Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called public art,

land art Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United StatesArt in the modern era: A guide to styles, schools, & mov ...

or art intervention; however, the boundaries between these terms overlap.

History

Installation art can be either temporary or permanent. Installation artworks have been constructed in exhibition spaces such as museums and galleries, as well as public and private spaces. The genre incorporates a broad range of everyday and natural materials, which are often chosen for their " evocative" qualities, as well as new media such as video, sound,

performance A performance is an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Management science In the work place ...

, immersive virtual reality and the internet. Many installations are site-specific in that they are designed to exist only in the space for which they were created, appealing to qualities evident in a three-dimensional immersive medium. Artistic collectives such as the Exhibition Lab at New York's

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 inter ...

created environments to showcase the natural world in as realistic a medium as possible. Likewise, Walt Disney Imagineering employed a similar philosophy when designing the multiple immersive spaces for Disneyland in 1955. Since its acceptance as a separate discipline, a number of institutions focusing on Installation art were created. These included the

Mattress Factory The Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museum located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a pioneer of site-specific installation art and features permanent installations by artists Yayoi Kusama, James Turrell, and Greer Lankton. The museum' ...

, Pittsburgh, the Museum of Installation in London, and the

Fairy Doors of Ann Arbor, MI The Fairy Doors of Ann Arbor are a series of small doors that are a type of installation art found in the city of Ann Arbor in the U.S. state of Michigan. The first one appeared in the baseboards of the home of Jonathan and Kathleen Wright in 1993 ...

, among others. Installation art came to prominence in the 1970s but its roots can be identified in earlier artists such as Marcel Duchamp and his use of the readymade and Kurt Schwitters' ''Merz'' art objects, rather than more traditional craft based sculpture. The "intention" of the artist is paramount in much later installation art whose roots lie in the conceptual art of the 1960s. This again is a departure from traditional sculpture which places its focus on

form Form is the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object. In a wider sense, the form is the way something happens. Form also refers to: *Form (document), a document (printed or electronic) with spaces in which to write or enter data ...

. Early non-Western installation art includes events staged by the Gutai group in Japan starting in 1954, which influenced American installation pioneers like Allan Kaprow.

Wolf Vostell Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 – 3 April 1998) was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happenings and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are ch ...

shows his installation ''6 TV Dé-coll/age'' in 1963 at the Smolin Gallery in New York.

Installation

''Installation'' as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently; its first use as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 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. Allan Kaprow used the term "Environment" in 1958 (Kaprow 6) to describe his transformed indoor spaces; this later joined such terms as "project art" and "temporary art." Essentially, installation/environmental art takes into account a broader sensory experience, rather than floating framed points of focus on a "neutral" wall or displaying isolated objects (literally) on a pedestal. This may leave space and time as its only dimensional constants, implying dissolution of the line between "art" and "life"; Kaprow noted that "if we bypass 'art' and take nature itself as a model or point of departure, we may be able to devise a different kind of art... out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life".

Gesamtkunstwerk

The conscious act of artistically addressing all the senses with regard to a total experience made a resounding debut in 1849 when

Richard Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...

conceived of a '' Gesamtkunstwerk'', or an operatic work for the stage that drew inspiration from ancient Greek theater in its inclusion of all the major art forms: painting, writing, music, etc. (Britannica). In devising operatic works to commandeer the audience's senses, Wagner left nothing unobserved: architecture, ambience, and even the

audience An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called "readers"), theatre, music (in which they are called "listeners"), video games (in which they are called "players"), or ...

itself were considered and manipulated in order to achieve a state of total artistic immersion. In the book "Themes in Contemporary Art", it is suggested that "installations in the 1980s and 1990s were increasingly characterized by networks of operations involving the interaction among complex architectural settings, environmental sites and extensive use of everyday objects in ordinary contexts. With the advent of video in 1965, a concurrent strand of installation evolved through the use of new and ever-changing technologies, and what had been simple video installations expanded to include complex interactive, multimedia and virtual reality environments".

Art and Objecthood

Franzoesischer Dom - Festival of Lights 2011

In "Art and Objecthood", Michael Fried derisively labels art that acknowledges the viewer as " theatrical" (Fried 45). There is a strong parallel between installation and theater: both play to a viewer who is expected to be at once immersed in the

sensory Sensory may refer to: Biology * Sensory ecology, how organisms obtain information about their environment * Sensory neuron, nerve cell responsible for transmitting information about external stimuli * Sensory perception, the process of acquiri ...

