters, to be either applied or negated
once he has taken in the new environment. What is common
to nearly all installation art is a consideration of
the experience in total and the problems it may present,
namely the constant conflict between disinterested criticism
and sympathetic involvement. Ultimately, the only things
a viewer can be assured of when experiencing the work
are his own thoughts and preconceptions and the basic
rules of space and time. All else may be molded by the
artist’s hands.
Brief
History
“It's not about winning. It's the enjoyment
of doing it - it gets your brain going.”
Christo (born 1935), Bulgarian Installation Artist
There
have been installations since Marcel Duchamp put a urinal
in a New York gallery in 1917 and called it art. This
was the most resonant gesture in 20th century art, discrediting
notions of taste, skill and craftsmanship, and suggesting
that everyone could be an artist.
After
Duchamp’s “Ready-Mades” (the first
works blurring the borderline between art and what is
outside it) artists started to explore the margins of
art and to eliminate the dichotomy between art and life.
The Assemblage and Environment Art of the sixties were
born out of this exploration: These works of art consisted
of various materials and objects piled up by the artist
to fill a given space. Installation was not considered
as a separate method of art production yet; it only
meant the way an exhibition was realized.
But
soon the qualities of the exhibition hall became of
increasing importance owing much to the two main painterly
streams of the 20th century. Spatialism challenged the
illusory two dimensional picture plane and integrated
art with architecture; the technique of collage combined
art and everyday objects on the canvas which also interacted
with the real space of the gallery – and they
both meant to break open the artistic realm and to make
it one with the social space, now also including the
viewer.
All
this increased the importance of the work´s context
– context indicating the exhibiting space as well
as the cultural disposition and sensitivity of the audience
– and altered the conventional relationship between
the viewer and the work of art. Meaning too, not being
predestined in these works, is something being established
in this encounter. The forerunning trends of 20th century
art include the early Dada, Futurism, and Constructivism
as well as the theatrical movements of the Avantgarde
that offered a scene for the fusion of art and everyday
life throughout the century.
The
activity of the followers of Duchamp changed our acceptance
about the art object: Yves Klein organized an exhibition
entitled Le Vide/Empty(-iness) and left the gallery
completely empty; his aesthetically irrelevant paintings
became interesting because of the bravura of their making,
the living paintbrushes. Piero Manzoni made the cult
of the artist´s person just as important as his
creation. The understanding of the sculptures of Beuys,
and later the Minimalists and Postminimalists lay rather
in the process of their making, or their architectural
interpretation than in their construction.These
works question what we are to focus on when viewing
art since it is no longer evident what the art object
is, what the subject of art is, what we are required
to look at. The minimalists sought formal simplicity
and lucidity in creating their ‘three-dimensional
works’ which did not yield to the category of
painting or sculpture but did draw attention to their
own non-artistic nature. Unlike them, the Post-Minimalists
of the late sixties abandoned formal clarity and produced
loosely structured and diffused works seeming to reject
altogether the idea that the material was constructed.
The
viewer and his reactions were of great importance for
the Situationists operating with ‘concretely and
deliberately constructed moments of life’, and
studying these ever-changing and contingent reactions
as crucial factors for the artist.
In
the past two decades, after time and space had been
integrated in art as its material, installation that
originally stood for the display of the exhibition,
began to describe a kind of artmaking which rejects
concentration on one object in favour of a consideration
of the relationship between a number of elements or
of the interaction between things and their context.
Famous
artists and their installation works
1.
Artists : Christo and Jean-Claude
Installation :
• Wrapped Reichstag, 1995 – the Reichstag
remained wrapped for 14 days and all materials were
recycled.
• The Umbrellas, 1991 – The artists and
1,880 workers opened 3,100 umbrellas in Ibaraki and
California. A Japan-USA work of art to reflect the similarities
and difference in the ways of life and the use of the
land in two inland valleys.
2. Artist : Dan Flavin, 1961 - 1996
Various works includes :
• Icons, 1961 – series of works with electric
lights
• Greens crossing greens, 1966 – a barrier
installation at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne
• Alternating pink and gold, 1967 – first
large scale installation made for the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago
• Flourescent lights installation (1972), Buffalo,
New York
• Lighting the entire rotunda of the Frank Lloyd
Wright designed by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New
York City to commemorate its restoration and reopening
in 1992.
3.
Artist : Walter De Maria
Installation :
• Lightning field, 1977 – comprised of polished
stainless steels at a desert in New Mexico. An elaborately
wrought installation that becomes glorious when the
slanting rays of departing or rising sun illuminate
the steels to fleet one wonders if it were a mirage.
Internationally recognized as one of the most significant
works of art.
4.
Artist : Damien Hirts
Installation :
• In and out of love, 1991 – a scene of
pastoral beauty became one of languid death. Butterfly
cocoons were attached to large white canvases with radiators
to encourage hatchings and briefly flourish. In a separate
room, butterflies were embalmed on brightly coloured
canvases, their wing weighed down by paint.
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