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Alfred Sheppard

Fine Art Sculpture 2009 Title: Potency of Space - Embodied Perception Through Installation Art

Abstract

Implicit in this dissertation is the philosophical notion that installation art brings about a coalition of the body and space through sensorial immersion. Installation Art invites us to break away from preconceptions of visual art and creates a synthesis between ideas, artists, objects and materials. What the potency of space implies is possibility, activity and dynamism, potency being the strength of something but also the capacity to achieve or bring about a particular change through infiltration. I have reflected on changes that brought about installation art. I describe pieces of work that I have had first hand experience of by Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Roger Hiorn, Louise Bourgeois and Cildo Meireles and consider them in the context of the multi-sensory experience. Central to my discourse is the idea of the viewer of art becoming a participant. To support my critique of immersion, embodiment and subjectivity I reference statements by other artists – Ilya Kabakov, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, El Lizzitsky. The writings of Georges Perec and J.G. Ballard informed my thinking about space and language and the philosophical musings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty led me to contemplate perception.

Contents

Table of illustrations

Introduction page 1

Chapter One: Freeing the Viewer page 2

Chapter Two: The Perception or Deception of Space page 7

Chapter Three: Connection and Embodiment page 13

Chapter Four: Immersion and Synthesis page 17

Conclusion page 20

Bibliography page 22 & 23

Table of Illustrations

Fig. 1 - Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 2007, Killing Machine,

Intstallation

Fig. 2 - Robert Irwin, Black Line Volume, 1975, Installation

Fig. 3 - Roger Hiorn, Seizure, 2008, Intstallation

Fig. 4 - Louise Bourgeois, Red Rooms, 1994, Installation

Fig. 5 - Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Opera for a Small Room, 2005,

Installation

Fig. 6 - Cildo Meireles, The Sermon on the Mount: Fiat Lux (Let there be Light), 1973/79, Installation

Fig. 7 - Cildo Meireles, Cruzeiro do Sul (Southern Cross), 1969/70, Installation

Fig. 8 - Cildo Meireles, Red Shift, 1967/84, Installation

Fig. 9 - Cildo Meireles, Volatile, 1980/94, Installation

Preface

On entering the gallery you see the time-based work either stationary or at work,

lights dim, bright lights switch on, mechanical arms as if from a mechanized

dentist’s chair play over a fur covered seat which adjusts backwards. Sound of

stringed instruments boom out from speakers. A pneumatic arm hits the strings

of a broken guitar creating other real sounds. The light brightens and falls,

ricocheting off a disco ball hanging in the middle of the frame surrounding the

chair while televisions that litter the floor fuzz with sickening white light. Shadows

loom with more menace than the objects. The dance of light and sound stops,

lights flicker on and you are transported back to the gallery.

You see the instruction to press the button again and make the choice to destroy

someone who is not there.

My description of Killing Machine, an installation by Janet Cardiff and George

Bures Miller at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Summer 2008 (Fig. 1)

Alfred Sheppard - Potency of Space - Embodied Perception Through Installation Art

1

Potency of Space

Introduction

In my research for this dissertation I have encountered many pertinent

critiques and theories surrounding space and its complexities and in

linking them to my tacit knowledge of art I have found more questions than

answers. Sol LeWitt says the philosophy of the work (of art) is implicit in

the work and it is not an illustration of any system of philosophy 1 Similarly,

this text is philosophical in nature and cannot be tied to a particular school

of thought.

My investigation will focus on the potency of space created by artists with

particular reference to installation art. I am interested in art’s connection

to, and need of an audience. How a work of art communicates is

dependent upon the artist creating an opportunity for the viewers’

heightened perception and, in the case of the installation, giving the

participant an embodied experience.

I will be considering art where the expectation is that it will be experienced

through object, material, atmosphere, actions, situations, metaphor,

narrative, time and space and I will discuss changing notions of art.

Artwork that takes you out of yourself provides a sensorial experience that

is not limited to the visual and the involvement of an audience turns them

into participants. In this dissertation I will refer to the audience, subject or

viewer as participant when talking about installation art.

