Acknowledgements Contents

First published :wos by order

of the Tate Trustees by
Heartfelt thanks are due to John Hayes, Margaret Iversen, Introduction: Installation art and experience 6
Michael Newman, and especially to Francesco Manacorda.
Tate Publishing, a division of
The research towards this book was supported by the Henry
Tate Enterprises Ltd, Millbank,
Moore Institute, Leeds; the Nordic Institute for Contemporary
London SW IP 4RG
www.tate.org.uk/publishing Art, Helsinki; and the Royal College of Art, London. The dream scene . 14
© Claire Bishop 2005

All rights reserved. No part of

this book may be reprinted or
Heightened perception 48
reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic,
mechanical or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, Mimetic engulfment 82
including photocopying and
recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Activated spectatorship 102
British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data
A catalogue record for this
book is available from the
British Library Conclusion 128
ISBN 1-85437-518-0

Designed by OI.02
Colour Origination by Notes 134
Bright Arts
Printed in China by
C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd.
Selected Further Reading 141
Front cover:
Yayoi Kusama Peep Show or
Endless Love Show 1966
Back cover: Olafur Eliasson
The Mediated Motion 2001 Index 142
Frontispiece: Richard Wilson
20:50 1 98 7
 INTRODU
INSTALLATION ART AND
EXPERIENCE

What is installation art?

'Installation art' is a term that loosely refers to the type of art into which the
viewer physically enters, and which is often described as 'theatrical', 'immersive'
or 'experiential'. However, the sheer diversity in terms of appearance, content
and scope of the work produced today under this name, and the freedom with
which the term is used, almost preclude it from having any meaning. The word
'installation' has now expanded to describe any arrangement of objects in any
given space, to the point where it can happily be applied even to a conventional
display of paintings on a wall.
But there is a fine line between an installation of art and installation art.
This ambiguity has been present since the terms first came into use in the r 960s.
During this decade, the word 'installation' was employed by art magazines to
describe the way in which an exhibition was arranged. The photographic
documentation of this arrangement was termed an 'installation shot', and this
gave rise to the use of the word for works that used the whole space as 'installation
art'. Since then, the distinction between an installation of works of art and
'installation art' proper has become increasingly blurred.
What both terms have in common is a desire to heighten the viewer's
awareness of how objects are positioned (installed) in a space, and of our bodily
response to this. However, there are also important differences. An installation of
art is secondary in importance to the individual works it contains, while in a work
of installation art, the space, and the ensemble of elements within it, are regarded
in their entirety as a singular entity. Installation art creates a situation into which
the viewer physically enters, and insists that you regard this as a singular totality.
Installation art therefore differs from traditional media (sculpture, painting,
photography, video) in that it addresses the viewer directly as a literal presence in
the space. Rather than imagining the viewer as a pair of disembodied eyes that
survey the work from a distance, installation art presupposes an embodied viewer
whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision.
This insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key
characteristic of installation art.
This idea is not new: at the start of her book From Margin to Center: The Spaces of
Installation Art (r 999), Julie Reiss highlights several recurrent characteristics that
persist in attempts to define installation, one of which is that 'the spectator is in
some way regarded as integral to the completion of the work'. This point remains
undeveloped in her book. Yet if, as Reiss goes on to remark, spectator participation
'is so integral to Installation art that without having the experience of being
in the piece, analysis ofInstallation art is difficult', then the following questions
are immediately raised: who is the spectator of installation art? What kind of
Olafur Eliasson
The Weather Project 'participation' does he or she have in the work? Why is installation at pains to
Tate Modern, London emphasise first-hand 'experience', and what kinds of 'experience' does it offer?
Oct 2003-March 2004
These are the kinds of questions that this book seeks to answer, and as such it is

6
 as much a theory of installation art -of how and why it exists -as it is a history.
Besides, installation art already possesses an increasingly canonical history:
Western in its bias and spanning the twentieth century, this history invariably
begins with El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp, goes on to discuss
Environments and Happenings of the late I950S, nods in deference to Minimalist
sculpture of the I 960S, and finally argues for the rise of installation art proper in
the I970S and I980s. The story conventionally ends with its apotheosis as the
institutionally approved art form par excellence of the I 990s, best seen in the
spectacular installations that fill large museums such as the Guggenheim in
New York and the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.
While this chronological approach accurately reflects different moments in
installation art's development, it also forces similarities between disparate and
unrelated works, and does little to clarify what we actually mean by 'installation
art'. One reason for this is that installation art does not enjoy a straightforward
historical development. Its influences have been diverse: architecture, cinema,
performance art, sculpture, theatre, set design, curating, Land art and painting
have all impacted upon it at different moments. Rather than there being one
history, there seem to be several parallel ones, each enacting a particular repertoire
of concerns. This multiple history is manifested today in the sheer diversity of
work being produced under the name of installation art, in which any number of
these influences can be simultaneously apparent. Some installations plunge you
into a fictional world -like a film or theatre set - while others offer little visual
stimuli, a bare minimum of perceptual cues to be sensed. Some installations are
geared towards heightening your awareness of particular senses (touch or smell)
while others seem to steal your sense of self-presence, refracting your image into
an infinity of mirror reflections or plunging you into darkness. Others discourage
you from contemplation and insist that you act- write something down, have
a drink, or talk to other people. These different types of viewing experience
indicate that a different approach to the history of installation art is necessary:
one that focuses not on theme or materials, but on the viewer's experience.
This book is therefore structured around a presentation of four - though there
are potentially many more - ways of approaching the history of installation art.

The viewer
Like 'installation art', 'experience' is a contested term that has received many
different interpretations at the hands of many different philosophers. Yet every
theory of experience points to a more fundamental idea: the human being who
Mike Nelson constitutes the subject of that experience. The chapters in this book are organised
The Cosmic Legend of around four modalities of experience that installation art structures for the viewer
the Uroboros Serpent
- each of which implies a different model of the subject, and each of which results
Turner Prize installation,
Tate Britain, London in a distinctive type of work. These are not abstract ideas remote from the context
Nov 2001-Jan 2002 in which the art was produced, but are rather, as will be argued, integral both to

8 9
the conceptualisation of installation art as a mode of artistic practice in the late a combination of those that I have experienced first-hand and those works that
I960s, and to its critical reception. They should be considered as four torches with have become the focus of particularly strong or interesting observations from
which to cast light on the history of installation art, each one bringing different others about the experience of viewing them. The inevitably subjective streak in
types of work to the fore. all these accounts once more asserts the fact that works of installation art are
Chapter One is organised around a model of the subject as psychological, or directed at and demand the presence of the viewer.' This point is further
more accurately, psychoanalytical. Sigmund Freud's writings were fundamental to reinforced by the problem of how to illustrate installations photographically.
Surrealism, and the I938 International Surrealist Exhibition is paradigmatic for Visualisation of a work as a three-dimensional space is difficult via a two-
the type of installation art discussed in this chapter - work that plunges the viewer dimensional image, and the need to be physically inside an installation renders
into a psychologically absorptive, dream-like environment. Chapter Two takes as photographic documentation even less satisfactory than when it is used to
its starting point the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the English reproduce painting and sculpture. It is worth bearing in mind that many artists
translation of his book The Phenomenology ofPerception (I 96 2) was crucial to the turned to installation art precisely through the desire to expand visual experience
theorisation of Minimalist sculpture by artists and critics in the I960s, beyond the two-dimensional, and to provide a more vivid alternative to it.
and to their understanding of the viewer's heightened bodily experience of
this work. This second type of installation art is therefore organised around Activation and decentring
a phenomenological model of the viewing subject. Chapter Three turns back to There is one more argument that this book presents: that the history of
Freud, specifically to his theory of the death drive put forward in 'Beyond the installation art's relationship to the viewer is underpinned by two ideas. The first
Pleasure Principle' (I920), and to revisitations of this text in the I960S and I970S by of these is the idea of 'activating' the viewing subject, and the second is that of
Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes. The type of installation art discussed in 'decentring'. Because viewers are addressed directly by every work of installation
this chapter therefore revolves around these different returns to late Freud and art - by sheer virtue of the fact that these pieces are large enough for us to enter
his idea oflibidinal withdrawal and subjective disintegration. Finally, Chapter them - our experience is markedly different from that of traditional painting and
Four looks at a type of installation art that posits the activated viewer of sculpture. Instead of representing texture, space, light and so on, installation art
installation art as a political subject, examining the different ways in which presents these elements directly for us to experience. This introduces an emphasis
poststructuralist critiques of democracy - such as that of Ernesto Laclau and on sensory immediacy, on physical participation (the viewer must walk into and
Chantal Mouffe - have affected installation art's conception of the viewer. around the work), and on a heightened awareness of other visitors who become
The argument, then, is that installation art presupposes a viewing subject part of the piece. Many artists and critics have argued that this need to move
who physically enters into the work to experience it, and that it is possible to around and through the work in order to experience it activates the viewer, in
categorise works of installation by the type of experience that they structure for contrast to art that simply requires optical contemplation (which is considered to
the viewer. Of course, it is possible to say that all art presumes a subject - insofar as be passive and detached). This activation is, moreover, regarded as emancipatory,
it is made by a subject (the artist) and is received by a subject (the viewer). In the case since it is analogous to the viewer's engagement in the world. A transitive
of traditional painting and sculpture, however, each element of this three-way relationship therefore comes to be implied between 'activated spectatorship'
communication (artist - work of art - viewer) is relatively discrete. By contrast, and active engagement in the social-political arena.
installation art from its inception in the I 960S sought to break radically with this The idea of the 'decentred subject' runs concurrently with this. The late I960s
paradigm: instead of making a self-contained object, artists began to work in witnessed a growth of critical writing on perspective, much of which inflected
specific locations, where the entire space was treated as a single situation into early twentieth-century perspective theories with the idea of a panoptic or
which the viewer enters. The work of art was then dismantled and often destroyed masculine 'gaze'. In Perspective as Symbolic Form (I924), the art historian Erwin
as soon as this period of exhibition was over, and this ephemeral, site-responsive Panofsky argued that Renaissance perspective placed the viewer at the centre of
agenda further insists on the viewer's first-hand experience. the hypothetical 'world' depicted in the painting; the line of perspective, with its
The way in which installation art structures such a particular and direct vanishing point on the horizon of the picture, was connected to the eyes of the
relationship with the viewer is reflected in the process of writing about such work. viewer who stood before it. A hierarchical relationship was understood to exist
It becomes apparent that it is difficult to discuss pieces that one has not between the centred viewer and the 'world' of the painting spread before him.
experienced first-hand: in most cases, you had to be there. This problem has Panofsky therefore equated Renaissance perspective with the rational and
substantially affected the selection of examples included in this book, which are self-reflexive Cartesian subject ('I think therefore I am').

10 11
 Artists throughout the twentieth century have sought to disrupt this
hierarchical model in various ways. One thinks of a Cubist still life, in which
several viewpoints are represented simultaneously, or El Lissitzky's idea of
'Pangeometry' (discussed at the end of Chapter Two). In the 1960S and 1970s-the
relationship that conventional perspective is said to structure between the work
of art and the viewer came increasingly to attract a critical rhetoric of 'possession',
'visual mastery' and 'centring'. That the rise of installation art is simultaneous
with the emergence of theories of the subject as decentred is one of the basic
assumptions on which this book turns. These theories, which proliferate in the
1970S and are broadly describable as poststructuralist, seek to provide an
alternative to the idea of the viewer that is implicit in Renaissance perspective:
that is, instead of a rational, centred, coherent humanist subject, poststructuralist
theory argues that each person is intrinsically dislocated and divided, at odds
with him or herself.' In short, it states that the correct way in which to view our
condition as human subjects is as fragmented, multiple and decentred- by
unconscious desires and anxieties, by an interdependent and differential
relationship to the world, or by pre-existing social structures. This discourse of
decentring has had particular influence on the writing of art critics sympathetic
to feminist and postcolonial theory, who argue that fantasies of 'centring'
perpetuated by dominant ideology are masculinist, racist and conservative; this is
because there is no one 'right' way oflooking at the world, nor any privileged
place from which such judgements can be made. 3 As a consequence, installation
art's multiple perspectives are seen to subvert the Renaissance perspective model
because they deny the viewer anyone ideal place from which to survey the work.
With such theories in mind, the historical and geographical scope of this book
should be addressed. Despite the vast number of installations produced in the last
forty years, the majority of the examples featured here date from 1965 to 1975, the
decade in which installation art comes of age. This is because it is at this time that
the main theoretical impulses behind installation art come into focus: ideas of
heightened immediacy, of the decentred subject (Barthes, Foucault, Lacan,
Derrida), and of activated spectatorship as political in implication. This decade
also witnessed the reconstruction of proto-installations by El Lissitzky, Piet
Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Kurt Schwitters, and some of these modernist
precursors are discussed in order to stress the fact that many of the motivations
behind installation art are not uniquely the preserve of postmodernism but are
part of a historical trajectory spanning the twentieth century.
This is also why this study'S field of investigation stays more or less within
Franceso di Giorgio
Martini
Western horizons, despite the fact that installation art is now a global
Architectural View phenomenon - witnessed in the contribution of non-Western artists to biennials
C.1490-1500
worldwide. In order to keep this book focused on one aspect of installation, its
GemiiJdegalerie,
Staatliche Museen zu viewing subject, there is no discussion of the work of those non-western artists
Berlin whose desire to immerse or activate the viewer springs from different traditions.

12 13
 THE DREAM SCENE

'Under the coal sacks, through the aroma of roast coffee, amongst the beds and the
reeds, the record-player could make you hear the noise of panting express trains,
proposing adventures on the platforms of main-line departures in the station of dream
and imagination .. .' Georges Hugnet'

The Total Installation

In The Man Who Flew into Spacefrom his ApartmentI98s, the Russian artist Ilya
Kabakov (b.I 93 3) stages a narrative scene for the viewer to unravel. You enter
a sparsely decorated hallway with coats and a hat hanging up on one wall;
on another wall is a shelf, upon which a number of framed documents rest.
These comprise three reports of an incident - a man flying into space from
his apartment - that were ostensibly given to the police by the three men who
shared the flat with the escapee. Looking around the hallway, you notice an
incompetently boarded-up doorway; peeping through the cracks you see a small
cluttered bedroom, strewn with posters, diagrams and debris, a home-made
catapult with a seat, and a hole in the ceiling. In one corner of the bedroom is
a maquette of the neighbourhood, featuring a thin silver wire soaring out of
one of the rooftops. Kabakov refers to this type of work as a 'total installation'
because it presents an immersive scene into which the viewer enters:
The main actor in the total installation, the main centre toward which everything
is addressed, for which everything is intended, is the viewer ... the whole installation
is oriented only toward his perception, and any point of the installation, any of its
structures is oriented only toward the impression it should make on the viewer, only
his reaction is anticipated.'
It is significant that Kabakov refers to the viewer as an 'actor', since his work is
frequently described as 'theatrical', by which it is meant that it resembles a theatre
or film set. Kabakov himself often compares his work to theatre: the installation
artist, he says, is the 'director' of ' a well-structured dramatic play', and all the
elements of the room have a 'plot' function: lighting, for example, like the use
of sound and reading matter, plays a vital role in enticing the viewer from one
part of the space to the next.
Since leaving Russia in the late I 98os, Kabakov has become one of the most
successful installation artists working today and his writings are amongst the
most fully formulated of the attempts made by artists to theorise installation
art. However, the idea of the 'total installation' offers a very particular model of
viewing experience - one that not only physically immerses the viewer in a three-
dimensional space, but which is psychologically absorptive too. Kabakov often
lIya Kabakov
The Man Who Flew into describes the effect of the 'total installation' as one of 'engulfment': we are not just
Space from his surrounded by a physical scenario but are 'submerged' by the work; we 'dive' into
Apartment 1985
it, and are 'engrossed' - as when reading a book, watching a film, or dreaming.
Collection: Centre
Georges Pompidou, This book hopes to show that cinema, theatre, reading and dreaming all offer
Paris quite distinct experiences, but what they do share with installation art is a quality

14
of psychological absorption. The text will therefore focus on one specific inhabited by a different personality. Representing the characters by the ephemera
mode that Kabakov cites - dreaming - and will argue that this provides the they had left behind in each space, Kabakov invited us to fantasj5e about the
closest analogy to our experience of one particular type of installation art. complex psychological interiority of the apartment's inhabitriits: The Man Who
Never Threw Anything Away (with an enormous collection of valueless objects),
The Dream Scene The Ta len tless Artist (a selection of banal Socialist Realist paintings), The Composer,
Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation ofDreams (I900) offers a psychoanalytic The Man Who Saved Nikolai Viktorovitch, and so on. This installation, like much of
definition of what dreams are and how we should interpret them. For Freud, Kabakov's subsequent work, alludes to the generic, institutional spaces of Soviet
the experience of a dream has three main characteristics. The first is that it is life under communism - schools, kitchens, communal apartments - but he
primarily visual (,dreams think essentially in images'), although it may include hopes that they also represent a category of place that Westerners immediately
auditory fragments, and presents itself with a sensory vividness more akin to recognise, and which he believes 'already exist in principle in the past experience
conscious perception than to memory (,dreams construct a situation' that 'we of each person'. The viewer therefore encounters these works 'like his own
appear not to think but to experience'). The second characteristic of the dream personal, highly familiar past', while the installation as a whole, Kabakov writes,
is that it has a composite structure: if taken as a whole, it will seem to be is capable of 'orienting a person inside of itself, appealing to his internal centre,
nonsensical, and can only be interpreted when broken down into its constitutive to his cultural and historical memory'.
elements, rather like a rebus. l Most importantly, Freud argues that the dream is In On The Total Installation, Kabakov presents many arguments about
not meant to be 'decoded', but analysed through free-association - in other words, installation art, several of which are worth reiterating since they epitomise the '
allowing meaning to arise through individual affective and verbal connections. general tenor of opinion since the I960s. He argues that installation is the latest,
The ability of each dream element to be replaced by an associative word or dominant trend in a succession of artistic forms (which have included
syllable is the dream's third main characteristic. the fresco, the icon and the painting) that all serve as 'models of the world'.
These three features - the sensory immediacy of conscious perception, Indeed, installations should appear to the viewer, he says, as 'a kaleidoscope of
a composite structure, and the elucidation of meaning through free-association- innumerable "paintings'''. Here we encounter two ideas that frequently recur in
precisely correspond to a model of viewing experience found in the 'total texts on this type of installation art: firstly, that the immersive qualities of the
installation' as described by Kabakov. We imaginatively project ourselves into 'dream scene' installation are in some way related to the character of absorptive
an immersive 'scene' that requires creative free-association in order to articulate painting, and secondly, that traditional perspective is overturned by installation
its meaning; in order to do this, the installation's assemblaged elements are art's provision of plural vistas! For Kabakov, what confirms the place of
taken one by one and read 'symbolically' - as metonymic parts of a narrative. installation in this trajectory is its status as a non-commodifiable object. When
The appropriateness of the dream as an analogy for this type of installation the fresco first appeared, it was an 'immaterial' model of its world. As it waned,
art is borne out in Kabakov's description of how the 'total installation' operates the fresco (like the icon and the painting) became increasingly 'material' and
on the viewer: 'the main motor of the total installation, what it lives by - [is1the 'real', that is, it became a commercialised and commodified product. Kabakov
cranking up of the wheel of associations, cultural or everyday analogies, personal claims that this is also characteristic of installation art:
memories'. In other words, the installation prompts conscious and unconscious
It is just as absolutely immaterial, impractical in our practical time and its entire
associations in the beholder: existence serves as a refutation of the principle of profitability ... the installation cannot
Familiar circumstances and the contrived illusion carry the one who is wandering inside be repeated without the author; how to put it together will simply be incomprehensible.
the installation away into his personal corridor of memory and evoke from that memory It is virtually impossible to exhibit an installation permanently because of the lack of
an approaching wave of associations which until this point had slept peacefully in its sufficient space in museums. [...]The installation encounters the firm hostility of collectors
depths. The installation has merely bumped, awakened, touched his 'depths', this 'deep who don't have the place to house it and conditions do not exist for keeping it in reserve.
memory', and the recollections rushed up out of these depths, seizing the consciousness It is impossible to repeat or reconstruct the installation in another place, as a rule it is 'tied',
Overleaf:
of the installation viewer from within. intended only for a specific dwelling. It is impossible to reproduce, recreate, a photo gives
lIya Kabakov
virtually no impression of it at alL
Moreover, this 'wave of associations' is not simply personal, but culturally The Man Who Flew
into Space from
specific. The Man Who Flew into Space ... was originally part of a large installation Despite the fact that Kabakov's own installations are successfully collected,
his Apartment 1985
of seventeen rooms called Ten Characters I 988, conceived as a communal Collection: Centre toured, stored and photographed around the world, these are - as we shall see-
apartment complete with toilets and two kitchens, in which each room was Georges Pompidou, Paris well-rehearsed arguments about installation art: its scale and site-specificity

16 17
 ~'
circumvent the market, while its immersiveness resists reproduction as a two-
dimensional image, thereby placing new emphasis on the viewer's presence
within the space.

The International Surrealist Exhibition

Many of Kabakov's installations - particularly those that mimic museums-
encroach upon the role of the curator, almost to the point of usurping his or her
position altogether. Today it is commonplace to observe that the hanging of an
exhibition - the sequence of works on the wall, the lighting and layout of the
rooms - determines our perception of the art on display, but this heightened
awareness is a relatively recent development. For the early twentieth-century
avant-garde, the exhibition hang was perceived as a way in which to supplement
the radical polemics of their artistic practice and to announce their distance from
current aesthetic conventions. The Surrealist exhibition displays in Paris in 1938,
1947 and 1959, and in New York in 1942, are some ofthe best examples ofthis
tendency, which has been referred to as an 'ideological hang'.s In recent years,
International Surrealist the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition has become an oft-cited precursor
Exhibition
Galerie des Beaux-Arts,
of installation art, celebrated less for the individual paintings and sculptures
Paris, Jan-Feb 1938 it brought together than for its innovative approach to exhibiting them. The
exhibition is often referred to as 'Duchamp's coal sacks', but these comprised just
one element of the installation, Contributions by Man Ray, Salvador DaH, Georges
Hugnet and Benjamin Peret played an equally important role. Under the direction
of Marcel Duchamp as overall producer (generateur-arbitre), the installation's
complex realisation was an unquestionably collaborative venture.
Held in the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, one of the smartest galleries in Paris, the
1938 exhibition sought to transform the grandiose decor of this prestigious venue,
which was out of keeping with the Surrealist aesthetic. Georges Hugnet reports

•
how the desire to conceal the gallery's interior swiftly became a priority: the red
carpets and period furniture were removed, while bright daylight (entering via
skylights) was obscured with 1,200 dirty coal sacks - filled with newspaper to
give the appearance of volume - hanging from the ceiling. Dead leaves and bits
of cork were strewn on the floor, and a Louis XV-style bed with rumpled linen
was positioned in each of the four corners. Next to one of the beds was a pond,
made by Salvador DaH, complete with water lilies and surrounded by reeds, moss,
rosebushes and ferns. The central room of the exhibition made a direct appeal to
the viewer's senses: the poet Benjamin Peret installed a coffee-roasting machine,
which 'gave the whole room a marvellous smell', while a disquieting recorded
soundtrack of hysterical inmates at an insane asylum permeated the gallery, and,
as Man Ray reports, 'cut short any desire on the part of visitors to laugh and joke'.6
A brazier in the middle of the space was surrounded by the only clear area in the
International Surrealist
show, while the works themselves were crammed onto revolving doors, pedestals Exhibition
and what walls were still available around the edge of this oneiric environment. Galerie des Beaux-Arts,
Paris, Jan-Feb 1938

20
21
 For the opening night, the exhibition was held in darkness. Man Ray had viewing of the paintings on display. His irreverent gesture prefigured a more
devised a way in which to illuminate the exhibition with stage lights concealed sustained engagement with abstraction that was to come with the work of Allan
behind a panel, which were to have provided a dramatic flood oflight onto the Kaprow (b.1927), prompted by the death of Jackson Pollock in 1956.
paintings as the viewer approached the work.' However, this was not ready in Kaprow maintained that Pollock's contribution to art was significant for three
time for the opening - much to the chagrin of the artists, whose works were now reasons. Firstly, his all-over paintings - made on the floor and worked on from
plunged into darkness. Guests to the vernissage were therefore issued with Mazda every angle - spurned traditional composition, ignoring the frame in favour of
flashlights to negotiate their path around the exhibition. s Given the Surrealist 'a continuum going in all directions simultaneously'. Secondly, Pollock's action-
interest in dreams and the unconscious, this nocturnal mode of encounter was an painting was performative: he worked 'in' the painting, and this process was
entirely fitting solution, since it evoked Freud's comparison of psychoanalysis to a 'dance of dripping ... bordering on ritual itself'. Thirdly, the space of the artist,
archaeology: viewers were cast into the role of excavator, uncovering the works the viewer and the outer world became interchangeable: Pollock's method of
one by one as if retrieving for analytic illumination the dark and murky contents painting was choreographic, and the viewers themselves must feel the physical
of each artist's unconscious psyche. impact of his markings, 'allowing them to entangle and assault us'." In form,
Unlike the components of Kabakov's installations, the coal sacks, pond, beds technique and reception, then, Pollock's work offered a challenge to the
and brazier of the 1938 installation were not culturally recognised symbols for generation that followed.
anything in particular; their existence and juxtaposition served simply to spark Although wall-sized murals might have been the most obvious way to respond
new trains of thought in the visitor's mind. Indeed, using a railway metaphor, to this challenge, Kaprow rejected this solution since it was both two-dimensional
Georges Hugnet described the exhibition as 'a station for the imagination and and gallery bound. It is worth remembering that at this time - the late 1950S-
the dream', a platform of departure for the visitor's unconscious free association.' Abstract Expressionist painting was commanding unprecedentedly high prices
The suspended coal sacks, he wrote, were like a 'steamroller' that 'caused, in the for living artists, and generating a boom in New York's commercial art galleries.
ramparts of our senses, a breach so large that the besieged citadel was run over It was precisely this type of market-oriented space that Kaprow wished to negate
with the heroic charge of our dreams, desires, and needs'. Hugnet's language when he began making immersive environments using second-hand materials
evokes a mode of experience redolent of psychically charged impact, both and found objects. For him, commercial galleries were 'stillborn' and sterile, spaces
disturbing and pleasurable, which Andre Breton described as 'convulsive beauty': for looking but not touching - he disparaged the 'lovely lighting, fawn grey rugs,
a fleeting experience of 'extraordinary happiness and anxiety, a mixture of panic, cocktails, polite conver:sation' that took place there and instead wished to make
joy and terror' in the face of an apparently harmless object or incident - but environments that were vividly 'organic', 'fertile', and even 'dirty'.'l Downtown
which could nonetheless prove revelatory for the subject once analysed. w This loft spaces such as the Reuben Gallery, the Hansa Gallery and the Judson Gallery
disturbingco"existence of desire and anxiety was considered by many of the (in the basement of the progressive Judson Church) became the preferred choice
Surrealist artists to hold revolutionary potential, since it threatened the thin of venue for artists like Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Kaprow who chose to
veneer of bourgeois manners and social propriety. The 'dream scene' of the 193 8 make immersive 'environments'. The move towards installation art and the
Surrealist Exhibition can be seen as a similar attempt to present the viewer rejection of conventional art galleries were therefore intimately connected.
with a psychologically charged encounter in order to rupture and de stabilise An important part of Kaprow's agenda in turning to environmental
conventional patterns of thought. The rumpled beds in each corner of the installations was a desire for immediacy. Instead of representing objects through
gallery confirmed this equation between the exhibition's mise-en-scene and paint on canvas, artists should employ objects in the world directly:
the unpredictable and irrational imagery of dreams. [Pollock] left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by
the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be,
Environments and Happenings the vastness of Forty-second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint ofour senses,
Lewis Kachur has noted that it makes sense 'to see Surrealism's public exhibition we shall utilize the specific substances ofsight, sound, movement, people, odours, touch. Objects of
spheres as actualisations of the spaces within the "painted dream", DaH-Magritte every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke,
wing of the group', in other words, as literal manifestations of the worlds depicted water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand otherthings.'4
in their paintings." Duchamp's Mile afString installation for the exhibition
First Papers afSurrealism in New York, 1942, took a more abstract and gestural That Kaprow understood the implications of Pollock's work in this way reflects
approach, criss-crossing the space with a mile-long string so as to impede clear the influence of John Cage, whose composition classes in New York he had

22 23
 attended during 1957-8. Cage's insistence on a Zen-inspi1ed integration of art
and everyday activity contributed to a new understanding of authorial intention
and the role of the viewer. In events like 4'33"of 1952, a silent work for performer
and piano in which peripheral noise became the 'performance', the role of
contingent phenomena (such as the coughs and shuffles of the audience) received
a
a new significance. It was only short step from Cage's passive incorporation of
context and chance to Kaprow's Environments that aspired to make the viewer an
active element of the composition.
Kaprow initially considered this inclusion of the viewer to be merely formal:
'we have different coloured clothing; can move, feel, speak, and observe others
variously; and will constantly change the "meaning" of the work by so doing'.'s
Later, he gave the viewer 'occupations like moving something, turning switches
on - just a few things', which in turn suggested 'a more "scored" responsibility for
that visitor' and the fully interactive role of audiences in the Happenings. ,6 Words
1962 was a 'rearrange able environment with light and sounds', in which visitors
could select words pre-painted on white sheets of paper and hang them around
the room to form phrases. Kaprow claimed that he 'wasn't installing anything to
be looked at ... but something to be played in, participated in by visitors who then
became co-creators'.'7 Both Environments and Happenings insisted on the viewer
as an organic part of the overall work.
Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow For Kaprow, this inclusion of the viewer placed a greater responsibility on
An Apple Shrine Words him/her than had previously been the case. In his eyes, the activation of viewers
Judson Gallery, Judson Smolin Gallery,
Memorial Church, New York,
had a moral imperative: the Environments and Happenings were not just another
New York, Nov-Dec 1961 11-12 Sept 1962 artistic style, but 'a human stand of great urgency, whose professional status as art
Photo: Robert McElroy Photo: Robert McElroy is less a criterion than their certainty as an ultimate existential commitment'.'8
As Jeff Kelley has argued, Kaprow's views were informed by the pragmatist
philosopher John Dewey, whose Art as Experience (1934) he had read closely and
annotated as a student." Dewey maintained that we can only develop as human
beings if we actively inquire into and interact with our environment. Being thrust
into new circumstances means having to reorganise our repertoire of responses
accordingly, and this in turn enlarges our capacity for 'experience', defined by
Dewey as 'heightened vitality ... the complete interpenetration of self and the
world of objects and events'.'O When Kaprow plunged visitors into a 'dirty' and
'rough' environment, filling them with 'tense excitement' and 'risk and fear', it
was in order to provide visceral irruptions into everyday consciousness for the
sake of its growth." Artwork that was politely framed, argued Kaprow, 'stoodfor
experience rather than acting directly upon it'. n
Thus Kaprow did not consider a conventional art gallery a suitable location
for the transformative potential of aesthetic experience: there, the viewing of art
was too inhibited by ingrained responses. Moreover, its pristine white spaces
were synonymous with the eternal and the canonical- the precise opposite of
Kaprow's insistence on flux, change and disorder. It is clear that the nervous

