20th century AD

Once upon a time there was painting and there was sculpture. But that was a long time ago. The technologies employed by artists now include film, video, slide projection, sound and computers, and there is no limit placed upon the materials that may be used. The present-day visitor to a gallery or museum of contemporary art can expect to be met by almost anything.

At the Dia Foundation in New York there is a room filled to waist height with earth. Walter de Maria's 50m3 Earth, made at a time in the late 1960s when artists were beginning to examine the relationship between the industrial and natural landscapes of the world and the ways in which they were represented in the gallery, has to be carefully tended and watered to keep it looking and smelling fresh. Although one can only stand at the doorway and look in, the physical presence of the work is impressive.

At the Saatchi Gallery in London there is a room filled to waist height with used car oil. A channel let into the tank allows one to enter the gallery which, because of the perfect reflective qualities of the still, black liquid seems to dissolve as the strong illumination from the skylight also appears below one's feet.

However opposed their ultimate effects, these examples of what has come to be known as installation art share the idea that an artwork is not an object in the gallery but something that extends throughout, thoroughly occupies and is to some extent congruent with its space.

It has been more than a quarter of a century since art - some art at least - required its spectators to experience it differently. The term "installation" covers a huge variety of artworks, a variety of form, materials, content and effect so broad that there seems little that could justify giving them all the same generic name. However, it is possible to identify a number of factors, principally concerning a new perception of the space and time within which the relationship between spectator and work of art takes place, which go some way to explaining why this word has become so commonplace in recent years.

Ready-made art

If we needed a historical precedent we could look to Marcel Duchamp who, in the early years of the century, offered a series of mass-produced artefacts - a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, a urinal, a snow shovel, and others - as "ready-made" works of art. These defied the idea that the artist's touch, as the sign of a unique expressive act, was essential to art. They also demonstrated that it is the context in which we encounter things that largely determines how we behave towards them. If we come across something in an art gallery, whatever it is, we are predisposed to treat it as if it were art. By extension, to talk about the meaning of the work is to speak of what arises out of this encounter and not to refer to something that lives in the work waiting to be unlocked and released. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this is not merely the justification that the charlatan seeks in order to pass off just anything as art, but an opportunity to reflect upon the particular qualities of one's experience here, now.

A good illustration of this is given by Gary Hill's Tall Ships. As the viewer walks down a broad, darkened corridor, other figures appear to close in from left and right. Whenever the spectator pauses to take a closer look, they too stop and stare back, making one feel extremely self-conscious, before turning and walking away. The figures are video projections triggered by the presence of the spectator: in other words, there is only something there to look at because you are looking.

However varied installations are, the thing they have in common is the fact that their meanings depend upon a relationship between the objects and images of which they are constituted and the space that contains them. This space is also the space inhabited by the spectator, and as such it is an environment subject to the vagaries and contingencies of daily existence. Things occur in our lives over which we exercise little or no control. Chance plays a large part in what happens to us, and the same is true to a greater or lesser extent in installation. Even something as simple as stipulating that a work must be viewed in natural light, as the Welsh artist Bethan Huws does with her painstakingly prepared but apparently empty interiors, is sufficient to place one's endeavours in the hands of fate. The gallery environment is not stable, but prone to change according to the season, the time of day and the amount of cloud cover. One is not exactly seeing a different room when the sun comes out or goes in, but one is experiencing an environment whose full potential cannot be revealed in one instant.

Another contrasting example of the way in which chance acts within the structure set up by the artist to make the work could be seen in Zurich's Shedhalle in the late 1980s when Christian Marclay carpeted the floor with blank-grooved records. Visitors could only "see" the installation by walking on the discs, an eventuality which inevitably led to their becoming scuffed and scratched. The very act of viewing leaves its trace.

Perishable materials

Installations unfold in time, their significance develops out of the spectator's being with and in them. It is as much in this - the importance of duration - that their unfixable, ephemeral quality lies as in the fact that they may physically change or degrade. Of course, some do change. Anya Gallacio's use of perishable materials such as flowers, fruit, chocolate or ice, means not only that her work will change fro m day to day, but also that she can never be certain how those changes will affect the way the work looks. Flowers fade, dry out and shrivel, ice melts, oranges rot. Painting the gallery walls with chocolate, as she first did in Vienna in 1993, created an ambience that could be smelled as well as seen: sweet-smelling chocolate box art for a world that prefers as far as possible to avoid confronting unpleasantness. (Those who were not too squeamish could lick and taste the surfaces too.)

One can also see this mixing together of input from different senses at work in the German artist Joseph Beuys's Plight, now part of the collection at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The work comprises a blackboard and a thermometer lying on top of a grand piano in a room entirely lined with thick rolls of felt. It is impossible to consider the various references suggested by this work without taking account of the full range of its sensory impact. The cosy, insulating warmth of the felt quickly becomes suffocating, a point made both by the presence of the thermometer and the closed lid of the piano. The silence of the instrument emphasizes a synaesthetic equivalence between the stifling of sound and the containment of heat, just as the work's English title indicates the somewhat contradictory notions of a pledge and a predicament. With installation, then, the experience of art is inflected with sensorily rich, tactile elements. It is still visual art, but the eye that apprehends is unequivocally and inescapably housed in a body.

Duchamp explained his works as being things that interested or amused him, and it is this quality of being interested in or fascinated by things rather than struck or absorbed by their beauty that characterizes installation. Many installations are, of course, beautiful, but the manner in which they are viewed is akin to the way in which we watch television, go for a drive, or fill a supermarket trolley. Our involvement in these activities is distracted in the full sense implied by the critic Walter Benjamin, a sense that includes the polarities of being fully attentive and thoroughly diverted, as well as everything in between. This is a far cry from the ideal, detached position of the contemplative, dispassionate viewer of the more traditional art forms.

Awkward questions

Beuys's ambiguity and Marclay's chance appear in other situations as uncertainty. The kind of reflection we are triggered into by installation can as well be broadly social and political as poetic or spiritual. At the Venice Biennale of 1993, the U.S.-based German artist Hans Haacke broke up the stone floor of the German pavilion. A photograph of Hitler making a pre-war visit to the Biennale was mounted at the door while on the gallery's back wall the word "Germania" was written up in a Fascist typeface. Picking one's way across the fractured, loose and uneven floor was a precarious venture, appropriately symbolic of the difficulties inherent in the country's own task of economic and social integration after reunification.

In a comparable vein, the Russian Ilya Kabakov has, since the break-up of the Soviet Union, made a series of profoundly affecting environments that pose awkward questions about the transition to a new model of social organization. For the 1991 Carnegie International he created an entire "school" complete with pupils' work and meticulously kept attendance and academic records. The pupils and staff had been told they had to abandon these fruits of their earlier endeavours and move to another establishment. There was, though, no information on exactly where they were to go or what to expect when they arrived. Why, Kabakov asks, need so much of our former lives be jettisoned? It has been and remains of value in making us what we are and without it our sense of self-worth and our very identity as people is profoundly undermined. And here we recognize that what, in installation, might strike us as transient, contingent, diffuse or unresolved is itself expressive of the character and qualities of contemporary life.

COPYRIGHT 1996 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group