1 Sol LeWitt, quoted in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Published by Blackwell, 2003) p.848.


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Chapter One: Freeing the Viewer

Art has traditionally been defined as painting, sculpture & architecture and

was governed by a panoptic worldview. It was ‘stand and stare art which

made the viewer passive. In paintings the frame encloses the work within

a predetermined format thus mediating the world with purely visual

information. Post-structuralists determined that there was no ‘right’ way to

look at the world and each person’s gaze upon it is different. I take from

this that there is no finite interpretation of art.

Possession of objects is central to our consumer culture: objects have

become fetishised and dislocated from their purpose and original function.

Throughout the 20th century the re-appropriation of objects has led to

negation of the art object. Abstract expressionism began to ignore ‘the

frame’ and Jackson Pollock in particular broke from tradition by working on

a horizontal plane.

Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become

preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our

everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the

vastness of Forty-second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion

through paint of our senses, we shall utilize the specific substance

of sight, sound, movement, people, odours, touch. Objects of every

sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and

neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand

other things.2

Ilya Kabakov, avant-garde artist under the Soviet regime, said this about

painting in an interview with Robert Storr:

2 Allan Kaprow & Jeff Kelley,The Legacy of Jackson Pollock in Essays on the Blurring of Art and

Life (University of California Press, 2003) Introduction.


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I think that today everyone familiar with art knows how to look at a

painting. Even if a nail is hammered into it or a stool is hanging

before it everyone, knows that it is a painting and there exists a

means for looking at it, one developed historically and gained

individually by education and a lot of experience. 3

Minimalism was significant in setting the scene for wider interpretations of

what an artwork is as it made the viewer aware of the space and not just

the object. It was initially scorned for its provocation of the viewer and for

the fact that it evaded traditional critique. This negativity has also followed

the analysis of installation art, which is equally unquantifiable – unframed

objects within a space placed uncompromisingly - the participants

becoming part of the composition. It is challenging dealing with three

dimensions that do not conform to purist methods of deconstruction. Yet it

is the necessity of this involvement of an audience that is the reason I

consider installation art to be so powerful.

In 1975 Robert Irwin made Black Line Volume (Fig. 2) in the Museum of

Contemporary Art, Chicago. This consisted of a black line of tape on the

floor around the edge of a room outlining the volume of the room. In the

centre of the space was a pillar, which was part of the existing structure of

the building. People working at the museum were asked by many visitors

whether the pillar was part of the work. Irwin, pleased by this said they

were seeing this room for the first time4. Their desire to understand

heightened their awareness, reconnecting the viewer to the space. The act

of perceiving is sensory so to perceive perception is nigh on impossible.

However, if something destabilises what you are seeing, this jolt can be a

means at least of understanding perception, in making the participant

probe the limits of the work within the space they were questioning - limits

3 Ilya Kabakov, quoted in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology

of Changing Ideas (Published by Blackwell, 2003) p.1178. 4 Robert Irwin, quoted in Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate Publishing, London 2005) p.57.


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in which the subtleties of space and objects and their relationship to

perception are reconsidered.

To take people out of time art must break away from history. The art

gallery attempts to be different from the museum in that objects are

ambiguous and refuse linear definition. But museums and art galleries still

assume the same function and work is often presented in commodified

format. The museum desires to assign uniform cultural meanings to

objects and phenomena and up until the early 20th century art was also

presented as part of this historical narrative. In the West in the 1960s the

art ‘exhibition’ began to be replaced when happenings and environments

required spectators to enter inside. The ‘event’ took over from the ‘object’,

and spaces of art became a forum for radical thinking .The word ‘art’ now

denotes myriad relational activities, with installation art becoming a

dominant form in the 1990s, reconnecting to the radical ideologies of the

happening.

Installation art expanded the notion of sculpture by focusing on the

conditions under which different types of objects are viewed. The object

itself is only one element of the whole and has to co-operate with all the

other conditions. An individual can engage with the narrative of the piece

from many vantage points according to the specifications of the site and

from their own psychological state and cultural expectations. However, the

artist must still grapple with the problem of the gallery being modelled on

the museum. The move towards installation could be seen as a rebellion

against the white gallery space.

Robert Irwin regarded installation art as a way of freeing the viewer’s

perceptual experience and allowing the act of seeing itself to be felt. The

impossibility of artwork having singular meaning using this model changes

our attitude when experiencing art. Installation art is a democratic form as

the viewer’s perception has equal validity with that of the creator of the


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work. Ownership of art is called into question when the object is relegated

in favour of the idea. In a market economy installation art is harder to sell

and therefore it becomes politically challenging.

