In the book Installation Art by Claire Bishop, the work featured therein is divided into four categories. As makers of installations these can become specific strategies to help us understand how our viewer may interact with the work and help us to craft an installation that effectively conveys meaning. The text that follows is based on my interpretation the book.
Dreamscapes
The dream may be psychological, in the Freudian sense, using metaphors and symbolism to evoke elusive content.
George Segal Couple in Open Doorway 1977
Mystic spirituality can function in a similar manner. A bit of both may be found in the work of Paul Thek, highly influenced by his Catholic upbringing;
Heightened Perception
Minimalism escaped from expressionist dogma with pure formalism. It only asks...'what am I seeing?'
Robert Morris, installation in the Green Gallery, New
York, 1964
A counter 'anti-minimalist' movement added content to the language of minimalism;
Here a simple gesture is accompanied by a message, often disruptive.
Mimetic Engulfment
Here you are absorbed, or reflected into, the environment. In Larry Bell's works viewer's reflections can be absorbed into the piece.
Larry Bell. Photo: World Red Eye.
Or in the case of Yayoi Kusama's chamber rooms the viewer's multiple reflections combine with the illusion of infinite space.
Activated Spectatorship
These works provoke actions from the viewer. They usually have political leanings, sometimes governmental and sometimes personal. Joseph Beuys is a seminal example.
Not only was Beuys an artist but also active in government as a founder or co-founder of the German Student Party (1967), Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum (1971), Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974), and German Green Party Die Grünen (1980).
Rirkrit Tiravanija's installations often have had political content, but he wants you to be physically nurished as well.
This exhibition at the Hirshhorn includes a communal
dining space in which visitors were served curry and invited to share a
meal together. The installation included a large-scale mural, drawn on
the walls over the course of the exhibition, which referenced protests
against Thai government policies.
The idea of installation art is usually considered something that arose from what was referred to as 'Happenings' and 'Environments' and the scene that somewhat centered around the artist/provocateur Allan Kaprow in the US in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In 1960 Jim Dine created Car Crash, a happening that played out in an elaborate construction that both performers and the audience where immersed in.
Another prototypical installation is Claes Oldenburg's The Store, seen here re-created in a museum setting.
Again the border between 'Environment' and 'Performance' are blurred. This was also the case with Judy Chicago's Womanhouse, but her later work The Dinner Party existed purely as an environment where the viewer moved through the piece.
Gordon Matta-Clark's work physically deconstructing architecture is known mostly through documentation, although he did create 'souvenir' cuttings of his buildings to circulate as product.
Sometimes the artifacts of a performance become an installation, as seen in Carolee Schneemann's Up to and Including Her Limits,
Many of installation art's pioneers kept re-inventing the form, as we see in Yayoi Kusama's interactive Obliteration Room.
Some artists wanted to make their installations more accessible over time, like Dan Graham.
And also Ann Hamilton, whose The Event of a Thread becomes an amusement-park-like spectacle.
This can be taken to the monumental level, as with James Turrell's work in process, Roden Crater.
Video can be placed in a site in a way which perfectly integrates with it, as seen in Bill Viola's Tiny Deaths.
Or it can totally dominate the architecture, as seen in the retrospectives of Pipilotti Rist. Although primarily working in video, abstraction informs much of their work.
Judy Pfaff's installations reference nature but also embrace abstraction.
Rachel Whiteread's work uses the literalness of the imprint, creating a negative reproduction of her subject matter.
Sarah Sze uses everyday objects in a way that defies their former functions and transforms them into formal constructions.
Danish artists' group Superflex constructs a fake McDonalds here, which they flood, with the final work consisting as a semi-documentary video. Often work falling into the installation realm defies categorization.
Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled (Free/Still) serves free curry in a very intentionally constructed, though makeshift looking, environment.
Although solidly viewed in an art context, teamLab is actually a for-profit company, pushing the boundaries between fine art and entertainment.
Who's face is missing from 'The Medium is the Massage'? Well many, but given that this book was put together right after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we need to seriously contemplate the exclusion of Dr. Martin Luther King. The March on Washington of August 28, 1963 was instrumental in getting this legislation passed, and was also a feat of new technologies. About 260,000 people were transported to Washington, mostly on buses traveling on the new interstate highway system. An adequate sound system was considered essential in maintaining order. Equipment was rented at a cost of $19,000. The elaborate set up was sabotaged on the day before the march, and then was successfully rebuilt overnight by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Television had contributed greatly to the success of the event. President Kennedy had watched Dr. King's speech on TV and was "very impressed", and agreed to meet with the march's organizers.
“The civil-rights revolution in the South began when a man and the eye
of the television film camera came together, giving the camera a focal
point for events breaking from state to state, and the man, Martin
Luther King Jr., high exposure on television sets from coast to coast,”
wrote the journalists Robert Donovan and Ray Scherer in their history of
television news, Unsilent Revolution.
Many people spoke and performed that day, including Bob Dylan...
The choice of mostly white singers was criticized at the time, and Dylan himself questioned the validity of his own participation, but this is certainly one of his most moving performances ever.
James Blue's monumental film, The March, 1963, restored in 2008.
The most extraordinary experimental film we'll be looking at is Mothlight, a physical object collage on film. Although viewing it in facsimile digital video form rather film is not ideal, the magic still comes through...what is projected here is not an optical rendering of things, instead it's the semi-transparent things themselves.
Writer J. Hoberman explains thus...
...Mothlight was created by painstakingly collaging bits and pieces
of organic matter—moth wings, most notably, as well as flowers, seeds,
leaves, and blades of grass—and sandwiching them between two layers of
clear 16-mm Mylar editing tape."
And points out that the significance is this...
"NOT THE CAMERA BUT THE PROJECTOR; not a representation but the
thing itself, a ribbon of once-living stuff preserved in celluloid
coursing along, flashing before our eyes: It was neither Muybridge’s
1879 motion studies nor the Lumière brothers’ 1895 actualités nor even Peter Kubelka’s imageless flicker film Arnulf Rainer (1960) that truly manifested the very essence of cinema but the film-object Mothlight, a three-minute-thirteen-second motion-picture collage assembled and printed by Stan Brakhage..."
Quite
a lot - we were doing steady ones and ones where he was pulling me and
it looked like I was diving and there were the ones on round paper, then
there were the fire and water prints.
He was a hard worker.
Did you feel like you were being exploited?
No, not at all. When an actress does what a film director asks her to do, she's not exploited, she's just co-operating.
He was like a director in a way and we were doing exactly what he wanted us to do, but we also wanted to do it.
Did he ask men to do the same?
I think he did it with himself and perhaps a couple of men.
There are some. I think there is a huge one where there is a man flying around in space in a print.
But perhaps it was a hint to the fact there should be more women artists.
There are not so many in history so far.
A lot of people would say he was the artist and you were the object.
No, we were subjects.
The model traditionally was always an object for the painting, object for the public.
But there, especially when we did the presentation in public, we were all subjects.
Also, for the public, we were acting.
We were not just still objects.
I think things are a bit more complex.
How do you feel about the works now?
Oh, I like it very much.
I will disappear sooner or later, unfortunately quite sooner because I'm nearly 82.
But there will be some prints of mine around.
There could be some DNA in the blue paint!
