SUVAN GEER
SUVAN GEER
Barbara Bloom, "The Reign of Narcissism", installation at the
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), 1988-89
Dan Flavin, "Untitled (to Robert, Joe and Michael)," installation,
86 x 82", MOCA, 1975-82.
Installation art is hot right now. Strange. For years no one seemed to know
what an installation was, now it's everywhere. From Documenta 9 to the Whitney
Biennial. There are even galleries and museums completely devoted to it,
here and in Europe. Last year two books crammed with color photo documentation
of hundreds of pieces were published, and MOCA has accumulated enough of
the work in its permanent collection to flesh out a two part exhibition
[Part 2 is currently on exhibit through May 21 --Ed.]. As an artist who
has been doing installation art since 1979, the explosive growth of my chosen
practice is both satisfying and frustrating.
It's satisfying because I take the proliferation of this genre, with its
roots in so many different 20th century traditions--Bauhaus architecture,
Dada, Happenings, Minimalism, even theater--to signify art's desire to maintain
an energetic inquiry into the merger of art and life by leapfrogging over
traditional boundaries where necessary. Further, installation's insistence
on the importance of multiple fragments of sensory information and context
is part of my own fascination with the art form.
But the deluge of work is frustrating too. There is a lot of work being
created and very little analysis of it. Many reviews are simply descriptive.
Because the form is experience dependent (and often technologically innovative)
critical writing often reads like a step by step tour of Disneyland. When
the writing does engage the work's content it often leaves unconsidered
the form itself. The result is a confusion which allows mechanized sculptures
or a room full of discreet objects to be lumped under "installation"
when they have nothing to do with it. I agree with critic Richard Smith
that if we had retained the early designation of "environments,"
suggestive of a "place to be," rather than going with the more
process oriented tag "installation," which sounds like a routine
putting things into place, things might not be so confusing. But in a world
where "environment" is synonymous with "ecology" perhaps
there is no word free from confusion.
Clearly installation is a widely diverse and idiosyncratic art form. It
would be impossible to come up with a simple definition that included everything
artists are doing with it. But there are junctures where installations come
together. One of these is space. In many ways perhaps what is most notable
yet overlooked about installation is the way it uses, or addresses space,
context and site. Space in installation art is not simply the gallery. empty
house or unplowed field that the art occupies. Space is one of the essential
elements in the work. It is the near tangible, almost liquid air of James
Turrell's mass-less light rooms and the open, expansive cradle for Walter
De Maria's Nestr Mexico Lightning Field.
Like sculpture, which can slice or suck up space into invisible volumes,
installation asks space to participate in creating a work's meaning. But
installation does it not just with assembled objects but by referring to
and playing off its environmental space. If the objects and the space they
create or occupy are not integral to one another, if the experience of moving
through the work does ; not engender or alter meaning, it is not, to my
mind, an installation. It is a
collection of things.
Installation space may be a firm, physical reality completely bound to the
l viewer's body as in Daniel Wheeler's rambling internal journey You are
Here, [see Todd Baron's article in the March, 1995 issue--Ed.] an illusionary
suggestion of depth such as Richard Wilson's motor oil 20/50, or
a representational context loaded with ideological baggage such as Marcel
Broodthaers' critiques of the cultural power of museums, or any of Ann Hamilton's
site specific explorations of the invisible but tangible presence of labor.
Installations are threaded on the space they use, their site, and the context
they create or exist within like beads on a string.
Space used as a sculptural material is not new. It can be traced back to
the Constructivists and Futurists who incorporated it into their works to
reflect the dynamism of the increasingly mobile and chaotically fragmented
modern world. Later, however Modernism's narrow concentration on form and
the art object drove avant garde artists like Yves Klein to rebel and take
on space itself as meaningful. In 1958 Klein painted the outside of the
Iris Clert gallery in Paris his spiritually significant blue and painted
the inside white, removing everything except one empty showcase. Entitled
The isolation of senxibilih in a state of primary mattes stabilized by
pictorial sensibility, the exhibition offered the site as subject and
object for consideration. This was, in the words of artist Patrick Ireland
(who writes under the pen-name Brian O'Doherty), the "new space,"
the gallery "infiltrated with consciousness. The white cube [as] art-in-potency,
its enclosed space an alchemical medium."
In the 60's and 70's art's space, rather than the things within it, increasingly
became the locus for many artists' attention. They focused on specific sites:
fields, deserts and seashores, as well as on gallery "non-sites"
(as Robert Smithson designated them) where other locations could be interpreted.
Other artists were looking at space as specific sites and attending to their
work's context--whether it was the empty building which housed the work,
the museum as cultural institution, or the intangible electronic techno-space
of video, T.V. and sound.
While installation space was something to be occupied, explored or felt
as a substance or volume it was also something recognized as shaping mind
and society and therefore loaded with political and cultural implications.
Maria Nordman repeatedly recast public sites and buildings as spaces where
observation and human occupation were the art under consideration. She used
existing architecture and urban territories of meeting to show how place
can interact with the social groups in which it is located. Space could
also be genderized. In 1972 Womanhouse was founded as a collaborative art
environment by feminist women of the California Institute of the Arts, under
the direction of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. It was a temporary space
where the domestic rituals of women's lives could be explored in the politically
explicit context of an abandoned and condemned house.
Space in this century is a material completely bound up with our experience
of it. Feminism and psychoanalysis in an age impacted by Einstein's Theory
of Relativity have amplified the position of the viewer and it's a relationship
vital to contemporary art. Just as the art object now interacts with its
context, the viewer's role in assigning meaning or creating it has become
central to the art malting process.
Installation art is inexorably linked to experience. It depends on its audience.
Frequently bodily movement unfolds the work's meaning or creates it. Sensations,
sounds, and smells are an integral part of it. But most essentially, time
passes, and it is the living time of the viewer. Unique to installation
art is the importance of the real time experience of the audience. They
are observing, and perhaps participating in, something which often has only
a limited life span or can be altered by their presence. The piece may not
be the same twice, even for j the same viewer. It may be gone next week.
While often subtle, this shanng of time by the art and the audience highlights
the importance of the expenence of the viewer to the work and its meaning.
Clearly an installation is a construction whose function is to be experienced
now. It exists for that purpose and then (usually) ceases to exist.
I find installation's transitory nature and experiential basis to be significant
at this point in history.
First perhaps because it suggests art is a living thing. But secondly, because
installation ideally represents a radicalization of space, a talking back
of art's ability to think and operate independently within a world of product
marketability and sales (Realistically of course, within a global culture
of capitalism where even ideas are commodities, installations are as much
product as anything else).
However I consider conscious expenence to be precious. In witnessing one
of Connie Zehr's "carpets" of loose copper slag erupting sculptural
chunks whose meaningful relationships change as we move around them, or
feeling the slow bum keenness of watching something almost imperceptible
like Charles Ray's spinning tableware, or chasing our own illusive video
image in one of Bruce Nauman's video pieces, something which underlies the
significance of art in the present world is emphasized: The importance of
the individual's expenence.
We live at a time where Universal Studios and virtual reality have reengineered
experience so that first-hand human knowledge is fast becoming indistinguishable
from techno-simulation. There are now millions of people living vicanously
through actors on soap operas, and the media routinely devours the world
for uss burping out detachment and stimulation. In such a world mindful
expenence is endangered. Like law and religion, art is facing a brave new
world nfe with humanity ' s increasing capacity for self-manipulation, deception
and mind games. In such an environment installation art can question and
revive the human capability of thinking on its feet, and "knowing"
directly by expanding, exhuming and exploring individual experience.