Do (artworks)… need to be constructed at all? Can an idea be art?

And what defines an artwork? The use of conventional cues, like a

stage or a frame or a signature? Or setting in which it is placed - a

gallery, for example, or a museum? 5

Site specific art means that objects become relational to their setting and

the meaning carried in the work will inevitably adjust to new conditions.

Work relative to the space it inhabits is fundamental in all art forms. Even

more so in the installation where, in order for an object not to appear as if

it has simply been positioned, it needs to exhaust or subvert the space it

inhabits.

Roger Hiorn Seizure 2008 (Fig. 3) readdresses the purpose and base

meaning of ‘place.’ He initially canvassed for permission to crystallise (i.e.

to introduce an invading substance) to the Smithsons’ Robin Hood

Gardens in Poplar in East London, but his proposal was rejected. Instead

he took over the space of a South London flat – the once hopeful future of

architectural space that had become a failure of modernist social housing

and was soon to be demolished. The artist is not the creator of this work

as the copper sulphate crystals, if given the right conditions are

geologically programmed to grow. Hiorn is the ‘intervener’ and by

subverting the space and its purpose is, in a sense, returning the building

to its original social intention by making something for the people, a

democratic work of public art. Hiorn said There is a purity that

crystallisation has and then it doesn’t anymore. As soon as the first person

5 Stuart Morgan & Frances Morris, Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century (Tate Gallery

Publications, 1995) p.15.


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goes into that room it doesn’t really exist any longer.6 Like un-trodden

snow the work entices you to walk through it. For me Seizure was both

rapturous and sorrowful; certainly, when entering the space I was struck

by the polarity of the beauty of the blue crystals coating the walls and the

process of destruction, partly being brought about by the visitors, but

mainly by the chemical breakdown and the inevitable reversal back to a

liquid state. Interestingly the work is not exactly site specific. The material

had synthesised with the space but the work could exist anywhere. Also,

to make a work that has no finite point but is in a constantly progressive

state means that reinstallation would fundamentally change the work. So,

Seizure could be classified as an event rather than an installation. The

artist wants to put himself to the front, I want to make myself disappear,7

says Hiorn. The author of this work could be anyone. The other visitors I

talked to were experiencing Seizure like children - not asking who the

author was or analyzing the content of the work but just letting the work

affect them sensorially. The basic concept behind Seizure is to question

the fundamental meaning of space through opposition of materials and the

experiential relation of the participant on a primal aesthetic level.

6 Roger Hiorn, quoted in Kim Patrick, SEIZURE: Roger Hiorns And The Art Of Disappearing, http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/live+art/public+art/art61413,14/01/09, (first published 09/10/08) 7 Roger Hiorn, quoted in Kim Patrick, SEIZURE: Roger Hiorns And The Art Of Disappearing,

http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/live+art/public+art/art61413,14/01/09, (first published 09/10/08)


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Chapter Two: The Perception or Deception of Space

How and where does space begin? Space can be thought of as either

absolute, crude or natural. It can also be considered as zones or

‘spatialities’ shaped by human activity. Scientific theories make physical

spaces relatively easy for us to comprehend and we have history to tell us

how our landscape has been shaped by human use. We are beginning to

acknowledge our responsibility towards sustaining our environment but we

are constrained by outmoded sociological and political factors. Time has

been dissociated from nature and is recorded solely on measuring-

instruments, which are tied in to our functional institutions. Biological time

loses its form and is subordinated to the economy. Political powers think

that social time threatens the hierarchical model. In our current political

and economic climate markets govern time, and therefore spaces.

In our increasingly mechanised and automated environment people are

becoming ever more detached and dissociated. Opportunities for even

short exchanges of communication (for example, at the supermarket

checkout) are disappearing. Television was hailed as a medium to reach

and educate people but now we spend more of our time as voyeurs

watching other people’s lives. The internet increased freedom of

information and communication but is this intermediary dislocating us?

Here are tools connecting us in a new spacial arena, but out of these

innovations has come a world which draws us in on ourselves creating a

culture of the insular.

