Audience

2http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/carstenholler/

Ideology of the Modernist White Cube

• The dominant display form in modernist art, especially within American Modernism.

• A sacred sphere, separate from ‘everyday’ reality

• A space for distinct, ‘unique’, elevated ‘pleasures’.

• A space for quiet reflection, for transcendental experiences.

• A space to exhibit singular wall or plinth based

autonomous artworks.

• White walls• Sparse instruction or information• Uncomfortable seating• Grand imposing entrance• Uniform flat lighting• A religious silence

Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space by Brian O'Doherty

“….it can be seen that museums betray, in the smallest details of their morphology and their organisation, their true function, which is to strengthen the feeling of belonging in some and the feeling of exclusion in others. Everything in these civic temples in which bourgeois society deposits its most sacred possessions […] combines to indicate that the world of art is as contrary to the world of the everyday life as the sacred is to the profane. The prohibition against touching the objects, the religious silence which is forced upon visitors, the puritan asceticism of the facilities, always scarce and uncomfortable, the almost systematic refusal of any instruction, the grandiose solemnity of the decoration and the decorum, [..] monumental staircases both outside and inside, everything seems done to remind people that the transition from the profane world to the sacred, presupposes , as Durkheim says, ‘a genuine metamorphosis’, a radical spiritual change…”

Pierre Bourdieu “A Sociological Theory of Art’ in “The Pure Gaze: Essays on Art”printed in “The Field of Cultural Production”

• The reaction against the ideology and power of the modernist white cube - it’s demand for formal purity, specialisation and faith in the separation of art from everyday life.

• A belief that the experience of art offered by such spaces was untenably elitist and exclusionary.

• An attempt to resist the commodification of art - its growing commercialisation - an anti materialistic opposition.

• A demand for independence and freedom of expression

History / Sources of Installation Art

• Dada / Surrealism • Independent group• Fluxus• Happenings • Performance • Arte Povera• Minimalism• Conceptualism• Land Art

Dada

The International Surrealist Exhibitions 1938, 42, 47 and 58

• Marcel Duchamp, Installation for the exhibition of First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

“The central room of the exhibition made a direct appeal to the senses :the poet Benjamin Peret installed a coffee-roasting machine, which gave the whole space a marvellous smell’, while a disquieting recorded soundtrack of hysterical inmates at an insane asylum permeated the gallery..”

Claire Bishop

Installation Art

Independent group

Happenings -immersive environments

Allan Kaprow«Push and Pull. A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann»For the Museum of Modern Art's «Hans Hofmann and His Students» traveling show, Kaprow created «Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann», which consisted of two furnished rooms that could be rearranged by visitors. (Some older women, Kaprow noted, were appalled and began to houseclean.) Excerpt form the «Instructions»: Anyone can find or make one or more rooms of any shape, size, proportion, and color -- then furnish them perhaps, maybe paint some things or everything. Everyone else can come in and, if the room(s) are furnished, they also can arrange them, accommodating themselves as they see fit. Each day things will change.» Allan Kaprow

Kaprow wasn’t installing anything to be looked at..but something to be played in, participated in by visitors who then became co-creators.

Minimalism

Robert Morris Installation at the Green Gallery (1963)

‘For the first time, I was forced to recognise the entire space, and the people in it..Until Minimalism, I had been taught , or taught myself, to look only within a frame; with Minimalism the frame broke, or at least stretched’

Vito Acconci.

“Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition , rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells- in other words, neutral rooms called "galleries." A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.”

Robert SmithsonArtforum 1972

Land Art

• Walter De Maria Earth room• The New York Earth Room, 1977, is the third Earth Room sculpture executed by the artist,

the first being in Munich, Germany in 1968. The second was installed at the Hessisches

Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany in 1974. The first two works no longer exist.

Performance

VAllie Export

Main staircase and fresco painted by Tiepolo. Wurzburg, Bavaria, Germany

Installation Art• The viewers focus is shifted

from individual autonomous art objects (on walls or plinths) to the context within which artworks are exhibited.

• Installations employ a range of materials. They are hybrid, adaptable artworks, allowing artists to use a variety of forms, many of which traditionally would have been seen as incompatible (sculpture and painting and video etc.)

• Frequently installations are temporary in nature, built especially for the exhibition.

• Installations frequently invite and encourage a narrative reading.

The Viewer• To see yourself seeing. To engender a

critical, self conscious, reflexsive attitude to the activity of looking at art in a space.

• An active viewer - directly addressed. The interdependence of the work of art and the viewer - “the active nature of the viewer’s role within [installations], and the importance of first hand experience , came to be regarded as an empowering alternative to the pacifying effects of mass-media.” (Bishop Installation Art)

• A direct, first hand experience of the artwork. The viewer’s sensory awareness is heightened.

‘Plural Vista’s- a kaleidoscope of innumerable paintings’

• The experience of viewing an installation involves exposure to multiple perspectives

• This fragmented experience of navigating an installation finds parallels in the 70’s post structuralism ideas about the decentring of the subject.

