On Experiencing Installation Art

Abstract

Both sculptures (with the exception of low and high reliefs) and works of installation art present us with three-dimensional objects that we are invited to observe from multiple viewpoints. Starting from similar observations, art theorists have investigated the links between the two art forms as well as sought to distinguish between them.1 Famously, Michael Fried introduced a distinction between theatrical and antitheatrical artworks: the former present objects in situations that include the beholder and invite her to appreciate them qua the mere objects they are—Fried discussed especially the early minimalist works by Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Carl Andre (Fried [1967] 1998, 153), which are the precursors of installation artworks2; the latter require to be experienced as detached from the beholder (155) and invite her to appreciate them qua media that have been manipulated to convey meaning. In antitheatrical sculptures, in particular, manipulation of the medium aims at presenting a variety of elements in interplay with each other (161). A decade later, Rosalind Krauss argued that works of minimal art as well as works like Bruce Nauman's Corridors, which today we would ascribe to the category “installation art,” convey meaning differently than sculptures, that is, by prompting the public to interact with them and scrutinize their space under the light of its sociocultural significance, rather than by representing space (Krauss, 1977, see esp. 262, 270). Krauss's distinction seems promising in light of the fact that Susanne Langer's insightful understanding of the phenomenology of sculpture can help us look deeper into the idea that sculptural space is different from the space of works of installation art.3 In a nutshell, Langer argues that, when we encounter a sculpture, we experience the space around it as organized around the possible movements of the sculptural object—analogously to how, when perceiving three-dimensional space, we experience it as organized around our possible movements (Langer 1953, 86–92; see also Hopkins 2003, 281–282). According to Langer, while in standard perception of three-dimensional space “the kinetic realm of tangible volumes, or things, and free air spaces between them, is organized in each person's actual experience as his environment, i.e. a space whereof he is the center” (Langer 1953, 90), when we perceive a sculpture as a sculpture—as opposed to a mere object that does not convey any content—we imagine that the sculpted object could move in certain ways in the space surrounding it, depending on how it is sculpted: “A piece of sculpture is a center of three-dimensional space. It is a virtual kinetic volume, which dominates a surrounding space, and this environment derives all proportions and relations from it, as the actual environment does from one's self” (91). According to Robert Hopkins's reading of Langer, sculptural experience is not illusory, while it is an experience in which our perception of the three-dimensional space is structured by thoughts that concern the ways in which we imagine the sculpted object could move in it (Hopkins 2003, 282, see also 275).4 Based on Krauss and on Hopkins's reading of Langer, then, we can distinguish between the experience of sculpture and that of installation art: while in the former we are prompted to imagine the possible movements of the sculpted object within the space surrounding the sculpture, the latter does not arouse this kind of imaginings.5 Not only Fried and Krauss but also more recent literature on works of installation art stresses that they are structured around the beholders, who are invited to explore their spaces and the objects possibly placed within those.6 Think of Robert Irwin's simplest light installations, such as Untitled (1971), which belongs to the Walker Art Center collection.7 The work is displayed by hanging a rectangular, transparent cloth from the ceiling of an empty gallery room and anchoring it to the floor, to keep it stretched and wrinkleless. The cloth hangs obliquely—its lower rim is closer to the back wall of the room than its upper rim—and is as wide as the back wall: the beholders cannot reach the back wall, but they can get close to the cloth, which creates a space with a very sloping roof. The cloth is illuminated with fluorescent lights and its image is reflected by the polished, uniform gallery floor: as a consequence, when the beholders get closer to the cloth, they have the visual experience of entering into a luminous prism. The gallery floor, walls, and ceiling are integral to the display of Irwin's work, which is a simple, luminous space that the public is invited to enter and explore. Think, also, of Yayoi Kusama's The Obliteration Room (first displayed in 2002 as an art project for children), a much more complexly structured work which, at the beginning of its exhibition, shows an entirely white apartment, complete with white furniture.8 Here, the public is confronted with an articulated space and is invited to cover, or better yet, obliterate it with brightly colored stickers, so that the apartment gets more and more colorful over the course of the work's exhibition. The mode of experience of the works from within their own spaces, however, does not seem unique to installation art. Works of architecture, too, consist of portions of space that we are supposed to experience from within. Some works usually categorized as installation art, in particular, present spaces that are similar to architectural ones: think, for instance, of some of Richard Serra's massive Cor-Ten works such as Sight Point (1975), now installed in front of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Some works usually categorized as architecture, also, are akin to installation art: think, for instance, of Bernard Tschumi's Folies (1982–1998) at Parc de la Villette, Paris, which are structures that the public can enter and explore and that, according to the original plan, should not fulfill any specific function (only recently, some have been converted to offices, information centers, and restaurants). Notwithstanding the similarities between the experience of installation art and that of architecture, I believe that the former is distinguished from the latter by its interactive character. In the next section, then, I argue that interactivity is a key feature of installation art and that it also allows us to distinguish its experience from that of architecture. Considering Irwin's and Kusama's works shows that installation art can prompt the public to engage in various sets of actions. The actions prompted by Untitled are rather basic: one is invited to enter its empty space, walk, sit down, or perhaps even crawl, and undergo the visual experience aroused by the fluorescent lights. By contrast, the actions prompted by The Obliteration Room are more complex: one is invited to enter a furnished space and to put stickers over every available surface. Are works of installation art interactive? Berys Gaut argues that a work is interactive just in case it authorizes that its audience's actions partly determine its instances and their features. So traditional musical and other performing works are not interactive, for the audience is not authorised to determine their instances and features; the performers do that. But in interactive works it is the audience that determines the work's instances and their features. (2010, 143)9 Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed plays, according to Gaut, are a case of interactive works: audience members who go on stage during the performances of the plays partly determine the works’ instances and their features. Do