Sunday 25 November 2007

Notes from 'Contemporary Installations'; Kate Davidson and Michael Desmond

Installation is an an art of the real:
- Era of fluid identities, mobile lifestyles and undefined relationships- installations are 'islands of refuge'
- Connect with world through physical materiality- can be beyond visual- sound/ smell/ spatial
- Self-contained spaces- exclude the extraneous, reinforcing a singular and insular aesthetic
- Art of connections- unity of the components
- Suffer from a loss of the real- long for 'first-hand accounts and for contact with primal sources of information' Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulations', New York: Semistexte, 1983

Geography of Installations:
-Sets up borders to create physically separate spaces
- By mapping a place- establishes as environment that exists as a work of art
- Elements are choreographed- making movements within a complex and varied site
- Haphazard accumulations of disparate data
- Follows a tradition of walking and viewing- origin in Flanerie- the nineteenth century practice of promenading
- Emergence of exhibition halls, department stores and museums- encourages the pedestrian's mobilised gaze
- Advent of cinema, television and computers, non-commercial transactions increasingly depend of the immobility of the audience
- 'The gaze becomes more virtually mobile, [while] the spectator becomes more physically immobile'- Anne Friedberg, 'Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern', Los Angeles: University of California, 1993

Time in Installations:
- Allows the artist to compress and manipulate the time the viewer spends within a work
- 'The 'flow' of life as a primary inner experience [is, in reality] a succession of states that melt into one another to form an indivisible process'- Paul Edwards, 'The Encyclopedia of Philosophy', New York: Crowell, Collier and Macmillan, Inc. 1967
- Artist's capacity to evoke memory, displacing the past into the present
- Christian Boltanski's installations attempt to create a hiatus, momentarily suspending the audience's belief that they are in an art museum- his works are more reminiscent of disused storage areas than the pristine white cube characteristic of modern museum spaces
- Materials can be selected for their appearance of embodying time- Rosalie Gascoigne's materials- weathered artefacts- prompt a Proustian evocation of their modest life and the passage of time

Theatre of Installations:
- Illusion of reality in theatre and cinema depends upon the convention of a single-point perspective- the view of the immobile spectator
- Installations- offer a multiple of viewpoints for the 'mobilised gaze' and offers palpable references to the material world
- Senses- surround and enhance the encounter of the work
- An arena for personal performance- the viewer is implicated within the work of art as a participant
- The 3-D space- visitors acutely aware of their bodies
- Sensation is the data of immediate awareness- the audience 'acts a [both the] catalyst and the receptor' Andrew Benjamin, 'Installation Art', London: Art and Design, 1993
- Frequent use of 'found' objects- apparent that the objects are props, choreographed for effect, placed for seduction
- Installations themselves are displaced objects, never able to join the 'real world'

Space of Installations:
- Fundamental to installation art
- El Lissitzky, 'Proun Environment', 1923: 'Space is the equivalent of a physical material with properties such as wood and stone'- considered to have form

Materials of Installations:
- Enormously varied
- Hybrid of art forms- little respect for established conventions- strength derives from its novelty and synaesthetic effect
- Objects- unaltered from ordinary existence, preserve an aspect of reality- have the capacity to intrude and provoke with their presence
- Familiar, domestic items- never innocent or neutral- remain recognisable and retain their character
- Collage of meanings- provides a rich, synthetic field of relationships- generating allegory and metaphors
- Metaphoric process- combination of object and context diverts original meaning and intent- creates a dynamic between literal and implied meaning

Site of Installation:
- Not permanent or site-specific- destined to be 'works in progress'
- Planning and preparation must be re-negotiated for each new site- enable's the work's renewal - Location of an installation defines its meaning- context of the museums to evoke institutions per se.

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