Notes on installation...

How do we begin to define 'installation art'? Here are some starting points...

• Usually 3D works designed to transform a space (or the perception of a space).
• Usually applied to interior spaces
• Exterior interventions are often called “land art” or “environmental art”
• Can be temporary or permanent
• Installation can incorporate a very broad range of materials and media (video, sound, performance, VR, internet, etc)
• Many installations are site-specific in that they are designed to exist only in the space for which they were created

Installation as a term for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently (1969). It was coined in this context in reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century. Installation art has often challenged the line between "art" and "life"... Remember Beuys’s “Social Sculpture” and the idea of the "Gesamtkunstwerk" (an all-encompassing work of art that draws upon all of the major art forms: painting, writing, music, etc. in order to achieve a state of total artistic immersion).

Let's think specifically about installations that are "interactive"...

• These will often involve the audience acting on it or the piece responding to the user’s activity.
• Web-based installations, gallery based installations, digital based installations, electronic based installations, etc.
• New technology has informed a variety of new installations that allow for diversity of interactivity.
• For example, the work may involve sensors, which plays on the reaction to the audiences’ movement when looking at the installations; Artists have also explored VR which can be deeply immersive; video, film, and web-based technology are also commonly used.

Here are some institutions that collect and support installation art and where you can see/experience it:

The Mattress Factory
DIA – Beacon
The Medicine Factory
Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe
Electronic Language International Festival (FILE)

Here are some installations to look at and artists that may be inspiring:



“Spiral Jetty” (1970) Robert Smithson
Built entirely of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah,
The Spiral Jetty forms a 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake which is only visible when the level of the Great Salt Lake falls below an elevation of 4,197.8 feet.
Though many would file this under "land art" or "environmental art", I think it is interesting to think about "installation" in as broad of terms as possible.





“Give if you can - Take if you have to” by Jacek Tylicki (Arambol, Goa, India) is an example of a simple, poetic installation which allows visitors to choose how (and if) to interact with it while also arguably serving an important social function.

Most of Tylicki's projects work to raise social and environmental issues, Beginning in 1973, Tylicki put sheets of canvas or paper into the wind, the rivers or the forests, and left them out for long periods of time so that the natural environment could "create art" on/out of the materials.

He also founded a periodical called "Anonymous Artists" where artists presented their artworks without revealing their own names. In 1985, he created an installation called Chicken Art. For the piece, Tylicki transformed a gallery into a chicken house where live chickens lived, watching the realistic paintings of chickens, chicks and roosters hanging on the gallery walls. Asked about the show, he declared: "For the chicken, the most beautiful is chicken." Another installation was "Free Art", where well known, invited artists, like gave away their artworks to the public for free.

“Test Site 2006” by Carsten Höller (Tate Modern, London) is a series of slides where visitors can experience both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the "inner spectacle" of the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety as they have a go descending in the slides. The piece asks viewers to rethink how they experience a museum and how they use their bodies. The slides in the installation wove through several floors of the museum, allowing visitors to slide through as many as 5 stories. (BTW - Has anyone been to the City Museum in St. Louis?)

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a 'voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind'. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don't have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

To date Höller has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, but the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall offers a unique setting in which to extend his vision. Yet, as the title implies, he sees it as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across London, or indeed, in any city. How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?

Höller has undertaken many projects that invite visitor interaction, such as Flying Machine (1996) that hoists the user through the air, Upside-Down Goggles (1994/2001) that modify vision, and Frisbee House (2000), a room full of Frisbees. The slides, like these earlier works, question human behaviour, perception and logic, offering the possibility for self-exploration in the process.

Best known for the politically charged images he has projected onto buildings and monuments - images of rockets projected onto triumphal arches, the image of handcuffed wrists projected onto a courthouse facade, images of homeless people in bandages and wheelchairs projected onto statues in a park from which they had been evicted, Krzysztof Wodiczko has helped to make public space a place where marginalized people can speak, establish their presence, and assert their rights.

Wodiczko gives participants the opportunity to speak about their traumatic experiences, creating spaces for individual therapy and public reflection. In the Tijuana Projection (image below), the aim was to give voice and visibility to the women who work in Tijuana's "maquiladora" industry. The women's testimonies focused on a variety of issues including work-related abuse, sexual abuse, family disintegration, alcoholism and domestic violence. A headset with a camera and a microphone was connected to two projectors and loudspeakers that transmitted the testimonies live.









Graffiti Research Lab does a lot of interesting projects. Here are just two examples - check out their website to learn and see more:
Interactive Architecture
Night Writer









Shirin Neshat is an interesting photo and video artist (who has recently released her first 'traditional' feature narrative film, Women Without Men). Her work deals primarily with the history, mythology, and struggles of women, usually women in the Muslim world. You can read one review of her installation show here.