24
 Various
The American
Supermarket 1964
reconstructed in,
Shopping, Schirn
Kunsthalle, Frankfurt,
Sept 2001-Dec 2002

excitement he wished to solicit from the viewer was more psychological than food and shopping for art. Cecile Whiting has shown how the installation played
existential: the objects from which the Environments were made were not off two modes of viewer engagement: the connoisseurial detachment of aesthetic
random but chosen to 'represent a current class of things: memoirs, objects of judgement and the hands-on 'absorbed shopper' involved in everyday chores.
everyday usage, industrial waste, and so forth'." As a result, the Environments had The latter mode, she notes, was at the time particularly associated with female
'a high degree of associational meaning' and were 'intended to stir the observer on consumers whose relationship to commodities was regarded as more susceptible
an unconscious, alogicallevel'.'4 Bearing indexical traces of previous usage, the to 'unconscious or hidden ideas, associations and attitudes'.'9
assemblaged materials were intended to prompt reverie in the viewer. In An Apple These installations of the early I 960S structure an experience for the viewer
Shrine 1960, the visitor moved through maze-like narrow passages of board and that is in close dialogue with the 'art' of window-dressing, strategic shop layout,
wire, choked with tar paper, newspaper and rags, to a tranquil central clearing- and the increasingly prevalent concept of a 'retail experience'. Then, as now,
described by one reviewer as having 'the stillness ... of a ghost town evacuated at department stores aimed to entice viewers into the shop by encouraging fantasy
the moment before an avalanche' - where apples were suspended from a tray identification with the goods on display in the windows. While this structure
and signs read 'Apples, apples, apples'.'5 The photographic documentation of this was to a degree present in The Store, whose objects were visible through a large
work shows how well viewers became collaged into it, tentatively exploring its window from the street, it became an integral part of Oldenburg'S Bedroom
passages as they would a decrepit and abandoned old house. Ensemble of 1963. This showroom-style bedroom is presented as a tableau,
Kaprow's search for the shock impact of 'unheard-of happenings and events ... cordoned off and inaccessible to the viewer. 39
sensed in dreams and horrible accidents' therefore seems to offer many For Lucas Samaras (b.1936), the fact that the Bedroom Ensemble could not be
similarities to Surrealist art, with its aim to undercut the ego's defences and entered was its downfall. He found unsatisfactory the way in which Oldenburg-
Claes Oldenburg trigger unconscious desires and anxieties.'6 But the Surrealist encounter, as like Ed Kienholz and George Segal- failed to accommodate the viewer in his
The Store described by Breton, was essentially a missed encounter, whose immediacy work. Instead he wished to create a wholly immersive environment in which the
107 East 2nd Street, temporarily steals our sense of self-presence." By contrast, the shock of the dirty space existed for the viewer to activate as an engaged and absorbed participant.
New York, 1961
Photo: Robert McElroy and new and unexpected inKaprow's Environments sought to confirm the Room 1964 comprised a reconstruction of the artist's bedroom, installed in the
viewer's sense of self-presence: he tells us that 'all the time you're there, getting Green Gallery, New York. Unlike the tableaux of Kienholz and Segal, in which
into the act'.'s This 'authentic' revelation of the subject through the immediacy figures were placed in particular scenarios, the objects in Room were not 'glued
of first-hand experience was to become a recurrent theme in the rise of down' and relationships between the objects were 'fluid'." Samaras believed
installation art in the 1960S. strongly that installations should not illustrate a situation, but should be geared
towards the visitor's first-hand, real experience. Discussing his Room in the
Realism in the 1960s context of Oldenburg'S Bedroom Ensemble and of related tableaux by his former
Kaprow's desire to use actual objects in the world rather than represent them is, tutor Segal, he commented that 'none of them was really concerned with
unsurprisingly, also found in the work of his contemporaries. At the end of 1961, a complete environment, where you could open the door, walk in, and be
Claes Oldenburg (b.1929) began renting a shop at 107 East md Street, which he in a complete art work'.3'
named The Ray Gun Mfg. Co. The back room functioned as a studio, while Room therefore addressed itself directly to the viewer, whose experience was
the front room, 'The Store', was used to display and sell his sculptures. Here, he not that of detached onlooker but the focus of the work. Samaras saw the piece as
presented small-scale works made of plaster-soaked muslin painted with trickled an 'aggressive' riposte to the dealer Sidney Janis, who had exhibited Oldenburg's
enamel paint. The walls, along with every other surface of the room, were also Bedroom Ensemble under the label of 'New Realism' earlier that year; for Samaras,
covered in paint - forming a 'wallpaper' of blob by green stripes patterned with Room was authentically 'real in that it has real things and you can walk in, poke
leaves that united the space and the work. around, sit down and make love'.ll The room was cluttered with his personal
Three years later, the Bianchini Gallery held The American Supermarket, an ephemera - clothes, underwear, art works in progress, books, writing, paper bags
exhibition devised by the dealer Paul Bianchini and his business partner Ben - and a radio was left playing, suggesting that the room's occupant might return
Birillo as a way to display and sell the work of numerous Pop artists, including at any minute. Unlike the tableaux of Kienholz and Segal, Samaras 'turne-d
Andy Warhol, Robert Watts and Jasper Johns. Real cans of Campbell's soup the spectator into an accomplice, a Peeping Tom spying on him in his absence ...
were stacked next to Warhol's screenprint Campbell's Soup Cans 1962, and, like Though the spectator had been invited to spy, the menace of his own surreptitious
Oldenburg'S The Store, drew attention to the similarities between shopping for forbidden curiosity replaced physical menace.'l4

26 27
 The difference between the work of Samaras and that ofKienholz and Segal
might therefore be understood not just as the difference between installations
and tableaux, but also between dreaming and fantasy. The psychoanalysts
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis have explained that in the dream
(or daydream) 'the scenario is basically in the first person ... the subject lives
out his reverie': this would be analogous to installation art of the type presented
by Samaras, in which the viewer is protagonist. 35 Fantasy, by contrast, is
characterised by a scene in which we identify with a figure rather than acting
this role ourselves: the work ofKienholz and Segal would typify this mode,
since their sculpted figures are immersed and absorbed on our behalf, and
prevent us from becoming the psychological centre of the work.

Paul Thek's processions

Installations like Samaras's Room are conspicuously absent from the rest of US
art production during the I 960S, largely due to the dominance of Minimalism
on both East and West coasts. One notable exception is the work of Paul Thek
(1933-88) who sought to combine the viewer's movement in and through the
installation with a symbolic iconography. Referring to his installations as
'processions', Thek alluded both to the ritualistic and social quality of the viewer's
movement through the work, and to the fact that each piece was constantly 'in
George Segal
The Diner 1964-6 process'. His large-scale assemblaged scenes, made of found (and usually organic)
Collection: Walker Art materials, also incorporated sound, music and theatrical lighting, and were
Center, Minneapolis
reworked for each venue where they were shown.
Thek is best known for his irreverent response to Minimalism in his first
installation The Tomb 1966-7, later renamed Death ofa Hippie. The work
comprised an 8 'Iz foot high pink-lit ziggurat (a form much used by Robert
Smithson) into which the viewer could enter. Inside this three-tiered pyramid
was a beeswax model ofThek's body as a corpse, surrounded by pink goblets,
a funerary bowl, private letters and photographs. Viewers filed into the
construction like mourners and could sit on floor cushions around the 'body'.
In the rest of the gallery were wax body parts, 'laid out on the floor in their
cases and roped off with red cord', placed to look 'like finds from a tomb or
an archaeological site'.3 6 The work encouraged the viewers to activate and
interpret the scene by adopting the roles of mourner and archaeologist. 37
Later installations recycled the hippie figure, as well as other sculptures
(such as Fishman 1968) in more elaborate scenes. These installations, made from
1968 onwards, look incredibly contemporary in their casual distribution of
materials around the gallery space. In this year Thek relocated his practice to
Europe, touring from venue to venue with The Artist's Co-op, a collective with
Lucas Samaras
whom he collaborated to produce each exhibition. This nomadic and communal
Room or Room no. 1,
approach to making art was reflected in Thek's conception of how the work installation at Green
as a whole was to be experienced: the viewer's passage through the installation Gallery, New York, 1964

28 29
 was compared to communion, and wherever possible, Thek organised his
exhibitions to coincide with religious festivals. He felt strongly that the public
understood more clearly 'the "liturgical" nature of the art' during a holiday
period (,Christmas is my favourite')Y The ritualistic structure of his installations
reflected his Catholicism and his desire to 'humanise' the gallery environment
by 'turning down the lights, giving people some chairs to sit on, and not having
the art restricted in any way'.l9 Visitors to his installations of the 1970S followed
paths through the works that were softly lit, often by candles, and that contained
a variety of opportunities to rest in contemplation.
As might be imagined, Thek was influenced by contact with the work of Joseph
Beuys (1921-86), which he encountered for the first time in 1968. Beuys was
yet to develop the environmental approach to displaying his work seen in the
Beuys Blockin Darmstadt in 1970, but Thek was clearly inspired by his passion
for a democratic 'social sculpture', which had clear parallels with his own
inclusive and collective approach to the production and reception of art.
Moreover, just as Beuys used fat and felt as allusions to his personal mythology,
Thek developed his own symbolic iconography in which trees, boats, fish,
stags, pyramids and a stuffed hare were recurrent elements. Although such
symbolism remained obscure to the uninitiated viewer, the recycled materials
were highly evocative and open enough to permit personal interpretation.
Jung's 'collective unconscious', which Thek related to his own experience of
Christianity, was an important influence in this regard, as was the group's
- experience of psychedelic drugs.
Significantly, it was not just the individual objects that Thek considered to
be symbolic, but also their layout: a corridor was a 'place of concentrated energy,
a womb passage, the Way of the Cross'; a fountain was 'the sacristy'; trees were
'growing life, visible age'; sand was 'water that you can walk on':O Pyramid!A Work
in Progress 1971, at the Moderna Museet Stockholm, was the first piece in which
the viewer's path through the installation was choreographed step by step:
One had to come through a twisting, almost-pink newspaper tunnel, and walk up some
steps onto a wharf which is in a truncated pyramid. On the inside are blue newspaper walls
held up by trees from which I had not stripped the branches or leaves so it feels like a forest.
So you are in a forest in a pyramid at the end of a tunnel and it is painted blue like the sea
and lit by candles. And then the wharf is set as a dining room. There's some bread on the
table and some wine and newspaper clippings and books and prayers. In a corner is a little
light and a chair and a flute. There is also a piano and a bathtub with oars. And then you
leave the pyramid and there's a large room to wander through with all sorts of things and
it's all lit by candles and filled with waves of sand. And at the very end, just before you exit,
Paul Thek
is the Hippie as a Viking chieftain in a kind of boat:'
Pyramid/A Work in
Progress
Robert Pincus-Witten remarked of Thek's meticulously visualised Tomb in 1967
Modema Museet, that 'the central experience of the spectator is that of intrusion', but these later
Stockholm, 1971 installations - more allusive and enigmatic in their imagery - sought to create

30 31
 Marcel Broodthaers
Musee d'Art Moderne,
Departernent des Aigles,
Section des Figures
(Der Adler vom
Oligozan bis Heute)
Stii.dtische Kunsthalle,
Dusseldorf, May-July
1972

a gentle atmosphere of comfort and beauty.4' The loose and collective nature placing alternate white and coloured stripes on billboard hoardings and gallery
of the work was carried through from manufacture to reception, so that the walls, responding to the entire site around a gallery in order to undermine its
experience of peacefulness he sought to elicit - 'so beautiful that you're shattered authority as a privileged venue for art. The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers
when you leave' - was also emphatically communal. 43 (1924-76), by contrast, assumed directorship of his own (fictional) museum,
the Musee d'Art Modeme, Departement des Aigles, 1968-72. Broodthaers's Musee
Institutional critique adopted a 'total installation' approach in order to parody the apparatus by which
Richard Flood has argued that Thek's installations were defined by the fact museums confer value upon objects. It has subsequently become the subject of
that he was an American whose country was fighting a war in Vietnam: his extensive critical discussion, but its status as an installation is often overlooked,
comforting, 'meditative environments', Flood writes, opposed 'the awfulness that as is its relationship to Broodthaers's Surrealist literary heritage. Like the 1938
was unfolding in South East Asia'.44 In Europe and the US, mounting hostility Surrealist exhibition, the Musee operated as a platform of departure for the
towards the conflict in Vietnam, together with the left-wing student protests imagination, but not in order to unleash an encounter with unconscious desires
of 1968 and the rise of feminism, were proving to be decisive events for many in the name of revolutionary Marxism; instead it sought to induce a different type
artists. The younger generation came to acknowledge that politically disengaged of catalysing narrative, one more specifically critical of structures of authority,
art could be seen as complicit with the status quo, and argued that any art object and of our psychic investments in them.
that gratified the market implicitly supported a conservative ideology in which Broodthaers's Musee had numerous sections, each of which alluded to the
capitalism dovetailed with patriarchy, an imperialist foreign policy, racism and a various roles of a museum, from the historical and exhibiting function of the
host of other social ills. Section XVIIIe Siecle, Section XIXe Siecle, and Section XXe Siecle, to the administrative,
The link between museum institutions and social inequality was made explicit financial and press concerns of the Section Puhlicite, Section Documentaire, and
in the works of Hans Haacke (b.1936), whose Manet-PROJEKT 741974 exposed Section Financiere. The largest section, the Musee d'Art Modeme, Department des
the links between museum patrons, trustees, politics and business. Many artists Aigles, Section des Figures (Der Adler vom Oligozan his Heute) 1972, involved the
began to question their role within the museum system, and consciously avoided actual loan of over 300 objects - each bearing the image of an eagle - from forty-
the production of discrete, portable objects on which the market depended. three collections including the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum and
Assuming responsibility for the dissemination and reception of their art, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Shown at the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle, these
increasing numbers of artists turned to the issues of medium and distribution objects were hung on the walls and displayed in vitrines, but this conventional
as a way in which to make a 'political' statement without subjecting the presentation was complicated
work to explicit propaganda on the level of content. Context became a crucial by a trilingual plaque placed beside each object stating that 'this is not a work
consideration in addressing art's relationship to the market and museum of art'. Explicitly referencing Rene Magritte's disruption of language and image
infrastructure, and installation art was but one of many forms that emerged ('this is not a pipe'), Broodthaers's plaques sought not only to disturb the viewer's
as a result. 45 Married to the physical architecture of a given space for a specific assumption that all objects in a museum were automatically works of art, but
duration, works of installation art were dependent on the context in which they also to remind us that it was not the individual object alone but the relationships
were shown and were therefore difficult - if not impossible - to sell. Moreover, between the objects (including their context) that constituted this work of art.
context-dependency redirected meaning away from the individual author and The fact that Broodthaers's Museeimpersonated a museum within a museum
onto the work's reception: the specific circumstances in which it was experienced strengthened the work's subversive power. He maintained that this potency
by a particular audience. The active nature of the viewer's role within such lay not so much in the idea of a fraudulent museum, but in the creation of an
work, and the importance of their first -hand experience, came to be regarded entire fictitious structure around it that drew attention to the way in which any
as an empowering alternative to the pacifying effects of mass-media. 46 institutional authority is staged. The official inaugurations, the correspondence
The international exhibition Documenta 5, held in Kassel in 1972, reflected with stamped letterheads, the mailing list of art world notables, the donations,
this changed political mood, and saw an unprecedented number of contributions the visitors who flocked from abroad, the concerts held in the Section XIXe Siecle,
taking the form of installation art.47 Several of these directly addressed the the contracted art shippers: all these peripheral supports and the simulacra
institutions in which art was shown, and became known as 'institutional of bureaucracy were as significant as the Musee's individual exhibitions.
critique'. Vastly differing formal strategies were grouped under this label. Although conventionally framed as Conceptual art - with all its connotations
From 1965 onwards, for example, the French artist Daniel Buren (b.1938) began of anti-visual austerity - Broodthaers's Musee, like his entire oeuvre, is in fact

32 33
 Marcel Broodthaers
Musee d'Art Moderne,
Departement des Aigles,
Section des Figures
(Der Adler vom
Ohgozan bis Heute)
Stadtische Kunsthalle,
Dusseldorf, May-July
1972

dense with rebuses, puns and riddles. And the 'puzzle' of the work is exacerbated
by the artist's deliberately contradictory statements about it. As Michael
Compton observed, 'it is in the experience of trying to sort it out and of knowing,
finally, that one has not, that one perceives a kind of hidden message'!8 This is
because the work cannot be reduced to a simple deconstruction of museum
ideology - its supposedly impartial and valorising status, the objectivity of its
taxonomy, its status as public repository of wealth and the symbolic invocation
of the eagle to uphold this - since it also harnessed the disruptive force of
the viewer's unconscious desires and anxieties. Every visitor to a museum,
noted Broodthaers, is steered by 'narcissistic projection ... onto the object he
contemplates', and so it was on the level of unconscious free-association that the
placards beside each object would disrupt (perturbe) conventional patterns of
viewing!' As Broodthaers acknowledged, it is only through deception that the
truth may appear: 'I believe that a fictional museum like mine allows us to
grasp reality as well as that which reality hides.'5
0

Broodthaers' Musee d'Art Moderne sets a precedent for contemporary

installation artists like Mark Dion (b.1961), who seek not to vilify the museum
but to 'make it a more interesting and effective institution'.5' Dion's The
Department ofManne Animal Identification of the City ofNew York 1992, like Fred
Wilson's Mining the Museum 1992, and Susan Hiller's From the Freud Museum
1995, investigates and overturns museum taxonomies, and by implication the
ideologies that underpin them. Although all three artists are motivated by
different political tendencies, it is significant that they choose to articulate these
through a parody of museum-display conventions. Vitrines are filled, labels are
written, charts are drawn, taxonomies unravelled; the 'objectivity' of institutional
display, these artists imply, is always already interpretation. As Dion notes, the
museum tells a narrative 'through a very particular type of representation: for it
is both the thing itself and a representation of it'.5' It is important that so many
of these artworks harness the viewer's own capacity to free-associate in their
installations, revealing subversive, marginal perspectives doing combat with
grand narratives.

Feminism and multi-perspec1ivalism

One of the key ideas underlying institutional critique is that there is more than
one way to represent the world. Installation art, by using an entire space that
Marcel Broodthaers
must be circumnavigated to be seen, came to provide a direct analogy for the
Musee d'Art Moderne,
Departement des Aigles, desirability of multiple perspectives on a single situation. One artist who has
Section des Figures articulately theorised this shift in relation to installation art is Mary Kelly
(Der Adler vom
(b.1941). For her, the viewer of an installation is 'sort of out of control' because
Oligozan bis Heute)
Stadtische Kunsthalle, 'the view is always partial' - 'there's no position from which you can actually
Dusseldorf, May-July see everything at once'. 53 Like many artists in this period, Kelly came to regard
1972 installation art's multi-perspectivalism as eman~ipatory - in contrast to single-

34 35
 point perspective, which centres the viewer in a position of mastery before the overflowing bin of 'used' sanitary towels and tampons, while the fleshy pink
painting, and by extension, the world. Nurturant Kitchen by Susan Frazier, Vicki Hodgetts and Robin Weltsch was
Kelly's Post-Partum Document I973-9 is a complex installation assembled over adorned with ambiguous shapes that resembled both food (fried eggs) and breasts.
six years, in which I 35 framed images colonise the walls of a gallery space: her Although the anger and frustration permeating Womanhouse is specific to the
identically framed pictures, texts, objects and documents line the gallery walls in I970S, its symbolic equation of domestic space and femininity continues to
the coolly objective manner typical of the museum displays that Broodthaers's reverberate through contemporary art, from the work of Louise Bourgeois and
Museeparodied. And like Broodthaers, Kelly's formal restraint was used to Mona Hatoum to that of Tracey Emin.
counterpoint a more turbulent and troubling content: collecting her son's used
nappies, dirty vests and scribbled drawings, Kelly overlaid each fetishised 'relic' Spectacular immersion
with personal commentary and Lacanian diagrams. Like the rest of Kelly's oeuvre, During the I980s, major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale,
Post-Partum Document occupies an ambiguous position within the history of Documenta, Skulptur. Projekte Munster and the Sao Paulo Biennial, together with
installation art: its neatly framed components do not respond to the exhibition venues like the Dia Center (New York) and Capp Street Projects (San Francisco),
site, and are more psychologically absorptive (in the manner of traditional came to rely increasingly on installation art as a way to create memorable, high-
painting) than physically immersive. And yet Kelly maintains that it is precisely impact gestures within large exhibition spaces, be these signature architectural
the temporal, cumulative unfolding of the work in an installation situation statements or derelict ex-industrial buildings. A surge of new venues dedicated
that enables it to impact upon the viewer, 'rather than viewing the work from to post- I 960S art further consolidated the status of installation art through
the fixed vantage of traditional perspective'.54 enlightened acquisitions policies and the creative commissioning of new work. 55
Kelly's writing repeatedly highlights a connection between single-point Today, installation art is a staple of biennials and triennials worldwide, capable
perspective and (patriarchal) ideology, and implies that installation art is one way of creating grand visual impact by addressing the whole space and generating
to challenge and subvert this association. Rather than representing women striking photographic opportunities. For curators, installation art still carries a
iconically, as an image to be 'mastered', Kelly uses images of clothing or texts to hint of mild subversion (the work will probably be unsaleable) and risk (since the
Susan Frazier, show a 'dispersed body of desire', a modality of representation that also affects outcome is unpredictable), though as Julie Reiss has argued, today's installation
Vicki Hodgetts and
Robin Weltsch
the viewers, since we are unable to 'master' this body in one glance. It would be an art is far from a marginal practice but close to the centre of museum activity. 56
Nurturant Kitchen understatement to say that Kelly's installations are visually remote from the Much installation art of the I 980s is notable for its gigantic scale, and often
from Judy Chicago and 'dream scene' works discussed in this chapter, but her observations are crucial involves an expansion of sculptural concerns to dominate a space, rather than
Miriam Schapiro
Womanhouse
to the history of installation art. This is because she represents a position that a specific concern for the viewer's immersion in a given environment. These
553 Mariposa Avenue became increasingly important in installation art's self-legitimation - that the works do not adversely affect the space in which they are shown, n'or in many
Los Angeles, Jan-Feb inclusion of the viewer in a multi-perspectival space offers a significant challenge cases do they respond to it: one thinks of the productions of Arte Povera artists,
1972
to traditional perspective, with its rhetoric of visual mastery and centring. Instead Joseph Beuys, or Claes Oldenburg during this decade. Cildo Meireles (b.I948)
of a hierarchical relationship to the object (which was viewed as synonymous and Ann Hamilton (b.I9S6) both produced work in the late I980s that could
with bourgeois possession and masculinity), the viewer of installation art finds be regarded as typical of the ambitious and visually seductive installation art
that 'there's no position from which you can actually see everything at once'. prevalent in that decade, but they distinguish themselves by retaining a specific
With feminist art of the early-to-mid-I970S in general, it could be argued interest in the viewer's sensory experience. Like the other artists mentioned
that formal concerns were less significant than the politicised content. This is above, their work is characterised by the use of unusual materials, often in vast
well demonstrated if we compare Mary Kelly's psychoanalytic reworking of quantities, yet Meireles and Hamilton seek to transform the character of a room
Conceptual art to the visceral 'central core' imagery developed in West Coast entirely, generating meaning through the symbolic associations of the materials
performance and installation art. Womanhouse I972, by Judy Chicago (b.I939) used and thereby immersing the viewer in a vivid psychological encounter.
and Miriam Schapiro (b.I923), comprised a series of installations in a condemned Cildo Meireles was unable to realise many of his installations during the I970S
Hollywood mansion. Together with the twenty-one students on their Feminist due to the oppressive military regime that had gripped Brazil since the mid-I960s;
Art Program at Cal Arts, Schapiro and Chicago transformed the building's interior many of his works remained in notebook form until the I980s -a delay that is
into a series of site-specific installations. Today the iconography of Womanhouse reflected in the dating of each piece. His installations manifest many of the
appears dated and heavy-handed: Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom contained an phenomenological concerns of Brazilian art of this period, staging a heightened

36 37
 Ann Hamilton
tropos
Dia Center for the Arts,
New York,
Oct 1993-June 1994

perceptual experience for the viewer that may be optical (the monochromatic
overload of Red Shift 1967-84), haptic (the balls of various weights in
EurekaiBlindhotland I 970-5), gustatory (sweet and salty ice cubes in Entrevendo
197 0-94) or olfactory (the smell of natural gas in Volatile 1980-94). The materials
that Meireles uses, often in large quantities, are symbolically freighted:
I am interested in materials which are ambiguous, which can simultaneouslybe symbol
and raw substance, achieving a status as paradigmatic objects. Materials which can
carry this ambiguity range from matches to Coca-Cola bottles, from coins and banknotes
to a broom, as in La Bruja (The Witch, 1979-8r). They are in the everyday world, close
to their origin, yet impregnated with meaning. 57

MissiiolMissoes (How to Build Cathedrals) 1987, is perhaps typical of Meireles's use

of repetitive and metaphorically laden materials: 600,000 coins arranged on the
floor are joined to 2,000 bones hanging from the ceiling by a white column of 800
communion wafers. The objects metonymically allude to religion, commerce and
human loss, and together stage a critical commentary on the practices of the
church in an oblique and poetic fashion. 58
An important aspect of Meireles's installations is the fact that they can be
reconstructed; unlike many of his contemporaries, Meireles does not tie his
work to a specific site, seeking instead to work against the aura of the unique
work of art. This is in sharp contrast to Ann Hamilton, who does not restage her
installations. This is not just because each one requires an immense amount
of collective labour in order to be realised, but also because they are integrally
related to the specific history of the site in their structure and choice of materials.
For the installation indigo blue 199 I, for example, she placed 14,000 pounds of
recycled work clothing in a former garage in Charleston. Like Meireles, Hamilton
harnesses perceptions other than the visual to immerse the viewer, often
demoting the optical in order to foreground more intuitive senses like smell,
sound and touch: in between taxonomy and communion 199 I, the floor was laid
with sheep fleeces covered by panes of glass that cracked under the weight
of the viewer's body. In tropos 1993, the Dia Center in New York was carpeted
with the tails of slaughtered horses, forming an excessive turf of slippery, tangled,
pungent hair.
Hamilton's use of sensory perception differs from that ofMeireles in that she
aims to reawaken our sensory relationship to the organic physical world through
memory and unconscious association. Sensory perception is always placed in
the service of emotional triggers to prompt what Hamilton calls a 'state of
suspended reverie'.59 The inability oflanguage to describe and contain somatic
experience is one of her enduring interests, and the erasure oflanguage has
Cildo Meireles
become a recurrent motif in her work. 60 As such, her materials do not operate
Missao/Miss6es
(How to Build symbolically (as metonymic references to nature, science, the animal kingdom,
Cathedrals) 1987 and so on), but seek to prompt in the viewer an individual chain of associational

38 39
 responses. As part of privation and excesses 1989, a performer continually dipped
his hands into a felt hat filled with honey. While Beuys used both felt and honey
as objects of deep personal resonance (he saw the honeycomb as a symbol of
warmth and survival and regarded felt as a substance with life-saving properties),
Hamilton's emphasis is on the very stickiness of sweet honey adhering to the
skin, and the associations of its pungent scent. By presenting these materials
in specific quantities, Hamilton seeks to produce an immersive and unconfin~d
state of mind in the viewer, one in which the heightened self-awareness of
phenomenological perception is overtaken by personal associations.

Studio/installation/house
All of the work mentioned above involves an emphasis on 'real' materials rather
than their depiction or illustration. The associational value of found materials-
which had been used in the 1960S and 1970S to connote 'everyday life' (Kaprow),
'low culture' (Oldenburg), or 'nature' (Thek) - were by the I 980s harnessed
for their sensuous immediacy, but as a way in which to subvert our ingrained
responses to the dominant repertoire of cultural meanings. This strategy remains
the prevailing mode of articulating ideas in contemporary installation art,
but its origins go back to the 1920S and 1930S - not just to Surrealist exhibition
installation, but to the Merzbau, an environmental work developed by Kurt
Schwitters (1887-1948) in his home in Hannover. Extending from the studio
to embrace adjacent rooms, the found materials in the Merzbau included
newspapers, driftwood, old furniture, broken wheels, tyres, dead flowers,
mirrors and wire netting. As Hans Richter recalled, Schwitters also included
metonymic tokens of his friends:
there was the Mondrian grotto, the Arp, Gabo, Doesburg, Lissitzky, Malevich, Mies
van der Rohe and Richter grottoes. A grotto contained very intimate details of
each friendship between them. For example, he had cut a lock of my hair for my grotto.
A big pencil from the drawing table of Mies van der Rohe was in the area reserved
for him. In others, you would find a shoelace, a cigarette butt, a nail clipping, the end
of a tie (Doesburg's), a broken pen. 6 '
These objects were combined into assemblages, ex voto shrines and walk-in
'grottoes', while the whole sprawling work was permeated by the stench of
boiling glue, found rubbish and pet guinea pigs. 6'
The Merzbau is now regularly cited as a precursor of installation art, and has
an extensive surrounding literature that does not need to be revisited here. It will
suffice simply to mention two accounts of viewing the work, which focus on
the somewhat testing ordeal ofSchwitters's guided tours around it and reveal the
symbolic status of the materials he assemblaged. Nina Kandinsky recalled that
Kurt Schwitters 'he always had an anecdote, a story or a personal experience to hand, to illustrate
Merzbau
5 Waldhausenstrasse
the tiniest incidental [object] that he was preserving in the niches of the column'.6 3
Hannover, c.1932 Vordemberge-Gildewart recalled that a 'guided visit around this giant work,

40 41
 Christian Boltanski
Reserve 1990-
Collection: Centre
Georges Pompidou,
Paris

commented on and illuminated by Schwitters himself, lasted more than four

hours. It wasn't an easy experience.'6 4 Schwitters used the word 'Merz' to denote
a technique of assemblage - 'the combination of all conceivable materials for
artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the
individual materials' - but despite this technical equality, it is clear that in
practice the artist was drawn to objects of a specific, highly personal provenance. 6S
This reading of the Merzhau as a palimpsest of metonymic objects will have
many resonances for people familiar with recent installation art. The use of old
clothing, draped across walls or strewn over the floor, in the work of French artist
Christian Boltanski (b.I944) is an obvious example (such as Reserve I990-),
as is the use of old shoes in installations by innumerable artists. However, it is
Schwitters's conversion of his studio to an installation that has become a more
poignant point of reference for recent work. In I 97 I, Daniel Buren argued that
artists should abandon their studios and operate site-specifically, so that the
production of a work of art was not divorced from its place of reception. 66 Buren's
agenda was explicitly political: he objected to art's commodity status within the
market system. But his alternative - the belief that there is only one correct way
to see art (that is, in the place where it was made) - nevertheless still subscribes
to a doctrine of authenticity that the market reinforces (for example, in its
valuation of the artist's signature). Although many artists today work with
installation, and often site-specifically, Buren's anticipated liberation of art from
the market has failed to come about. Works of installation are certainly harder
to sell than paintings or sculptures, but they are nevertheless bought, sold
and collected by both institutions and private individuals worldwide. One
\ contemporary artist whose work reflects the complexity of this situation today
is the German artist Gregor Schneider (b. I969). As with Schwitters, his home
is the site of an ongoing work of art, but the rooms are replicable elsewhere,
in galleries, museums and private collections.
Das Totes Haus Uris Schneider's home in Rheydt, which originally belonged
to his family but that has been subject to an ongoing internal revision by the artist
since I 984. Purged of natural light and colour - almost every surface is bleached
a dusty sterile white and reeks of stale disuse - the rooms of the house are
obsessively lined and re-lined. One room has up to eight windows placed in front
of each other; some are artificially lit to give the impression of opening on to
the exterior; the final room has a window that opens onto a solid white wall
(,That makes most people scared: says Schneider, 'and they want to get OUt').6 7
The Kaffeezimmerrotates imperceptibly on an axis, so that people are unnerved
Gregor Schneider
to find that the door through which they exit the room does not lead back to Das Totes Haus Ur
the place where they entered. Schneider receives visitors, but the guest room (views of the stairway
is total i,soliertes- spartan, soundproofed and windowless. and The Totally Isolated
Guestroom)
When invited to exhibit elsewhere, Schneider rebuilds the rooms of his house 12 Unterheydener
in the museum or gallery; he refers to these as its dead limbs and this has led to the Strasse, Rheydt, 1984-