I am interested in J.G. Ballard’s writing, which generally deals with the

latent behaviour within people that is brought out by their environmental

situations. Ballard demonstrates the sort of psychoses that can emerge in

a society that values individuality over community in his short story The

Enormous Space. This tells of a man’s experiment with isolation where he

closes himself off in his suburban house thereby reducing the whole of


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society to a confined space.8 This withdrawal from so-called reality opens

up the vast potential of the subconscious, as symbolised by the infinite

attic and the protagonist’s new decoding of things he finds. He speaks of

his new interpretation of the rooms in the house as a kind of ‘exploded

geometry’. He recognises the new space as originating from the rooms of

the house but his expanding perception questions their relational limits by

his disregard of the constraints of the physical world. The ego and the

constructs of our life are ways in which to protect ourselves from a

Lacanian idea of an ‘internal sense of fragmentation’. Without this

separation from the world (through the construct of self) we find ourselves

in this place of madness. But in turn madness is only determined by

opposition to order, which is only a construct we place upon ourselves in

space and the world.

Artists have a fascination with the square or grid or cube. Is it their

uniformity, controlled and ordered in opposition to nature that makes them

so alluring? The grid can mark space, and in the same way as space, the

grid can become infinite, its lines never stopping. As a mark it is tangible

and imaginable, stretching out across to the horizon, whereas infinite

space is not perceivable; therefore grids can offer a blueprint to explain

space. Sol LeWitt utilised the square and the cube as they were for him

among the ‘least emotive’ of any possible forms. A more complex form

would be too interesting in itself and obstruct the meaning of the whole.

There is no need to invent new forms […] the square and cube are

efficient and symmetrical.9

Sol LeWitt’s thesis on space is that it can be thought of as an area

occupied by a three-dimensional volume filled with air. The interval

between objects that exist in this air can be measured and these

8 Richard Curson-Smith (dir.), Home (Based on JG Ballard's short story, The Enormous Place),

(BBC Four, broadcast 15/02/09). 9 Sol Le Witt, quoted in Lynne Cooke, Sol Le Witt, Dia Art Foundation,

http://www.diabeacon.org/exhibs_b/lewitt/essay.html, (first published 20/11/08)


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measurements are important to a work of art. When contemplating space

we see its contrariness; that the world is full of stuff and nothing and, like

opposing magnets, the ‘space between’ is rarely focused on.

Georges Perec states that language gives form to space :

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the

blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those

portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of

harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end

the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of

text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is

visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?10

The theory of the bicameral (two chambered) mind could go some way to

explain both the construct of language which Perec defines as the creator

of space, and also the construct of self to guard against an ‘internal sense

of fragmentation’. The bicameral mind posits the theory that before we had

language we did not have individual consciousness. Without metaphorical

language we could not define ideas and emotions as coming from within.

Instead our internal self was discerned through what we would identify

now as auditory hallucinations. This bicameral state meant that ancient

peoples believed in duality where body and mind were separate entities. If

we were without metaphorical language we would not be ‘conscious’. The

bicameral mind theory means that humans would have been locked in a

primal state, still having cognitive ability but lacking subjectivity. Does this

mean that humans, whilst having instinct, lacked intuition, imagination, self

will and all that we take for granted as being ‘human’? Before language did

we have space? So, what did we think in before we had words; what

space did we think in before we had rooms?

10

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, (Penguin Classics, 1997) p.13.


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In The Concentration City11 J.G Ballard tells a story of a seemingly infinite

city with no common land. The concept of free space has been forgotten

and is inconceivable by its population. The protaganist designs a flying

machine which prompts him to think of the possibility of open space and

he sets off on a journey to find it. The story serves as a dystopic allegory

on many levels but my point is that our attitude and response to the

concept of space is relative to our cultural conditioning and is also an

individual perception.

As a personal observation I tend to think of space as white as it is a non

colour, full of possibility, and I think of physical space as something

contained in a room. The room is a structured code like a language, a

quantifiable measure of space which is controllable.

Imagined space is something that Georges Perec speaks of in his book

Species of Spaces and Other Places. He speaks literally about a space in

his apartment that would have no use at all, highlighting how such a space

is conceivable but nameless, the name of a space being derived from its

function. I consider this to go some way to explaining the problems of

spoken language as words are not enough to express the subtleties of

human consciousness and perception. This is why art is profoundly

important for offering alternative levels of communication through

embodied experience.

