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. Continue reading…

Taken 3/26/11

notes transcribed from a talk the artist Carolee Schneemann gave at the Nasher Museum at Duke University; she came in honor of an epistolary book our Kristine Stiles published on her, titled Correspondence Course.

–who saw the body as sculpture and as painting, and video as response to writing (for Carolee)

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Tourism, and its Semiotics in Museums

I recently reread “Semiotics of Tourism” by Jonathan Culler and was reminded of its usefulness in examining museums.

In it, Culler makes a nuanced reading of touristic habits and its significance for contemporary semiotics. His Tourist is one who deals in the currency of signs and signifiers, who reads “cities, landscapes, and cultures as sign systems.” (155) This means also that what registers is only what is apparent; the Tourist’s understanding is apprehended through surfaces. His world is only what the Tourist can Structurally infer. His are [sites/sights].

A topically oriented being, the Tourist is also exempt from the criticism of his counterpart, the so-called Traveler, who seeks the truth via pure essence and the authentic. Culler astutely points out that the notion of authenticity is constructed, recognized as such only when given the markers of its own authentic-ness. (161) In other words, authenticity is conferred when affirmed by an authority figure, a cultural construction. Authenticity as that which opposes superficiality is thus destabilized, if not entirely denied. Semiotic participation vis-à-vis the Tourist is thus inevitable and ubiquitous.

The idea of constructing [site/sight] is particularly relevant to the museum. The [site/sight] is denoted with what Culler calls “markers,” which operates triply: representing it, giving information on its significance, and making it recognizable. (159) Markers construct [sites/sights] in reverse; they precede the existence of a significant object.

Is this not what museums do? Perhaps their markers are quadruple: they also collect the [sites/sights] (here, objects) into one space where the importance of one confirms the importance of another and visa versa. Museums are vehicles of semiotic presumptions.

Yet the constructive power of museums thus reveals the shortcomings of Culler’s argument. Like the museum, he is limited because he assumes the tourist’s unconflicted subjectivity, assumes a universality to touristic practice, and in groups signs into distinct cultural systems. The institution, the participants, and their exchange, are more opaque than they are rendered here.*

• Jonathan Culler. “The Semiotics of Tourism.” Framing the Sign. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

* I was told that this criticism was too hasty, please drop me a line if anyone is interested in talking about Culler in greater depth. I would love to keep the conversation going.

Sarah Thornton’s Art Basel

In preparation for my visit to Art Basel, I want to look at Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World, and its mention. Her treatment of Art Basel is consistent with her treatment of all of her subjects, emphasizing the singularity and totality of each component in the art world. There is a neat and self-assuming wholeness to her exploration, beginning at the title (she makes her art world in seven days, God makes his world in seven days), down to the chapters (THE Auction, THE Magazine, THE Biennale). Someone else (I think Paddy Johnson) has said this already—what she describes is not THE art world, but AN art world. The book is an attempt to itemize and make routine these days, suggesting that they stand in for each of many, and necessarily leaves out other (harder to define) nooks in the art world. What, for example, about a gallerist’s day in the gallery? An art historian’s day? Or (equally relevant at this point) an art blogger’s day? Her focus also over-emphasizes the art market and the well-established, which then become analogous to the art world. (Takashi Murakami’s studio operations cannot stand for the experiences of an artist living in a collective, sharing a 20 square-foot room with three others.)

She devotes one of her seven day-long explorations to Art Basel, which she calls “The Fair,” connoting simultaneously the uniqueness and quintessentiality that its reputation carries. The word “fair” conjures two meanings: of display, and of sale. The second disproportionately obscures the first in Thorton’s chapter—most of the buying happens on the single day before the fair opens to the public for the week. Art Basel is described, in fact, as almost everything but a display of art. Its focus is on the politics, the commercial consequences, the competition, the etiquette, and the central players.

Knowing that most of this will be inaccessible to my visit, I found her reaction to the fair something I could see for myself. What interested me the most was her closing statement, that afterwards one “crave[s] nothing more than a well-thought-out museum show.” I am surprised she ended on a controversial and loaded statement. What does it mean to identify a well-thought-out museum show as its opposite? My goal tomorrow is to find an answer to that question.

Art Basel from a previous year

On Museums, 2

On the weekly theme of MoMA, I’ve had to read “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis” by Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, out of Preziosi for my thesis study. This post is probably not for the museum-lover. Note also that this was written about the older MoMA, before its move to Queens, and then back into New York City.

Furthering the idea of the  museum as site of ritual,  Duncan and Wallach isolate the museum from its ties necessarily to the state, and focus on how its monumentality is inscribed in its very creation. Monuments and ceremonial sites are defined here as spaces that describe an ideology, written into the architecture, plan, and objects of the space. Though the museum may try to erase itself behind the objects, it remains present in its ideology. The engagement with ideology–the ritual–is written into what D&W call the architectural script. MoMA represents a museum whose scripts are informed by two western ideologies—that of western capitalism, and of the mind-body duality.

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Objects

I have a foreign professor who refers to everything in the class as an ‘object’. She talks about space as object, architecture as object, gardens as object, fresco as object, drawing as object. I noticed it early on and I couldn’t tell if it was a deliberate move in the engagement of critical theory, or a slightly mis-translated Italian colloquialism. Either way, there is a bare truth recognized about objecthood.

Homi Bhabha, in an essay “Double Vision,” points out that a museum experience is one of visual schizophrenia, of trying simultaneously to take in the spectrum of objects, while trying to convince the eye that objects retain individuality. (The eye becomes jaded in a short amount of time, which says what regarding lengthy museum visits?) In our attempts to ascribe significance to every thing we encounter, sometimes, significance cancels out. They are again reduced to objects in a sequence. Especially in the field of art history in an academic form where textbooks take the appearance of catalogues, the ground is so leveled that one eventually becomes disillusioned with significance, and the individual as unique genius, entirely. Aren’t we studying just objects after all?

In art history, and museums, it seems reductive, or politically incorrect, to call our objects of study just ‘objects,’ as if inscribed in this word, there a self-isolation, or an otherness that we in our global society can no longer feel comfortable admitting to. Something in the terminology must be changed to suggest that these art-objects/specimens/artifacts/works bear distinction and significance. If we take away these designations from what we see, the entire foundations of art museum and art history collapse; they need objects to be more than just stuff.