42 43
naming of the work as The Dead House Ur. These replica rooms are reconstructed ships built by a community of shipwrecked castaways on Bermuda to take them to
from memory and are not always identical to the 'originals' in Rheydt - which Virginia. The installation's sixteen rooms refer to utopian communities,
are themselves subject to ongoing revision. For the German pavilion at the 2001 colonisation and the origins of capitalism; this theme is reinforced by allusions to
Venice Biennale, Schneider reconstructed the entire Dead House as a labyrinthine William Burroughs'S novel Cities of the Red Night(1981), Hakim Bey's T.A.z.: t~e
structure spanning four floors. Visitors had to sign a declaration of personal temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism (1991), and The Many-
liability before entering, an act that charged the viewing experience with the Headed Hydra (2000), a history of eighteenth-century trading by Marcus Rediker
chilling possibility that one could indeed become trapped inside its and Peter Linebaugh, all of which Nelson relates to Venice's past (as the nexus of
claustrophobic interior. East-West trade routes) and its tourist industry present.
In Rheydt, Schneider has made one small room that is completely insulated: Nelson's first major work of this kind, The Coral Reef2000, at Matt's Gallery in
London, is a complex installation that is worth describing in some detail. Passing
If you had gone into the room the door would have swung shut. There was no way of
through a shabby gallery entrance, the viewer first encountered an Islamic mini-
opening it either from inside or from outside. I was interested in notions of immediacy.
cab office, then went on to access a network of corridors, doors and rooms. These
In that room you would no longer have been sensually perceptible. You would have
been gone.
included a biker's garage, a spartan chamber bearing a notice of evangelical
meetings, a virulent blue room containing heroin paraphernalia, a security
Schneider's understanding of the word 'immediacy' here does not strike us as surveillance office with pornographic magazines, a bar strewn with equipment for
something that can be compared to Kaprow's search for life-affirming experience. a bank raid, and a small room containing a sleeping bag and some extinguished
Nor is it a phenomenological, heightened perception of space. Like the Surrealist candles. The spaces were not labelled, and therefore required a degree of detective
model of the 'encounter' that overshadows this chapter, it is a highly charged work in order to fathom who and what was being referenced. The individual rooms
psychological experience inflected by unconscious affect. The Dead House Uris an had an extraordinary psychological potency, but so did the experience of linking
uneasy, uncanny space, not just because it demands our willing submission to its them all together. Each room seemed to allude to a different subculture or social
interiority, but because this is itself doubled - both within the house (its interred group, and more specifically to the particular belief system for which it stood. This
rooms, rubbish-logged crawl spaces, trapdoors and blind windows) and elsewhere repertoire of belief systems seems to allude to the alternatives that forma substrata
(in its exhibited 'limbs'). (a coral reef) beneath the 'ocean surface' of global capitalism in the West.
Moreover, Nelson's underlying theme - 'the impossibility of believing in
An imaginative virus anything but wanting to believe in something ... wanting another system of
In contrast to Schneider, the British artist Mike Nelson (b.1967) has neither a government or humanity' - was repeated in the structure of the work as a whole. 68
studio nor collectors. Within the context of this chapter his work represents a As one moved through the rooms, piecing together their clues - a painting of white
return to some of the values that were originally associated with installation art horses, a mobile phone, or a newspaper cutting - the sense of 'searching' for what
when it came of age in the I 960s: its engagement with a specific site, its use of each room symbolises (and for what connects the rooms) replicated the ideological
'poor' or found materials, and its critical stance towards both museum 'search' that each room represented. At the furthest 'end' of the installation, the
institutions and the commercialisation of 'experience' in general. It is also one of first room (the mini-cab office) was doubled: many visitors assumed themselves
the most influential examples of this type of installation being produced today. to be back at the beginning, and thus experienced the most unnerving confusion
Nelson cites Kienholz and Thek as formative influences, but his work is more when they next encountered a series of rooms that bore no relation to the ones
regularly compared to that of Kabakov because it presents for the viewer a series they recalled walking through only minutes previously.69 The doubled room also
of corridors and rooms to explore, each of which appears to belong to a recently acted as a destabilising deja-vu, casting into doubt what one had seen in the rest
departed individual or group of individuals. Like Kabakov, Nelson adopts a of the installation.
narrative approach to installation, creating scenarios that are 'scripted' in advance The Coral Reeftherefore integrated our physical presence within its thematic
from a complicated web of references to film, literature, history and current narrative, carefully structuring a viewing experience that reinforced and enriched
affairs; his scope is therefore more ambitious, both intellectually and narratively, the concerns of the work. The swastika-shaped layout drew the viewer in and
than Kabakov's world of imaginary characters perpetually locked within Soviet around the space, maximising confusion; as Nelson observed, 'disorientation was
Russia of the 1960S and 1970S. The Deliverance and the Patience made for the Venice so much part of The Coral Reef-you were supposed to be lost in a lost world oflost
Biennale in 2001 takes its title from the names of two eighteenth-century galleon people'.7 In other installations - such as The Cosmic Legend ofthe Uroboros Serpent
0

44 45
 2001, or Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted 2001 - the experience of fictional
space constructed by Nelson has been so compelling that viewers questioned
whether or not they had even entered a work of art." The complex layering
of references, many of which are impossible to fathom without assistance, can
give the impression 'that somebody knows the purpose of the space, what's
happening behind the scenes and you don't'; as the artist observes, this
powerlessness offsets the psychological absorption with feelings of exclusion
and otherness, 'whether that be cultural otherness, intellectual otherness or
political otherness'."
These uncertain beginnings, middles and endings are integral to the
psychological impact of Nelson's installations, and one that he hopes stays with
the viewer long after they have left the work; as the critic Jonathan Jones noted,
entering The Coral Reefwas akin to signing a contract in which one agreed 'to have
an implant in your head ... an acceptance of an imaginative virus that you would
not be able to purge from your memory'.71 Nelson maintains that one of the
reasons for the complicated distribution of rooms in his work, and its meticulous
replication of reality, is precisely to expose the viewer to a different mode of
receptivity, one in which you could 'fall into a more relaxed state, where things
can affect you on a subliminal level' - infecting your mind to the point where
elements of the work might return, like a dream, 'at times and places that are
quite unpredictable'.74
Nelson's work is thus paradigmatic of the 'dream scene' type of installation art
that has been put forward in this chapter. Such work is characterised both by
psychological absorption and by physical immersion - the viewer does not
identify with a character depicted in a scene but is placed in the position of
protagonist. As a consequence, this form of installation art is often regarded as
being related in some way to the absorptive character of painting, reading and
cinema. These analogies are all valid, since there is a strong narrative element
to many of the installations discussed here. Yet because the installation seeks to
trigger fantasies, individual memories or cultural associations in the viewer's
mind, the symbolically charged 'dream scene' provides the richest and most
poignant model of comparison for our experience of these works. The use of
found materials, whose worn patina bears the indexical trace of previous
ownership, is prevalent in this type and acts as a further trigger for reflection
and free association. The highly subjective criticism that circles around these
often uneasy spaces, and the artists' insistence on our first-hand experience
of them, reinforces this emphasis on a psychologistic mode of interpretation.
Perhaps most importantly, the key idea that emerges in writing on this work
is that traditional single-point perspective is overturned by installation
Mike Nelson art's provision of plural and fragmented vistas: as a result, our hierarchical
The Coral Reef
Matt's Gallery, London,
and centred relation to the work of art (and to ourselves) is undermined
Jan-March 2000 and destabilised.

46 47
 HEIGHTENED PERCEPTION

'Space is not there for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it ... We reject
space as a painted coffin for our living bodies.' El Lissitzky'

Carsten Holler's Lichtwand (Light Wall) 2000 comprises an intensely bright

barrage of flashing lights whose harsh impact on the retina is almost intolerable
for more than a few minutes. Several thousand lightbulbs flash incessantly at 7.8
hz - a frequency that is synchronous to that of brain activity and thereby capable
of inducing visual hallucinations in the viewer. Entering this environment is
unbearable for some people. The bulbs generate an oppressive heat, while the
relentless lighting assaults not only the eye but also the ear, generating a sound
pulse to equal the visual overstimulus that bears down upon us. It is a work
designed to dislocate and disorient, but which also requires the presence of the
viewer in order to generate its effect: Holler (b.r 96 r) describes Lichtwand and
related pieces as 'machines or devices intended to synchronise with the visitors in
order to produce something together with them. They are not objects that can be
given a "meaning" of their own'.' The work is therefore incomplete without our
direct participation.
Holler began to produce this type of work in the mid-r990S, harnessing the
viewer's physical and mental engagement via machines and installations that
provoke alterations of consciousness and cast the stability of our everyday
perception into doubt. Pealove Room r993 is a small space in which to make love
under the influence of phenylethylanine (PEA) without touching the ground:
it comprises two sex harnesses, a mattress, a phial and syringe containing PEA,
the chemical produced by the body when in love. Flying Machine r996 invites the
viewer to be strapped into a harness and fly in circles above a room, able to control
the speed but not the direction of his or her journey. Like Holler's Slides, adult-sized
versions of the children's playground ride relocated inside a gallery, the Flying
Machine induces a sense of bodily euphoria - what the artist calls 'a mixture of bliss
and senselessness' that releases us from the gravitational certainty of daily life.
Holler has described himself as an 'orthopaedist who makes artificial limbs
for parts of your body that you don't even know you've lost'. This comment
highlights the feelings of bodily revelation and dislocation that can occur when
interacting with his work. Perception is understood to be something mutable
and slippery: not the function of a detached gaze upon the world from a centred
consciousness, but integral to the entire body and nervous system, a function
that can be wrong-footed at a moment's notice. Holler's art permits glimpses of
the world from radically different perspectives - under the influence of drugs
or a disorienting environment - and in this way aims to induce doubt about the
Carsten Holler very structure of what we take to be reality. Although at times the viewer may
Lichtwand 2000 feel like a laboratory rat in this work, Holler aims less to prescribe a particular
Collection: Museum fur
Moderne Kunst,
outcome or gather data (as in a scientific experiment) than to provide a playful
Frankfurt arena for unique perceptual discoveries.

48
Merleau-Ponty and Minimalism
The I 960s was the decade when this type of work first began to emerge. It is
indebted to Minimalist sculpture, and to its theoretical reception by artists
and critics in New York at this time, for whom the writings of French
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) were of decisive influence.
In The Phenomenology ofPerception (1945), Merleau-Ponty addressed what he
saw as a fundamental division in Western philosophy's understanding of the
human subject. He argued that subject and object are not separate entities but
are reciprocally intertwined and interdependent. One of the key claims of
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is that 'the thing is inseparable from a person
perceiving it, and can never be actually in itself because it stands at the other
end of our gaze or at the terminus of a sensory exploration which invests it
with humanity." The perceiving subject and the perceived object are therefore
considered as 'two systems ... applied upon one another, as the two halves of an
orange': The second key claim of Merleau-Ponty is that perception is not simply
a question of vision, but involves the whole body. The inter-relationship between
myself and the world is a matter of embodied perception, because what I perceive
is necessarily dependent on my being at anyone moment physically present in
a matrix of circumstances that determine how and what it is that I perceive:
'I do not see [space] according to its exterior envelope; I live it from the inside;
I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me."
Although Merleau-Ponty wrote about art on several occasions, his focus was on
painting as evidence of how the body is inscribed in its surroundings. His essays
'Cezanne's Doubt' (1945) and 'Eye and Mind' (1960) both turn to painting as
a manifestation of the way in which we relate to the world in general. By contrast,
if the artists discussed in this chapter use Merleau-Ponty's ideas, it is to illuminate
our experience of a particular type of art: installation. For these artists, painting
mediates the world, and does not allow the viewer to experience perception first
hand. This chapter therefore deals with works that drastically change the way
in which Merleau-Ponty himself exemplified his ideas with regard to artistic
production. It is telling that this shift occurs in the early I 960s, when painting
appeared to reach exhaustion. The Phenomenology ofPerception was translated into
English in 1962, and The Primacy ofPerception in 1964; both were seized upon by
artists and critics as a way in which to theorise the new aesthetic experience
offered to the viewer by Minimalist sculpture. To begin this second genealogy
of installation art, then, it is necessary to turn to Minimalism and its status as
a crux between the tradition of sculpture and installation art.
Robert Morris's plywood polyhedrons, Donald Judd's Plexiglass boxes and
Carl Andre's bricks are among the works that immediately come to mind when Robert Morris
we think of Minimalist sculpture. The inert uneventfulness of these pieces, in Installation view of
exhibition at Green
which composition and internal relationships are stripped down to the simplest
Gallery, New York,
geometrical structure, often leads people to proclaim that Minimalism is Dec1g64-Jan1g65

50 51
 inhuman, anti-expressive and therefore boring art. From photographs, one could
be forgiven for agreeing, but in the flesh our encounter with the work is quite
different. As we walk around a Minimalist sculpture, two phenomena are
prompted. Firstly, the work heightens our awareness of the relationship between
itself and the space in which it is shown - the proportions of the gallery, its height,
width, colour and light; secondly, the work throws our attention back onto our
process of perceiving it - the size and weight of our body as it circumnavigates the
sculpture. These effects arise as a direct result of the work's literalism - that is, its
literal (non-symbolicand non-expressive) use of materials - and its preference for
reduced and simple forms, both of which prevent psychological absorption and
redirect our attention to external considerations.
In his essay 'Notes on Sculpture 2' (1966), Robert Morris argues that one more
factor determines the quality of our relationship to Minimalist objects: their size.
Large works dwarf us, creating a public mode of interaction, while small works
encourage privacy and intimacy. It is significant that most Minimalist sculptures,
such as Tony Smith's 6ft cube Die 1964, fall between these two extremes and are
human in scale. The critic Michael Fried, in his well-known indictment of
Minimalist sculpture 'Art and Objecthood' (1967), argued that itwas precisely
this scale that gave such works 'a kind of stage presence', not unlike 'the silent
presence of another person'. As such, Minimalist objects are inescapably
'in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder'.6

Theatrica Iity
Minimalism's call to the beholder threatened two of the paradigms that Fried,
like many critics at that time, held dear: firstly, the autonomy of the art object
(in other words, its self-sufficiency and independence from context) and secondly,
the purity of each artistic medium. Fried argued that because Minimalist art
shared its space and time with that of viewers (rather than transporting them
to another 'world'), it was more akin to theatre than to sculpture. His argument
hinges on the idea of temporality: rather than existing in a transcendent time
and place (signalled by a plinth or frame), Minimalist sculpture responds to its
environment. The experience of viewing it is therefore marked by 'duration'
(like theatre), because it directly solicits the viewer's presence, unlike the
transcendent 'instantaneousness' that Fried felt to be proper to the condition
of beholding visual art. He used the term 'theatricality' to denote such unwanted
cross-pollination between artistic disciplines.'
Minimalism was immensely controversial at the time of its appearance, and
debate around it continued to rage throughout the 1960S. Merleau-Ponty was
Robert Morris often invoked by Minimalism's supporters to explain the work's effect: Judd's
Untitled (L-Beams) 1965 sculptures, wrote Rosalind Krauss in 1966, were 'obviously meant as objects of
Collection: Whitney
perception, objects that are to be grasped in the experience oflooking at them'.8
Museum of American
Art, New York Later, in Passages in Modem Sculpture (1977) she argued that Robert Morris's

52 53
Untitled (L-Beams) I965 demonstrated how perceptual experience precedes room becomes of such importance does not mean that an environmental
cognition: these three identical forms could each appear quite different, situation is being established,' wrote Morris. He immediately followed this
depending on the position of the work and of the viewer. Her argument is statement, however, with the apparently contradictory view that 'the total space
explicitly indebted to Merleau-Ponty: each L-beam takes on a different character is hopefully altered in certain desired ways by the presence of the object'. u .
according to the angle from which it is seen and a host of contingent factors such Morris was not alone in expressing such reservations. Judd felt that the word
as the level of sunlight, the depth of shadows, and the varying intensities of colour 'environment' should denote one unified work, and concluded his review of
even within the most neutral shade of grey. As Krauss explains: Morris's 1965 Green Gallery show in characteristically prosaic fashion: the fact
that the exhibition comprised several sculptures did not mean that it was an
no matter how clearly we might understand that the three Ls are identical (in structure and
environment, because 'there are seven separate pieces. If Morris made an
dimension), it is impossible to see them as the same ... the 'fact' of the objects' similarity ,
belongs to a logic that exists prior to experience; because the moment of experience, or in I
environment it would certainly be one thing.''' It would seem that for these
experience, the Ls defeat the logic and are 'different'.9 artists, the word 'environment' evoked the assemblage-based works of Oldenburg
and Kaprow, and the tableaux of Kienholz and Segal- art characterised by
By alluding to Merleau-Ponty, Krauss demonstrated that she understood a symbolic and psychologistic mise-en-scene. Such pieces adopted precisely those
Minimalism to have radical implications for the way in which art had hitherto aspects of the Abstract Expressionist legacy that Minimalism sought to eliminate:
been understood. By relocating the origin of an artwork's meaning away from the the narrative, the emotive, the organic. Indeed, anything remotely connected
interior (the colour and composition as a metaphor for the artist's psyche - as in to the psychodramatic tendencies of the Happenings stood for the precise
Abstract Expressionist painting), Minimalism proposed that art was no longer opposite of the Minimalists' literal 'what you see is what you see' aesthetic.'l
modelled 'on the privacy of psychological space'; instead, Krauss argued, it was Even so, critics were on the whole adamant that Minimalist exhibition
structured 'on the public, conventional nature of what might be called cultural installations forged a heightened awareness of space that was undeniably
space'. By stressing the interdependence of work of art and viewer, Krauss showed environmental. Reviewing Frank Stella's 1964 Castelli show alongside Judd's
that Minimalist work pointed towards a new model of the subject as 'decentred'. Green Gallery exhibition of the same year, Lucy Lippard noted how both bodies
As argued in the previous chapter, installation art's claim to destabilise the of work had affected their surroundings to such an extent that they had to be
viewer is a recurrent theme from the 1970S onwards, and the idea also underpins called environments:
Krauss's appreciation of Minimalism's importance. Intriguingly, it was not
There is a growing tendency, even in straight painting exhibitions, to surround the
a Minimalist sculpture but Michael Heizer's epic earthwork Double Negative 1969
spectator, whose increased physical participation, or immediate sensorial reactions to the
that she considered best exemplified this decentring tendency. Visitors to Double work of art, often operate at the expense of the more profound emotional involvements
Negative- 240,000 tons of earth displaced from either side of a desert mesa in demanded by the New York school painting in the 50S ... Don Judd was probably not
Nevada - could only ever have a partial view of this work because it existed in planning an environment, yet his exhibition casts a definite collective spell which to
two halves, separated by a ravine. Krauss saw Double Negative'S elimination of some extent overshadows the individual pieces.'4
a single viewing position as 'a metaphor for the self as it is known through its
appearance to the other'. Her argument reflects the way in which Merleau-Ponty's As Lippard rightly notes, contemporary painting was also beginning to establish
ideas about the interdependency of subject and object came increasingly to relationships with its place of exhibition: the bold, unmodulated colours of Frank
acquire an ethical and political tenor in the years following 1968: the multi- Stella's hexagonal canvases at Castelli inevitably led the viewer to register the
perspectivalism implicit in installation art comes to be equated with an negative spaces between the paintings. The previously neutral background wall
emancipatory liberal politics and an opposition to the 'psychological rigidity' was activated, and the gallery walls gave the impression of a coherent, quasi-
of seeing things from one fixed point of view. w muralistic, whole. The syntax of these works became as important as the
individual paintings, whose domain now seeped out to embrace the whole room.
The Minimalist environment To reflect this, 'installation shots' documenting an exhibition began to be
Significantly, the artists associated with Minimalism did not consider their reproduced in magazines, implying that the sum of the works in situ was more
work to be installation art - or, as it would have been called at the time, an important than any single image of one object in the show. Such photographs
'environment'. They acknowledged that the placement of the work in a gallery recorded the negative space between individual works and the interplay amongst
was important, but protested against the use of this term: 'That the space of the them, together with a host of contingent factors like the proportions of the room

54 55
and the quality oflight. The aesthetics of an exhibition's 'installation' and 'hang' The installations of Robert Irwin (b.1928) are paradigmatic of this
were increasingly commented upon by critics, directly testifying to the way dematerialised response to phenomenological perception. They are governed
in which the new work shifted the viewer's attention away from the objects by the idea of response to a site: what he calls site-determined, as opposed to site-
(be these paintings or sculptures) and onto their overall relationship to each dominant (work made in the studio without considering its destination), site-
other and to the space. In this respect, Robert Morris's 1964 exhibition at the adjusted (work commissioned for a particular situation but relocatable) or site-
Green Gallery, New York, is paradigmatic: the simple, block-like sculptures specific (work that responds directly to a specific venue and which cannot be
articulate and activate the room, creating an impression of a unified whole. relocated). ,6 Irwin's faith in the primacy of perceptual experience is evidenced
As a result the word 'installation', with its neutral overtones of the exhibition whenever he discusses his installations made with 'scrims' of muslin that filter
hang, increasingly gained currency as the 1960s progressed. and reflect the light. He recalled standing in his 1970 project at New York MoMA,
Yet, however panoramic, installation shots could not convey the viewer's Fractured Light - Partial Scrim - Ceiling - Eye- Level Wire, when a fifteen-year-old
experience of heightened bodily awareness when moving around the works. boy entered the work, said 'wow' and 'spun around, sort of walked around in
Morris was among the first to emphasise the importance of the viewer in a revolving circle, turning as he went, just sort of really reaching and responding
understanding what was radically new about Minimalism: to it'. '7 Such a spontaneous response was, for Irwin, evidence of the primacy of
The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them afunction ofspace, embodied perception over intellection. As such, he considered his work to be
light, and the viewer'sfield ofvision. The object is but one ofthe terms in the newer aesthetic. It is in democratically available to everyone. Describing Black Line Volume 1975, a single
some way more reflexive, because one's awareness of oneself existing in the same space as line of black tape installed on the gallery floor of the Museum of Contemporary
the work is stronger than in previous work, with its many internal relationships. One is Art, Chicago, Irwin noted that four people who worked at the gallery asked
more aware than before that he himselfis establishing relationships as he apprehends the object whether he had built the structural pillar in the centre of this space. He regarded
from various positions and under varying conditions oflight and spatial context.'5 this as a great triumph since it indicated to what extent 'they were seeing this
The viewer was now considered to be as essential to the work as the room in room for the first time'. ,8
which it was installed, and the next generation of artists, on the West coast of the For Irwin, such experiences demonstrated that interpretative criticism -like
US, took up this challenge directly. photographic documentation - was of limited value in relation to his work.
Indeed, all mediation or explanation was doomed to failure: 'The idea of
midwifing experience is absurd for this reason: the relationship between art and
Light and Space viewer is all first hand now experience, and there is no way that it can be carried to
The West coast response to Minimalism focused less on the critical debates you through any kind of secondary system."9 To an extent this is true, at least as
around objecthood than on the ephemeral character of the viewer's sensory borne out in the writing on Irwin's practice, in which critics find little to observe
experience. In many cases, this experience was staged within finely tuned spaces beyond the fact that the work makes you 'perceive yourself perceiving'.
voided of all material objects - as seen in the work of Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Irwin regards installation art as a way to 'free' the viewer's perceptual
Doug Wheeler, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Larry Bell and Michael Asher. experience and allow the act of seeing itself to be felt. As might be anticipated,
The phrase 'light and space' was coined to characterise the predilection of these his writings make extensive reference to Merleau-Ponty, whose texts he studied
artists for empty interiors in which the viewer's perception of contingent sensory throughout the 1970S. He considered the viewer's heightened consciousness
phenomena (sunlight, sound, temperature) became the content of the work. and inclusion in the work to represent an ethical position ('by your individual
In photographic documentation, many of these works look disarmingly similar. participation in these situations, you may ... structure for yourself a "new state of
From Bruce Nauman's Acoustic Wall 1971, to the MOMA installations by Michael real", but it is you that does it, not me, and the individual responsibility to reason
Asher (Untitled 1969) and Robert Irwin (Fractured Light - Partial Scrim - Ceiling- your own world view is the root implication').'o However, this 'responsibility'
Eye- Level Wire 1970-I), there is a tendency for each installation to resemble little was far from the targeted political 'consciousness raising' of his contemporaries.
more than a bleak, white, eventless space. To a degree this photographic similarity Indeed, Irwin's ultimate aim seems to have been simply to open the visitor's
is unproblematic, since such installations intended to resist mediation and eyes to the aesthetic potential of the everyday world as it already existed: 'if you
instead be experienced directly. Nevertheless, closer investigation of these works, asked me the sum total- what is your ambition? ... Basically it's just to make you
and of the divergent criticism they attract, allows us to identify important a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is ...
differences between them. The whole game is about attending and reasoning.''' For Irwin, perceptual

56 57
 experience is unquestionable and absolute. The authenticity of our perception
is what matters, and it is never considered that this experience might be socially
and culturally predetermined. As such, his aestheticising approach could
not be further removed from the rigorous interrogation of perception that .
was being undertaken at this time by several of his contemporaries, including
Michael Asher (b.1943).
Asher's approach to installation art since the late 1960s has been allied to
a critique of the political and economic role of exhibition venues. He is probably
best known for his installation at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979, in which he
removed a late eighteenth-century statue of George Washington by Jean-Antoine
Houdon from the exterior of the building and replaced it in one of the museum's
galleries of eighteenth-century art. Resituating the monument amongst other art
of its period had the effect of immediately diminishing the political and historical
rhetoric with which it was imbued when adorning the exterior of the Institute;
Asher's gesture implied that art history could act as a neutralising cover for
politics and ideology. The relocation of the statue demonstrated how objects are
dependent on their context for meaning. Like Morris's three L-beams, Houdon's
George Washington was perceived as different depending on where one stood in
relation to it - but there was an important difference: in Asher's intervention the
shift showed not merely the contingency of our perception, but also how objects
acquire different meanings according to their context and the different discourses
inhabiting them. Yet Asher's installations from the ten years preceding this
work are - in the photo-documentation at least - almost indistinguishable from
Irwin's: both artists present empty, white, uninhabited, apparently neutral
architectural spaces.
In critical writing on Asher's earliest installations, perceptual phenomenology
is down-played in favour of a more political enquiry into the work of art's
ideological preconditions. But in his first appearance in a major exhibition, the
Whitney Museum's Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials 1969, Asher produced
work no more explicitly critical of the museum institution than most other
dematerialised art of this time. His contribution to this exhibition - a 'sculpture'
taking the form of a column of pressurised air - used one of the museum's existing
passageways, eight feet in width, through which a planar body of air was siphoned.
With low noise levels, minimum airstream velocity and a marginal location
away from the main galleries, the work was imperceptible to the eye. Asher later
rationalised the piece in terms of integrating peripheral phenomena into the
institutional mainstream: 'In this work I was d~aling with air as an elementary
material of unlimited presence and availability, as opposed to visually determined
Robert Irwin eleme·nts. I intervened therefore to structure this material, given in the exhibition
Black Line Volume container itself, and to reintegrate it into the exhibition area.''' This uneasy use
Museum of of phenomenological means for conceptual ends hints at some of the problems
Contemporary Art,
Chicago, 1975 to be encountered by 1970S artists dealing with the legacy of Minimalism.

58 59
 A similar confrontation between sensory immediacy and institutional critique
is seen in Asher's 1970 installation at Pomona College, California. The photo-
documentation of this work is once more deceptively similar to Irwin's
installations in consisting oflittle but a series of empty, white, well-proportioned
architectonic spaces. Asher removed the front door to make the entrance area
a perfect cube, open day and night. He then split the gallery into two triangular
spaces, linked by a short corridor, and lowered the ceiling to provide a uniform
height throughout. The installation therefore comprised a series of clean and
immaculately sealed spaces, while the drywall panels and sandbags of their
construction could be seen from the gallery offices, entered by the public from
a courtyard behind the gallery during working hours. Like Minimalist sculpture,
Asher's installation focused attention on the viewer, and on how we receive and
perceive any given space. Unlike Minimalism, it also showed how the white
gallery space was not a timeless constant but subject to contingent flux: the
installation was accessible day and night, so that 'exterior light, sound, and air
became a permanent part of the exhibition'. '3 In Asher's description of the
work, he becomes more critical as he proceeds: because the work was open to
a multiplicity of viewing conditions, it was seen to undermine both the 'false
neutrality of the [art] object' and its dependency on 'the false neutrality of the
[architectural] container'.'4
Later, Asher was at pains to distance these installations from
'phenomenologically determined works which attempted to fabricate a highly
controlled area of visual perception', yet this was precisely how Asher's work
was received when first exhibited.'5 Like the work ofIrwin, Nordman, Bell and
others, Asher's installations offered situations for the viewer to meditate on the
contingent and contextual nature of their sensory perception in relation to their
surroundings. His association of the phenomenological with the purely visual
(rather than the embodied) is revealing: Merleau-Ponty's complex account of
perception is reduced to opticality, and the politics of his phenomenology
are ignored. Instead, Asher regards perception as a de-intellectualised sensory
indulgence - in opposition to Merleau-Ponty, for whom it is precisely 'the
moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us', summoning us
'to the tasks of knowledge and action'.'6

Vivlmcias
The reception of Merleau-Ponty in the US is markedly different from its
application in Brazil, where phenomenology was introduced into the artistic
context in the late 1940S by the art critic Mario Pedrosa. Pedrosa - along with the Michael Asher
poet and theorist Ferreira Gullar - was a decisive influence on Concretism (the Untitled installation
view from exterior,
first wave of Brazilian abstract art) in the 19 50S. The second wave of abstract art, Gladys K. Montgomery Art
Neo-Concretism, reacted to this Constructivist-inspired work by manipulating Center at Pomona College,
its abstract geometrical forms into environmental situations that surround and California, Feb-March 1970

60 61
 ,
. I

directly engage the viewer. Lygia Clark (1920-88) produced multi-panel objects
to be manipulated by the spectator; by the mid-1960s these took the form of
softer, more malleable toys to prompt heightened sensory perception as a direct
stirn ul us for psychological exploration. The work of Helio Oiticica (1937-80) was
more social and political in inclination, engaging with the architecture of the
favelas(slums) and the communities that lived there. Oiticica's writings about
viewer perception, interactivity, and lived experience (vivencias) are therefore
a crucial reference point not only for this chapter but for the history of
installation art as a whole.
By the mid-1960s, Oiticica had developed a series of objects that were to form
the building blocks of his later environments, the most important of which were
the Penetrables. Initially produced in maquette form, the Penetrables used panels
of colour to create temporary-looking architectural structures. The viewer was
required to 'penetrate' the work physically, and it is telling that Oiticica's
description of this anticipates the multi-perspectival theme reiterated by Western
installation artists in the following decade: 'the structure of the work is only
perceived after the complete moving disclosure of all its parts, hidden one from .
the other, it is impossible to see them all simultaneously'." Tropiccflia I967 was the
first of these environments to be realised, and took the form of a closed labyrinth.
It comprised a wooden structure curtained with cheap patterned materials, set
amongst a 'tropical' scenario with plants, parrots and sand. Entering the structure,
viewers walked over a sequence of different materials (loose sand, pebbles, carpet)
and could play with different toys and tactile objects before arriving at the
innermost space, which was dark and contained a television. For Oiticica, the
underlying meaning of the work was not the 'tropicalist' imagery but the viewer's
'process of penetrating it'. ,8 He compared the sensory experience of entering
Tropicalia to walking over the Rio hills and to the architecture of the slums, whose
improvisational dwellings strongly appealed to him as formal influences, as did
makeshift structures on construction sites and popular decorations in religious
and carnival feasts.
Underpinning all of Oiticica's tactile and sensory environments was the desire
to exceed the 'passive' experience of viewing two-dimensional works of art.
Spectator participation, Oiticica wrote in I967, was 'from the beginning opposed
to pure transcendental contemplation'.'9 Unlike Europe and the US, where single-
point perspective came to be regarded as analogous to an ideology of mastery
(be this colonialist, patriarchal, or economic), the Brazilian emphasis on activated
spectatorship was a question of existential urgency. A military dictatorship
seized control of the country in 1964, and from 1968 onwards the government
suspended constitutional rights, practised kidnapping and torture, and effected
Helio Oiticica a brutal censorship of free expression. It is impossible to regard the drive towards
TropicfJiia
interactivity and sensuous bodily perception in Brazilian art during the I960s
Museu de Arte Moderna,
Rio de Janeiro, 1967 as other than a political and ethical exigency in the face of state repression.