If one goes a step further, as anthropologists have, it is not only

murder, excrement, menstrual blood that are dirty, but anything

which endangers structure. When you have a coherent system, an

element which escapes from this system is seen as dirty.12

11 J. G. Ballard, The Disaster Area: The Concentration City (Published by Panther Books, 1969)

p.31-54

12

Stuart Morgan & Frances Morris, Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century (Tate Gallery

Publications, 1995) p.24.


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In our fear of chaos we are driven to create barriers to protect spaces of

nurture (such as the womb, nest, shelter, cave, house,). The spaces we

desire and form attachments to are humanised. Instead of ‘habitat’ or even

‘house’, we call the space we live ‘home’. Do we trap ourselves by

projecting metaphorical language onto the spaces we are connected to?

We impose on our environment with artificial constructs that we think of as

natural but in fact are oppressive. Instead of homes being places of

sanctuary they can become places of isolation. Could our need to lay a

mark to the land, scratch our name in a tree and set a fence round our plot

be a mis-placed procreation instinct - our desperate belief that we should

carry on through someone or something else?

George Perec states: To put down roots, to rediscover or fashion your

roots, to carve the place that will be yours out of space, and build, plant,

appropriate, millimetre by millimetre, your ‘home’: to belong completely in

your village, knowing you're a true inhabitant of the Cevennes, or of

Poitou.13

Within the spectrum of social space there are designated zones, which

have become more fragmented as society becomes more specialised.

Day to day activities from leisure, work, play, transportation, mutual

facilities all have their special spaces. Spaces can be atmospheric,

layered or contained within each other. They can be actual or ideological

spaces, spaces of dreams and the unconscious. And they can be pictorial,

architectural, plastic or literary 'spaces'. As a social construct based on

values and on consensus of meaning, space affects all our behaviour,

activities and perceptions. Space produced in a certain manner serves as

a tool of collective thought and action.

13

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, (Penguin Classics, 1997) p.71.


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The art we make is informed by and references our life and seeks to

transcend our perception of reality. How can thoughtful creativity emerge

from the restrictions of capitalist society? An artist may not intend a work

to be read as a metaphor for highlighting general issues in the world, but

the world will seek meaning in what the artists make. An understanding of

work comes through one’s cultural context; therefore I believe that the

power of a work of art is less that the meaning is implicitly fixed, but more

that it holds a mirror to the participant and shows them themselves - the

space and context they are in.

Visual art does not exist without an audience and Ilya Kabakov holds that

the possible future of art is that which is multi sensory. I don’t see any

special goals, but I think there will be a sharp and fast turn to the viewer.

Today, the level of contact between the viewer and work that exists, for

example, in theatre and in other forms of performance, does not exist in

visual art. Perhaps the difference will disappear’14

14

Ilya Kabakov, quoted in Boris Gro s, David A. Ross, Ilya Kabakov, Iwona Blazwick, Ilya Kabakov

(Published by Phaidon, 1998) p.28.


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Chapter Three: Connection and Embodiment

In primitive times the physical power of space and the placing of objects

within special places was central to being. Totems and imagery were

powerful forces essential for spiritual wellbeing and were ascribed power

and meaning by priests, doctors or artists, there being no differentiation

between these roles. As cultures became more demarcated the artist’s

role became that of ‘decorator’. Post structuralism recognised that society

was dislocated and divided by unconscious desires.

El Lizzitsky states: (By progress we mean here) the freeing of art from its

role as ornament and decoration, from the need to satisfy the emotions of

the few. Progress means proving and explaining that everybody has the

right to create. We have nothing to do with those who minister to art like

priests in a cloister 15

Installation art brings about the death of the world of appearances and the

artist recreates the world in a concentrated form, effectively immersing the

viewer’s senses and giving them a visceral, embodied experience.

Embodied space is the location where human experience and

consciousness takes on material and spatial form. Embodiment takes into

account phenomenological understandings, spatial orientation, and

linguistic dimensions and is about first hand experiences rather than

abstract experiences of others.

For me it’s important to exist in the perception of others. In fact, the

opinions of others are more significant to me than my own. The mind of

15 El Lizzitsky, quoted in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of

Changing Ideas (Published by Blackwell, 2003) p.345.