/ narrative experience that surrounds him and maintain a degree of self-identity as a viewer. The traditional theater-goer does not forget that they have come in from outside to sit and take in a created experience; a trademark of installation art has been the curious and eager viewer, still aware that they are in an exhibition setting and tentatively exploring the novel universe of the installation. The artist and critic Ilya Kabakov mentions this essential phenomenon in the introduction to his lectures "On the "Total" Installation": " neis simultaneously both a 'victim' and a viewer, who on the one hand surveys and evaluates the installation, and on the other, follows those associations, recollections which arise in him he is overcome by the intense atmosphere of the total illusion". Here installation art bestows an unprecedented importance on the observer's inclusion in that which he observes. The expectations and social habits that the viewer takes with him into the space of the installation will remain with him as he enters, to be either applied or negated once he has taken in the new environment. What is common to nearly all installation art is a consideration of the experience in toto and the problems it may present, namely the constant conflict between disinterested criticism and sympathetic involvement. Television and video offer somewhat immersive experiences, but their unrelenting control over the rhythm of passing time and the arrangement of images precludes an intimately personal viewing experience. Ultimately, the only things a viewer can be assured of when experiencing the work are his own thoughts and preconceptions and the basic rules of space and time. All else may be molded by the artist's hands. The central importance of the

subjective Subjective may refer to: * Subjectivity, a subject's personal perspective, feelings, beliefs, desires or discovery, as opposed to those made from an independent, objective, point of view ** Subjective experience, the subjective quality of conscio ...

point of view when experiencing installation art, points toward a disregard for traditional Platonic image theory. In effect, the entire installation adopts the character of the

simulacrum A simulacrum (plural: simulacra or simulacrums, from Latin '' simulacrum'', which means "likeness, semblance") is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, u ...

or flawed

statue A statue is a free-standing sculpture in which the realistic, full-length figures of persons or animals are carved or cast in a durable material such as wood, metal or stone. Typical statues are life-sized or close to life-size; a sculpture t ...

: it neglects any ideal form in favor of optimizing its direct appearance to the observer. Installation art operates fully within the realm of sensory perception, in a sense "installing" the viewer into an artificial system with an appeal to his subjective perception as its ultimate goal.

Interactive installations

An interactive installation frequently involves the audience acting on the work of art or the piece responding to users' activity. There are several kinds of interactive installations that artists produce, these include

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

-based installations (e.g.,

Telegarden The TeleGarden was a telerobotic community garden for the Internet. Starting in the mid-1990s, it allowed users to view, plant and take care of a small garden, using an Adept-1 industrial robotic arm controlled online. History The project bega ...

), gallery-based installations,

digital Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits. Technology and computing Hardware *Digital electronics, electronic circuits which operate using digital signals **Digital camera, which captures and stores digital i ...

-based installations, electronic-based installations, mobile-based installations, etc. Interactive installations appeared mostly at end of the 1980s (''Legible City'' by Jeffrey Shaw, ''La plume'' by Edmond Couchot, Michel Bret...) and became a genre during the 1990s, when artists became particularly interested in using the participation of the audiences to activate and reveal the meaning of the installation.

Immersive virtual reality

With the improvement of technology over the years, artists are more able to explore outside of the boundaries that were never able to be explored by artists in the past. The media used are more experimental and bold; they are also usually cross media and may involve sensors, which plays on the reaction to the audiences' movement when looking at the installations. By using virtual reality as a medium, immersive virtual reality art is probably the most deeply interactive form of art. By allowing the spectator to "visit" the representation, the artist creates "situations to live" vs "spectacle to watch".

Gallery

File:Firoz Mahmud Sucker Aichi Triennale 13.JPG, 'Sucker'wfp21' aircraft sculptural installation by Bangladeshi artist

Firoz Mahmud Firoz Mahmud ( bn, ফিরোজ মাহমুদ) is a Bangladeshi visual artist based in Japan. He was the first Bangladeshi fellow artist in research at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Mahmud's work has been exhibited at t ...

Aichi Arts Center is the main venue for the performing arts in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. The center consists of: *Aichi Prefectural Museum *Aichi Prefectural Arts Theater **Main Hall **Concert Hall *Aichi Prefectural Arts Promotion Service *Aichi Prefect ...

, Nagoya, Japan File:NEORIZON.jpg, Maurice Benayoun, ''Neorizon'', urban interactive art installation, eArts Festival Shanghai, 2008. File:Eberhard Bosslet Installation Unterstützende Massnahmen anmassend I Kassel cocumenta 8 1987 .jpg, Eberhard Bosslet, Anmaßend I,

documenta ''documenta'' is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. The ''documenta'' was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultura ...

Kassel Kassel (; in Germany, spelled Cassel until 1926) is a city on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel and the district of the same name and had 201,048 inhabitants in December 2020 ...

, Germany 1987 File:Aleya-milton-becerra.jpg,

Milton Becerra Milton Becerra (born 1951) is a Venezuelan artist who pioneered land art in Venezuela in the 1970s. Early works He graduated from the Cristóbal Rojas School of Arts (1972) under the Jesús Soto promotion. From 1973 to 1980 Milton Becerra wa ...