62 63

1
The sensory fullness of vivencia (total life-experience) in Oiticica's installations
therefore came to focus on an idea of individual emancipation from oppressive
governmental and authoritative forces. lo Oiticica developed the term 'Supra-
sensorial' to account for the emancipatory potential of this work which, it was
hoped, could 'release the individual from his oppressive conditioning' since
it was irreducible to consumer product or confinable by state forces:
This entire experience into which art flows, the issue ofliberty itself, of the expansion of
the individual's consciousness ... immediately provokes reactions from conformists of all
kinds, since it (the experience) represents the liberation from those prejudices of social
conditioning to which the individual is subject. The stance, then, is revolutionary.3'

Oiticica argued that he could not have come to this new understanding of the
relationship between work of art and audience without the development of
the Parangoles(1964 onwards), capes and tents to be worn and (ideally) danced
in, which he developed in collaboration with the Mangueira samba school.
His experience of the samba, and of the Dionysian fusion of individual and
environment that it provoked, was for him revelatory in rethinking the viewer's
position within a 'cycle of participation', both a 'watcher' and 'wearer': 'My entire
evolution, leading up to the formulation of the Parangole, aims at this magical
incorporation of the elements of the work as such, in the whole life-experience of
the spectator, whom I now call "participator".'l' Like the Penetrables, the Parangoles
were regarded as open-ended objects that did not enforce a particular reading
or response, and as situations that permitted the participant to realise their
own creative potential through a direct engagement with the world. That this
engagement was effected through the intensity of sensory perception - to the
point of hallucination - was of the highest importance.
Political censorship in Brazil increased after 1968 and resulted in an artistic
diaspora: Lygia Clark relocated to Paris, while Oiticica moved to New York in 1970.
Cildo Meireles likewise moved to New York at this time in order to avoid the
cultural marginalisation that was taking place in Brazil. His work, as we have
seen in Chapter One, is strongly marked by phenomenological interests, but its
sensory impact always aspires to a more symbolic level (as in the use of the colour
red in Red Shift or the smell of natural gas in Volatile). Merleau-Ponty's principle
of embodied perception continues to be a prominent feature of contemporary
Brazilian installation art: Ernesto Neto's engorged membranes of translucent
fabric, held taut by bundles of aromatic spices, invite the viewer to relax inside
their curved and sensuous forms, while Ana Maria Tavares employs urban
architectural materials such as steel, glass and mirrors to create complex
walkways. In Labirinto 2002, Tavares cut through several floors of a former textile
Ernesto Neto
factory in Sao Paulo to create a Piranesian series of spiral staircases and paths Walking in Venus Blue
that offered the viewer different means of navigating the space, and radical Cave
new perspectives onto it. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,
New York, 2001

64 65
Live installation
The approach to embodied perception by Brazilian artists is noticeably more
sensuous than in the West, where it was used more strategically, and often to
highly conceptual ends. By the 1970S in New York, Minimalist sculpture was the
subject of extensive critique by the subsequent generation of artists, particularly
those associated with performance art. The work of Vito Acconci (b.1940) is
typical of the convergence of installation, performance and Conceptual art: from
making performances staged outside the gallery (and shown as documentation),
he moved to performing inside the gallery space, and then abandoning
performance altogether in favour of showing residual props in installations
where viewers are expected to perform for themselves. In this last move, the I
activated role of the viewer was seen as explicitly political in motivation:
encouraging the viewer to interact with the installation was hoped to raise
consciousness directly, and to produce an active relationship to society at
large. As Acconci later said, 'I never wanted to be political; I wanted the work
to be politics.'ll
Acconci acknowledged that his early work 'came out of a context of feminism,
and depended on that context', but it was equally an engagement with
Minimalism, which was by 1970 the art norm. He recognised that Minimalism
had initiated an important shift in the viewer's perception of gallery space:
'For the first time, I was forced to recognise an entire space, and the people in it ...
Until Minimalism, I had been taught, or I taught myself, to look only within
a frame; with Minimalism the frame broke, or at least stretched.'34
In his now legendary Seedbed 1972, Acconci presented an installation of clearly
Minimalist lineage that was used as a masking device to conceal his body and
to shift the focus onto the viewer. He performed Seedbed three times a week, for
a duration ofthree weeks, in January 1972. The gallery was empty but for a ramp
of raised floorboards at one end of the room, culminating on either side with
a loudspeaker. Beneath the ramp Acconci lay masturbating, his amplified gravelly
Brooklyn accent dominating the room and responding verbally and physically
to the visitor's presence above. The self-consciousness that Fried found to be
uncomfortably 'theatrical' in Minimalist sculpture became, in Seedbed, acutely
intimate: every audible physical movement on the visitor's part triggered a flood
of ambiguous verbal fantasy from the artist.l s The visitor was implicated in
the installation-performance, and this complicity was soldered by Acconci's
suggestion that without the viewer, he would be unable to 'perform' successfully.
It hardly needs saying that this eroticisation of phenomenological perception
wrought a significant twist in the received understanding of these ideas. The
viewer's experience of Seedbed could not be more different from the emotionally
detached, self-reflexive stroll taken around the work of Morris or Judd. Vito Acconci
Seedbed
Seedbed therefore seemed to be a critique of Minimalism, and of its viewing Sonnabend Gallery,
subject: although Minimalist sculpture fore grounded the viewer's perception New York, Jan 1972

66 67
 Vito Acconci
Sketch for Command
Performance
at 112 Greene Street,
New York, Jan 1974

as em10died, this body was not gendered or sexual. Seedbed brought the visceral time of gender other than male, race other than white, culture other than
corporeality and sensationalism of the more explicit performance art by women Western.'4' As the 1970S progressed, phenomenology came under attack for
(such as Shigeko Kubota's Vagina Painting 1965, or Carolee Schneemann's assuming the subject to be gender-neutral and therefore implicitly male.
Meat Joy 1966-7) into a literalist and anti-expressive Minimalist installation. Feminists and left-WIng theorists argued that the perceiving body was never- an
When Acconci compared himself to 'a worm under the floor' he hinted at the abstract entity but a nexus of social and cultural determinations. This type of
repressive clinicality of both Minimalism (with its emphasis on de-eroticised thinking sought to 'decentre' further what was already (in Merleau-Ponty)
'pure' perception) and the 'white cube' gallery space, in which baser actions, a project of destabilising subjectivity. These arguments will be revisited at the
emotions and excretions had no place. '6 end of this chapter. What follows next is a focus on the work of Bruce Nauman
By the mid-to-Iate 1970s, Acconci turned to making installations in which the (b.1941) whose installations of the 1970S did not directly engage with such
audience was invited to 'act' and assume for themselves the role of performer. identity politics but instead proposed a type of 'difference' more akin to Merleau-
In his notes for Command Performance 1974, this summoning of the audience was Ponty: one in which perception itself is shown to be internally fractured and split.
explicit: 'to leave viewers room to move, on their own, the agent has to get out of Nauman's influential output suggests that the body, rather than being a unified
the space (since, as long as he/she is there as "artist", other people can be there repository of sensory perceptions, is in fact in conflict with itself.
only as "viewers")'.'7 Made for I I 2 Greene Street, New York, Command Performance In Nauman's soundproofed Acoustic Wall 1970, one becomes aware of the fact
comprised a chair placed at the base of one of the columns bisecting the gallery. that we perceive space with our ears as much as with our eyes: as one moves
A closed-circuit television camera was trained upon the spotlit chair, filming past the wall, auditory pressure increases and subtly affects one's balance. Green
whoever sat in it; in front of the chair was a monitor playing a tape of Acconci Light Corridor of 1970-1, by contrast, uses scale and colour to generate physical
inciting the visitor to step into the limelight and 'perform' for him/herself. The unease: the corridor is so narrow that it can only be entered sideways, while
camera linked the participants' image to a monitor positioned behind them at the oppressive green fluorescent light lingers on the retina and saturates one's
the entrance to the installation - and which they would have seen upon entering. after-vision with magenta upon leaving the space. Even with full knowledge of
Viewers became both passive observers and active participants in the piece, how these pieces work, they still prompt a certain level of anxiety: anticipation
watching Acconci on video while bringing the work to completion by sitting Vito Acconci is wrong-footed by actual experience, and we feel perpetually at odds with
in the chair and 'performing' for other visitors who enter the installation. Command Performance the situation. The introduction of closed-circuit video technology allowed
112 Greene St, New York,
For Acconci, this perceptual activation was expressly political in motivation: Nauman to develop these ideas, and to suggest that these moments ofbodily
1974
Collection: San Francisco confusion could disrupt the plenitude of self-reflexive perception proposed
much of the early work focused on instrumentality because at that time there was
Museum of Modern Art. by Minimalist art.
an illusion that the instrumentality of a person was important and it could lead to Accessions Committee
a revolution ... The viewer is sort of - you're in this position where you're pushed. You have In the late 1960s and early 1970S, instant video feedback was widely used by
Fund: gift of Mrs. Robert
been aime~ at. Now that you're aimed at, though, you can potentially do something. ,8 MacDonnell, Byron R. artists, since it allowed them to watch the monitor (as if it were a mirror) while
Meyer, Modern Art Council, simultaneously performing for the camera. In an essay published in 1976,
Norman C. Stone and
Acconci's installations of the late 1970s, such as (Where We Are Now ...) 1976, The Rosalind Krauss argued that such work was narcissistic: because video could
National Endowment
People Machine 1979, and VD Lives/TV Must Die 1978, all set up situations in which of the Arts record and transmit at the same time, it 'centred' the artist's body between the
literal 'missiles' were suspended in rubber slingshots, aimed at visitors and the parentheses of camera and monitor:' She went on to discuss works that exploit
gallery architecture: if the viewer unhooked the swing of The People Machine, 'one technical glitches and disruptions in feedback in order to criticise the medium
swing after another will swing out window, catapult will be released, ball will be of video. At the end of her essay she turned to video installation as a further
shot, flag will wave and fall into heap'.39 Perhaps unsurprisingly, this potentially example of the way in which artists might resist the easy seductions of video.
violent interaction was never actually realised. Acconci came to acknowledge She mentioned Nauman but trained the full weight of her argument on the work
that both the artist and the gallery situation would inevitably restrict what kind of Peter Campus. In his installations mem 1975 and dor1975, Campus projects
of gestures (if any) would be taken by the viewer. video feedback of the viewer onto the gallery wall from an oblique angle; rather
than presenting a mirror-like image that we can master, he allows us to see only
PheNaumanology 40 a fleeting, anamorphic glimpse of ourselves when exiting the room.
Acconci wanted to take a step back from performing 'so there could be room for Nauman's works of the early 1970S set up a similar tension between the
other selves ... Remember, this was just after the late 60S, the time - the starting viewer's anticipated and actual experience:

68 69
 They won't quite fit. That's what the piece is, that stuff that's not coming together ... My
intention would be to set up [the situation], so that it is hard to resolve, so that you're
always on the edge of one kind of way of relating to the space or another, and you're never
quite allowed to do either.'3

In Live-Taped Video Corridor 1970, two video monitors are installed at the far end of
a long thin corridor; the top monitor is linked to a camera positioned high on the
wall at the corridor's entrance; the lower monitor plays a pre-recorded tape of an
empty corridor. As you walk into the work and advance towards the monitor, the
image of your head and body (filmed from behind) becomes visible on the upper
screen. The closer you get to the monitor, the smaller your image appears on
screen, while the more you try to centre your image on screen, the further away
from the monitor you are required to stand. At no point are you allowed to feel
'centred' and in control.'4 Nauman compared the viewer's experience of these
works to the moment of 'stepping off a cliff or down into a hole':45

The feeling that I had about a lot of that work was of going up the stairs in the dark and
either having an extra stair that you didn't expect or not having one that you thought was
going to be there. That kind of misstep surprises you every time it happens. Even when
you knew how those pieces were working, as the camera was always out in front of you ...
they seemed to work every time. You couldn't avoid the sensation, which was very
curious to me.'6

Although clearly related to Minimalist sculpture in their literal use of materials,

and in foregrounding the viewer's perception in time and space, Nauman's
Corridor Installations also differ from these works. Rather than providing
a plenitudinous experience of perception, Nauman fails to reassure us that we
are a synthesised unity (and seems to relish our discomfort). The glitches and
misrecognitions that take place in these corridors suggest that there might be
a blind spot in perception that becomes apparent only when our looking is
returned to us by a camera or a mirror.. ' We can therefore observe some subtle
differences between Minimalist sculpture and the Postminimalist installations of
Nauman. Krauss argued that Minimalism decentresthe viewer, because we are no
longer afforded a single position of mastery from which to survey the art object.
However, we are only decentred in relation to the work, not in relation to our own
perceptual apparatus, whose plenitude still guarantees that we are coherent and
grounded subjects. By contrast, Nauman's installations demonstrate how easily
perception can be prised apart and might be far more fragile and contingent than
Bruce Nauman
Green Light Corridor we allow. Merleau-Ponty describes this failure of perception in The Visible and the
1970-1 Invisible: it is impossible to be both subject and object, as the point of coincidence
Collection: Solomon R. 'collapses at the moment of realisation' ..8 He describes this as a blind spot or
Guggenheim Museum,
New York, Panza
punctum caecum, evidenced when we try and feel our left hand touching our right
Collection, Gift, 1992 hand at the same time as feeling our right hand touching our left. Each limb has

71
 Dan Graham
Public Space/
Two Audiences 1976
Collection:
Van AbbeMuseum,
Eindhoven

its own tactile experience, and cannot be synthesised. Nauman's installations doing meditative spaces around the perceptive field of the single spectator ...
likewise point to the impossibility of our own organs of perception being I was more interested in what happened when spectators saw themselves looking
immanent: I fail to coincide with myself. at themselves or looking at other people.'s' Graham's installations of the 1970S
therefore insist on the socialised and public premise of phenomenological
Dan Graham perception. This interest, as already suggested, was partly informed by his reading
Merleau-Ponty discusses the blind spot in chapter four of The Visible and the of Lacan: the installations 'are always involved with the psychological aspect
Invisible, where he also introduces the idea of the 'chiasm', a crossing over between of your seeing your own gaze and other people gazing at yoU'.53 Any experience
ourselves and the world. It is well-known that Merleau-Ponty's idea of the blind of his work therefore aims to be 'a socialised experience of encountering yourself
spot derives from his reading of an essay by the French psychoanalyst Jacques among others'.54
Lacan, 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the l' (1949). In this For Graham, the experience of being among other people forms a strong
paper, Lacan argues that it is only when seeing itself in the mirror (or having its counter to the 'loss of self' that we experience in traditional works of art,
actions reflected by a parent) that the child realises that it is autonomous and specifically painting, which encourage us to escape from reality by identifying
independent entity in the world - rather than narcissistically co-extensive with the scene or objects represented: 'In this traditional, contemplative mode the
with it. Of course, for Lacan this independence is mere illusion: our sense of self observing subject not only loses awareness of his "self", but also consciousness
(the ego) is just an imaginary construct, a defence against our internal sense of of being part of a present, palpable, and specific social group, located in a specific
fragmentation. What is important in Lacan's essay is that the ego is structured as time and social reality and occurring only within the architectural frame where
an effect of an external or reciprocal gaze: the world looking back at us. Lacan's the work is presented.'55 The spartan, empty spaces of his own installations
theory came to be of great importance to a generation of film theorists and deliberately eschew the direct imagery of advertising and representational
feminists in the early I 970S who focused on the question of perception as socially painting in favour of presenting the 'neutral' frames through which we usually
predetermined, indebted to the world that pre-exists our presence in it. In the experience these objects (the white walls of a gallery, or the windows of a shop).
installations of Dan Graham (b.1942) made in the 1970S, mirrors and video In the absence of an object, picture or product to look at, our perception is
feedback are used to stage perceptual experiments for the viewer that necessarily reflected back onto ourselves. Again, this approach continues the
demonstrate how our awareness of the world is dependent on interaction with phenomenological concerns of Minimalism, but there is an important difference:
others. Graham's work is therefore a crucial consideration for this type of although Graham's materials look 'neutral', for him they are socially and
installation art, since the status of the viewer preoccupies his thinking historically referential. Mirror and glass partitions, he writes, are often 'employed
throughout this decade. 49 to control a person or a group's social reality':
Graham's installations and writing of the 1970S can be understood as attempts
Glass partitions in the customs area of many international airports are acoustically sealed,
to address what he saw to be two problems in Minimalist and Postminimalist art
insulating legal residents of the country from those passengers arrived but not 'cleared'.
of the I 960s. The first problem was that its emphasis on perceptual immediacy Another example is the use of hermetically sealed glass in the matemity ward of some
and the viewer's presence 'was detached from historical time': 'A premise of hospitals, designed to separate the observing father from his newly born child. 56
I 960S "Modernist" art was to present the present as immediacy - as pure
phenomenological consciousness without the contamination of historical Graham's writings on his installations therefore move beyond abstract theoretical
or other a priori meaning. The world could be experienced as pure presence, issues of perceptual phenomenology and Lacanian models of vision in order to
self-sufficient and without memory.'5 For Graham this was suspect because it
0
ground these theories in specific social and political situations: the shopping
paralleled consumerist amnesia: the way in which the 'just-past' commodity mall, the gallery, the office, the street, the suburban residence or urban park. 57
is repressed in favour of the new. In contrast to perception as a series of Even so, Graham's installations appear somewhat stark and literal, harnessing
disconnected presents, Graham wished to show 'the impossibility oflocating the viewer's body in a manner more conceptual than sensuous. Public Space/Two
a pure present tense'; the perceptual process, he argued, should instead be Audiences, made fortheVenice Biennale in 1976, comprises a 'white cube' gallery
understood as a continuum spanning past, present and future. 5' His second with a door at either end, bisected by a pane of sound-insulated glass. The far
criticism of I 960S art was its stress on the viewer as an isolated perceiver. He wall of the space is mirrored, while the other end is left white. Two systems of
particularly objected to the solitary and 'meditative' nature of Light and Space reflections are thus established - in the ghostly, semi-reflective glass divide, and
installation art developed on the West Coast: 'when people in California were in the mirrored wall- both of which offer the viewing subject a reflection of

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 ,

him/herself in relation to the other viewers. Graham used his allocated space in
the Italian pavilion in order to display 'the spectators, their gazes at themselves,
their gazes at other spectators gazing at them',sB One's experience of the work
is rather drab, if not pointless, without the presence of other viewers to 'activ.ate'
this network of returned glances and make one 'socially and psychologically
more self-conscious' of oneself perceiving in relation to a group.59 Other works
achieved a similar effect in a less austere fashion, using video to explore the
temporal aspects of perception that were absent in Minimalist sculpture. Present
Continuous Pastes) and Opposing Mirrors and Monitors on Time Delay, both 1974, take
the form of plain white gallery spaces in which mirrors, monitors and delayed
video feedback encourage viewers to move around and collaborate with each
other in order to activate a network of reciprocal and temporally deferred glances.
In Graham's Cinema proposal, 1981, the complex account of heightened
bodily awareness that forms such a major theoretical component of his 1970S
installations is applied onto a functional architectural structure: a cinema. In this
model, the walls are constructed from two-way mirror and glass in order to make
film-goers conscious of their bodily position and group identity. As might be
imagined, the work is an explicit response to 1970S film theory. Paraphrasing
Christian Metz's influential article 'The Imaginary Signifier' (1975), Graham
argues that cinema-goers passively identify with the film apparatus (the point of
view of the camera) and become 'semi-somnolent and semi-aware', disembodied
viewers in 'a state of omniscient voyeuristic pleasure'.6o Cinema audiences lose
consciousness of their body, because they identify with the film as if it were
a mirror: 'At the cinema, it is always the other who is on the screen; as for me,
I am there to look at him. I take no part in the perceived; on the contrary, I am
all perceiving.'6'
It is against this disembodied perception and passive identification with the
film apparatus that Graham's Cinema proposal is targeted. When the house
lights are on, the audience sees itself reflected in the mirrored walls, while also
being visible to passers-by outside; when the lights are down, the mirror becomes
glass, allowing two-way visibility between inside and outside. This, says Graham,
enables spectators both inside and outside the building to perceive more
accurately their positions in the world. Once again, implicit in his account of
this work is an idea of decentnng the viewer, and the implication that this reveals
the 'true' status of our condition as human subjects.
Graham's works of the I 980s are atypical, in that there is a sharp decline in
'phenomenological installations' during this decade. An interest in the perceiving
Dan Graham body has nevertheless returned in contemporary art via video installation.
Present Continuous Although this merits extensive discussion in its own right, it must briefly be
Pastes) 1974
Collection: Centre noted how embodied perception has become a crucial consideration for artists
Georges Pompidou, like Susan Hiller, Jane and Louise Wilson, Doug Aitken and Eija-LiisaAhtila, who
Pans
work with multi-channel video projections. Although these video installations

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 •

feature highly seductive images that appeal strongly to imaginary identification, In Your intuitive surroundings versus your surrounded intuition 2000, the effect of
our psychological absorption in the work is often undercut by a heightened a changing sky as clouds pass over the sun is recreated through electronic dimmers
physical awareness of our body and its relation to other people in the room. 6 ' on an irregular schedule - but the lights are not concealed, and the mechanism is
laid bare for us to see. Eliasson makes a point about our perception of nature today
The return of phenomenology (as something we more frequently experience through mediation than first-hand),
As mentioned above, the main reason for the demise of interest in phenomenology but the fact that such a point about mediation is made through installation art (a
after the 1970S was the rise of feminist and poststructuralist theory that showed medium that insists on immediacy) is paradoxical. This is reflected in visitors'
how the supposedly neutral body of phenomenological perception was in fact response to his work: during The Weather Project 2003, a vast installation that
subject to sexual, racial and economic differences. 6J The writings of Michel suffused the turbine hall ofTate Modern in hazy and acrid yellow light, it was
Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others placed the subject in crisis, dismantling curious to see visitors stretched out on the floor bathing beneath Eliasson's
Merleau-Ponty's assertion of the primacy of perception to reveal it as one more artificial sun.
manifestation of the humanist subject. Yet in the I 990s, the 'phenomenological' Eliasson maintains, however, that the allusions to 'nature' in his work are not
type of installation art returned as an explicit point of reference for contemporary designed to form any environmentalist critique; rather, nature comes to stand
practitioners who now seek to incorporate identity politics and 'difference' into for what is 'natural', in the broadest ideological sense of something that is taken for
the perceptual agenda; these artists address time, memory and individual history granted. Despite the sensuous and spectacular appearance of Eliasson's work, he is
in ways that are arguably truer to Merleau-Ponty's thinking than the reductive keen to assert that it is also a form of institutional critique. Significantly, this
interpretation offered by Minimalism. As Merleau-Ponty observed, the self is not critique is no longer directed at the literal physicality of the white cube or the
simply an embodied presence in the present tense, but a psychological entity authority it symbolises (Asher, Graham), but at its 'natural' presentation of objects:
that exists 'through confusion, narcissism ... a self, therefore, that is caught up
in things, that has a front and a back, a past and a future'.6 4 I think that the museum, historical or not, much too often is exactly like The Truman Show.
The spectator is tricked and neglected with regards to the museum's failure to carry out or
The installations of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b.1967) are clearly indebted
enforce its responsibility by means of the way it discloses its ideology of presentation. Or to
to the work of 'Light and Space' precursors of the late 1960s, as well as to Graham's
put it more straight: most institutions forget to let the spectators see themselves seeing. 66
perceptual experiments of the 1970S. Indeed, several of Eliassorrs works appear to
be remakes of key pieces from this decade: RoomforOne Colourand 360 degree room Providing an experience of heightened consciousness, not only of the work
for all colours, both 2002, for example, allude to Nauman's Yellow Room (Triangular) but also of our position in relation to the institution, is regarded by Eliasson as
1973 and Green Light CorridorI970-I. This return to 1970S strategies arises partly a moral and social responsibility (just as it was for his Light and Space
from Eliasson's belief that the project of dematerialisation begun during this predecessors). Unlike business, which offers experiences for profit, art institutions
decade is still urgent and necessary (since the 1980s saw only a return to objects should, he argues, 'unveil the politics of experiential conditions ... [sol they do not
inundating the art market) and partly from his conviction that chronological submit to commodifying our senses using the same manipulative techniques as
distance permits a more nuanced rereading of this work, particularly with regard elsewhere'. In Eliasson's ambitious series of installations for Kunsthaus Bregenz in
to its understanding of the viewer. Rather than presupposing a 'neutral' and 2001, The Mediated Motion, he presented a different sensorial 'landscape' or
therefore universal subject, Eliasson considers his work to be a 'self-portrait of the environment on each of the museum's four storeys: a floor of mushrooms, a watery
spectator'.6 5 His emphasis on the non-prescriptive individuality of our responses is plane covered with duckweed traversed by a wooden deck, a platform of sloping
seen in his titles, which often address the viewer directly: Your intuitive surroundings packed earth, a rope bridge hanging across a foggy room. The uneven floor of earth,
versus your surrounded intuition 2000; Your natural denudation inverted 1999; Your for example, affected the visitor's balance (rather in the style of Nauman's Acoustic
windless arrangement 1997. The 'you' implies the priority (and uniqueness) of Wa/O, and this physical destabilisation sought - by extension - to raise doubts
your individual experience - in contrast to Eliasson's precursors, for whom about the museum's authority 'naturally' encoded in this space.
a particular type of embodied viewer (and experiential response) was pre-empted. It could be argued that in such installations, Eliasson does little more than
Eliasson is best known for harnessing 'natural' materials (water, air, earth, ice, Overleaf: spectacularly alter the gallery space: the critique operates on so refined and
Olafur Eliasson
light) into spectacular but low-tech installations that deliberately reveal their metaphorical a level that its relationship to our experience of the installation is
The Mediated Motion
staging: in Beauty 1993, a perforated hose sprinkles down tiny drops, creating Kunslhaus Bregenz, hard to fathom. This dehiscence was particularly evident in The Weather Project,
a liquid curtain, while a lamp beams light onto the water to produce a rainbow. March-June 2001 where institutional analysis was confined to the catalogue: a series of interviews

76 77
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with Tate staff sought to render the museum's modus operandi more transparent. EI Lissitzky
Proun Room 1923
It is important, however, that Eliasson's call for change is not directed at external (reconstructed 1965)
considerations (such as the museum's infrastructure), but at 'the way we see Collection:
and locate ourselves in relation to that external materia'. This point underlies an Van Abbemuseum,
Eindhoven
important difference between his work and that of his I970S forbears: rather
than seeking to overturn the system by addressing its structure, Eliasson wishes
to change our perception of that system, beginning from the individual, since
'changing a basic viewpoint necessarily must mean that everything else changes
perspective accordingly'. Like many of his contemporaries (such as Carsten
Holler), Eliasson has 'a renewed belief in the potential of the subjective position'.
This marks a major shift away from the anti-humanist and 'structuralist' thinking
of previous institutional critique, such as that of Buren and Asher. By returning to
the subjective moment of perception, Eliasson aims less to activate viewers than
to produce in them a critical attitude.
Emerging here, then, is a reiteration of the concerns already unfurling in the
previous chapter: an increasing interest in directly implicating and activating
the viewer as a direct counterpoint to the pacifying effects of mass-media
entertainment, and in disorientation and decentring. Both of these point to as 'that which is not looked at through a keyhole' but which instead surrounds
an overriding insistence on the viewer's first-hand experience, since neither the viewer. Rejecting the Renaissance 'cone of perspective', which fixes the viewer
operation (activation nor decentring) can conceivably take place through in a single vantage position, Lissitzky argues that 'space does not exist for the
a mediated experience of the work in photographs, magazines, videos or slides. eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in if. 69 For Lissitzky, the wall as neutral
In this way, installation art implies that it reveals the 'true' nature of what it support should itself be mobilised as a vital component in the composition:
means to be a human in the world - as opposed to the 'false' and illusory subject 'We reject space as a painted coffin for our living bodies."o
position produced by our experience of painting, film or television. But this idea Lissitzky's equation of decorative walls and death prefigures innumerable
is not simply the preserve of post- I960s art. Although Minimalist exhibition avant-garde gestures against the sterility of white galleries. However, it is
installation is crucial to the development of installation art as a whole, important to recognise that - unlike later artists - he is not targeting the ideology
an important precursor for its literalist, non-symbolic use of materials is of institutional space; instead he is seeking a practical, utilitarian revision of
found in the writing and exhibition spaces ofEI Lissitzky (I890-I94I). conventional perspective, so that space becomes not a pictorial abstraction but a
At the I9 23 Berlin Art Exhibition, EI Lissitzky was allocated a small gallery real arena in which every subject must act. The implication is that 'keyhole' space
space to himself, but did not use it for a conventional exhibition of his drawings for the eye alone - the perspectivalism of traditional painting - is synonymous
on paper. Instead, since all six surfaces of the room - ceiling, floor and four walls- with complacent bourgeois spectatorship, in which 'real life' is observed from a
could potentially be part of the exhibition, he integrated these architectural safe, detached and disengaged distance. The axonometrical space that Lissitzky
elements into a unified display. Attaching coloured relief forms to the walls, developed in his Proun drawings was intended to supplant the structural
Lissitzky drew visitors into the space and encouraged their dynamic movement limitations of perspective, which bound the spectator to a single point of view, at
around it through a predetermined sequence of visual events. 6, The emphasis a specified distance, before a painting." Most importantly, he considered these
on movement was deliberate: pondering the nature of exhibition installation, drawings not to be 'yet another decorative patch' for the walls of a home or gallery,
Lissitzky noted that 'space has to be organised in such a way as to impel everyone but as 'diagrams for action, operational charts for a strategy to adopt in order to
automatically to perambulate in it'.68 He understood the need to keep people transform society and to go beyond the picture plane'." Exactly like subsequent
flowing around the rooms to be the practical imperative behind any given installation artists who equate activated spectatorship with social and political
exhibition. In his essay 'Proun Space', w~itten to accompany the I923 room, engagement, the Proun Space was not simply an architectural installation
Lissitzky argues - in terms that anticipate Merleau-Ponty's account of embodied adorned with reliefs, nor an exercise in fusing interior design with sculpture, but
vision - for a new conception of three-dimensional space. Lissitzky posits space a blueprint for activating and engaging the viewer in everyday life and politics.