16 Ilya Kabakov, quoted in Boris Gro s, David A. Ross, Ilya Kabakov, Iwona Blazwick, Ilya Kabakov

(Published by Phaidon, 1998) p.22.


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the other, for me, is not relative but completely idealized 16

In other words, the perceptions of the audience are as much the work as

the work itself.

Louise Bourgeois is, for me, an artist whose installations exemplify

embodiment. Through utilising objects that emit an array of clues and

resonate with closed, brooding emotion Bourgeois’s work is seemingly

confessional. A cursory investigation of her history reveals themes in her

work referential to the infidelity of her father and other traumas in her

past. However, this knowledge is secondary in the understanding of her

work as it is more of a feeling than a rational judgement. Bourgeois’s

way of interpreting and understanding the present is through an

obsessive reiterative process of cogitation. To experience her work (and

here I will refer to Red Rooms, 1994 Installation) (Fig. 4) is to experience

oneself in relation to space and the matter held within space. There is a

feeling of holding or confinement of participant and object within the

space; in fact Bourgeois refers to her spaces or rooms as ‘cells’ – places

of restriction but also structures of life. Bourgeois’s iconography compels

the audience to decode elements. For example, what do we perceive In

Red Rooms? We notice the use of colour as a levelling device connecting

the objects and then we think of the connotations the colour carries; we

observe the mirror facing the bed, emphasising the feeling of peering

through an intermediary into the room; the children’s toy on the bed could

signify a child in an adult’s room; the ambiguity of a cloth rendered in

marble veiling an object; the tension of flesh rendered in glass hanging

from a bar above the bed; and in the other cell the head of an animal in

marble laid on a shelf as if decapitated; protection and fragility entwined as

a large red glass arm cups round casts of children’s hands; spindles of

thread around the room as if time is locked within the coiled yarns….. This

work emphasises the body, not always by figurative depictions of the

human form but through coalition of body and space. There are polarised


15

feelings of freedom and dependency, of being let in and immersed but

held back and confined at the same time.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued that subject and object are not separate

entities as the world is made of the very stuff of the body. Theories of

alterity consider and reconsider the self as an object in itself and also as a

part of the world, where it is not itself, and so the dichotomy continues. If I

touch my hand, I am touching and being touched at the same time. Being

made from the same matter or, as Ponty would describe, the same ‘flesh’

as the world our body (ourselves), our vision (the space we see) and the

world are inseparable in life. Seeing and moving are one complete

process and as the human body is actively sensual, perception and action

work together unconsciously. We have sensations but we do not perceive

sensations and it is by way of sensations we experience the world around

us.

If perceptual consciousness is embodied we have a world or a context to

be in but if we concentrate on this setting it becomes necessary to put

ourselves out of focus. Embodied consciousness sinks to the background

of experience allowing the world around us to come to the forefront. The

experience of this can be inverted through sensory interruption.

An installation called Opera for a Small Room (Fig. 5) by Janet Cardiff and

George Bures Miller I consider effectively creates these sensorial

interruptions. This work is a fabricated story of a man who is an obsessive

collector of records; the artists found the records in a second-hand sale

that were the property of a

R. Denneny, thus the artists became the collectors of things collected.

Within the gallery space there is a room-sized box that you cannot enter

which houses the physical elements of the installation. Through windows

cut in the box you can see a dusty room with records and record players

stacked around a chair and other detritus. A chandelier and assorted lights


16

are arranged within the box. Records begin to play and 24 antique loud

speakers in the box boom with overlaying music and audio; coloured

bright lights pulsate intermittently and change in time with the sounds. A

deep narrative voice describes the room and later intercedes with more

poetically enigmatic talk. This theatrical deluge of light and sound draws

you to look into the lit room and the sensory interruption of this distracts

you. Rainfall sounds from above and shadows escape the box: you

question whether what you are experiencing is just the artwork or is some

of the ambient noise actual? The resulting sensorial confusion creates a

memory of it as a happening, then the work comes to an end, and starts

exactly as before.


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Chapter Four: Immersion and Synthesis

When we speak of the viewer, the audience and the public, are these

terms suggesting otherness and division from the maker? The artist

selects materials, absorbs their code, reacts and interprets them in and

with space and offers them up to be experienced or re-experienced.

Without interaction between material/artist/viewer, artistic ideas might as

well stay in the mind of the maker.

