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In attending various galleries and museums this past October, such as the Sculpture Center and Jack the Pelican in New York, I noticed a trend: many exhibitions were set up as installations in the form of a narrative, whereby each part of the story was broken up into “stations” that the viewer was to view, and in a certain chronology. In its inception and original phase in the 70s, installation art engaged questions such as the collapse of the boundaries between art and audience, creating experiential immersive environments rather than a hierarchically composed work (i.e. painting), creating direct bodily experience rather than merely a representation of such, and de-centering the viewer from a singular focal point, etc. How do issues of narratives and narrativity, sometimes regarded as a gauche remnant of an antiquated modernism, figure into installation art, that… |
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The Use of Narrative within Installation Art – Andrea Liu
In attending various galleries and museums this past October, such as the Sculpture Center and Jack the Pelican in New York, I noticed a trend: many exhibitions were set up as installations in the form of a narrative, whereby each part of the story was broken up into “stations” that the viewer was to view, and in a certain chronology.
In its inception and original phase in the 70s, installation art engaged questions such as the collapse of the boundaries between art and audience, creating experiential immersive environments rather than a hierarchically composed work (i.e. painting), creating direct bodily experience rather than merely a representation of such, and de-centering the viewer from a singular focal point, etc.
How do issues of narratives and narrativity, sometimes regarded as a gauche remnant of an antiquated modernism, figure into installation art, that descendant of a more boundary-pushing Minimalism/performance art/Environment/Happening strain of contemporary art? Does the execution of narrative—a close-ended, linear entity broken into parts, proceeding in a fixed order—circumscribe or detract from the efficacy of a work of installation art and its capacity to break boundaries or foster a perceptually inclusive totality? How are narratives reconfigured or transformed, opened up or transgressed, within the context of installation art? Do video and film (within the context of installation) bear a more amenable relationship to narrative, being time-based entities; or not necessarily?
How does one define “narrative” within the context of installation, or even within visual art itself? As narratives about the artist and the progression of his/her work, as narratives of the location where the installation is set, as narratives of things/people/events/sensations pictorially represented in the work, etc? Can we make a distinction between implied narrative (i.e. of artist or site) as opposed to narrative that is actively unfolded or created by the work itself?
How much elasticity is there in the concept of narrative—can it mean almost anything and take any form, in our postmodern era, or do there have to be certain components in place for it to qualify as narrative: temporality, causality, discrete events? Can narrative be abstract or purely conceptual, even phenomenological, or must it relate to tangible things/events/people? Do narratives yoke us into a more conservative investment in representation, even realism, being a convention and a formal structure involving suspension of disbelief, continuity and resolution? Are narratives depoliticizing by virtue of their retrograde schema of ordering the world, as opposed to questioning the conventions of representation, perception and even communication? Are narratives neutral and it just depends on how they are used, or are they predisposed to expressing or supporting certain elements, sensibilities and ideologies in installation art and not others?
Finally, can narratives render art discursive?
From a colorful panoply of different starting points, the articles in our NY Arts “Narrative in Installation” section unearth these issues and flesh them out. Lynn Somers-Davis synthesizes installation art’s main thrust as a critique of the notion of authorial intention, whereby narrative is often fragmented in the service of creating a perceptual or immersive experience. Julie Wills frames her thinking on installation art in terms of how works are processed by the viewer, drawing a distinction between the more didactic narrative installations vs. the more open-ended unpredictable trajectory of experiential abstraction within installation. Chris Gregga likens the element of narrative to an illustrative device that distracts and fails in its over-explicitness. Nicholas Knight draws a distinction between the ostensive subject matter of installations—that which is on the surface, explicit, tangible, denotative and not connotative—vs. the experiential aspect of work, which is associative, contingent, unpredictable and contextual.
What conclusions, if any, can be gleaned from our exploration of the topic of narrativity within installation art? One can say, amongst this gaggle of writers, there is a muted but palpable hostility towards narrative, and probably an overarching predilection for regarding narrative as over-determined in its referentiality, constrictively yoked to representation and a pre-mapped prescription of how one’s thought process should unfold, and inimical to a holistic incorporation of the viewer’s experience. As both Knight and Wills touch upon, narrative’s sequentiality (one thing comes after another) renders a simultaneity of perception and an apprehension of the interwoven aspect of elements in an artwork less possible, thereby disemboweling one of the most exciting and challenging components of installation art.