80 81
 MIMETIC ENGULFMENT

'He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar.' Roger Caillois'

Darkness
Few of us have not lain in bed at night and felt ourselves slipping out of
consciousness, our bodies enveloped in darkness as ifby a soft black cloud. Yet in
an age of pervasive electrical illumination we rarely experience darkness as a
completely engulfing entity. Even at night, streetlamps and car headlights slip
through chinks in the curtains to offer limited visibility. Stepping into a pitch-
black installation may be one of the few times we experience total, consuming
darkness. In most museum displays of contemporary art, an encounter with
such spaces has become increasingly familiar. We leave behind a bright white
gallery and step into a dark passageway that twists and turns on itself to block
out the light. As we fumble for the reassuring presence of a wall to orient us,
the blackness seems to press against our eyes. Even when the light of a video
projection becomes visible as the main focus of the work, we still strain to locate
our body in relation to the dark environment.
The kind of experience that such installations generate for the viewer is
diametrically opposed to Minimalist sculpture and Postminimalist installation
art. Rather than heightening awareness of our perceiving body and its physical
boundaries, these dark installations suggest our dissolution; they seem to
dislodge or annihilate our sense of self - albeit only temporarily - by plunging us
into darkness, saturated colour, or refracting our image into an infinity of mirror
reflections. Postminimalist installations are invariably spaces oflight, where the
body's physical limits are established and affirmed by their relationship to the
sensible co-ordinates of a given space. By contrast, in the works discussed below,
the possibility oflocating ourselves in relation to the space is diminished,
because this space is obscured, confused, or in some way intangible.
There is no 'placement' in engulfing blackness: I have no sense of where 'I' am
because there is no perceptible space between external objects and myself. This is
not to say that in darkness I experience a 'void': on the contrary, encounters, when
they occur, are sudden and all too present; consider how objects become more
jutting, awkward, unwieldy in a dark room. Yet until we do bump into someone or
something, we can go forwards and backwards in the blackness without proof of
having moved. At its extreme, this lack of orientation can even raise the question
of whether it is accurate to speak of 'self-awareness' in these circumstances.
Entering such rooms can make one aware of one's body, but as a loss: one does not
sense one's boundaries, which are dispersed in the darkness, and one begins to
Lucas Samaras
coincide with the space.
Room no.2 or Mirror The ideas above are indebted to the French psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski,
Room1g66 who vividly describes in his book Lived Time(I933) how daylight is characterised
Collection: Albright-
Knox Art Gallery,
by 'distance, extension and fullness', while the dark night has something more
Buffalo, New York 'personal' about it since it invades the body rather than keeping its distance:

82
 James Turrell
Trace Elemenis1990
Installation at Hayward
Gallery, London, 1993

'I no longer have the black night, complete obscurity, before me; instead, it covers external colours and shapes from those that seem to derive from inside our eyes.
me completely, it penetrates my whole being, it touches me in a much more In some of Turrell's darkest pieces - such as Wedgework III I 969 - we become
intimate way than the clarity of visual space." Minkowski gives a case study of aware of a glowing deep-blue wedge oflight beyond what appears to be a white
schizophrenia and suggests that the patient's sense of being 'penetrated' by and dais, but the terrain between our body and this space of light is unfathomably
dissolved in space may well be the overriding characteristic of human experience dark. In his series of 'Space-Division Pieces' such as Earth Shadow 1991, a dark
of darkness in general: room is lit only by two dim spotlights; the room appears to be empty but for
a glowing rectangular shape on the far wall. When we advance towards this
[dark space] does not spread out before me but touches me directly, envelops me, embraces
rectangle, its colour seems opaque and yet too evanescent to be solid. If we try and
me, even penetrates me completely, passes through me, so that one could almost say that
while the ego is permeable by darkness it is not permeable by light. The ego does not affirm
touch this coloured block oflight, our tentatively outstretched hands pass through
itself in relation to darkness but becomes confused with it, becomes one with it. l the anticipated surface to an unbounded volume of coloured fog - a revelation
that is both unnerving and exhilarating. Standing before such fields of colour,
Minkowski's ideas were taken up by the French theorist Roger Caillois (19 I 3-78) our bodies are immersed in a rich, thick atmosphere of coloured light almost
whose 1935 essay 'Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia' analyses the tangible in its density.
phenomenon of insect camouflage or mimicry: Observing that mimetic insects James Turrell is usually considered to be paradigmatic of the 'Light and Space'
stand as great a chance of being eaten by predators as non-mimetic insects, art discussed in Chapter Two. Like his Postminimalist contemporaries on the
Caillois concludes that what in fact occurs in the phenomenon of camouflage is 'a West Coast (Robert Irwin, Maria Nordman, Bruce Nauman), he was influenced by
disturbance in the ... relations between personality and space'.5 Insect mimicry is the way in which Minimalism's reductive and literal forms forced the viewer into
thus tantalisingly described by Caillois as a 'temptation by space', an assimilation heightened awareness of perception as emboaied and interdependent with its
to the surrounding environment that results from a desire for fusion between surroundings. The argument that Turrell's installations are objects of perceptual
animate and inanimate. As with the human experience of dark space, argues enquiry -like the Minimalist sculptures of Morris or Andre - has therefore
Caillois, the mimetic insect is decentred: it no longer feels itself to be the origin of tended to dominate readings of his work, backed up by Turrell's own assertions
spatial co-ordinates, and its awareness of being an entity distinct from its external that 'perception is the object and objective' of his art.' Far less attention is paid to
surroundings begins to disintegrate. The mimetic insect does not know where to the way in which his installations in fact undermine the self-reflexivity of
place itself and is thus depersonalised: 'He is similar, not similar to something, but phenomenological perception. Rather than grounding the viewer's perception
just similar'.6 Caillois's argument is explicitly influenced by Freud's theory of the in the here and now, Turrell's installations are spaces of withdrawal that suspend
death drive, in which he posited an instinct oflibidinal retreat, in other words, time and orphan us from the world. Although the installations contain light,
a desire to return to our primary biological condition as inanimate objects. Freud's and materialise this as a tactile presence, they also eliminate all that we could
theory is complicated and controversial- not least because the 'unbinding' work call an 'object' situated as distinct from ourselves. Turrell describes the works as
of the death drive can be experienced as both pleasurable and unpleasurable- situations where 'imaginative seeing and outside seeing meet, where it becomes
but the idea of instinctual renunciation is key to the experience of mimetic. difficult to differentiate between seeing from the inside and seeing from the
engulfment structured for the viewer by the works in this chapter. The dualism outside'.s This borderline status is quite distinct from the heightened self-
oflife and death drives, like that of conscious and unconscious psychic activity, reflexivity induced by Minimalist sculpture: Turrell's works do not make us 'see
was considered by Freud to de stabilise the rational Enlightenment subject. ourselves seeing' because, as Georges Didi-Huberman has observed, 'how, indeed,
could I observe myselflosing the sense of spatial limits 7'9
Lost in the light This mimetic elision of subject and environment is well demonstrated in
In many of the installations made by the American artist James Turrell (b.I 943) accounts of Turrell's 1976 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in
since the late I 960S, viewers walk through a disorienting pitch-black corridor that which he adapted a series of four galleries to form a single installation, Arhirit. The
extinguishes all residual daylight before finally emerging into a larger, darker work made use of research that he had undertaken with Robert Irwin during their
space infused with deep colour. This colour becomes stronger (and even changes joint participation in Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 'Art and Technology'
hue) as the cones and rods of our eyes adjust to the drop in light, a process that programme in 1969. They had experimented with the perceptual effects of the
may take up to forty minutes. For a long time, therefore, we cannot identify the Ganzfeld (a homogenous phenomenal space) and its aural equivalent, the
boundaries of the room we are in, nor see our own bodies, nor even differentiate anechoic chamber. Arhiritcomprised a sequence of four Ganzfelds: the white

84 85
 rooms were experienced by the viewer as a series of different coloured spaces,
since the light entering each (through an aperture high on the wall) reflected
particular objects outside the building (a green lawn or red brickwork). This
gentle tinting of the white spaces was exaggerated in intensity by the sequencing
of the rooms, so that the after-colour of one gallery space lingered on the retina to
make its complement in the following room even stronger. Turrell could not fully
have anticipated the physical response elicited by this installation: without form
for the eye to latch onto, visitors fell over, disoriented, and were unable to keep
their balance; many had to crawl through the exhibition on their hands and knees
in order to prevent themselves from being 'lost in the light'.w
When Arhiritwas reinstalled in single-room format as City ofArhirit at the
Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980, several US visitors brought lawsuits
against Turrell after having fallen through what they perceived to be a solid wall,
but which in fact was just the edge of the Ganzfeld. In subsequent installations,
Turrell divided viewers off from the Ganzfeld by a slim wall to create what he
calls a 'sensing space' for the viewer to stand in. Even with the presence of this
partition, the colour and darkness of his installations still seem to adhere to
the body: as one critic noted, 'it is as though one's eyes were glued to this
hazelike emanation, as though they were being sucked into it with deliberate
determination'. n The extreme effects of these colour fields frustrate our ability
to reflect on our own perception: subject and object are elided in a space that
cannot be plumbed by vision.

Mirror displacements
Although Turrell's work is notable for its calmness and stillness, it also plays on
a desire for abandonment, and this has led many critics to frame their response
to his installations - with their unbounded, embracing opacity - in terms of
spirituality, or a sense of the absolute. This is because it structures a subsuming
over-identification with the void-like coloured space that engulfs and penetrates us.
This provides a quite different challenge to the centred subject from that
discussed in Chapter Two. In the installations of Dan Graham, we are made aware
of the interdependency of our perception with that of other viewers: reflective
glass and mirrors are used to disrupt the idea that subjectivity is stable and
centred. For Turrell, the space in which such self-reflexive perception may take
place is foreclosed, and we become one with the surrounding environment.
The same mimetic engulfment may nonetheless occur with mirrors when set
against each otherto form a mise-en-abymeofreflections. From the early 1960S
and throughout the 1970S there is a conspicuous rise in the number of artists
James Turrell
Wedge work IV 1974, incorporating mirrors in their work. Not all of these take the form of installation-
installation at one thinks of Michelangelo Pistoletto's ongoing series of Mirror Paintings 1962-,
Hayward Gallery.
Robert Morris's Untitled mirror cubes 1965, Robert Smithson's Minor Vortexes of
London, April-June,
1993 the mid-1960s, Michael Craig-Martin's Face 1972 and Lucio Fontana's Cuba di

86 87
 •
•

Yayoi Kusama
Dots Obsession: New
Century 2000
Maison de la Culture du
Japon, Pans,
Feb 2001

88 89
 Yayoi Kusama
Kusama's Peep Showor
Endless Love Show
Castellane Gallery,
New York, March 1966

specchi I 97 5. For the most part, this use of mirrors arises as a logical extension of Of course, the experience of mimicry in these pieces exists primarily for the
the interest in phenomenological perception during this period: reflective artist: it is hard for the visitor in everyday clothing to feel remotely 'similar' to
surfaces were an obvious material with which to make viewers literally 'reflect' an installation of enormous coloured balloons covered in dots. However, in
on the process of perception. But it is no coincidence that Jacques Lacan's paper on Kusama's mirrored installations of the mid- I960s, such as Kusama's Peep Sh(JW-
'The Mirror Stage' was translated into English at this time (I968), and that his a mirrored hexagonal room with coloured lights flashing in time to a pop
most significant discussion of visual art took place in his I 964 seminar 'The Four soundtrack that includes songs by The Beatles - the viewer does become 'one
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis'. object among many' in a visual field. Kusama was photographed inside this room,
Lacan's argument in 'The Mirror Stage' is underpinned by the idea that the as she has been inside most of her installations, but viewers today remain on its
literal act of reflection is formative of the ego. Unlike Merleau-Ponty's idea that exterior (itself confusingly installed in a mirrored room), looking in through one
consciousness is conftrmedby reflection - 'seeing itself seeing itself' - Lacan of two peep holes to the interior. Stretching out as far as the eye can see are
instead stressed the fact that my first recognition of myself in the mirror is in fact reflections of your eyes (angled from left, right and centre), interspersed with
a willed misrecognition, or meconnaissance: I am seduced by identification with flashing lights and blaring music. Although the title and viewing holes allude to
the external impression of myself as a coherent, autonomous totality - when in erotic peep shows, there is no gratification of voyeurism in this work: the only
fact I am fragmentary and incomplete. Lacan turns to the example of a person performers are your own eyes darting in their sockets, multiplied to infinity.
standing between two mirrors to show how the regress of reflections does not Given the work's alternative title, Endless Love Show, it would seem that
represent any progress in interiority and does not confirm the certainty of our viewers were intended to experience this installation in the company of someone
self-identity; instead, the reflections destabilise the ego's fragile veneer. His thesis who would look through the second peep hole; two sets of eyes would be cast
is easily affirmed if we situate ourselves between two or more mirrors. My sense around the room and be fused as one. '3 The title of this work - as with her other
of selfis not corroborated by an infinity of reflections; on the contrary, it is pieces and exhibitions, such as Love Forever, Love Room, Endless Love Show- is
unpleasant - even disturbing - to see the reflection of a reflection of myself, typical of a I960S psychedelic sensibility in appealing to the fantasy of a shared
and stare into eyes that are certainly not anybody else's, but which do not feel social body whose intersubjective immanence would obliterate individual
commensurate with 'me'. n difference: 'all you need is love' to fight individualistic capitalism. '4 The 'endless
This effect is well demonstrated in two installations exhibited within months love' ethos, although premised on self-obliterative impulses, is ultimately in the
of each other in I966, both of which have (appropriately) doubled titles: Kusama's service of erotic fusion: 'Become one with eternity. Obliterate your personality.
Peep Show, also known as Endless Love Show, by Yayoi Kusama and Room 2, Become part of your environment. Forget yourself. Self-destruction is the only
subsequently retitled Mirror Room, by Lucas Samaras. Unlike the work of Robert way out ... I become part of the eternal and we obliterate ourselves in Love."5
Morris and Dan Graham, the mirrors in the work of Kusama and Samaras do not The obliteration of self-image has also been an enduring motif in the work of
corroborate the present space-time of the viewer, but offer a mimetic experience Lucas Samaras since the late I960S.,6 In his Autopolaroids I970-I, he double- and
of fragmentation. In these installations, our reflection is dispersed around the triple-exposed his naked image in order to present his profile, his hands and
space to the point where we become, as Caillois writes, 'just similar. body fading in and out of the holes in his furniture, embracing himself in his
kitchen, or obliterated in shadows and pools oflight. This doubled and mimetic
Self-obliteration relationship to both his image and environment takes three-dimensional form in
In the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b.I929), self-obliteration is his Mirror Room, first shown at the Pace Gallery, New York, in I966. Unlike the
a persistent motif-from her performances of the late I960s, in which she used hexagonal Kusama's Peep Show, Samaras's work comprises a cube into which the
polka dots (painted or cut out of paper) to make herself and her performers blend viewer enters. The room is large enough to contain not just the standing visitor
in with an environment that had also been covered in similar dots, to more but a table and chair, also covered in mirrors. If Kusama's work has an expansive
recent video work such as Flower Obsession Sunflower 2000, in which the artist coherence in its illusion of infinity (the octagonal walls reflect enough to keep the
wears a yellow hat and T-shirt and sits in a field of sunflowers; when the camera viewer's multiplied face identifiable in the darkness), Samaras's panelled room,
pulls back, she appears to be assimilated into her surroundings. In her return made of hundreds of smaller mirrored plates, dissolves the viewer's perception of
to installation art in the I 990s, such as Dots Obsession I 998 and Mirror Room both body and space into a kaleidoscope of fragmented shards.
(Pumpkin) I99I, Kusama has designed and worn special outfits that integrate Kim Levin has described the experience of walking into this work as yielding
her into the colour and pattern of the room. 'the disorienting precarious feeling of seeing yourself endlessly receding, a feeling

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 Richard Wilson
20:50
Saatchi Gallery,
Boundary Road, London,
1987

of vertigo, a dropping in the pit of your stomach as from a dream of falling'." centre of the space. Visitors are requested to leave coats and bags behind before
The director of Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which acquired the work in entering, and this unburdening of chattels inadvertently charges the experience
1966, described it in more euphoric terms: 'When you're inside it, you feel you're with a quasi-ritualistic character; as one critic has noted, entering the installation
floating on a cloud. Infinity stretches out in all directions. You see yourself is like 'a journey half-way across the River Styx'." This deposit of baggage als.o
reflected thousands of times."s But if Kusama's use of mirror reflections was in the serves an aesthetic purpose, since it heightens awareness of the way in which the
service of 'endless love', Samaras's work derives from more violent and morbid wedged steel walkway closes in on the boundaries of our body (the sides are waist
impulses. In a statement to Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Samaras writes that 'the high but appear to fall away as the ramped floor rises). As you walk along the
idea for a completely mirror covered cube room occurred to me around 1963 gangplank, you seem to rise gently above this turbid lake of oil whose reflective
when I incorporated the idea in a short story, Killman'. Levin has also recorded surface provides a perfect mirror of the room.
how Samaras, growing up in Greece, recollected the 'scary' custom of covering At first glance 20:50 appears to be an object of phenomenological enquiry in
the mirrors of a house while a corpse was in it.'9 More important for the artist, the tradition of Nauman's corridors discussed in the previous chapter. It can also
however, was the way in which a mirror, during adolescence, 'was used to inspect be read symbolically (in the style of the 'dream scene' installations of Chapter
portions of one's body identity, and it was also used as an aid in the physical One), since the title refers to the viscosity of standard engine oil: as an elegaic
mimicry of adults and the opposite sex. Sometimes one's image in the mirror embrace of industrial waste, 20:50 has been seen to encapsulate the tension
became an audience but most of the time it was a source of perplexion.'w For the between technological production and nature.'l However, the disorienting
viewer too, Mirror Room structures an experience of the body fragmented into reflections that form such an integral part of 20:50 align it with the mimetic
separate pieces. concerns of Freud and Caillois. As with Turrell's tangible abysses oflight, the oil
Samaras continued to pursue the theme of mirrored space, now with sadistic of 20:50 is both threatening and seductive: it has been compared to a 'terrifying
intent. Corridor I 1967 comprises a mirrored corridor that turns back on itself void' that 'draws you down into its still and fathomless depths'; it is 'forbidding'
twice as the ceiling slopes lower, until the viewer must crouch down to exit the and 'sinister', even 'menacing', yet challenges you to 'brave its velvety surface'. '4
work; Room 3, made in Kassel in 1968, returned to the cube format but was armed The ambiguous character of the oil mimics the room in which it is installed and
inside and out with protruding mirrored spikes. Entering via a low door, visitors in doing so appears to evacuate us from the space. Indeed, standing at the narrow
invariably bumped their heads on a spike above the entrance as they tried to tip of the walkway - wide enough for one person only - we seem weightless,
stand up. Arnold Glimcher, director of the Pace Gallery, vividly described the hovering above the oil, which in turn seems to disappear, present only through its
disorienting character of this work: 'You didn't know where the points really were prickly smell and the occasional speck of dirt on its surface. The stilled reflection
in the slick wet dark light, you were totally inhibited, your perceptual faculties of the walls and ceiling adds a morbid touch (one critic compared the experience
were completely confused. It was terrifying.''' of this work to the sailor's fate of 'walking the plank'). The dense inertia of the
It is noticeable in discussions of the work of both Kusama and Samaras that oil is marked by a lucid, hyperreal stasis; one moment it is overproximate, a mass
viewers' accounts of this work fall into one of two categories: oceanic bliss or of stagnant liquid matter that threatens to spill over to where you stand, the next
claustrophobic horror. This is not something that the artist can predict, and there it is all but invisible, disappearing beneath its reflection.
is no 'right' or 'wrong' way to experience such a work. Because the pieces use When installed at the former Saatchi gallery in north London, the glass ceiling
mirror reflections to dislocate our sense of self-presence and play with our gave viewers the impression of being suspended over a void: at a certain point the
orientation, they solicit an individual response that reflects the dual role of the reflections ceased to be the spectral double of the room and actually assumed the
ego as understood by Lacanian psychoanalysis: as a comforting defence against uncanny solidity of a darkened world. This oscillation between presence and
fragmentation, or as an all too fragile mirage. absence, threatening and seductive, draws the viewer into a dizzying,
disembodied state - not unlike the 'syncretistic' vision described by Anton
Through the looking glass Ehrenzweig as crucial to the 'oceanic' experience of artistic creation. In The Hidden
Since first being exhibited in 1987 at Matt's Gallery in east London, the Order ofArt (1967), Ehrenzweig describes how, in syncretistic vision, the libido is
installation 20:50 by British artist Richard Wilson (b.1953) has acquired a media not drawn to meaningful configurations (gestalts) but surveys everything with an
reputation verging on cult status. The installation comprises a room half filled 'open-eyed empty stare', in which the artist is unable to extricate him or herself
with 200 gallons-of used sump oil, and entered by viewers - one or two at a time- from the work as a separate entity ('as we reach the deepest oceanic levels of
via a narrow wedge-like walkway that runs from one corner diagonally into the dedifferentiation the boundaries between the inside and outside world melt away

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and we feel engulfed and trapped inside the work of art').'5 The dark and simulacral heavily theorised discipline culminated in two key articles, written in 1975:
mirror of the oil exerts a similarly irresistible pull on the viewer's unconscious, 'The Imaginary Signifier' by Christian Metz and 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative
and this is especially acute when the work is seen at night: the dark windows Cinema' by Laura Mulvey. Both writers were concerned with the 'apparatus' of
form the final veil between the night sky below and an oceanic chasm beneath. cinema itself - the way in which viewers identify with the camera's eye - and the
ideological pacification that this engenders. Both essays are more concerned with
Video Atopia our psychological relationship to the content of a film than to our experience of
In his article 'A Cinematic Atopia' (1971), the American artist Robert Smithson viewing it in a cinema. However, Metz's tutor Roland Barthes discusses precisely
(1938-73) describes the engulfing lethargy of sitting in a cinema and watching this latter situation in 'Leaving the Movie Theatre', an essay that can only be
films. The consuming darkness removes us from the world, suspending us in regarded as a riposte to his former student.,sSince he accounts for our experience
an alternative reality in which our bodies are subordinated to eyesight: of cinema in spatial (rather than simply psychological) terms, Barthes's essay
permits a consideration of video installation as a practice distinct from cinema.
Going to the cinema results in an immobilisation of the body. Not much gets in the way
His starting point is an evocative description of how we leave cinemas: in a slight
of one's perception. All one can do is look and listen. One forgets where one is sitting.
The luminous screen spreads a murky light throughout the darkness ... The outside world daze, with a soft, limp and sleepy body. He thus compares the experience of
fades as the eyes probe the screen.'6 watching a film to being hypnotised, and the ritual of entering the dimmed
space of a cinema as 'pre-hypnotic'. Unlike Metz and his generation, who are
Smithson revels in the sheer number of films in existence; for him they swarm suspicious of the ideological hold film has over us, Barthes is willing to be
together in a celluloid mass to cancel each other out in a pool of tangled light fascinated and seduced. This is because he does not consider cinema to be solely
and action. In the face of this 'vast reservoir of pure perception', the viewer the film itself, but the whole 'cinema-situation': the dark hall, the 'inoccupation
is 'impassive' and 'mute', 'a captive of sloth' whose perception descends into of bodies' within it, viewers cocooned in their seats. Unlike television, whose
'sluggishness'. Indeed, the ultimate filmgoer, Smithson notes: domestic space holds no erotic charge, cinema's urban darkness is anonymous,
would not be able to distinguish between good or bad films, all would be swallowed up
exciting, available.
into an endless blur. He would not be watching films, but rather experiencing blurs of many This is not to say that Barthes is unwary of 'cinematographic hypnosis' and its
shades. Between blurs he might even fall asleep, but that wouldn't matter. Sound tracks hold over us: indeed, it 'glues' us to the screen, fascinating and seducing us, just
would hum through the torpor. Words would drop through this languor like so many lead like our reflection in the mirror (Barthes deliberately alludes to Lacan's article).
weights. This dozing consciousness would bring about a tepid abstraction. It would increase Following contemporary film theorists of that decade, he suggests that film's
the gravity of perception ... All films would be brought into equilibrium - a vast mud field ideological hold can be broken by arming ourselves with a counter-ideology,
of images forever motionless. But ultimate movie-viewing should not be encouraged. whether this be internal (such as a critical vigilance to what we are watching)
or external, via the film itself (as in Brechtian alienation, or the chopped-up
Initially Smithson's text seems to be derogatory, as ifhe -like so many of his narratives of Godard). But for Barthes these are not the only ways with which
contemporaries - is deriding the passivity of mass-media spectacle. But the to break the spell of cinema; the strategy that interests him most, he says
evident pleasure that he takes in his writing makes it impossible to align him enigmatically, is to 'complicate a "relation" by a "situation"'. In other words,
with denigrators of mass-media consumption in this period. Instead, Smithson's he advocates that we be 'fascinated twice over by cinema:
vocabulary is permeated by a fascination with entropy, the idea of the physical
by the image and by its surroundings - as if I had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic
and spatial energy drain that he took from the second law of thermodynamics, and
body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishise not
which underpinned his artistic practice and theoretical interests. The inevitable just the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture ofthe sound, the hall, the darkness, the
dissolution of entropy was for Smithson a manifestation of the Freudian death- obscure mass ofthe other bodies, the rays oflight, entering the theatre, leaving the hall.'9
drive; the latter's dual aspect of unpleasurable disintegration and pleasurable
retreat into nothingness is clearly visible in Smithson's droll and vivid language. '7 This enthralment with the 'surroundings' of cinema is the impulse behind so
Smithson wrote this essay just before film theory was to undergo a radical much contemporary video installation: its dual fascination with both the image
upheaval through the influence of Marxist and psychoanalytic thinking in French on screen and the conditions of its presentation. Carpeting, seating, sound
and English leftist intellectual circles during the 1970S. Focused around the insulation, size and colour of the space, type of projection (back, front or
magazines Communications, Cahiers du Cinema and Screen, this new and freestanding) are all ways with which to seduce and simultaneously produce

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 I Bill Viola
Isaac Julien
Baltimore Five Angels for the
Installation at FACT, Millenium 2001
Liverpool, Collection: Tate, London
Feb-April 2003

a critically perceptive viewer. Works like Isaac Julien's three-channel installation Even so, Wagner is right to suggest that Viola's recent work emblematises
Baltimore 2003 make manifest the psychological and physical split that Barthes a certain complacency with regard to video as a medium. His imagery has become
describes: we are enticed by the smooth play of images across the screens, but also increasingly religious, often deriving from or suggesting paintings, and the work
by the intense blue walls that surround them. In Douglas Gordon's free-standing is ever more slick and populist, employing the latest plasma screens and special
projections, such as Between Darkness and Light 1997, viewers circumnavigate effects. In Five Angels for the Millenium 2001, a vast dark room filled with ambient
a large screen on either side of which two different films are simultaneously music accompanies five large-scale projections; an absorptive darkness and
projected. The video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila (such as Today 1999) and immersive imagery combine to engulf and soothe the viewer. Each screen is
Stan Douglas (Win, Place or Show 1998, for example) both use multiple screens to saturated in richly coloured watery imagery (it is hard to ascertain if they are
present alternative versions of a narrative. Tellingly, many of these works do not filmed from above or beneath the surface), and on each one in turn we are shown
immerse the viewer in darkness: dark space (with its mystical and mystifying the figure of a man falling through or leaping out of the fluid depths. The screens
atmosphere) would run counter to the focused rationality and concentration are individually titled - Departing, Birth, Fire, Ascending and Creation - and these
needed to investigate and elucidate these narratives. The viewer's split and metaphysical names suitably reflect the portentous mood of the imagery. The
desirous relationship to both the image and the physical 'cinema-situation' is work clearly aspires to an immersive experience for the viewer, where we are
integral to all of these artists' works. fused with the darkness and identify with the figure passing through sublimely
Addressing what exceeds the cinematic image, then, provides an important elemental colour.
alternative to the model of 'activation' discussed in the previous chapter, together The popular reception of Viola's recent work as 'spiritual' is reminiscent of
with a different modality of destabilising the viewer. The split focus of moving writing on Turrell, and for similar reasons: Viola's work has always consorted
image and surrounding situation together serves to distance art from spectacle- with the metaphysical, but for a brief period he produced a more aggressively
yet this distance is ambiguous, since contemporary artists are (like Barthes) as bleak type of art. In his video installations of the early I 990S, a tougher, more
smitten with the cinematic object as they are critical of it. This is a significant existential approach to the video medium (and the darkness in which it is
difference between contemporary video art and its 19 70S fore bears, for whom the projected) is adopted. In these works, Viola does(not encourage a fusion with the
medium of video was often deliberately contrived to frustrate the viewer and absolute (as is implicit in Five Angels) but explores a more annihilating brand of
thwart visual pleasure as a direct opposition to the mainstream use of the moving subjective fragmentation. The four-screen installation The Stopping Mind I 99 I
image - as exemplified in Joan Jonas's Vertical Roll 1972, Vito Acconci's Red Tapes offers a dark, protean rush of images (operations, barking dogs, owls flying,
197 6, or Martha RosIer's Semiotics of the Kitchen 1975 and Domination and the desert roads at night, figures tossing in their sleep) in a way that only just keeps
disintegration below the surface. The camerawork is not slick and polished,
Everyday 1978.
but harnesses the glitches and errors inherent in video technology to exaggerate
Technological fragmentation its affective impact. The staging of these screens reinforces this fragmentation
One of video installation's pioneers, the American artist Bill Viola (b.I 9 5I), has further: entering into a black chamber, you encounter the four hanging screens,
recently come under attack by the art historian Anne Wagner. She has suggested each showing frozen imagery. Moving towards the centre you hear a man
that unlike Acconci, Jonas and RosIer, who refuse 'any guarantees of pleasure, whispering a description, at high speed, of his body's progressive loss of sensation
whether bodily or artistic, or offers of entertainment, whether passive or in an unknown black space. A loud grating noise suddenly sets the images on the
voyeuristic', Viola has no mistrust of his medium. lo Wagner argues that for the screens into motion and we are harried by jolting camerawork. The shock of this
I970S generation, such scepticism was a necessary rejection of 'the public movement catches us off-guard. Just as suddenly, the screens become still and
pleasures of television, which, like the offers of advertising, centre on illusions silent, and the whispered voice resumes its description of sinking down into
of presence, intimacy, and belonging'. One way of refusing the pacifying comfort blackness. The Stopping Mindhas been seen as a metaphor for consciousness-
of mass-media, she suggests, is for artists to create a discrepancy between 'what the coloured 'external' world of the video screens contrasting with the 'internal'
the viewer sees and feels, and what she can be sure she knows'. For Wagner and 'unconscious' whispered voice of the artist. But the two realms remain
(and for many of her colleagues writing in the journal October), it is our disconnected, and suspend the viewer in an uneasy hiatus. We may be 'centred'
relationship to video's content that must be tackled, not its presentation in an in the installation (it is only by standing at its very middle that one can fully hear
installation. For them, the redoubled, eroticised fascination that Barthes proposes- Viola's voice) but our relationship to the sound and the images on screen is
'the bliss of discretion' in the cinema-situation - is not a critical alternative. perpetually on the verge of collapse.

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 The three-screen installation Tiny Deaths 1993, addresses our experience of
darkness more directly. We are plunged into total blackness before emerging into
a penumbral space: on the three walls ahead are projections, dimly lit and barely
visible in the darkness. A low-level murmuring of indecipherable voices can. be
heard. The screens do not emit enough light to enable us to see where we are in
the room, nor to identify the presence of other visitors. On each wall we gradually
become aware of the dim shadow of a human form, flickering in slow motion.
Gradually a light source appears on one of the figures, increasing in intensity
until it is consumed in a flash of white light. During this burst of brightness, the
whole room is momentarily illuminated; then abruptly, everything is plunged
back into darkness until the cycle begins again. Viola's work does not give one's
retina time to adjust to the drop in light, and one is repeatedly made to undergo
the experience of being plunged into darkness. This disorientation is integral
to the installation, since it oscillates our attention between identification with
the figures on screen, the silhouettes of other visitors visible against them, and
the darkness into which we are submerged. Each burst oflight momentarily
illuminates the room, but plunges us deeper and more irreparably into the
blinding darkness that follows. Viewers are mimetically engulfed by the work
on two levels: in the consuming darkness, and as shadows merging with the
silhouettes on screen.