I do not see [space] according to its exterior envelope; I live in it from the

inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front

of me.17

There are many types of art and one could argue that the artists make the

work for themselves or from a fundamental imperative to create and the

fact that the work is experienced is secondary to its conception. However,

for the classification of a piece of work to be art, the work needs to be

experienced by another, and if the other is needed in the completion of the

work surely they are a ‘participant’. The conceiver of the work has the

control and they fix the point of completion but the life of a work is endless

as the artwork forms a dialogue with participants and generates sensorial

perception of object and space, which I consider the creative act. Cildo

Meireles thinks of art not limited to the visual you have to bring touch,

hearing and smell into play.18

The use of space is influenced, manipulated or controlled by the materials

the artist chooses. Materials have their own meaning, which can be

obvious or hidden.

17

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate

Publishing, London 2005) p.50. 18 Cildo Meireles, quoted in ArtDaily, MACBA Presents the Largest Exhibition in Spain of the

Brazilian Artist Cildo Meireles, http://www.artdaily.org/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=28956&b=cildo, (first published 02/18/09)


18

Cildo Miereles uses paradignamic materials and symbols that have

universal connotations. He recognises that an artwork will have more

phenomenological power if the viewer is confronted with matter that they

have instant recognition of, or personal connection to. By using quantities

of the same object Meierles reduces the objects to matter – they become

cells, still holding their original intention but their value is exaggerated or

altered by becoming a different ‘whole’. The viewer becomes a participant

by immersion in a physically charged space where materials offer endless

possibilities.

In The Sermon on the Mount: Fiat Lux (translation - Let there be Light)

1973/79 (Fig. 6) 126,000 packed and stacked matchboxes were on show

for twenty four hours and actors were employed as security guards and

stood around the piece. Meireles said you can go into a shop and buy a

box of matches with no problem, but pack thousand of boxes together, (as

in Fiat Lux) and you have a potential bomb19 Accumulation of objects is a

popular artistic device but in Fiat Lux the matches form a mass of palpable

tension in the balance of actual danger and possibility of danger. Meireles

is fundamentally holding the audience as hostages, making them central

to the drama.

Similarly in Cruzeiro do Sul (Southern Cross) (Fig. 7). Here Meireles

shows how a minute object can become monumental. A tiny piece of wood

no bigger than a thumbnail confounds our sense of scale. It is installed

with 200 metres of space around it, the space effectively demarcated as

part of the work. Made from oak and pine this object is symbolic of

creative possibilities as these types of wood were use by indigenous tribes

in Brazil to kindle fire. The potential, like an atom locked within this minute

object could be destructive.

19

Guy Brett, Cildo Meireles (Tate Publishing, 2008) p.15.


19

In Red Shift 1967-84 (Fig. 8) Meireles works with an accumulation of

objects where colour is the only connection (similar to Louise Bourgeois’s

Red Rooms).

Here he perpetuates questions about existence.

Every year, we find more experimental evidence that the Big bang

occurred roughly 15 to 20 billion years ago […] the fact that stars

are receding from us at fantastic velocities has been repeatedly

verified by measuring the distortion of their star-light (called the red

shift) […] starlight of a receding star is shifted to longer wavelengths

– that is, toward the red end of the spectrum20

Much of Meireles’s work has undertones of the poetics of physics.

Certainly, Red Shift refers to how we quantify the constant expansion of

our universe. The work presents as a cosmological investigation of the

beauty, synchronicity and chaos of space and our place within it.

Cildo Meireles essentially translates material meaning and imbues space

through sensory overload. It is stated of his work that instead of focussing

only on the retinal field of perception he concentrates on a synthesis

between sensorial and mental relations, so that the senses and reason

stimulate each other to produce, together, the cognition of inhabited or

merely conceived space. 21

The most notable work in the recent retrospective at the Tate was Volatile

1980-94 (Fig. 9). The dark L-shaped room filled with the smell of t-butyl-

mercatan (the scent added to refined gas so we can smell it) and talcum

powder that you wade through towards a single lit candle excites and

disturbs the participant. The fragility of the flame and the suffocation of the

room places the participant at odds with the matter creating something

transcendental.

20

Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and

the Tenth Dimension (Published by Oxford University Press US, 1994) p.196.