• “This discourse of decentring has had particularly influence on the writing of art critics sympathetic to feminist and postcolonial theory, who ague that fantasies of ‘centring’ perpetuated by dominant ideology are masculinist, racist and conservative; this is because there is no one ‘right’ way of looking at the world, nor any privileged place from which such judgements can be

made.” (Bishop) Group Material ‘American’ 1985

• Judy Chicago Dinner Party 1974 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

One of the first openly female-centered art installations, Womanhouse - a series of fantasy environments exploring the various personal meanings and gender construction of domestic space - was created by students of the Feminist Art Program along with a number of local Los Angeles, CA artists, first conceived by Paula Harper and spearheaded by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.

Installation art’s multi-perspectivalismwas viewed as emancipatory and in contrast to single-point perspective, which in its centring of the viewerin a position of mastery was for feminists marked by patriarchal power relations.

The decentred viewer

Ilya Kabakov“the Man who flew into Spacefrom his Apartment”1985

‘The man who flew into space from his apartment’ is a shattered room in a Russian tenement, littered with the drawings of machines invented by its occupant, a crazy reincarnation of Leonardo, who has seemingly catapulted himself through the ceiling of the building. Kabakov had started on this work while still ‘stuck’ in Russia in the 1980’s, the drawings and story related to the dream of escape from the constrictions of the USSR into the apparent freedom and liberty of the west. The ‘promised land’. However this work was not conceived as a simplistic critique of life under the hardship of communism, but in a more broader way as a means of communicating the tension between a desire for a utopian social order, a rational planned management of life, and a yearning for a far more unrestricted, imaginative, perhaps self destructive kind of personal freedom.

ABOVE: Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space (from the Ten Characters series), 1981–88. Wood, rubber, rope, paper, electric lamp, chinaware, paste-up, rubble, and plaster powder, 96 x 94.9 x 147 cm. Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne,

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

"The main actor in the total installation, the main centre toward which everything is addressed, for which everything is intended, is the viewer."

Ilya Kabakov

Paul McCarthy

29Cady Noland

30

Barbara Kruger

Installation art in the 1990’s• Installation arts rebirth in the

1990’s - from counter cultural margin to the mainstream museum centre

• In the increasing battle for audiences, installation art’s site specificity (you literally have to see it to experience it) means it is able to compete against other more popular mediums in terms of its ‘spectacle’.

• In an art culture dominated by biennales this site specificity becomes a powerful force in attracting art tourism

Mariko Mori

• “Contemporary installation is expensive and is generally reliant on private sponsorship and public funding. It is thus tied to corporate involvement in the arts and the commercialization of the museum, in a way that directly cuts against its origins in do-it-yourself artists' projects; this in turn is linked to the connection between globalization and privatization [..] which pushes museums and galleries into ever more spectacular display.”

• Source: Julian Stallabrass• Contemporary Art - A Very Short Guide (Oxford 2006) pg. 18

Chris Ofili, Venice Biennial 2003. British Pavilion

Chris Ofili

History of video art• Late sixties - early video

cameras appear on university campuses - they are large and bulky.

• Naim June Paik uses Sony Portapak Camera

• Early history closely connected to recording of performance -camera is stationary

• Key first generation video artists or artists using video -Dan Graham, John Baldessari, Joan Jonas, Martha Rosler, bruce nauman, William Wegman, Vito Acconci....

Video Art• A time based medium.• Experiencing the changing

patterns of form of video over time is frequently a central aspect of its character.

• In theory an infinitely reproducible, non auratic medium. The hope that technological innovation would lead to democratic transformation in the production and consumption of art. Another instance of the dematerialisation of the art object - and anti-form.

• The exhibition of video is fluid - from large scale projections filling a space, to single free standing works on domestic monitors.

Martha Rosler “Semiotics of the Kitchen”

• Video art frequently positions itself in a ‘dialogue’ with mainstream television or film.

• An interventionist practice - not only did it have the potential to reach far bigger audiences, it also had the possibility of offering a critique of the values and forms of commercial, mainstream TV and film- to turn TV /film against itself

• A deconstruction of the mechanisms of manipulation, seduction and the resulting ‘rituals of passive consumption / one way transmission’.

• A form capable of offering alternative narratives in alternative spaces

• A new form. No artistic or critical history.

http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci.html

Martha Rosler

38

Bruce Nauman “Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk)” 1968

“From it’s beginnings in the 1970’s counter culture, artists’ video and film has sidestepped the hypnotizing conditions of

narrative cinema precisely in order to critique the dominant culture’s most thoroughly passivizing entertainment

genre.”

Brandon TaylorArt Today

Laurie Anderson

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SirOxIeuNDE• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hhm0NHhCBg

41

Bruce Nauman, Violent Incident, 1986, video, 200.0 x 250.0 x 90.0

cm, installation, Tate Gallery, London.

Bruce Nauman“ANTHRO/SOCIO 1991. Projection on three walls and six monitors - the head screams “Feed Me, Help Me / Anthropology..Help Me / Hurt Me / Sociology…”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxmm16gqRis&feature=related

Tony Ourslerhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aqIk_ynVak

“Installation, through its use of cinematic techniques both quotes and deconstructs the

experience of film: its viewing place and conditions, its narrative sequencing and its use of represented space. […] Artists are using the physical apparatus of film making, the language

of cinematography and the subject matter of filmic narrative as a means of exploring the

conditions of viewing when film is taken out of cinema and installed in the gallery context. “

Source: Nicolas De Oliveira Installation Art

Matthew Barney“Cremaster”

Pipolitti Rist “Show A Leg” tramway, Glasgow 2001.