Aural engulfment
Sound can be as immersive as darkness, and the work of Canadian artist Janet
Cardiff (b.I 95 7) demonstrates this well. Cardiff uses the Binaural recording
method - in which microphones are placed inside the ears of a dummy head - to
create an uncannily intimate relationship with the viewer. Taking the form of
installations and walks in which the viewer listens to a pre-recorded soundtrack
on headphones, Cardiff's work has primarily been discussed in terms of its
affective impact on the viewer - its unnerving, eerie vividness, its eroticism and
menace - rather than on the level of theme or structure. This is because the work
is mesmerisingly vivid, to the point where critical distance is almost entirely
foreclosed in the overwhelming immediacy of entering the aural situations she
creates. These experiences are particularly strong when they take the form of
individual audio-walks, such as The Missing Voice - Case Study B (London, 1999).
Many critics have observed that Cardiff's audio-walks are cinematic,
transforming the world into a film set with the viewer as its central protagonist,
but Cardiff has also produced a series of installations that deal explicitly with the
experience of watching film. Perhaps more than any other contemporary artist,
Cardiff is infatuated with what Barthes calls the 'cinema-situation': her
installations Playhouse and The Paradise Institute both place the viewer inside
Bill Viola miniature cinemas, and are preoccupied less with the action on screen (which is
Tiny Deaths 1993 deliberately enigmatic and fragmented) than with the experience of being in

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 - Janet Cardiff
The Paradise Institute
Installation at the
Canadian Pavilion,
Venice Biennale, 2001

a dark public space. The sound of other viewers whispering, taking off their as if we become indivisible from Cardiff's own body, as she herself has observed. l'
coats, answering mobile phones and eating popcorn are integral to the work's Although she inverts the cinema apparatus by refusing identification with the
immersive effect. Ironically, these sounds are the ones that we conventionally image, it is ultimately the seductive escapism of mainstream cinema that she
shut out in order to lose ourselves in a film; the darkness of cinema theatres is aspires to replicate: 'I think that my work allows you to let go, to forget who you
designed to promote absorption and separation from the physical proximity of are ... What 1, and I think many other people, love about movie theatres is that you
other people. Yet this apparatus is precisely what Cardiff draws our attention to, can forget about "the real world" and just let the film carry you along with it.'ll
paradoxically by reinforcing our isolation through the use of headphones. The works of art discussed in this chapter problematise the idea of subjectivity
Playhouse 1997, is designed for one viewer at a time, and begins from the as stable and centred, by fragmenting or consuming the viewer's sense of presence
moment we don a set of headphones, pull apart the red velvet curtains and enter within a space. Cardiff's audio-installations enact a similar eclipse of the viewer
the box of a miniature theatre. This 'pre-hypnotic' situation, which Barthes through a form of aural hypnosis. Her embrace of the seductive and escapist can
discussed as crucial to the experience of cinema, is exaggerated further in be (and has been) criticised for its shameless manipulation of the viewer and
The Paradise Institute 2001, a larger installation designed to seat seventeen for its uncritical compliance with spectacle: although the work seems to offer
people simultaneously. The events that follow taking a seat in this work are so active participation, our experience inside it is one of powerless obedience. But
completely disorienting that it becomes impossible to distinguish real-time Barthes's article reminds us that literal activity is not necessarily a prerequisite
peripheral noise from Cardiff's pre-recorded ambient soundtrack. In both for criticality: he notes how we may free ourselves from the ideological hold
Playhouse and The Paradise Institute the noise of the 'cinema situation' is only one that film has over us by becoming 'hypnotised by a distance' - not simply
of three levels of the soundscape: there is also the film soundtrack (re-recorded a critical/intellectual distancing, but an 'amorous', fascinated distance that
in a large cinema to give a false impression of space) and a narrative that unfolds embraces the whole cinema situation: the theatre, the darkness, the room, the
in the form of Cardiff's voice, implicating the viewer within a noirish mystery presence of other people. Cardiff's installations foreground this situation,
that competes with the entertainment on screen. If 19 70S film theory imagined even while they risk replacing one seductive apparatus with another: Barthes's
our identification with cinema via an internalised 'camera' in the back of our 'bliss of discretion' - as both separation and discernment - is jeopardised by
heads, then Cardiff pulls our attention in three directions simultaneously in order Cardiff's over-proximate collapse of our body and world into hers.
to expose this mechanism. Our absorption in the performance on screen before The installations in this chapter, then, do not seek to increase perceptual
us is constantly thwarted by the fragmented and unbelievable plot, the stock awareness of the body but rather to reduce it, by assimilating the viewer in various
characters and hammy acting, but also by the artist's own femme-fatale persona, ways to the surrounding space: in these works, the viewer and installation can be
whispering breathily in our ears and sweeping us into a competing subplot. argued to collapse or (to use Ehrenzweig's term) 'dedifferentiate'. This type of
By inverting our conventional experience of cinema and its imaginary hold mimetic experience may be an effect of dark space (where you cannot situate your
over us, Cardiff exposes us to the 'cinema-situation' - the peripheral space that body in relation to the room, its objects, or to other visitors), of mirrors that reflect
goes beyond the image on screen. However, in doing this she could be said to force and refract one's image, of submerging us in an unbounded field of colour, or of
another identification, this time with sound - and to replace one dominant sense consuming us in sound. Unlike the call to activation that motivates the other
with another. Cardiff's use of sound is undeniably hypnotic - few are able to types of installation art discussed in this book, the viewer in these works is often
break the spell and remove their headphones once the piece has begun, and the intended to be passive. This dedifferentiating passivity is in keeping with the
sheer seductiveness of this trompe l'oreilleimmediately makes us yield to her libidinal retreat that marks Caillois's understanding of mimicry. His observations
directorial will. Unlike the immersive 'dream scene' installations of Chapter One, about 'psychasthenia' are apt for such installations, particularly those of Cardiff:
Cardiff leaves no space for our own fantasy projection: we are at the sway of her the ego is 'penetrated' by sound (rather than space), and is dissolved, as a discrete
instructions for as long as we wear the headphones. l' Although she speaks of entity, into its environment. This raises the question of how it is possible to
a desire to heighten the viewer's awareness and to sharpen our senses, we are reconcile installation art's drive to 'decentring' with its persistent emphasis
consumed by her sound to the point of invisibility, reduced to a disembodied ear. (explored in the previous chapters) on activated spectatorship. This conflict-
(Reading transcriptions of the installations afterwards, one is struck by whole which will be explored further in the conclusion - suggests that such modalities
parts of the script that did not stay in one's mind.) This complete yielding of might well be incompatible with each other, and might problematise the
control to another voice has prompted reviewers to describe the work as both apparently smooth rhetoric that accompanies installation art's historical and
menacing and erotic. Indeed, in the most vivid moments of her work it is theoretical development.

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 ACTIVATED SPECTATORSHIP

'The entire experience into which art flows, the issue ofliberty itself, of the expansion
of the individual's consciousness, of the return to myth, the rediscovery of rhythm, dance,
the body, the senses, which finally are what we have as weapons of direct, perceptual,
participatory knowledge ... is revolutionary in the total sense of behaviour.'
Helio Oiticica'

If the last chapter focused on an analysis of one way in which installation art
aims to decentre the viewer, then this chapter examines the idea of activated
spectatorship as a politicised aesthetic practice. It is conspicuous that the drive
towards activating the viewer (so that we are surrounded and given a role within
the work, as opposed to 'just looking at' painting or sculpture) becomes over
time increasingly equated with a desire for political action. Recent critics and
artists writing about installation art have suggested that the viewer's active
presence within the work is more political and ethical in implication than
when viewing more traditional types of art. A transitive relationship is implied
between activated spectatorship and active engagement in the wider social
and political arena.
But what exactly do we mean by 'political' in this context? In the broadest
sense, 'politics' refers to the organisation of state and government, and to the
operations of power, authority and exclusion that take place within this domain.
Of course, this has often been addressed by art on the level of illustration: there is
a long history of propaganda and political criticism in painting - David, Manet, or
Russian Revolutionary posters, for example. Equally, art can be instrumentalised
as a political weapon or scapegoat, as seen in the repression and promotion of
abstraction in post-World War II USSR and USA respectively. This chapter does
not address the political in art in this sense (as a symbol or illustration), nor does
it examine the political uses of art; instead it turns to some 'political' models
that have been explored through installation art's literal inclusion of the viewer.
A recurrent theme underpinning the work discussed in this chapter is a desire
to address viewers in the plural and to set up specific relationships between them
-not as a function of perception (as we saw in Chapter Two), but in order to
generate communication between visitors who are present in the space. This type
of work conceives of its viewing subject not as an individual who experiences art
in transcendent or existential isolation, but as part of a collective or community.'

Social Sculpture
Any discussion of society and politics in relation to installation art ought to begin
Helio Oiticica with the German artist Joseph Beuys (192I-86), whose work is in many ways a
Block Experiments in crux between politicised art practices of the early and late 1960S. Beuys's activities
Cosmococa ... 1973 fall into two distinct areas: an artistic output comprising sculpture, drawing,
Reconstruction at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery, installation and performance, and direct political activism (he formed the
May-June 2002 German Students' Party in 1967, and was instrumental in founding the Free

102
 Joseph Beuys
Bureau for Direct
Democracy
Documenla 5, Kassel
June-Oct 1972

International University in 1974 and the Green Party). The key idea underpinning took place there. Dirk Schwarze's report of one day's proceedings in the
all ofBeuys's activities was the notion of ' social sculpture', in which thought, installation is a remarkable testimony to the artist's indefatigable energy for
speech and discussion are regarded as core artistic materials: embroiling the public in debate. The office opened at loam and shut at 8pm daily,
and on the day that Schwarze documents, Beuys received 811 visitors in the.
My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture ... intervening ten hours, of which thirty-five directly engaged with the artist. Their
or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how
questions are highly varied, and range from investigating his ideas for democracy
the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone.
through referendum, to interrogating him on the relationship between his art
THINKING FORMS - how we mould our thoughts or
SPOKEN FORMS - how we shape our thoughts into words or
and activism, and harrassing him for his naive idealism and celebrity. As with
SOCIAL SCULPTURE - how we mould and shape the world in which we live: many other transcriptions ofBeuys's debates during the 1970S, the discussion is
SCULPTURE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS; EVERYONE IS AN ARTISP notable for the artist's willingness to field all questions, even if hostile or
pointedly personal. If the day described in Schwarze's report is typical of the work
Beuys regarded the world as spiritually alienated from its relationship with as a whole, then Beuys probably converted very few people to the campaign, but
nature, and deemed creativity the key to emancipation and individual self- his use of speech and debate as artistic materials nevertheless allow us to read
determination. Only art, he maintained, could provide a space of 'playful activity' the Bureau as a seminal forerunner of much socially engaged contemporary art.
free of the means-ends relationships of capitalism! He therefore proposed that Beuys's Bureau installation for Documenta 5, and 7000 Oaks for Documenta 7
political activity should itself be reconceived as artistic practice: 'Real future in 1982, are the works that seem most contemporary in their integration of
political intentions must be artistic." In I970 he formed the Organisation for direct activism and artistic techniques. The concern here, however, is to
Direct Democracy through Referendum, and used exhibitions as a means to consider the subjective model underlying these pieces, not Beuys's efficacy in
campaign for this to a wider audience. Public debates and dialogues became an instrumentalising political change. For the most part, Beuys is out of sync with
increasingly important aspect of Beuys's practice during the following decade, his contemporaries (in both Europe and the US) in believing in the transformative
and in them he laid out his ideas for an 'expanded concept of art', the importance power of creativity: for him, art is a route to individual self-realisation, and is
of ' social sculpture', and sought feedback on these ideas. Significantly, these indivisible from an understanding of spirituality as a force that integrates us with
dialogues were not conceived as performance art, although they took place our environment. If we disregard the spiritual dimension of Beuys's world view,
within galleries and often lasted many hours, and today would almost certainly then his entire theorfCtical edifice crumbles, for his belief that politics can be
be described as such. subsumed within the aesthetic is supported by a faith in the transcendent
When compared to the writings of many other artists during this period, potency of creativity. The controversy that ensued from Beuys's decision to
the transcriptions of Beuys's debates are notable for their frustratingly circular exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum after Hans Haacke's show had been censored
character: he seems to advocate an interminable big dialogue that never seeks there in 1971 demonstrates how different priorities were emerging. 6 For Beuys's
to form conclusions, only to set ideas in motion. At Documenta 5, I972, he chose contemporaries like Haacke, Buren and Asher, art is not a free space that exists
to put forward his campaign for 'direct democracy' (as opposed to electoral outside ideology, but an intrinsically contested and therefore political site, since
representation) in the form of a debate-based installation, The Bureaufor Direct how and what we validate as art is determined by institutional authority. Beuys,
Democracy, an office in which the artist worked for the duration of the exhibition. by contrast, viewed political activism as an extension of his artistic practice.
It was a direct copy of his headquarters in Dusseldorf (into which the public could From his perspective, boycotting a museum would have no impact on the status
come off the street and find information about his campaign), relocated to Kassel quo, whereas establishing a political party (as art) certainly would
in order to reach a wider audience. This live installation directly solicited the Because ofBeuys's understanding of the relationship between art and
participation of members of the public and was a significant development in politics, he has come under heavy critical fire from left-wing art historians
Beuys's practice, which until this point had taken an envi.ronmental form only in such as Benjamin Buchloh, who claim that his attempts to fuse the two lead to
the Beuys Block I970, an elaborate seven-room display of his work at the a neutralisation of the latter by the former. In other words, Beuys's claim that
Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. Staging his office within an art 'everyone is an artist' aestheticises politics, rather than politicises aesthetics.
exhibition (rather than on the streets of Kassel) was important for Beuys, since he Buchloh quotes Walter Benjamin by way of corroboration: the Third Reich
believed that for politics to advance, it must be subsumed within art. aestheticised politics (in the form of rallies and light displays) in order to conceal
As a consequence, the appearance of the Bureau is less important than what the true horror of its ideological message. 7 The comparison is extreme, and is

104 105
symptomatic of the US backlash against Beuys's cult status in Europe by 19 80 . today, as the body's presence is considered to be authentic, immediate and
With distance it is possible to observe Beuys's work as more radical than ephemeral, the last refuge against ideological capture. These ideas certainly
Buchloh's doctrinaire criticism could at that time permit. Buchloh argues that underpin Oiticica's thinking; it is significant, however, that for him the body
Beuys did not change the status of the art object within the discourse itself (unlike is not isolated but part of a community. Around 1965, he began to conceive of
Duchamp, Beuys does not make us question what and how an art object might a 'sense of total art', which emerged from his experience of the popular samba
be); yet it is possible to assert that, at moments, Beuys's practice engages in this culture of the favela. This was to be of decisive importance for the social
question radically, since it posits dialogue and direct communication as artistic development of his work w Oiticica's family was middle-class, and thus his
materials. 'Social sculpture' may therefore be understood as a precursor of embrace of favela culture and its grinding poverty was in itself a social statement,
contemporary installation art that presupposes a politicised viewing subject, especially when he invited favela samba dancers to participate in an exhibition
and this permits a more nuanced reading of Beuys than the straight rejection of of his Parangolfworks at Rio's Museu de Arte Moderna in 1965."The Parangolfs
him by early postmodernist theorists. Opening his work to public examination, (a slang term meaning an 'animated situation and sudden confusion and/or
criticism, hostility and dialogue, Beuys provides a model of artistic engagement agitation between people') were strangely weighted capes made from unusual
that has influenced a whole generation of contemporary practitioners, one of fabrics that encouraged wearers to move and dance, and forged a circular
whom ~ Thomas Hirschhorn ~ will be discussed later in this chapter. relationship between watcher and wearer. Oiticica observed that for the
person wearing a Parangole, 'there is, as it were, a violation of his "being" as
Babylonests and creleisure an "individual" in the world', which leads to a shift in his role to that of
As Thierry de Duve has pointed out, 'power to the imagination' is Beuys's core '''participator'' ... motor centre, nucleus'." These performances were staged within
cry, familiar to us from nineteenth-century Romanticism: he upholds the cult large collective events such as the Parangolf Colectivo (Rio 1967, a collaboration
s
of the centred individual, realising him- or herself through the creative act. It is with Lygia Pape, samba dancers, and the audience) and the multi-disciplinary
therefore productive to compare his 'social sculpture' with the Brazilian idea of action Apocal(popotese (August 1968). As the curator Carlos Basualdo has noted,
vivencias (total life-experience), which, in the work of Helio Oiticica, was similarly they 'could not fail to be perceived as extremely provocative'" due to the
construed as a counter to the alienating relations of capitalism. For Oiticica, explicitly political confrontation they staged between street celebrations and
heightened sensory perception was also founded on an idea of creative self- institutional propriety, disrupting class hierarchies and conventions.'4
realisation, but this was not to be aestheticised; instead, the sensory immediacy The vibrant interaction of the Para ngo les was translated into an installation
of vivencias aimed to produce a subjectivity radically opposed to that formed by format in Eden 1969, the focal point of a larger project called the 'Whitechapel
the dominant culture. Experience' or the 'Whitechapel Experiment'." The whole ground floor of the
Chapter Two discussed the importance of phenomenology for a generation Whitechapel Art Gallery in London was subsumed into a total environment that
of Brazilian artists working in the 1960s. In the 1970S, this interest became more included sand on the floor, tropical plants and two parrots in an ad hoc enclosure
socially engaged: Lygia Clark's small-scale sculptural objects, to be handled by that the curator Guy Brett described as an 'abstracted evocation of a Rio de Janeiro
the (occasionally blindfolded) viewer, came to take the form of a psychological back yard'. ,6 Eden itself was bounded by a wooden fence, and contained different
group therapy in which the senses were regarded as key to the process of healing. areas for participants to explore barefoot: the floor was carpeted in parts, but
In the work of Helio Oiticica, installations became an occasion for collective also featured large Bolides of sand and hay, and a zone of dry leaves. The work
interactions and relaxation. For him, activation of the viewer was a political and contained the familiar Oiticica groups of works (referred to by the artist as
ethical imperative in the face of an oppressive dictatorship: a call to collective 'orders') ~ Bolides (manipulable boxes), Penetrables and Parangoles, as well as a dark
sensory perception and fusion with one's environment as a mode of resistance, tent. But the most important new feature was the Nests, an elaboration of his early
and ultimately of emancipation. Grounded in an experience of the body, vivencias 1960S Nuclei (geometrical forms hanging freely in space). The Nests comprised
opposed Brazilian state repression on the one hand and the pervasive small cabins, around two by one metres in size and divided by veils, inside which
consumerism and alienation of US culture on the other. 9 viewers were invited to relax, alone or with others. Oiticica referred to these
Across Europe and the US at this time, the direct gestures and personal spaces as 'nuclei ofleisure', places for sensory pleasure, conviviality and reverie;
instrumentality implicit in performance and installation art were viewed as tools in the context of London's cold, repetitive streets, he regarded them as a return
to challenge and change the dominant culture, its reactionary stereotypes and 'to nature, to the childhood warmth of allowing oneself to become absorbed ... in
ingrained attitudes. This motivation continues to underpin most performance art the uterus of the constructed open space'. '7

106 107
 Helie Oiticica
Eden
Whitechapel Art Gallery,
London, 1969

In a preparatory drawing for Eden, Oiticica subtitled the installation

'an exercise for the creleisure and circulations'. The neologism 'creleisure'
(a combination of creation, leisure, pleasure, belief, and perhaps Creole) was the
subject of an essay that he had written that year, and he viewed Eden as his first
major work of art on this theme. In 1968 he had been exposed to the writing
of the German political theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), whose Eros and
Civilisation 1955 and One-Dimensional Man 1964 argued that sexuality and
leisure under capitalism are forms of 'repressive de sublimation'; in other words,
what appears to be liberatory pleasure is in fact a form of repression, keeping
people content, passive, and thereby unwilling to rise up against the system. For
Oiticica, creleisure denoted a way to reappropriate leisure in capitalist society:
instead of the organised non-work of weekends and holidays, he proposed
a more ritualistic, collective outburst that jeopardises the conditioning of the
existing order - not unlike Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of carnival. In this light,
Eden's spaces were not to be equated with hippie passivity and 'dropping out'.
They aimed to be creative spaces for demystifying and internally transforming
an alienated world, 'not the place for divertive thoughts, but for the replacement
of myth in our lives'.,8 The installation was therefore seen as something open-
ended, to be used by each subject as a catalyst for individual development and
creative production. 'It is not the object which is important but the way it is
lived by the spectator,' he wrote, asking the reader at the end of his essay for the
Whitechapel catalogue to reflect on their communal environment: 'Have you
the idea for yours?"g Creleisure became integral to his conception of integrating
the viewer in his installations of the I970S, 'essential to the conclusion of the
partici pa tion -proposition'. '0
The nests in Eden were reworked for New York MoMA in 1970, and variants on
them - the Babylonests - were permanently installed in Oiticica's small apartment
in New York during that decade. These took the form of small 'cabins' stacked two
or three high, completely filling the space of his apartment and frequented by
friends and visitors. Each nest contained a mattress and was fronted by a gauzy
veil that 'simultaneously evoked a feeling of motherly cosiness and of seeing the
outside world through a mist'." It was Oiticica's social and working environment;
in his 'nest' he kept a typewriter, telephone, television, tape recorder and radio.
His apartment was also the location of his first Cosmococa installation,
a collaboration with Neville d'Almeida that further probed the idea of creleisure.
The Cosmococas, like the Quasi-Cinemas, were environmental installations
accompanied by films, slides and rock music that proposed a heightened sensory
pleasure explicitly derived from the use of cocaine. In Block Experiments in
Cosmococa, Program in Process, CCs Hendrix- WarI973, viewers were invited to
lounge on hammocks while tracks from Hendrix's album War Heroes blasted Helie Oiticica
Eden
out and the walls were washed with rapidly changing slide projections showing
Whitechapel Art Gallery,
the album's cover 'graffitied' with lines of cocaine. In these works, recreation is London, 1969

108 109
 posited as anarchically counter-cultural, since both the 'outlaw' heroes and the
iconography of cocaine are seen to stand outside the law, and therefore the logic
of consumer spectacle." This space for non-alienated leisure, with the senses
heightened by cocaine, was intended to produce a liberatory experience
of the world, 'as opposed to that leisure of today which is the programmed
de sublimation', rigidly circumscribed by the clock, checking in and checking
out either side of work.'l

Group Material
Thus Oiticica opposed the mediated spectacle of consumer culture in New York,
proposing an authentic experience of self-realisation that would undercut and
resist repressive de sublimation. However, the use of cocaine removed this agenda
from the social and collective impetus that had originally driven the ParangoIes
and Penetrables, and prompted a more individualist mode of narcotic escapism.
Even so, Oiticica's work and writings anticipate the rethinking of notions of
public and private that was about to take place in the late I 970S - in which the
public was not viewed as discontinuous with the private, but intrinsically
constitutive of it. This meant that the literal (physical) activation of the viewer
advocated by Oiticica, Acconci, Graham and others was not necessarily seen as
any more 'political' in implication than an examination of two-dimensional
imagery, popular film or any cultural artefact demanding a more traditional
mode of engagement. For this next generation of artists, all culture was viewed
as capable of producing subjectivity since it forms the repertoire of images with
which we identify and emulate. Influenced by the feminist engagement with
the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the Marxist writings of Louis
Althusser, these artists viewed culture as an 'ideological state apparatus' that
art could meticulously examine and demystify in order to raise consciousness
and realise change. Through such analyses, it was hoped that art could address
concrete issues such as feminism, education, Latin American right-wing
militarism, homelessness and AIDS. Perhaps inevitably, the oppositional attitude
towards the market system and museum that had so strongly marked the
preceding decade was no longer an overriding concern for these artists. The
New York-based collective Group Material was typical of the proponents of this
new position in claiming that the alternative should no longer stand outside
the mainstream but integrate and subvert it: 'Participating in the system doesn't
mean that we must identify with it, stop criticising it, or stop improving the
little piece of turf on which we operate."4
Group Material, whose membership has oscillated between fifteen and three in
Group Material number since its inception in I979, is best known for blurring installation art and
Americana 1985 exhibition making.'s It began by running a community gallery on the lower East
Exhibition installation
Side of Manhattan, and its first show, The Inaugural Exhibition I980 included works
at the Whitney Museum
of American Art of art by Group Material members alongside that of artists from a variety of

111
110
 Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Untitled 1989-90
Installation at Serpentine
Gallery, London, 2000

backgrounds (local, professional and untrained). For the exhibition The People's with a critique of dominant culture. In other words, the aesthetic is always
Choice 1981, neighbours were invited to donate 'things that might not usually find already ideological, since authorities such as museums and cultural institutions
their way into an art gallery'. This activity was backed up by collaborative events have the power to determine which objects we view as art, and how. As Felix
focused on social interaction and collaboration, such as the Alienation Film Festival Gonzalez-Torres, a member of Group Material between 1987 and 1991, argued:
1980 and Food and Culture 1981. The group considered the collaborative process 'Aesthetics are not about politics; they are politics themselves. And this is how the
of this exhibition-making to be as important as the outcome, and the entire "political" can be best utilised since it appears so "natural". The most successful of
spectrum of activity directed towards the production of art and exhibitions all political moves are ones that don't appear to be "political"."9 Group Material
became the subject of its work as much as the final display. Ideologically, Group therefore showed work that was under-represented or excluded from the official
Material sought to position itself between the commercial galleries of Manhattan art world due to its sexual, political, ethnic, colloquial or unmarketable character.
and the ghetto oflow-funded 'alternative' spaces without status: 'We knew that As the AIDS crisis mounted during the 1980s, the group's agenda acquired fresh
in order for our project to be taken seriously by a large public, we had to resemble urgency, fuelled by the NEA censorship of 'homosexual' and 'blasphemous' art
a "real" gallery. Without these four walls of justification, our work would by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano in 19 89.
probably not be considered as art.',6 Debate and dialogue became an important aspect of Group Material's practice,
By 1982, gallery activities became less important, and the group found a new and its 1988 Dia installation Democracy was backed up with a series of round-table
venue, less an exhibition space than a hub of operations for organising off-site and town-meeting discussions, later compiled into a book. The installation itself
events." Group Material was also being invited to participate in institutional took on the appearance of a vibrant educational display, themed around the
shows, such as the Whitney Biennial and Documenta. The Castle- its subject of electoral politics, education, cultural participation and AIDS; the
contribution to Documenta 8,1987 -directly alluded to Franz Kafka's short story diversity of material accumulated served to form a cultural indictment of
of oppressive bureaucracy and took the form of a curated exhibition in which government policy and its handling of the AIDS crisis. Like Americana, Democracy
objects by forty other artists (including Barbara Kruger and Felix Gonzalez-Torres) presupposed a critically vigilant viewer, one who is able to decipher cultural
were hung alongside mass-produced objects and work by lesser-known artists. signs as symptoms of a larger (dominant) ideology. The work was designed to
For the Whitney Biennial, the installation Americana 1985, similarly took the instigate a critical mindset, which the viewer would ideally carry forward into the
form of an alternative exhibition within an exhibition, an 'officially approved world and actively use. Not unlike Broodthaers's exhibition of eagle iconography
salon des refuses'. This installation also juxtaposed work by artists and non-artists, in the Dusseldorf installation of the Musee d'Art Modeme, Group Material forged
as well as mass-media imagery and commercial products - from detergent in the viewer an identification with its demystificatory agenda, now allied to
packages named Bold, Future and Gain to Norman Rockwell saucers, biscuits, folk a set of political convictions specifically opposed to the conservative policies
music and an illustration of Kafka's Amerika by Tim Rollins and fifty children of a Republican US government.
from the South Bronx - in order to dissect and criticise the myth of the American
Dream. This curatorial approach reflected a belief that all cultural objects are Community of loss
equally important manifestations of ideology; Group Material's militant policy Arguably the most significant art to emerge from Group Material was that of
of inclusion attempted to avoid reiterating the oppressive structures and Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96), who abandoned the dogma of
hierarchies they perceived to be already dominant in culture: collaboration to produce an influential body of sculpture, photography and
Mirroring the various forms of representation that structure our understanding of culture, installation in his own right. His work is quite distinct from that of Group
our exhibitions bring together so·called fine art with products from supermarkets, mass- Material in both its formal and political approach: if the latter's exhibitions
cultural artifacts with historical objects, factual documentation with homemade projects. sought a clear dissemination of information and did not contrive to represent
We are not interested in making definitive evaluations or declarative statements, but a particular 'aesthetic', then the formal language of Minimalist and Conceptualist
in creating situations that offer our chosen subject as a complex and open-ended issue. art remained key concerns for Gonzalez-Torres, who invested their anonymous
We encourage greater audience participation through interpretation. aesthetic with a subtle political and emotional charge. In Untitled (Placebo) 199 1,
one thousand pounds of identical silver-cellophane wrapped sweets are laid out
As such, Group Material considered its curatorial method to be 'painfully in the shape of a long rectangle on the gallery floor. The audience is invited to
democratic'.,8 help themselves to a sweet, and the piece gradually disappears over the course of
Group Material's practice implies that any critique of art is interchangeable the exhibition. Like Gonzalez-Torres's 'paper stacks' of posters that viewers may

112 113
 take away with them, Untitled (Placebo) exists as an instruction and can be
endlessly remade, but its key idea is viewer participation, since it is the gallery
visitor who creates the work's precarious physical identity. Gonzalez-Torres
considered our interaction with his installations to be a metaphor for the .
relationship between
public and private, between personal and social, between the fear ofloss and the joy of
loving, of growing, of changing, of always becoming more, oflosing oneself slowly and
then being replenished all over again from scratch. I need the viewer, I need the public
interaction. Without a public these works are nothing, nothing. I need the public to
complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part
of my work, to join in.lo

Gonzalez-Torres began making the 'candy spills' in 1991, when facing the death
from AIDS of his partner Ross Laycock. The spills therefore acquire an almost
unbearable poignancy since their weight often alludes to that of Ross's body, or to
both their body weights combine.d, as in Untitled (Loverboys) 1991. Comprising 350
pounds of white and blue cellophane-wrapped sweets, this work forms a double
portrait of the two men, but also alludes to their impending separation through.
death. Gonzalez-Torres's work therefore signals a crisis in the type of political
subjectivity proposed thus far in this chapter, which has revolved around an
assertion of political will and identity. The idea of subjective activation that
recurs in the work ofBeuys, Oiticica and Group Material is based on a humanist
model of the subject as having an essence - which is realised through an
authentic experience of creativity or political representation. In this model,
there is an emphasis on community as a form of communion, a goal of
togetherness via a shared idea or aim. By contrast, Gonzalez-Torres proposes an
idea of community centred around loss, always on the verge of disappearance.
The viewing subject in his work is always implicitly incomplete, existing as
an effect of being-in-common with others rather than as a self-sufficient and
autonomous entity.]'
Doubled clocks (Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1991) and mirrors (Untitled (March 5th)
199 I) allude to this reciprocal dependency, as does Untitled (Arena) 1993 - two
pairs of headphones plugged into a single Walkman playing a recorded waltz
tune, which viewers may wear to dance with a partner beneath a garland
oflight bulbs. Yet it is the candy spills that form the clearest expression of
Gonzalez-Torres's conception of the subject as 'incomplete', since they establish
Felix Gonzalez-Torres a relationship between us precisely at the moment of disappearance: the
Untitled (Placebo - sweets allude to a vanishing body, and are in turn dispersed into the bodies
Landscape - for Rani)
of the viewers, a transition that is infused with both mortality and eroticism:
1993
Installation at Museum of
Contem porary Art, Los
I'm giving you this sugary thing; you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else's
Angeles, April-June body. And in this way, my work becomes part of so many other people's bodies ... For just
1994 a few seconds, I have put something sweet in someone's mouth and that is very sexy.l'

114 115
Relational aesthetics
The French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud (b.196S) regards Gonzalez-
Torres's work as exemplary of what he terms 'relational aesthetics', artistic
practices of the 1990S that take as their theoretical horizon 'the realm of human
interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent
and private symbolic space'.ll In other words, the works of art that Bourriaud
categorises as 'relational' seek to set up encounters between people in which
meaning is elaborated collectively rather than in the privatised space of individual
consumption. The audience of this work is therefore envisaged as plural: rather
than a one-to-one relationship between work of art and viewer, relational
art sets up situations in which viewers are addressed as a collective, social
mass; moreover, in many of these works we are given the structure to create
a community, however temporary or utopian this might be.
It is important to emphasise that Bourriaud does not regard relational aesthetics
as simply a theory of interactive art, but as a means oflocating contemporary
practice within the culture at large: relational art is seen as a direct response to
the shift from a goods- to a service-based economy in the I 980s and I 990S. It is also
seen as a response to the virtual relationships of the internet and globalisation,
which on the one hand have prompted a desire for more physical and face-to-face
interaction between people, while on the other inspiring artists to adopt a DIY
approach and to model their own 'possible universes'.l4 This emphasis on
immediacy is of course familiar to us from the 1960s, when artists placed a great
premium on the authenticity of our first-hand encounter with a space or their
own presence. But Bourriaud distances contemporary work from that of previous
generations, because today's artists have a different attitude towards social change:
instead of a 'utopian' agenda, he argues that artists today seek to set up functioning
'microtopias' in the here and now; instead of trying to change their environment,
they are simply 'learning to inhabit the world in a better way'.ll
Bourriaud lists many artists in his book, most of whom were featured in his
seminal exhibition Traffic at CAPC Bordeaux in 1993. One artist is mentioned
with metronomic regularity, and his work can therefore be taken as paradigmatic
of Bourriaud's theory: Rirkrit Tiravanija (b.1961).l6 His is typical of much of the
relational art that Bourriaud discusses, being somewhat low-impact in appearance,
and including photography, video, wall texts, books, objects to be used and
leftovers from the aftermath of an opening event. It is basically installation art in
format, but this is a term that Tiravanija and many of his contemporaries would
resist: rather than forming a coherent and distinctive transformation of space
(in the manner of Kabakov's 'total installation'), relational artworks insist upon
use rather than contemplation. This approach can be seen in Maurizio Cattelan's
hiring out of his gallery space at the 1993 Venice Biennale to a cosmetics company, Rirkrit Tiravanija
or in Christine Hill's setting up of the Volksboutique, a second-hand clothes shop Untitled (Still)
303 Gallery, New York,
at DocumentaX, 1997. 37
1992