Ale'ya, Durban Segnini Gallery, Miami, 2009

Book Analysis of a process over time - 2007 - File:Vasiliy Ryabchenko. "Big Bembi", installation, barrels, linear lamps, deer horns, 1994.jpg, Vasiliy Ryabchenko, ''"Big Bembi"'', 1994 File:Christian Boltanski. Signatures.jpg, Christian Boltanski, ''Signatures'', 2011. File:Dombis 1687.jpg,

Pascal Dombis Pascal Dombis (born 1965) is a digital artist who uses computers and algorithms to produce excessive repetition of simple processes. Life and work Dombis lives and works in Paris. He earned an engineering degree from the Insa University in Lyon. ...

, ''Irrationnal Geometrics'', 2008. File:My Inner Beast portrait.jpg, '' My Inner Beast'', 1993 sculpture by Danish artist Jens Galschiøt. Exhibited in twenty cities across Europe without permission of the authorities. File:Test Site by Carsten Höller.jpg,

Carsten Höller Carsten Höller (born December 1961) is a German artist. He lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.Alice Rawsthorn (January 2012)"Cliff Hanger - The Ghanaian home of artists Carsten Höller and Marcel Odenbach goes above—and beyond" ''W Magazi ...

. ''

Test Site ''Test Site'' was an art installation, that was displayed in the turbine hall of Tate Modern in London, UK, between October 2006 and 9 April 2007. ''Test Site'' was designed like Carsten Höller, and was the seventh commission of the series of w ...

'', Tate Modern, 2006. Members of public slid down as much as five stories inside tubular slides. File:Electronic Superhighway by Nam June Paik.jpg, Nam June Paik, ''Electronic Superhighway'', Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii 1995 File:Wolf Vostell, Fiebre de Automóvil, 1973, Instalación.JPG,

, ''Auto-Fever'', 1973, Museo Vostell Malpartida. File:African Adventure, Tate Modern, November 2016 (01).JPG, ''African Adventure'' by Jane Alexander,1999-2002, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, England, November 2016 File:DavidSpriggsArt.jpg, David Spriggs, ''Vision II'', 2017. File:H Cronhammar.JPG, Installation by

Ingvar Cronhammar Ingvar Cronhammar (17 December 1947 – 20 May 2021) was a Swedish-Danish sculptor, who lived in Denmark from 1965 until his death. He gained a unique place in Danish art with his dark monumental works, often presenting an eerie confrontation ...

in Frederiksberg / Denmark 2015.

References

Bibliography

* Bishop, Claire. Installation Art a Critical History. London: Tate, 2005. * Coulter-Smith, Graham. Deconstructing Installation Art
Online resource
* Ferriani, Barbara. ''Ephemeral Monuments: History and Conservation of Installation Art''. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013. * Fried, Michael. ''Art and Objecthood''. In ''Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. * Grau, Oliver ''Virtual Art, from Illusion to Immersion'', MIT Press 2004, * "Installation nvironment''Grove Art Encyclopedia''. 2006. Grove Art Online. 30 January 200

* "Installation." Oxford English Dictionary. 2006. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 30 January 200

* "Install, v." ''Oxford English Dictionary''. 2006. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 30 January 200

* Murray, Timothy, Derrick de Kerckhove,

Oliver Grau Oliver Grau (born 24 October 1965) is a German art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance. Main Areas of Research are: Dig ...

Kristine Stiles Kristine Stiles (born Kristine Elaine Dolan in Denver, Colorado, 1947) is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global cont ...

, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Dominique Moulon, Jean-Pierre Balpe, ''Maurice Benayoun Open Art'', Nouvelles éditions Scala, 2011, French version, * Kabakov, Ilya. On the "Total" Installation. Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz, 1995, 243-260. * Kaprow, Allan. "Notes on the Creation of a Total Art." In Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. * Mondloch, Kate. ''Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. * Nechvatal, Joseph, ''Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances''. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. 2009. * * Reiss, Julie H. ''From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. * Rosenthal, Mark. ''Understanding Installation Art: From Duchamp to Holzer''. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2003. * Suderburg, Erika. Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

External links

Dossier: Site-specific Installations in Germany

Installation artists and art...the-artists.org
*
Museum of Installation (London): Interview with directors Nico de Oliveira & Nicola Oxley (2008)
''Sculpture'' / ''artdesigncafe''.
Public Art Installation Of Paul Kuniholm
*
Installation art definition from the Tate Art Glossary
Contemporary installation organizations and museums

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

The Mattress Factory Art Museum
Installation art
Electronic Language International Festival
Interactive art installations and New media art.
Media art center, Karlsruhe Germany
one of the biggest center with a permanent collection of interactive installations. {{Authority control Contemporary art movements Visual arts genres