21

Guy Brett, Cildo Meireles (Tate Publishing, 2008) p.16.


20

Conclusion

The probability of the synthesis of sense and reason is what makes

installation art a valuable cultural benchmark. We expect to learn

something about ourselves through art. In the preface to this dissertation, I

describe my experience of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s

installation Killing Machine. This piece takes charge of the audience even

though they feel they are taking charge of it. In giving the viewer the

choice to destroy a fictitious figure he or she is a participant and

performer. Inspired partly by the artist’s hatred of American capital

punishment and by Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony 1919 the work

holds you in the space and makes you responsible for your action. This

public execution is a symbolic execution of our own morality. Empty of

human presence except for the participant, the work turns you both into

the executioner and the prisoner strapped in the chair.

In this dissertation I have explored how installation art creates an

extended situation, forming a bridge in the space between object and

subject where the artist explains and interprets the world through a

phenomenological process of perception. The art object being no longer

insular emerges from the mundane into corporeal awareness and offers

itself up for immersive imaginative contemplation.

The codes that surround space (such as time and language) are

constructs that make up civilization and art is an essential activity where

from the creation of the world of things new meanings of grow out of

complexities. But man’s constructs can become barriers to actual

experiences and the role of the artist is to offer sensorial participatory

experience, which can break down inhibitions.


21

The meanings of artworks are dormant until activated by the process of

interpretation by the participant. Making work that probes ones perception

of space brings us to a point of perceptive transcendence through

embodiment. The artist and the participant are in a continuous creative

process connecting art with life, and if a work’s meaning is not prescribed

an audience is part of the work. To make art is to conceive thoughts and

present them tangibly, to participate in art is to be released from

preconception. Space is the page for the pen of the mind.

Word count with quotes 5,970 & 5254 without


22

Bibliography Page 1

Books

Ballard, J. G., The Disaster Area (Published by Panther Books, 1969)

Bishop, Claire, Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate Publishing, London 2005)

Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics (Published by Les Presses du Réel, 2002)

Brett, Guy, Cildo Meireles (Tate Publishing, 2008)

Charlesworth, JJ, Roger Hiorns: seizure (Published by London : Artangel, 2008)

Bradley, Fiona, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The House of Books Has No

Windows (Published by Modern Art Oxford, 2008)

Gro s B, Ross, D A, Kabakov,I & Blazwick, I, Ilya Kabakov (Published by Phaidon, 1998)

Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul, Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing

Ideas (Published by Blackwell, 2003)

Kaprow, Allan & Kelley, Jeff, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock in Essays on the Blurring of

Art and Life (University of California Press, 2003)

Kaku, Michio, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time

Warps, and the Tenth Dimension (Published by Oxford University Press US, 1994)

Morgan, Stuart & Morris, Frances, Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century

(Tate Gallery Publications, 1995)

Perec, G, and translated by Sturrock, J. Georges Perec: Species of Spaces and Other

Pieces

(Penguin Classics, 1997)


23

Bibliography Page 2

Journals

Brenner A, Concerning Sculpture and Architecture, in Leonardo, Vol. 4, No 2 (Spring

1971) Published by the MIT Press

Kabakov I, Tupitsyn M & Tupitsyn V, About Installation, Art Journal, Vol. 58, No 4 (Winter

1999) Published by College Art Association

Exhibitions

Louise Bourgeois Retrospective, Tate Modern, London, from 10/08/07 till 20/01/08

Cildo Meireles Retrospective, Tate Modern, London, from 14/08/08 till 11/01/09

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2008

Roger Hiorn, Seizure, An Artangel / Jerwood Commission, London, 2008

Films

Curson-Smith, Richard, Home (Based on JG Ballard's short story, The Enormous Place),

(BBC Four, broadcast 15/02/09).

Websites

ArtDaily, MACBA Presents the Largest Exhibition in Spain of the Brazilian Artist Cildo Meireles,

http://www.artdaily.org/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=28956&b=cildo, 11/02/09.

Lynne Cooke, Sol LeWitt, Dia Art Foundation, http://www.diabeacon.org/exhibs_b/lewitt/essay.html,

20/11/08,

Patrick, Kim, SEIZURE: Roger Hiorns And The Art Of Disappearing,

http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/live+art/public+art/art61413, 14/01/09, (first published 09/10/08)

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