116
117
 Rirkrit Tiravanija Rirkrit Tiravanija
Untitled (tomorrow is Untitled (tomorrow is
another day) exterior another day)
view at the Kiilnischer Installation view at the
Kunstverein, Kbln, 1996 Kiilnischer Kunstverein,
Kiiln,1996

Tiravanija is one of the most influential contemporary artists working in this But what kind of politics is at stake here? With Tiravanija's work, and the
way. He was born in Buenos Aires to Thai parents, raised in Thailand, Ethiopia and critical claims made for it, it is important to examine what is meant by the
Canada, and is currently based in New York. This nomadic global upbringing is 'political'. Because the work is inclusive and egalitarian in gesture, 'political' here
reflected in his hybrid installation-performances in which he cooks vegetable implies an idea of democracy. However, recent political theorists have shown that
curry or pad thai for people attending the museum or gallery in which he has inclusiveness does not automatically equate with democracy: instead, the public
been invited to work. The phrase 'lots of people' appears in the list of materials for sphere remains democratic only insofar as its naturalised exclusions are taken
each piece, indicating that the viewers' participation is crucial. In his first major into account and made open to contestation. In their influential book Hegemony
installation, Untitled (Still) 1992, at 303 Gallery, New York, Tiravanija moved and Socialist Strategy (1 985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that a fully
everything he found in the gallery office and storeroom into the main exhibition functioning democracy is not one in which friction and antagonisms between
space, including the director, who was obliged to work in public. In the storeroom people have disappeared; rather, democracy occurs when the frontiers between
he set up what was described by one critic as a 'makeshift refugee kitchen' with different positions continue to be drawn up and brought into debate. This is
paper plates, plastic knives and forks, gas burners, kitchen utensils, two folding because Laclau and Mouffe, following Lacan, understand the subject to have a
tables and some folding stoolsY In the gallery he cooked curries for visitors, and failed structural identity, and therefore to be dependent on identification in order to
the detritus, utensils and food packets became the exhibit whenever the artist proceed!' Because subjectivity is this process of identification, we are necessarily
wasn't there. A more elaborate version of this live installation was undertaken in incomplete entities - and antagonism is the type of relationship that emerges
Untitled (tomorrow is another day) 1997, at the Kolnische1 Kunstverein. Here, between such incomplete subjects. 43 When Tiravanija provides an 'experience of
Tiravanija built a wooden reconstruction of his New York apartment that was togetherness for everybody', it could be argued that relations of conflict are erased
open to the public twenty-four hours a day. People could use the kitchen to make rather than sustained, because the work speaks only to a community whose
food, wash themselves in his bathroom, sleep in the bedroom, or hang out and members have something in common: an interest in art, or free food. 44 Indeed, for
chat in the living-room. The catalogue accompanying the Kunstverein project the majority of visitors to a Tiravanija installation, the overwhelming impression
quotes a selection of newspaper articles and reviews, all of which reiterate the is one of arriving too late - having been excluded from the opening night's party.
curator's assertion that 'this unique combination of art and life offered an Underlying Bourriaud's argument about relational aesthetics is the
impressive experience of togetherness to everybody'.l9 Several critics, as well as presumption that dialogue is in and of itself democratic. This idea is found
Tiravanija himself, have observed that this involvement of the audience and the frequently in writing on Tiravanija's work. Udo Kittelmann, for example, has
fostering of relationships between them is the main focus of his work: the food stated: 'Groups of people prepared meals and talked, took a bath or occupied the
is a means to allow other issues to develop. +0 bed. Our fear that the art-living-space might be vandalised did not come true ...
Tiravanija therefore seeks to set up literal relationships between the visitors The art-space lost its institutional function and finally turned into a free social
to his work, and this active participation is privileged over the detached space.'45 Tiravanija's installations reflect Bourriaud's understanding of the
contemplation more conventionally associated with gallery experience. His work conditions produced by relational artworks as fundamentally harmonious,
insists that the viewer is physically present in a particular situation at a particular because they are addressed to a community of viewing subjects with something in
time - in this case, eating the food that he cooks, alongside other visitors in common. This is in contrast to the works of Gonzalez-Torres, where the emphasis is
a communal situation. As we have seen elsewhere in this book, this mode of less on communion than on what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a 'community at loose
considering the work of art as a trigger for participation has a history - Kaprow's ends', forever slipping out of grasp. Relational aesthetics understands the political
Happenings, Acconci's performances, Oiticica's nests and Beuys's declaration that only in the loosest sense of advocating dialogue over monologue (the one-way
'everyone is an artist'. A rhetoric of democracy and emancipation accompanied communication that the Situationists equated with spectacle); in all other
each of these precursors, and this continues to be the case with Bourriaud!' respects it remains an assertion of political will (in the creation of a mini-utopia).
He regards the open-ended, participatory work of art as more ethical and political Ultimately, Tiravanija's works tend not to destabilise our self-identificatory
in implication than the autonomous, finite object. The interactive premise of mechanisms but to affirm them, and collapse into everyday leisure - the
relational art is seen as inherently superior to optical contemplation (which is repressive desublimation opposed so passionately by Oiticica. The microtopia
deemed passive and disengaged) because the work of art is a 'social form' capable arguably gives up on the idea of transformation in public culture and reduces its
of producing human relationships. As a consequence, the work is understood to scope to the pleasures of the people in a private group who identify with each
be political in implication and emancipatory in effect. other as gallery goers.

118 119
Relational antagonism Santiago Sierra
Wall Enclosing a Space
By contrast, the 'antagonism' theory of democracy put forward by Laclau and entrance (left) and rear
Mouffe is underpinned by an idea of subjectivity as irremediably decentred view (below right)
and incomplete. It can be used to illuminate the work of an artist conspicuously Spanish Pavilion,
Venice Biennale.
ignored by Bourriaud: Santiago Sierra (b.1966), a Spanish artist who lives and
June-Nov 2003
works in Mexico. The work of Sierra, like that of Tiravanija, involves the literal
setting-up of relationships between people: himself, the participants in his work,
and viewers. But Sierra's 'actions' since the late 1990S have been organised around
a manipulation of relationships that are more complex (and more controversial)
than those produced by the artists associated with relational aesthetics. Sierra has
attracted tabloid attention and belligerent criticism for some of his more extreme
actions, such as 160cm line tattooed on four people 2000 and A person paidfor 3 60
continuous working hours 2000. These actions and live installations are -like much
performance art of the 1970S- ephemeral and documented in the form of casual
black and white photographs, a short text, or video. Sierra's work nevertheless
significantly develops the 1970S performance art tradition in his use of other
people as performers, and in his emphasis on their remuneration: everything and
everyone has a price. His work can therefore be seen as a sobering meditation
on the social and political conditions that permit such disparities in people's
'prices' to emerge.
Unlike the emphasis on dialogue for its own sake (as a representation of
communication) in the work of Tiravanija, Sierra's installations often imply that
silence can be as forceful as speech. In his exhibition at Kunst-Werke in Berlin
2000, viewers were confronted with a series of makeshift cardboard boxes,
each of which concealed a Chechnyan refugee seeking asylum in Germany. The
boxes were a low-budget, Arte Povera take on Tony Smith's celebrated 6 x 6 foot
sculpture Die 1962, which Michael Fried famously described as exerting the same
effect on the viewer as 'the silent presence of another person'. In Sierra's piece,
this silent presence was literal: since it is illegal in Germany for immigrants to be
paid for work, the refugees' participation could not be announced by the gallery.
Their lack of status was highlighted by their literal invisibility beneath the
cardboard boxes: 6 In such works, Sierra seems to argue that the embodied
perception posited by Minimalism is politicised precisely through the quality
of its relationship to other people - or more precisely, its lack of relationship.
Presence and perception, then, are shown to be pre-regulated by legal and
economic exclusions.
Sierra's work for the Spanish pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, Wall
Enclosing a Space, involved sealing off the pavilion's interior with concrete blocks
from floor to ceiling. On entering the pavilion, viewers were confronted by a
hastily constructed yet impregnable wall that rendered the galleries inaccessible.
Visitors carrying a Spanish passport, however, were invited to enter via the back
of the building, where two immigration officers inspected their documents.

120 121
 All non-Spanish nationals were denied entry to the gallery, whose interior
contained nothing but grey paint peeling from the walls, left over from the
previous year's exhibition. Once again, the type of Minimal ism espoused
by Sierra charges phenomenological perception with the political: his works
seek to expose how identity (here, national identity) is, like public space, riven
with social and legal exclusions. 47
It could be argued that Sierra's installations and actions are nihilistic, simple
reiterations of an oppressive status quo. Yet he embeds his work into 'institutions'
other than contemporary art (immigration, the minimum wage, traffic
congestion, illegal street commerce, homelessness) in order to highlight the
divisions enforced by these contexts. Crucially, though, he does not present these
territories as reconciled (unlike Tiravanija's seamless fusion of the museum with
the cafe or bar), but as spheres fraught with tension, unstable yet open to change.
Our response to witnessing Sierra's live installations and actions - whether the
participants face the wall, sit under boxes, or are tattooed with a line of ink - is
quite different in character from the 'togetherness' of relational aesthetics. The
work does not offer an experience of human empathy that smoothes over the
awkward situation before us, but a pointed racial/economic non-identification:
'this is not me'. The persistence of this friction, its awkwardness and discomfort,
alerts us to the relational antagonism of Sierra's work.

Making art politically

The Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn (b.I957) has repeatedly rejected the term
'installation' as a description for his practice, instead preferring the commercial
and pragmatic resonance of the word 'display' .4 8 What he seems to dislike most
about the term 'installation art' is its reduction of the work to a medium or set of
conventions within which it can be qualitatively measured; instead he regards his
practice as sculptural in the broadest sense, and he explicitly references Beuys's
concept of Social Sculpture. It would certainly be wrong to categorise Hirschhorn
as an installation artist, since his work takes many forms: impermanent outdoor
'monuments' dedicated to philosophers, makeshift 'altars' celebrating writers and
artists, and 'kiosks' displaying objects and information. Yet when shown inside
the gallery, his work is unequivocally installational in format, immersing the
viewer in an overload of found images, videos and photocopies, bound together
in cheap, perishable materials such as cardboard, gaffer tape and tinfoil.
Hirschhorn is well-known for his assertion that he does not make political art,
but makes art politically. Significantly, this political commitment does not take
Santiago Sierra
the form of activating the viewer in a space:
Workers who cannot
be paid. renumerated I do not want to invite or oblige viewers to become interactive with what I do; I do not want
to remain inside
to activate the public. I want to give of myself, to engage myself to such a degree that
cardboard boxes
Kunst-Werke, Berlin, viewers confronted with the work can take part and become involved, but not as actors.'9
Sept 2000 Hirschhorn therefore represents an important shift in installation art's

122 123
conception of the viewer, one that is matched by his assertion of art's autonomy.
Since the 1920S (and even earlier), artists and theorists have denigrated the idea of
art as a privileged and independent sphere, and instead sought to fuse it with 'life'.
Today, when art has become all too subsumed into life - as leisure, entertainment
and business - artists such as Hirschhorn are reasserting the autonomy of artistic
activity as a separate discipline. As a consequence, Hirschhorn does not regard his
work to be 'open-ended' or requiring completion by the viewer, since the politics
of his practice derive instead from how the work is made:
To make art politically means to choose materials that do not intimidate, a format that
doesn't dominate, a device that does not seduce. To make art politically is not to submit to
an ideology or to denounce the system, in opposition to so-called 'political art'. It is to work
with the fullest energy against the principle of'quality'.'o

Thus a rhetoric of democracy also adheres to Hirschhorn's work, but it is now

manifested in concerns other than for the viewer's literal activation: rather, it
appears in decisions regarding format, materials and location, such as his 'altars'
that emulate the ad hoc memorials of flowers and toys at the site of an accident,
and which are located in peripheral sites around a city." In these works - as in the
installations Pole-Selfand Laundrette, both 2001 - found images, texts, adverts and
photocopies are juxtaposed to contextualise consumer banality with political and
military atrocities.
Many of Hirschhorn's concerns came together in the Bataille Monument 2002
at Documenta 11. Located in Nordstadt, a suburb of Kassel several miles away
from the main Documenta venues, Hirschhorn's Monument comprised three
installations in large makeshift shacks erected on a lawn between two housing
estates, a temporary bar run by one of the local families, and a sculpture of a tree.
The shacks were constructed from Hirschhorn's signature materials of cheap
timber, foil, plastic sheeting and brown tape; the first housed a library of books
and videos grouped around five Bataillean themes: word, image, art, sex and sport.
Several worn sofas, a TV and video were also provided, and the whole installation
was designed to facilitate familiarisation with the philosopher, of whom
Hirschhorn describes himself a 'fan'. The other shacks housed a TV studio, and
an installation presenting information about Bataille's life and work. To reach
the Bataille Monument, visitors had to participate in a further component of the
work: securing a lift from a Turkish cab company that was contracted to ferry
Documenta visitors to and from the site. Viewers were then stranded at the
Monument until a return cab became available, during which time they would
inevitably make use of the bar.
In locating the Monument in the middle of a community whose ethnic and
Thomas Hirschhorn
economic status did not immediately mark it as a target audience for Documenta,
Batai/le Monument
Hirschhorn contrived a curious rapprochement between the influx of art tourists Documenta 11 , Kassel,
and the area's residents. Rather than the local populace becoming subject to what June -Sept 2002

124 125
 Thomas Hirschhorn
Batail/e Monument
Documenta 11, Kassel,
June-Sept 2002

he calls the 'zoo effect', Hirschhorn's project made the art public feel like hapless
intruders. Even more disruptively, in light of the international art world's
intellectual pretensions, Monumenttook the local inhabitants seriously as
potential Bataille readers. This gesture induced a range of responses amongst.
visitors, including accusations that Hirschhorn's gesture was inappropriate
and patronising. This unease revealed the fragile conditioning of the art world's
self-constructed identity and intellectual ambitions. The complicated play
of identificatory and dis-identificatory mechanisms at work in the content,
construction and location of the Bataille Monumentwere radically and
disruptively thought-provoking. Rather than offering, as the Documenta
handbook claims, a reflection on 'communal commitment', the Bataille Monument
served to destabilise (but also potentially liberate) any sense of what community
identity might be, or of what it means to be a 'fan' of art and philosophy.
A work like the Bataille Monumentis of course dependent on context for impact,
but it could theoretically be restaged elsewhere, in comparable circumstances.
Ultimately, it is not important that it is an installation, because the viewer
is no longer required to fulfil a literally participatory role, but instead to be
a thoughtful and reflective visitor. The independent stance in Hirschhorn's work
- collaboratively produced, but a product of a single artist's vision - assures the
autonomy of the work, but also of the viewer, who is no longer coerced into
fulfilling the artist's interactive requirements: This is something essential to
art: reception is never its goal. What counts for me is that my work provides
material to reflect upon. Reflection is an activity.'"
There has been a long tradition of activated spectatorship in works of art across
many media, from experimental German theatre of the I920S (Bertold Brecht) to
new-wave film (Jean-Luc Godard), from Minimalist sculpture's fore grounding
of the viewer's presence to socially engaged performance art (Mierle Laderman
Ukeles or Christine Hill, for example). The examination of works in this chapter
shows that it is no longer enough to say that activating the viewer tout court is
democratic, for every artwork - even the most 'open-ended' - determines in
advance the type of participation that the viewer may have within it. 53
Hirschhorn would argue that such pretences to emancipation are no longer
necessary: all art - whether immersive or not - can be a critical force that
appropriates and reassigns value, decentralising our thoughts from the
predominant and pre-existing consensus. Not tied any more to the direct
activation of viewers, or to our literal participation in the work, installation art
now witnesses its own implosion - and finds itself many miles from the avant-
garde call to collapse art and life with which it began.

Thomas Hirschhorn
Bataille Monument
Documenta 11, Kassel,
June-Sept 2002

126 127
 CONCLUSION

'Perhaps all Qur models, not only of history but of the aesthetic, are secretly models of
the subject' Hal Foster'

Insisting on the viewer's first-hand presence in the work, installation art has come
to justify its claims to political and philosophical significance on the basis of two
arguments: activated spectators hip and the idea of the dispersed or decentred subject.
This argument supports a consensus widely held among academics, curators,
critics and practitioners of contemporary art that the decentring of normative
(i.e. modern) subjectivity is today afait accompli. In this conclusion these claims
are re-examined, alongside the question of whether the achievements of critical
postmodernism can be considered so unproblematic ally accomplished. The
discourses identifiable as shaping the formation of the latter - phenomenology,
poststructuralism, feminism, post-colonialism - raise a number of problems and
contradictions that persistently intrude on this history of installation art as
presented thus far.

Self-reflexive and fragmented

Each of the preceding chapters has been organised around a theory that dissolves
what it considers to be an outdated modern conception of the subject as coherent,
transparent and self-reflexive.' These 'new' models are argued to fragment the
subject by unconscious representations (Freud), by the mutual imbrication of
subject and object (Merleau-Ponty), or by non-coincidence and alienation from
itself (Lac an, Barthes, Laclau and Mouffe). Yet in much writing about installation
art, the theories on which these models are based are conflated with both the
subject matter of the work and our experience of it.
The installation Empty Club 1996, by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco,
comprised a series of interventions in a disused gentlemen's club in London.
One of these featured an oval, pocketless billiard table, above which was a red
ball, hanging from the ceiling by a fine wire like a pendulum. In the catalogue,
the critic Jean Fisher notes that in navigating the installation, visitors came
to understand that an imperial world view was being undermined by a 'cryptic
or hermetic order for which the game rules have not been provided':

In a deterritorialised world that no longer possesses a centre (a telos- an organising

principle such as God, the Imperium, or even the gentlemen's club), there can be only a
multiplicity of inflections or contingent points of view ... in Oval Billiard Table, the
swinging pendulum-ball challenges the authority of the gravitational centre - a position
Gabriel Orozco which we cannot occupy. Moreover, unlike a regular billiard table, Orozco's pocketless
EmptyClub ellipse provides no privileged position from which to survey the field, but an indefinite
50 S1. James's, London,
number of equally tangential points of view. And perhaps significantly, it in itselfdoes not
1996
Commissioned and
present a game of elimination (no balls or players are knocked out of play) although the
produced by Artangel, relations of its parts may change; in other words, displacement is an event inherent in the
London work's internal relations as well as those with the spectators or players."

128
She goes on to argue that because visitors are 'unable to map themselves within approach creates a secondary, veiled object: the viewer's consciousness as
an entirely familiar field' they 'lose a sense of certainty - and become "decentred'''. a subject.'s Graham's comment points to the ambiguity at the heart of installation
In other words, Fisher makes a direct analogy between the viewer's experience art: does the viewer's consciousness become the subject/object, or the subject
of the work and a politically correct viewing subject - as if Orozco's installation, matter? Installation art and its literature elides the two subjects of its address-
by inducing a sense of disorientation, could produce a viewer who identifies with the literal viewing subject (who enters the work as a 'veiled object') and an
a decentred postcolonial subject position. Yet how is this 'fragmented' viewer abstract model of the subject (of which the viewer is ideally made aware through
to recognise his or her own displacement unless from a position of rational being in the work).
centredness? Throughout Fisher's text, and many like it, we find the viewer of This tension - between the dispersed and fragmented model subject of post-
installation art posited both as a decentred subject yet also as a detached onlooker, structuralist theory and a self-reflexive viewing subject capable of recognising its
the ground of perceptual experience. own fragmentation - is demonstrated in the apparent contradiction between
This same problem gnaws at the account of installation art in the present book: installation art's claims to both decentre and activate the viewer. After all,
the decentring triggered by installation art is to be experienced and rationally decentring implies the lack of a unified subject, while activated spectatorship
understood from a position of centred subjectivity. Everything about installation calls for a fully present, autonomous subject of conscious will (that is, a 'modern'
art's structure and modus operandi repeatedly valorises the viewer's first-hand subject). As argued in Chapter Four, the conception of democracy as antagonism
presence - an insistence that ultimately reinstates the subject (as a unified entity), put forward by Laclau and Mouffe goes some way towards resolving this apparent
no matter how fragmented or dispersed our encounter with the art turns out conflict; even so, the majority of examples discussed in this book are underpinned
to be. Perhaps more precisely, installation art instates the subject as a crucial by a more traditional model of political activation and therefore of 'modern'
component of the work - unlike body art, painting, film and so on, which subjectivity. As such, they operate on two levels, addressing the literal viewer
(arguably) do not insist upon our physical presence in a space. 4 What installation as a rational individual, while simultaneously positing an ideal or philosophical
art offers, then, is an experience of centring and decentring: work that insists on model of the subject as decentred. Both types of viewer are implied, but it is
our centred presence in order then to subject us to an experience of decentring. impossible to reduce one to the other: I (Claire Bishop) am not interchangeable
In other words, installation art does not just articulate an intellectual notion with the subject of phenomenological consciousness posited by a Bruce Nauman
of dispersed subjectivity (reflected in a world without a centre or organising installation. But paradoxically, I (Claire Bishop) am subjected by Nauman's work
principle); it also constructs a set in which the viewing subject may experience to an experiment that fragments my perception of myself as a self-contained
this fragmentation first-hand. and coherent ego.

Viewer and model Aesthetic judgement

Thus the 'decentring' of the viewer staged by contemporary art is not as simple Some would argue that this split sense of the 'subject' - as both centred and
and automatic as it first appears. As we have observed, installation art's emphasis decentred - indicates a failure of installation art, not least because this is an age
on first-hand experience arises in the 1960s as a response to mediated consumer marked so strongly by proclamations that the philosophical subject is not simply
culture and from opposition to the work of art as commodity. But in doing so decentred, but completely dead. 6 This argument might run as follows: installation
it admits a flood of conflicting appeals to the viewer's authentic experience of art feeds off the poststructuralist project to disperse the singular and unified
'heightened consciousness' (of body, self, place, time, social group) as- subject and to propose an alternative model of subjectivity as fragmented and
paradoxically - both an assertion of and a decentring of subjectivity. This is multiple; yet in doing this, installation art's repeated emphasisis on the need
because installation art plays on an ambiguity between two types of subject: the for a literal viewer makes of us a point of synthesis that undermines such
literal viewer who steps into the work, and an abstract, philosophical model of the deconstructions of interiority, self-presence and mastery. However, the situation
subject that is postulated by the way in which the work structures this encounter. is more nuanced and complex than this argument permits: installation art
To an extent this observation was pre-empted by Dan Graham in 1978, who posits us as both centred and decentred, and this conflict is itself decentring since
noted that 1960s art was a 'new form of Kantian idealism' in which 'the isolated it structures an irresolvable antagonism between the two. Installation art calls
spectator's "subjective" consciousness-in-itself replaces the art object to be for a self-present viewing subject precisely in order to subject him/her to the
perceived-for-itself; his/her perception is the product of the art. Thus, instead of process of fragmentation. When successful, this involves an overlap between the
eliminating the physically present art object, environmental art's meditative philosophical model of subjectivity presupposed by the work and the production

130 131
 of this model in the literal viewer who experiences i t first-hand. By this means,
installation art aims not only to problematise the subject as decentred, but also
to produce it.
This interplay is what differentiates the viewer's presence in installation art
from that implied by Michael Fried's famous (and quasi-religious) assertion that
'presentness is grace'.' The differences are clear: for Fried, 'presence' refers to the
work of art, rather than the viewer, who is virtually eclipsed by the work of art
(ideally, abstract painting and sculpture); Fried's model of the subject is centred
and transcendent, adequate to the centred and self-sufficient painting before us.
Installation art, by contrast, insists upon the viewer's physical presence precisely
in order to subject it to an experience ofdecentring, a transition adequate to the context-
dependent work in which we stand. But herein lies a crucial difference between
installation art's use of philosophy and what the latter actually articulates.
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is an account of our everyday relationship to
the world and is not intended to engender specific mechanisms of subjective
fragmentation; likewise, for Freud and Lacan we are 'decentred' at all times,
not just when experiencing a work of art. By seeking to contrive a moment of
decentring, installation art implicitly structures the viewer a priori as centred.
Even so, it is the achievement of installation art that on some occasions (and these
may only be very rare), the ideal model of the subject overlaps with our literal
experience, and we genuinely do feel confused, disoriented and destabilised
by our encounter with the work.
The degree of proximity between model subject and literal viewer may
therefore provide a criterion of aesthetic judgement for installation art: the
closer the ideal model to the literal viewer's experience, the more compelling
the installation. By way of conclusion, it is worth considering the broader
significance of the motivations underpinning the history of installation art as it
has been presented here. It has been argued in these pages that installation art is
closely allied to the concerns of poststructuralist theory, and shares its call for
emancipation. It is possible to say that installation art's insistence on the viewer's
experience aims to thrust into question our sense of stability in and mastery
over the world, and to reveal the 'true' nature ~f our subjectivity as fragmented
and decentred. By attempting to expose us to the 'reality' of our condition as
decentred subjects without closure, installation art implies that we may become
adequate to this model, and thereby more equipped to negotiate our actions in
the world and with other people. That this is to be achieved by our literal
immersion in a discrete space contiguous with the 'real world' has been the
Carsten Holier tacit manifesto - and achievement - of installation art.
Flying Machine 1996
Installation at the
Contemporary Arts
Center, Cincinnati,
Sept2000

