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Although by the early 90s installation art had emerged as a particular mode of art-making, encompassing structural and procedural components such as the immersive and experiential environment; the blurring of the boundaries between viewer and art object; and the bold mixing of media to include the performative, it maddeningly retained its fluid borders, admitting a breadth of approaches that broadly focused on the role of the viewer as an active subject. In the wake of body, performance and conceptual art, Earthworks and related practices informed by the extra-artistic elements of the societal, the political, (auto)biography and other forms of narrative, installation art evolved as a way in which artists treated and often critiqued a theory in art. |
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Postmodern Narrative in Contemporary Installation Art – Lynn M. Somers-Davis
Although by the early 90s installation art had emerged as a particular mode of art-making, encompassing structural and procedural components such as the immersive and experiential environment; the blurring of the boundaries between viewer and art object; and the bold mixing of media to include the performative, it maddeningly retained its fluid borders, admitting a breadth of approaches that broadly focused on the role of the viewer as an active subject. In the wake of body, performance and conceptual art, Earthworks and related practices informed by the extra-artistic elements of the societal, the political, (auto)biography and other forms of narrative, installation art evolved as a way in which artists treated and often critiqued a theory in art. In other words, installation art, by its very material form, thrust the viewer’s body into the space—or stage—of the work of art. No longer autonomous and self-contained, the work of installation art presented (rather than represented, like painting) a situation to behold. Some critics argued that a high modernism so indebted to the purity of media and its content—i.e., abstraction—could only have lead to a crisis of representation whereby the reintroduction of a “retrograde” narrative (or allegory) alongside a postmodern treatment of media and language took center stage.
Since the 60s, nascent forms of installation—arguably rooted in Allan Kaprow’s Happenings among other avant-garde gestures—have become clever shape-shifters ranging from the obsessive, oneric environments of Yayoi Kusama to the visceral and poetic environments of Ann Hamilton. Nearly 20 years since its emergence, installation art, which began as a radical practice often devised to circumvent institutional spaces, ironically comprises the hegemonic heart of many 21st century museum collections and commissions. Indeed, curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist has distinguished objects from “life-works”—artworks involving installations, events and actions in a close relationship with the viewer. Given the genre’s dominance in a newly global and technological art (and world) culture, it is worthwhile to revisit the import of installation, in particular its reliance on narrative or rhetorical structures.
In 1958, Kaprow charged artists to abandon the flat rectangular frame of painting and instead to become “preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life.” Pop artists embraced the messiness of life and “low” materials in work that, like Claes Oldenburg’s The Store and Lucas Samaras’ mirrored rooms, emerged as early forms of installation. Even Minimalism, whose artists conceived of their “specific objects” in a radically different manner than pop installation, were drawn to a phenomenological approach to spectatorship that complicated the separate spheres of artist or object and audience. While Kaprow would not use the term “theatrical,” as Michael Fried famously did in his scathing critique of 60s minimalist sculpture, it provides an apt description of the physically and often psychologically immersive situation that installation art presented for the viewer.
While its forms remain disparate, contemporary installation art generally shares two primary aims: one of these is to critique the notion of an overarching authorial intention, calling forth the (often de-centered) subject of the viewer; and secondly, to summon a range of narratives (albeit obtuse and fragmented), which contribute to a kind of sensation or perceptual experience of the work of art. Thus, notions of space, time, narrative, environment, memory and perception are critically and often philosophically deployed in order to create, situate, shape, interrogate and even contradict meanings.
In the current exhibition “Out of Time” at the Museum of Modern Art, a number of installation works treat these topics, in particular the malleability of time, presence and perception. The video/sound installations of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist return seduction and visual pleasure to what in the 70s tended to be a dry and overly conceptual medium. Ever is Over All—first seen in the Venice Biennale of that year—comprises two overlapping, slow motion projections on adjacent walls that, like the juxtaposition of opposites, work to simultaneously harmonize and distract. In this and other works, Rist turns a subtly feminist and witty eye to narratives of female sexuality, fantasy, power and desire. Here, a roving camera captures an impressionistic, fecund field of brightly colored flowers on the right-hand screen, while on the left, a young woman wearing a pretty dress and bright red shoes happily promenades along a city street, smashing car windows with an oversized steel flower. While the woman’s demeanor is light-hearted, and her step dainty, the violent behavior she displays contradicts traditional expectations of femininity. Rist creates on the one hand, a seductive picture of spell-binding fantasy, underlined by a soundtrack that layers the soft sound of a woman humming with a languid, percussive beat. The lyrical nature of this visual narrative is only undercut by the intermittent sound of shattering glass, and with these momentary jolts, the viewer’s recognition of an essential and irreconcilable tension between the real and the surreal. The critical import of Rist’s work is how she reenacts such dialectical tensions in and through the represented feminine body, which is paralleled in manipulations of the medium itself, through formal distortions, blurring, the constant flux of colors and forms intersecting and overlapping, etc. The desiring subject within Ever is Over All provides a kind of scene of desire into which the viewer can identify and project her own experiences of reality and fantasy, and through these, piece together other narratives.
Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off (2000) refuses the visual spectacle often associated with the genre. Here the artist has rigged an electrical timer to turn the lights in an empty gallery on and off at five second intervals. While the work certainly creates a momentary shift in the viewer’s physical perception, the question as to what effect and for what reason resounds in the sterile space (and the viewers’ minds). MoMA curators have likened the piece to John Cage’s famous four-minute, 33-seconds of silence; however, Creed’s work lacks an avant-garde vantage point that would make the work seem historically or otherwise motivated. Of course viewing experience is altered; however, Robert Morris introduced an aesthetic logic centered upon the spectator’s bodily relation to the work of art with his L-beams more effectively and sensitively, perceptually speaking, in 1963 than Creed does in 2007.
Gary Hill’s winter exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery stages political narratives utilizing video and sculpture that attempt to reframe communicative interactions (in this case between the viewer and an imaginary perpetrator and/or even a media presence). In Guilt, Hill created gold coins, minted with his own body and visage represented undergoing fictional scenes of torture. The spectator views the coins from across the room through the aid of a telescope, foregrounding themes of surveillance, voyeurism, and visual control or domination. Only when the viewer stoops to look through the lens does she hear a muffled and barely discernable soundtrack, a man’s voice (the artist’s?) speaking horrific stories of abuse. These verbal stories (“Torture is a tool for the greater good. He’s on the world’s back and you want him off. You want ‘em dead don’t you?”) constitute part of a larger narrative, which asks the viewer to consider how she figures into these political and ethical dilemmas. Guilt (and here the homophone for the precious gilt coin evokes a notion of shame) stages a scenario of domination and submission in the form of a subject who is witness to torture. Activated spectatorship in this case removes a level of passivity from the viewing subject. However, the brutality of violence is carefully distanced in several ways. First, the use of a magnifying device limits proximity to the image; and second, the nature of the images themselves—not mimetic representations of flesh and blood or even something akin to the graphic horror of the Abu Ghraib photographs, rather the neutral pecuniary device—creates a psychological distance from the fictive victim. Drawing on currency as the symbol of monetary (and this case bodily) exchange, Hill’s “precious” drawings on coins reify acts of suffering and abjection in a way that remains coolly abstract. In a similar vein one wonders how the sanitized media presentation of war images also have a distancing and sedative effect on television viewers, who like the spectators of Guilt, can choose to look away or turn off the set.
Lynn M. Somers-Davis
