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.