The Beginning of a Thought on Installation Art

In an attempt to re-compress some of the art and literature I’ve gathered in the past few years, I’ve been slowly pinning down corners of a subject I want to pursue in my graduate work. The recurring themes in my undergraduate studies circle around the art institutional space, how it can be transformative and plastic, validating and self-critical. Within the discourses on artistic space, I find myself returning to the idea of Installation Art, which cannot be called a medium by art historical tradition, but has in the past 40 years acquired the valence of a coagulated genre, and thus slipped into art world’s vocabulary. I have noticed a discrepancy in documentation and critical perspectives on installation art relative to its high visibility in contemporary exhibitions. While museum attention implies a certain validation in artistic and cultural currency, installation art has yet to move into the discourse of art history. This might be because the genre is perceived to be relatively young, but I would guess that this is more because installation is part performative, part conceptual, and incredibly fragile.

In the handful of survey books I’ve come in contact with, I frequently return to two prominent volumes: MOCA San Diego’s Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996 (1997), and Phaidon’s Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (2009). They offer competing methodologies by way of introduction to their subject.

Blurring the Boundaries offers survey coverage of what it self-advertises as “now-classic works” and “important names” in installation art history. This presupposes the existence of the genre while failing to include in its chronological bracket a greater historical context. It excludes, for example, the (proto-)installation art of Alan Kaprow’s early environments in the Hansa Gallery in 1952, Marcel Duchamp’s “Mile of String” in 1942, perhaps even Malevich’s “Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting” in 1914. What it instead might take as its starting point is the art historical mark of the first museum show to feature installation: “Anti Illusions: Procedures/Materials,” on display at the Whitney in 1969.

The Phaidon survey, on the other hand, skips the need for historicity entirely, offering instead a horizontal survey of the state of installation art. The book takes another shortcut and lumps installation art with contemporary sculpture, calling it a “close relative” on its book jacket, a smaller category that rides on the coattails of an established canon. The book’s introduction, and perhaps attitude, is based on Rosalind Krauss’s 1978 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” loosely summarized as an investigation of how the term sculpture has become an umbrella for what has since become identified as land art, performance, and installation. (Anne Ellegood, “Introduction,” Vitamin P, Phaidon Press [2009], p. 09.) The volume does not go further to use these categories as distinct.

That the internationally-respected Phaidon Press published its book just over two years ago and did not give installation its own title in its series (photography, drawing, and painting all received their own books, and painting even gets a second volume) implies that installation art has yet to settle into its own. On the other hand, MOCA was eager to proclaim it a full-blown canonized genre over a dozen years ago. This antimony suggests to me that the art historical discourse is still grappling with the categorization. I think the approaches demonstrated by these two volumes gesture at an attitude towards indoctrinating new art forms into art history: a want to have the dust settle neatly when it is not perhaps ready to or meant to settle.

I am still attempting to navigate a space in the discourse between the books I admire (perhaps between Julie Reiss’s From Margin to Center and Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another) for my own footing. My writing here in the upcoming months might start to lean towards this intersection of installation and institution. Please get in touch with me if there is work I should look at, writing I should investigate.

Thanks particularly to those who have patiently and kindly been my soundboards, editors, supporters, and encouraging dissenters for the sake of this project.