works of installation art fit this view of interactivity? First, according to Gaut, interactive works are types whose instances are tokens, that is, they are multiply instantiable works (141). If, with Sherri Irvin (2013a; forthcoming), we argue that works of installation art, like other contemporary works of art, are nonphysical historical individuals susceptible of having multiple occurrences, then we can conclude that works of installation art are, too, multiply instantiable works.10 According to this view, any new exhibition of Untitled, for instance, is a new occurrence of the work (more on this below). Second, Gaut argues that only those among the audience's actions that are authorized by the work's author contribute to producing tokens of an interactive work (2010, 141). This, too, is in line with Irvin's view of contemporary artworks (including works of installation art): namely, she argues that various works of contemporary art are governed, among other things, by rules for participation, which establish what kinds of actions the public is allowed to perform when interacting with them (see forthcoming). Kusama's work, for instance, allows the public to put stickers around the room but not to, say, draw on its walls. Finally, according to Gaut, interactive artworks are “types of which their interaction-instances are tokens” (141), which means that the audience of those works contributes to producing their tokens (by performing authorized actions). Is this condition, too, satisfied by works of installation art? Irvin does not properly discuss this issue (see 2013a and forthcoming). In a nutshell, she argues that a subset of contemporary artworks, which includes works of installation art, is composed of nonphysical historical individuals which stand in a relation of ontological dependence to particulars that represent the rules, sanctioned by their authors, for the constitution of their displays (that is, their occurrences)—and, on occasion, to other kinds of objects (for example, particular material objects such as a particular chunk of marble, if the rules prescribe that only that particular chunk be included in all the work's displays). Although Irvin acknowledges that some of those works ontologically depend on particulars that represent artist's sanctioned rules about how their public is supposed to participate in their displays (forthcoming), she does not discuss the hypothesis that the public participate into the instantiation of the displays of those works, focusing instead exclusively on the role that art institutions play in producing the works’ displays (forthcoming). It seems, then, that according to Irvin the displays of, for example, The Obliteration Room are those produced by art institution teams whenever the work is exhibited. An alternative view, according to which works of installation art fit entirely Gaut's understanding of interactive art, is the following: art institution teams produce partial displays of works of installation art whenever the works are exhibited, while the works’ public completes the displays by interacting with them in the way sanctioned by the artists through the works’ rules for participation.11 In particular, display completion happens whenever a member of the public interacts with one of the partial displays of a work in the way sanctioned by the artist. Each partial display, then, can prompt the making of many complete displays.12 To this proposal one could object that while it is evident that the public modifies the display of The Obliteration Room by putting stickers around the room, those who enter Untitled leave no trace of their actions and therefore do not seem to contribute to the production of the work's displays and properly interact with it. This objection, however, relies on a narrow understanding of what counts as the display of a work of installation art which, as I shall argue, is not faithful to the practice of installation art. In installation art, in general, members of the public are “in some way regarded as integral to the completion of the work” (Reiss 1999, xiii). This aspect of installation art has been thoroughly investigated by Claire Bishop (2005), who has argued that we should regard all works of installation art as experimenting with the public's experiences. Now, one could observe that this is what any artwork does, in a sense. I submit, however, that the lesson to learn from Bishop is that in installation art artists use the public's experiences as material for their work, manipulating them to prompt the public to appreciate some qualities of those experiences, in the same way as a painter might experiment with oil paint to prompt the public to appreciate, for example, its expressive qualities. The public's experiences, then, play a different role in installation art than, for example, in pictorial art: when we appreciate a painting, the obtaining of a certain visual experience is instrumental for us to be able to focus on the materials manipulated by the artists, such as oil paint and the configurations of marks and colors on a surface it allows to produce; however, the appreciation of the very fact that we have a certain visual experience while looking at the painting is not part of the experience of pictorial appreciation: the visual experience has a purely instrumental role. In installation art, instead, the experiences occurring as a consequence of the public's interacting with the work's partial displays in the ways prescribed by the artist are among the things the public is required to focus on, per se, in order to appreciate the work. This is why the public's experiences contribute to completing the displays of a work of installation art, no matter whether the public's interactions with the work's partial display issue in publicly observable results. The public's experiences, then, are part of the works’ displays.13 To support the proposed view, let us consider again Irwin's and Kusama's works. To appreciate both, it is crucial that we focus, among other things, on some of the qualities of the experiences they arouse in us. Untitled’s goal has been described as the exploration of “how phenomena are perceived and altered by consciousness” and Irwin's activity as “in effect orchestrating the act of perception.”14 Bishop writes about Irwin (as well as other West Coast artists like James Turrell): “The phrase ‘light and space’ was coined to characterise the predilection of these artists for empty interiors in which the viewer's perception of contingent sensory phenomena (sunlight, sound, temperature) became the content of the work” (Bishop 2005, 56, my italics). As for Kusama, in her early years she used to experience hallucinations, some of which of polka dots, and she has produced a significant body of work about self-obliteration (for example, Dots Obsession, 1998) where she appears covered in polka dots to blend in a similarly looking environment (see Turner 1999). The Obliteration Room, then, can be described as orchestrating for the public an experience similar to those had by the artist. To conclude and answer the question put forward in the previous section, I submit that what truly differentiates the experience of installation art from that of architecture is its interactivity. Architects build structures that we are invited to explore from within, just like works of installation art. Moreover, we can conceive of works of architecture as nonmaterial objects with material instantiations, analogously to works of installation art.15 Instantiations of architectural works, however, are not completed by the public's actions. The same, as I have argued, is not true of works of installation art.

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