132 133
NOTES

Introduction Chapter 1
1 Readers will note an inconsistency of tense in this book. 1 Georges Hugnet, Texposition internationale du 16 Kaprow, quoted in Michael Kirby, Happenings: An 32 Samaras, in Alan Solomon, 'An Interview with Lucas 50 Ibid. social responsibility of the infant who plays with trash
If pieces are still extant they are discussed in the present surrealisme en 1938', Preuves, no. 91,1958, P-47. Illustrated Anthology, London, '966, P.46. Although Samaras', ArtJorum, October 1966, p.44. 51 Mark Dion, in Lisa Corrin, Miwon Kwon and Norman and filth.' Samuel Cauman, The Living Museum:
tense; if they have been destroyed they are discussed in 2 Ilya Kabakov, On The TotalInstallation, Bonn, '995, p.2 75. Happenings were durational and 'scored' (in the loosest 33 Samaras, cited in Levin, op.cit., P.57. Bryson, Mark Dion, London, '997, p.I6. Experiences ofan Art Historian and Museum Director,
the past tense. This problem of tense also reveals much All subsequent Kabakov quotes are from this book unless sense) for performance, Kaprow acknowledged that there 34 Ibid., P.57. 52 Dion, 'Field Work and the Natural History Museum: Alexander Domer, New York, '958, P.36.
about the status of installation art: it does not easily lend otherwise stated. was very little difference between the two, describing 35 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, 'Fantasy Interview by Alex Coles', de-, dis-, ex-, vol. 3, '999, P.44. 63 Nina Kandinsky, quoted in Bazzoli, op.cit_, p.I2.
itself to discussion as an object detachable from the 3 This is what Freud calls the 'dream-work', a four-fold Environments and Happenings as 'the passive and active and the Origins of Sexuality', in Victor Burgin, James 53 Kelly, in Margaret Iversen, Douglas Crimp and Homi 64 F. Vordemberge-Gildewart, in MERZ: Ecrits choisies et
conditions under which it is seen. activity of condensation, displacement, considerations of sides of a single coin': 'Environments are generally quiet Donald, Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations ofFantasy, London, Bhabha, Mary Kelly, London, '997, P·z9· presentes par Mac Dachy, Paris, '990, p. 350.
2 Poststructuralism is part of but not reducible to representability and secondary revision. The dream-work situations, existing for one or for several persons to walk '986, p_22. 54 Kelly, Imaging Desire, Cambridge, Mass, '996, P.I69. 65 Kurt Schwitters, 'Merzmalerei', in Der Sturm,
postmodernism. It refers to a disparate group of thinkers ensures that all latent dream-thoughts are censored (or or crawl into, lie down, or sit in. One looks, sometimes 36 Thek, in Richard Flood, 'Paul Thek: Real 55 See for example the Fondation Cartier in Paris (1984), July '9 I 9, cited in John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, LondoR,
who came to prominence after 1968, particularly in disguised) in manifest images. The meaning of the dream listens, eats, drinks, or rearranges the elements as though Misunderstanding', ArtJorum, October '98" P.49. the Saatchi Gallery in London (1985), Kunst-Werke in '985, P·5 0.
France, and which includes jacques Derrida, Michel therefore lies not in its latent content but in the relation moving household objects around. Other Environments 37 The inclusion of a sculpted figure in this work did not Berlin (1990), the Museum fiir Moderne Kunst in 66 Daniel Buren, 'The Function of the Studio' (I97I),
Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, between the manifest and latent dream-thoughts, that is, ask that the visitor-participant recreate and continue the preclude a 'space' for the viewer because, unlike the work Frankfurt (1991), the De Pont foundation in Tilburg October, no. ro, Fall '979, PP.51-8.
Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, as well as transitional figures like in the operations of the dream-work. Sigmund Freud, The work's inherent processes. For human beings at least, all ofKienholz and Segal, the figure in question was (1992), the Fondazione Prada in Milan (1993), and 67 Gregor Schneider, in interview with Ulrich Loock iR
Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan. Their ideas do not Interpretation ofDreams(I900), Pelican Freud Library, vol. of these characteristics suggest a somewhat thoughtful supposedly 'dead' -an object rather than another subject. Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (1996). The late '990S Gregor Schneider: Das Totes Haus Ur, I985- I 99 7,
belong to any specific school of thought, but can be 4, Harmondsworth, '974, chapter 6, 'The Dream Work'. and meditative demeanour.' Kaprow, Assemblage, 38 Thek, letter to Felix Valk at Lijnbaancentrum, witnessed yet more new galleries, often housed in Stadtisches Museum Abteilberg Mbnchengladbach,
characterised by a desire to resist grounding discourse in All subsequent Freud quotes are from this book unless Environments and Happenings, New York, '966, P.I84. Rotterdam, r978, reprinted in Paul Thele The Wonderful elaborate architectural statements that rival the art Portikus Frankfurt am Main, Galerie Foksal Warszaw,
metaphysics, an insistence on plurality and an instability otherwise stated. 17 Kaprow, cited in The Hansa Gallery Revisited, New York, World That Almost Was, Barcelona, '995, p.2 30. shown inside: the Bilbao Guggenheim (1997), Kunsthaus '997. All quotes by Schneider that follow are taken from
of meaning, and an abandonment of the Enlightenment 4 Michael Fried famously argued that some paintings are 1997, n.p. 39 Thek, in Flood, op.cit., P.53. Bregenz (r997), Kiasma, Helsinki (1998), Mass MOCA this catalogue.
concept of the subject put forward by Descartes. 'absorptive' while others are 'theatrical', depending on 18 Kaprow, 'Happenings in the New York Scene', op.cit., 40 Paul Thek, in interview with Harald Szeemann, '973, (1999), and Tate Modern (2000). 68 Nelson, interviewed by David Burrows, Everything
3 For example, Jean Fisher, writing on Gabriel Orozco's whether the depicted figures ignore or establish eye p.z!. reproduced in Paul Thek: The Wonderful World, op.cit., 56 The final line of Reiss's book From Margin to Centre: The Magazine, issue 3.2, March 2000, P.3.
installation Empty Club '996, notes that visitors are contact with the beholder (Fried, Absorption and 19 Kelley, op.cit., pp.xi-xxvi. p.208. Spaces ofInstallation Art argues that 'tangible evidence of 69 One reviewer explicitly linked this effect of
'unable to map themselves within an entirely familiar Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age ofDiderot, 20 john Dewey, Art as Experience, London, '934, P·I9· 41 Thek, in Flood, op.cit., P.52. Installation art's evolutionary arc toward the helplessness to that described by Freud when he found
field, lose a sense of certainty - and become "decentred"': Berkeley and London, 1980). If I refer to painting in 21 Kaprow, 'Happenings in the New York Scene', op.cit., 42 Robert Pincus-Witten, 'Thek's Tomb ... absolute conventional, the final move to the centre' is to be found himself lost in a maze of unfamiliar streets but
'Orozco'sdecentring operation produces a compelling general as 'absorptive', it is in the sense that the viewer p.22. fetishism .. .', Artforum, November '967, P_25. in the merger between the Museum of Modern Art, New involuntarily returning again and again to the same place
analogy with current cultural debates on centre- projects onto and is therefore identified with the subject 22 Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, 43 Thek, in Flood, op.cit., P.52. York, and the alternative venue PSr in 1999. Op cit., p.I 57. -the red-light district. Rachel Withers, 'Mike Nelson,
periphery relations. In a deterritorialised world that no of the art. This contrast between loss of self and op.cit., P.I56. 44 Flood, in Paul Thek: The Wonderful World, op.cit., p.2 I 7. 57 Meireles, cited in Paulo Herkenhoff, Gerardo Matt's Gallery', Artforum, April 2000, P.I5!. The much-
longer possesses a centre (a telos -an organising principle heightened awareness of self will be explored further in 23 Ibid., p.I66. His work can also be seen as a response to the commercial Mosquera, Dan Cameron, CUdo Meireles, London, cited passage to which she refers is from Freud on 'The
such as God, the Imperium, or even the gentleman's club), Chapters Two and Three. 24 Ibid. p.I6I; Kirby" op.cit., p.20. imperatives of the art world, which would not be gratified r999,p·I7· 'i Uncanny' (1919), Standard Edition XVII, P.237.
there can be only a multiplicity of inflections or 5 Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, 25 Review byV.P., Art News, january '96" p.I2. by his insistence on recycled materials (the components 58 Paulo Herkenhoffhas argued that the vaulted bones 70 Mike Nelson, conversation with the author, 16 july
contingent points of view ... [Orozco's work] provides no Salvador Dall and the Surrealist Exhibition, Cambridge, 26 Kaprow, 'The Legacy ofjackson Pollock', op.cit., P.9. of the Pyramid!A Work in Progress were reworked for Ark, of Meireles's metaphorical cathedral are cannibalistic, zoO! and 14 April zooo.
privileged position from which to survey the field, but an Mass, 2001. See for example, his description in 'Happenings in the Pyramid at Documenta 5, 1972, and again for Ark, Pyramid, quantifying 'the human cost of evangelisation and its 71 The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent was entered
indefinite number of equally tangential points of view.' 6 Marcel Duchamp, in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with New York Scene', op.cit., p.I 5: 'blankets keep falling over Easter at Duisberg in 1973). Thek's collaborator Anne connections with the exploitation of wealth in the through an unmarked security door at Tate Britain, while
Fisher, 'The Play of the World', Empty Club, London, '998, Marcel Duchamp, London, 197 I, p.8z; Man Ray, SelfPortrait, everything from the ceiling. A hundred iron barrels and Wilson notes that 'Paul had a strong sense of overturning colonies', and making visible 'what has been obscured Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted, at London's lCA,
pp.r9-2o. London, '963, P.287. Marcel jean, by contrast, reports that gallon wine jugs hanging on ropes swing back and forth, the money-changers in the temple and for Paul this by history: the conquering and devouring of humankind, saw some visitors mistakenly wandering off into another
the soundtrack comprised a loud speaker blaring out 'the crashing like church bells, spewing glass all over ... a wall temple was art'. Wilson, 'Voices from the Era', in ibid., as well as the physical connection between the body building that was unconnected to the exhibition.
German army's parade march'. Marcel jean, The History of of trees tied with coloured rags advances on the crowd .. P· 20 4· and God which occurs in the holy space ofthe church'. 72 Mike Nelson, in 'Mike Nelson interviewed by
Surrealist Painting, London, 1960, p.z8!. there are muslin telephone booths for all with a record 45 See also the development of Land art (earthworks Ibid., P.59. Will Bradley' (leaflet), London, zo03, n.p.
7 'Duchamp had thought of installing electric "magic player or microphone ... you breathe in noxious fumes, or inseparable from their remote location); Conceptualism 59 Hamilton, Public Art Fund talk, Cooper Union, 73 jonathan Jones, 'Species of Spaces', Frieze,
eyes", so that lights would have gone on automatically as the smell of hospitals and lemon juice. A nude girl runs (an art of ideas, documented in typescripts, Xeroxes and New York, 28 September 1999. june-july-August 2000, P.76.
soon as the spectator had broken an invisible ray when after the racing pool of a searchlight, throwing spinach reportage-style photographs); performance art 60 For example, words are singed or rubbed out of books 74 Mike Nelson, op.cit., n.p.
passing in front of the paintings. The scheme proved too greens into it. Slides and movies, projected over walls and (ephemeral and time-based); multiples (mass-produced by a performer, or broken down phonetically in
difficult to carry out and had to be abandoned.' jean, ibid., people, depict hamburgers.' and widely disseminable); and Video art (often explicitly soundtracks.
pp.28I-Z. 27 The trope of 'haunting' by which Breton opens his opposed to commercial television and mainstream 61 Hans Richter, cited in Fran~ois Bazzoli, Kurt Schwitters:
8 In the following days, the public soon pocketed the novel Nadja (r928) expresses this sense of self-dislocation: cinema in both presentation and content). l'artm'amuse beaucoup, Paris, I991, pp.71~2. He continues:
entire stock of torches and there was no alternative in 'I retrace my steps over "what I must have ceased to be in 46 Guy Debord provided the most forceful discussion of 'There were also strange objects, and even more than
the end but to install permanent lighting. See jean, ibid., orderto be who I am'''. Breton, Nadja, Paris, '982, p.!. this idea in Society of the Spectacle(I968): spectacle is strange - as for example a piece of a dental bridge to
p.282. 28 Kaprow, 'Happenings in the New York Scene', op.cit, equated with 'false consciousness': 'the empire of modern which some teeth were still attached, or a little bottle of
9 Hugnet, op.cit., P-47. p.r6. passivity ... immune from human activity ... the opposite urine bearing the name of the 'donor'. All these were
10 Andre Breton, I.'Amour Fou, Paris, 1937, p.60. 29 Cecile Whiting, A Taste for Pop, Cambridge, r997, of dialogue'. Debord, Society ofthe Spectacle, New York, placed in individual holes kept for this purpose. Some of
11 Kachur" op.cit., pp.2I6-7. PP·34-5,4 8. '994,pp·'5- 7· us had several grottoes - for this we were dependent on
12 Allan Kaprow, 'The Legacy ofJackson Pollock', in jeff 30 The Bedroom Ensemble was first shown as an 47 Vito Acconci' (Fitting Rooms), Art and Language (Survey Schwitters' frame of mind - and the column grew'.
Kelley (ed.), Essays on the Blurring ofArt and Life, Berkeley, installation at Sidney janis's New York gallery. It marks I968-72), Michael Asher (Environment), Joseph Beuys 62 One riveting account of the MeIzbau comes from
'993, PP·I-9· a severe change in style from The Store, and reflects the (Bureau for Direct Democracy), Marcel Broodthaers (Musee Alexander Dorner, the progressive director of the
13 Kaprow, interview with Barbara Berman, in Allan rising hard-edged aesthetic of Minimal ism and the d'Art Modeme), Daniel Buren (Exposition d'une exposition, Hannover Landesmuseum and a keen supporter of
Kaprow, Pasadena Art Museum, 1967, P.3; Kaprow, influence of advertising hoardings, whose depictions of une piece en sept tableaux), Christo (a travel agency selling Schwitters's work. Recorded in Dorner's biography, it
'Happenings in the New York Scene', in Kelley(ed.), op, furniture in deep perspective are the most obvious source tickets to see his Colorado Great Curtain), Bruce Nauman describes a visit to the Merzbau, a work 'made of garbage
cit., p.I8. -for the distorted angles of the Bedroom Ensemble. (Elliptical Space), Claes Oldenburg (Mouse Museum), packed in plaster', and is striking for its intense evocation
14 Kaprow, 'The Legacy ofJackson Pollock', op.cit., pp.6-9 Appropriately for a work that references consumer Richard Serra (Circuit), Paul Thek (Ark, Pyramid). of odour and dirt: 'Dorner felt that free expression of the
(my emphasis). culture, the piece exists in five versions. 48 Michael Compton, in Marcel Broodthaers, Tate Gallery, socially uncontrolled self had here bridged the gap
15 Kaprow, 'Notes on the Creation of a Total Art' (1958), in 31 Sam~ras, in Kim Levin, Lucas Samaras, New York, '975, London, 1980, p.2!. between sanity and madness. The Merz tree was a kind of
Kelley, op.cit., p.I!. P·57· 49 Broodthaers, in Marcel Broodthaers, Paris, 1991, p.Z2!. fecal smearing - a sick and sickening relapse into the

134 135
NOTES

i
I
Chapter 2 Chapter 3
1 EI Lissitzky, 'Proun Space, the Great Berlin Art more pages from a spleenish journal', Artforum, December Oiticica, Rotterdam, 1992, P.57. inside and coming across the mirror reflection at the end, 63 See for example judith Butler: 'Merleau-Ponty's 1 Roger Caillois, 'Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia',
Exhibition of r923', reproduced in El Lissitzky 1890-1941: r9 67,p·23· 28 Oiticica, quoted in Guy Brett, 'Helio Oiticica: Reverie which cut off his head: the 'shock of seeing myself conception of the "subject" is additionally problematic in in Annette Michelson (ed.), October: The First Decade, 1976-
Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, Eindhoven, 13 Frank Stella, in Bruce Glaser, 'Conversation with Frank and Revolt', Art in America, january 1989, P.I77. Ina headless', he recalled, was the most disarming aspect of virtue of its abstract and anonymous status, as if the 1986, Cambridge, Mass, '998, P.72.
1990, p. 35· Stella and Donald judd', Art News, September 1966, similar work, Penetrciuel: Projeto Piltro para Carlos Vergara the piece. Sharp, op.cit., p.89. subject described were a universal subject or structured 2 Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time, Evanston;I970,
2 Carsten Holler, in Carsten Holler: Register, Milan, 2001 PP·55-6 l. 1972, viewers enter a labyrinthine structure of wood and 48 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, PP.I48-9. existing subjects universally. Devoid of a gender, this PP-4 28 ,4 0 S·
n. p. All subsequent quotes by Holler are from this 14 Lucy Lippard, 'Four Environments by New Realists', coloured plastic sheeting, pass through soft curtains in 49 'I thought the perceptual process - and the optics - of subject is presumed to characterise all genders. On the 3 Ibid., P-429.
catalogue. Artforum, March 1964, P·19· various fabrics, and are finally given a glass of freshly the artist and the spectator should be what the art was one hand, this presumption devalues gender as a relevant 4 Caillois, op.cit. Minkowski is also referenced by
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology ofPerception, 15 Robert Morris, 'Notes on Sculpture, Part 2', p.IS (my squeezed orange juice while listening to the radio or about.' Dan Graham, in Birgit Pelzer, Mark Francis and category in the description oflived bodily experience. On Merleau-Ponty, but the latter does not mention the ego-
London, 1998, P·320. emphasis). watching television. Beatriz Colomina, Dan Graham, London, p.I 5. the other hand, inasmuch as the subject described annihilating implications of Minkowski's text. Merleau-
4 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, 16 See Melinda Wortz, 'Surrendering to Presence: Robert 29 Oiticica, 'General Scheme of the New Objectivity', 50 Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power, Cambridge, resembles a culturally constructed male subject, it Ponty accepts that our spatiality in darkness can erode all
1997, p.I 33. The unfinished manuscript of The Visible and Irwin's Esthetic Integration, Artforum, November 1981, 1967, reprinted in Brett et aI, op.cit., 1992, p.lI6. Mass, 1999, pp.62, '43-4. consecrates masculine identity as the model for the sense of individuality, but ultimately finds the 'mystical',
the Invisiblewas published posthumously in 1964 (English p.63· 30 'It is against everything that is oppressive, socially and 51 Ibid., P.I44. human subject, thereby devaluing, not gender, but unificatory character of the night to be 'reassuring and
translation 1968). 17 Irwin, in Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name ofthe individually - all the fixed and decadent forms of 52 Graham, in Forum International, September 1991, P.74. women.' judith Butler, 'Sexual Ideology and earthly', another 'expression of the total life of the subject,
5 Merleau-Ponty, 'Eye and Mind' (1961), in Merleau-Ponty, Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, government, or reigning social stuctures', Oiticica, 53 Graham, Two- Way Mirror Power, op.cit., p.I4S. Graham Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of the energy with which he tends towards a future through
The Primacy ofPerception, Evanston, 1964, p.I 78. Berkeley, 1982, P.I53. 'Position and Program', 1966, reprinted in ibid., P.lo3. has said that he came to Lacan's article 'The Mirror Stage' Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology ofPerception', in jeffner his body and his world'. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology
6 Michael Fried, 'Art and Objecthood', Artforum, Summer 18 Irwin, in Weschler, op.cit., P.I74. This essay is significant for its conspicuous shift in after he had begun using mirrors and reflective surfaces in Allen and Iris Marion Young, The Thinking Muse, ofPerception , op.cit., PP.283-4.
1967, p.I6, p.IS. 19 Irwin, in Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space: Four Oiticica's understanding of participatory art as political his work, but he took the essay as confirmation of his Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989, P.98. 5 Caillois, op.cit., p.70.
7 Although analogies to theatre often arise in relation to Artists, Berkeley, CA, 197 I, p.88. in implication. thinking. See Graham, in Hans Dieter Huber (ed.), Dan 64 Merleau-Ponty, 'Eye and Mind', op.cit., P.163. 6 Ibid., P.72.
the 'dream scene' type of installation art discussed in the 20 Irwin, in Robert Irwin, Chicago, 1975, p.I 1. 31 Oiticica, 'Appearance of the Supra-sensorial', '967, Graham: Interviews City?, 1997, P.I7; Birgit Pelzer, 'Vision 65 Olafur Eliasson, in Karen jones, 'The ontology of 7 James Turrell, interview with Ziva Freiman, in Positionen
previous chapter, it is important to note that, for Fried, 21 Irwin, in RobertIrwin, Los Angeles, 1993, p.I 73· reprinted in ibid., p.I3o. in Process', October, no. II, Winter 1979, PP.I05-19. immateriality', in Seamless, Amsterdam, '998, zur Kunst/Positions in Art, VIenna, 1994, p.10; see also
theatricality does not refer to the scenographic aspect of 22 Michael Asher, Writings 1973- I 983 on works 32 Oiticica, 'Notes on the Parangol"', reprinted in 54 Brian Hatton, in Two-Way Mirror Power, op.cit., P.I45. http://www.xs4all.nli-deappel/textkaren.html Turrell's comments in James Turrell, Madrid, 1993, P.6S;
installation, but rather to the way in which we self- 1969-1979, Halifax, NS, 1984, p.8. It should be noted that ibid., P.93. 55 Graham, ibid., p.I 58. Not just traditional easel 66 Olafur Eliasson, in Angela Rosenberg, 'Olafur Eliasson and in Air Mass, London, "993, p.26: 'First, I am dealing
consciously 'perform' around it. In this respect, it is worth all the texts for this book were co-authored with the left- 33 Acconci, in jeff Rian, 'Vito Acconci', Flash Art painting, but film too is implied as a site of'ego loss'. This - Beyond Nordic Romanticism', Flash Art, May-june 2003, with no object. Perception is the object. Secondly, I am
recalling that Robert Morris performed with the wing art historian and theorist Benjamin HD Buchloh. International, jan/Feb 1994, p.84. This is subtly different is discussed in more detail below. p.l 10. All subsequent Eliasson quotes are from this article dealing with no image, because I want to avoid
choreographer Simone Forti and his earliest untitled 23 'Light intensity, colour, and shadows varied, from Oiticica, for whom a sensuous heightening of 56 Ibid., PP.155-6. In this context, not even the most basic unless otherwise stated. associative, symbolic thought. Thirdly, I am dealing with
Minimalist sculpture, a column, featured in a stage depending on the suns position in the sky. Reflected light perception was viewed as a form of resistance to the law. architectural materials used by Minimalist sculptors- 67 It is important to note that Lissitzky still regarded each no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no
performance in 196r. had a yellow tint due to the off-white colour of the 34 Acconci, in Richard Prince, 'Vito Acconci', Bomb steel, bricks, lighting strips - could be truly 'literal' and relief as a separate work of art, and listed each work image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are
8 Rosalind Krauss, 'Allusion and Illusion in Donald judd', interior. Nighttime light entered from streetlights which Magazine, Summer 1991, P.S3. devoid of reference. individually in the Proun Inventory. looking at you looking.'
Artforum, May r966, P.2S. cast a low, tinted blue light into the installation ... Sound 35 'the person to my left ... I'm doing this with you now .. 57 In this respect, Graham felt affinities with the work of 68 EI Lissitzky, 'Froun Space, the Great Berlin Art 8 Turrell, quoted in James Turrell: The Other Horizon,
9 Krauss, 'Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture', was generated from such sources as street traffic, people I'm touching your hair ... I'm running my hand down your jean-Luc Godard, particularly the approach taken in Two Exhibition of 1923', reproduced in El Lissitzky 1890-I94r: Vienna,I999,P· 12 7.
Passages in Modem Sculpture, London, r 9 77, P·267. walking past the gallery, and people within the back ... I'm touching your ass.' Acconci, 'Seedbed' or Three Things I Know About Her(I967). Graham saw this Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, P·3 5. 9 Georges Didi-Huberman, 'The Fable of the Place', in
All subsequent Krauss quotes are from this chapter. installation ... With the removal of the main-entry doors, statement, from Barbara Gladstone Gallery archive. film after making Homes for America (1966-7), and 69 Ibid., P.35 (my emphasis). James Turrell: The Other Horizon, PP·46, 54.
10 This connection was also made by Merleau-Ponty. the installation was also directly ventilated from 36 Acconci, in Prince, op.cit., P.SS. immediately understood Godard to be making a similar 70 Ibid., P.36. 10 Craig Adcock, James Turrell: The Art ofLight and Space,
In The Child's Relations with Others' (1960), he cites an outdoors, and therefore subject to varying climatic 37 Acconci, notes for Command Performance, reprinted in analogy between suburban housing schemes, formalist 71 Yve-Alain Bois expresses this contrast vividly: Berkeley, '990, p.I40.
experiment that took place in the United States, in which conditions'. Asher, op.cit., P.38. Vito Accanci, Chicago, 1980, p.20. aesthetics and capitalism. 'perspective is Medusa, it petrifies the spectator... [while] 11 Oliver Wick, 'In Constant Flux - The Search for the In-
psychologically 'rigid' subjects showed a tendency to 24 'The triangular shapes were defined in opposition to 38 Vito Acconci, interviewed by Maria Lind and Sina 58 Graham, op.cit., P.77. axonometry is Pegasus, the flying horse which was born Between', in James Turrell: Long Green, Zurich, 1990, p.I2.
give 'black-and-white answers' and to show 'very strong the usual architectural context surrounding a work of art Najafi, 'Vito Acconci Interviewed', Index, 1996, p.70; 59 Graham, Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects from the blood of Gorgon'. Bois, 'Axonometry, or 12 Mikkel Borch-jacobsen, alluding to a passage in
racial and social prejudices'. There was therefore a direct ... The arbitrary way in which the exterior elements Acconci, interview with Robin White, View, pp.l0, 16. 1965-1990, Cambridge, Mass, 1993, P.I90. Lissitzky's mathematical paradigm', in El Lissitzky Lacans Seminar X, speaks vividly of ,my own image in the
connection between 'psychological rigidity, as a mode entered the triangular spaces was as important to the 39 Acconci, notes to The People Machine, quoted by Steven 60 Graham, 'Cinema, 1981', in Dan Graham, Barcelona, 1890-1941, Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, mirror, gazing at me with strange anxiety-producing
of relation to self and others' and perception in its own work as the material construction of the installation, if Melville in 'How Should Acconci Count for US I', October, "998, p.I38. Metz's article on the identificatory P·3l. unheimlich eyes, which do not belong to me: some sort of
right: those subjects able to perceive ambiguously only as a contradiction to the installation's formal control no. 18, Fall 1981, p.8S. mechanisms of cinema was first published in English in 72 Ibid., PP.32-3. brilliant marbles, fully ready to leap from their sockets'.
('the same drawing of a cube seen now from one over these elements.' Asher, op.cit., PP-38-42. 40 Taken from the title of Marcia Tucker, Screen, Summer 1975, PP.I4-76. Borch-jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, Stanford, CA,
standpoint, now from another') were also those most 25 Ibid., P.30. Asher's installation at MoMA for the group- 'PheNAUMANology', Artforum, December 1970, PP.38-44. 61 Christian Metz, 'The Imaginary Signifier', cited by '99 ,P·23 2.
41 Acconci, in Prince, op.cit., P.54. 13 For' one critic, visiting Kusama's Peep Show with his
likely to adopt a liberal and tolerant outlook on politics exhibition Spaces, 1970, for example, was insulated with Graham in ibid., p.I 36.
and society. The questions given to subjects in the acoustical board on all six sides, including the floor, and 42 Rosalind Krauss, 'Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism', 62 In jane and Louise Wilsons Stasi City '997, and wife, this intention was jubilantly affirmed: he felt theiI
experiment touch precisely on the social issues that viewers were required to remove their shoes before October, no. I, 1976, PP.SI-64. Gamma 1999, it is impossible to watch all four screens at 'images became constantly confused by being ceaselessly
would come to a head at the end of that decade: 'Girls entering the space. The room absorbed sound to varying 43 Bruce Nauman, in Michele De Angelus, 'Interview once: appropriately for work that deals with institutional reflected on the seemingly endless lit up ceiling and walls
should learn only about household matters', 'We should degrees depending on where onE stood. As Oile reviewer with Bruce Nauman', in Bruce Nauman, London, r988, control and surveillance, you feel uneasy in the space, as if - and so one felt to be an integral part of some exploding
deport all refugees and give their jobs to veterans', observed: 'minimal light and sound stimuli place the p.I28. itis watching you. Similarly, Susan Hiller's four-screen endearment expanse'. joseph Nechtvatal, 'Yayoi Kusama:
'There is only one way to do something properly'. subject in a condition of suspension. Ifhe navigates the 44 'I used a wide-angle lens and it was above and behind video installation An Entertainment '990, offers a Installations, Maison de la culture du japon, Paris',
Merleau-Ponty, 'The Child's Relations with Others', white obscurity slowly, he may well feel dizziness and you as you walked into the corridors, so you were physically disorienting montage of Punch and judy http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/bbs2/messages/
in Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy ofPerception, op.cit., perceptual disorientation. The thick carpeting and sound- removed from yourself, sort of doubly removed. Your exhibitions in which the images travel around the room 634.html
pp.lor-s· proofed walls and ceiling make it impossible for the image of yourself was from above and behind, and as you from one wall to the next, assaulting the viewer from all 14 Kusama targeted Wall Street for at least three
11 Robert Morris, 'Notes on Sculpture, Part 2', in Morris, sensitive subject to respond, as he would normally, while walked, because the wide-angle lens changes the rate that four sides. There is no ideal place from which to view the performances in 1968. A press release read: 'OBLITERATE
Continuous Project Altered Daily, Cambridge, Mass, r995, moving through.' Dore Ashton, 'New York Commentary', you're going away from the camera, so as you took a step, whok Like Graham's Cinema proposal, these WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS. OBLITERATE
p.I6. in Studio International, March 1970, p.II8. you took a double step with your own image.' Ibid., p.I28. installations ground the viewer's experience in a complex WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS ON THEIR
12 Donald judd, Reviews, Arts Magazine, February 1965, 26 Merleau-Ponty, 'The Primacy of Perception and Its 45 Nauman, in Willoughby Sharp, 'Interview with Bruce social situation: as you move around to 'capture' all four NAKED BODIES.' Kusama, press release for Naked Protest
P.54. Dan Flavin was also adamant that his exhibitions Philosophical Consequences' (1956), in Merleau-Ponty, Nauman', in Bruce Nauman, op.cit., P.97. projections, you obstruct the sightlines of other viewers, at Wall Street, 1968, reproduced in Laura Hoptman, Akira
should not be referred to as environments, since the word The Primacy ofPerception, op.cit., P.25. 46 Nauman, in De Angelus, op.cit., p.l 28. who in tum obstruct your own view. Each viewer Tatehata, Udo Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, London, 2000,
connoted 'living conditions and perhaps an invitation to 27 Helio Oiticica, 'Aboutthe Hunting Dogs Project', '96" 47 Corridor with Mirror and White LightSI 97 I achieved becomes implicated in the work, as - by extension -we p. I0 7·
comfortable residence'. Flavin, 'Some other comments .. reprinted in Guy Brett, Catherine David, et aI, Helio a similarly disjunctive result: one critic recalled walking are in society and culture at large. 15 Yayoi Kusama, poster for the first 'Self-Obliteration'

136 137
NOTES

Chapter 4
performance, 1968, and interview with Jud Yakult (1968), entropy and the death-drive, see Margaret Iversen, Art 1 Helio Oiticica, 'Appearance of the Supra-Sensorial.' humidity/the taste of earth It he heat' (cape 10). as conscientious, self-critical and politically correct. partition between exhibition space and gallery office, or
both reprinted in ibid., p.II2. More recent installations, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (forthcoming publication). (NovemberlDecember 1967), reprinted in Brett et aI, 12 Oiticica, 'Notes on the Parangol"', in Brett et aI, op.cit., 29 Gonzalez-Torres, in Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez- Gordon Matta-Clark's restaurant Food, opened with his
such as Fireflies on the Water 2000, immerse us in the work 28 Roland Barthes, 'Leaving the Movie Theatre', in op.cit., pp.I 7-20. P·93· Torres, New York, 1995, P.I3. This point is also made by artist colleagues in the early '970S; Foodwas a collective
directly. We enter a darkened room (S x 5 x 3 metres) onto Barthes, The Rustle ofLanguage, Oxford, 1986, PP.34S-9. All 2 As Walter Benjamin notes, 'The theological archetype 13 Carlos Basualdo, 'Waiting for the Internal Sun: Notes Douglas Crimp in the AIDS special issue of October, nO.43, project that enabled artists to earn a small living and fund
a small jetty over a black pool of water; the walls are lined following Barthes quotations are from this article. of this contemplation is the awareness of being alone on Helio Oiticica's Quasi-cinemas', in Ann Bremner (ed.), r987, 'AIDS: cultural analysis/cultural activism'. Crimp their art practice without succumbing to the
with mirrors while small coloured lights (,fireflies') hang 29 My emphasis. with one's God.' Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Helio Oiticica: Quasi-Cinemas, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, argues that cultural production is itself political, an active ideologically compromising demands of the art market.
from the ceiling, reflecting across the watery surface into 30 Anne Wagner, 'Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations, London, '992, 2002, PA2 participation in democratic struggle. It is not a case of Other artists who presented food as a social and artistic
reduplicated infinity. Our own reflection is jettisoned into Presence', October, no. 9', Winter 2000, p.80: 'what is P.243, note 18. Another important reference point for this 14 During the opening days of the Sao Paulo Biennial in either art or activism, because cultural production is not a event in the 1960s and early 70S include Allan
an oceanic vortex that extends, apparently endlessly, in missing from Viola's spectacular meditations on life and shift can be found in Peter Burger's Theory ofthe Avant- 1994, some samba dancers wearing Oiticica'5 Parangoli marginalised luxury but a powerful political too!. In this Ruppersberg, Daniel Spoerri, and the Fluxus group.
all directions. We lose all sense of space and orientation death and transience is any built·in mistrust of his garde(I974), in which a typology of artistic production is capes danced through the rooms of the museum in a Crimp -like many of his generation - follows Althusser's 41 Beuys is mentioned infrequently in Relational
and merge with the environment - an experience that has medium. Nor does irony bracket his message. Instead his traced from the medieval period to the twentieth century. reprise of the mid-I 960s, but were ejected from the proposition that culture is an 'institutional state Aesthetics, and on one occasion is specifically invoked in
been described by one art critic on the internet as akin to work insists - sometimes to the point of coercion and Burger argues that 'sacral art' of the middle ages, such as museum (ironically, from a room ofMalevich paintings) apparatus'; art, therefore, does not reflect society but is order to sever any connection between 'social sculpture'
scuba diving or entering a planetarium: 'jubilatoryand against the grain of his predecessors' sheer reluctance and the cathedral, was produced collectively and received by the Dutch curator Wim Beeren. capable of producing subjectivity. and relational aesthetics. See Bourriaud, Relational
claustrophobic', 'energising ... and deeply disturbing'. scepticism - that we believe in the magnitude and collectively; this was superseded by 'courtly art' of the 15 The Whitechapel Experience also included the 30 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, interviewed by Tim Rollins, in Aesthetics, p.70.
16 An early installation by Samaras was discussed in meaningfulness of what camera and artist give us to see.' Renaissance, which was produced by an individual artist penetrable Tropicdlia (discussed in Chapter Two), a Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Los Angeles, r993, P.23. 42 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Social Strategy:
Chapter Two. All subsequent Wagner quotes are from this article. but received collectively; this in turn was replaced by selection of Parangoles, and a large billiard table (which 31 The French philosopher jean-Luc Nancy has argued Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London, 1985. 'The
17 Levin, op.cit., p.7l. Her comment recalls Bruce 31 Cardiff's collaborator George Bures Miller has 'bourgeois art' - the model of artistic practice ushered in Oiticica compared to Van Gogh's Night Cafe), on which that in political writing, community should be subject is partially self-determined. However, as this self-
Nauman's observation that the visitor to his Video compared the immediacy of her soundtracks to 'a with the Enlightenment and still dominant today- groups of East End boys often played during the show. understood as 'communion', a nostalgic desire for an determination is not the expression of what the subject
Corridors reliably experienced the feeling of'stepping off thinking voice, a voice inside your head', precisely which is both produced and received individually. 16 Email to author, 26 july 2003. immanent relation between subjects, rather like a already is but the result of its lack of being instead, self-
a cliff or down into a hole'. Nauman, in Sharp, op.cit., because it 'seems to exist outside any kind of mediation'. For Burger this individualism is symptomatic of 17 Oiticica, quoted by Brett in 'Helio Oiticica's relationship to a divinity. He proposes a vision of determination can only proceed through processes of
P·97· Miller, quoted in Meeka Walsh and Robert Enright, industrialisation and the alienating effects of capitalism; "Whitechapel Experiment", The WhitechapeiArt Gallery community as 'inoperative' (desoeuvre) or un-worked; one identification.' Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of
18 Gordon M. Smith, cited in jean Reeves, 'New Dazzler at 'Pleasure Principals: The art of Janet Cardiff and George it also indicates how impotent art has become, for it is no Centenary Review, London, 2001, P.78. that opens us up to the threshold of others' existence, and Our Time (1990), quoted in Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and
Albright Knox: Room with Mirrors to Infinity', Buffalo Bures Miller', Border Crossings, nO·78, 200r, P.33. longer integrated into the public arena but exists in the 18 Oiticica, 'Eden' (1969), in Brett et aI, op.cit., p.r3. which is calibrated on the death of those we call its Pragmatism, London, 1996, P.SS.
Evening News, r8 November 1966. 32 'It's as if! am part of your body.' Cardiff, quoted in ibid. domain of private consumption. The desire of the 19 Oiticica, quoted by Brett in 'Helio Oiticica's members. Crucially, Nancy's theory provides a reading of 43 Laclau contrasts this to the types of relationship that
19 Lucas Samaras, letter to Mr Murdock, p.I. For his The Paradise Institute'creates an eerie personal space that historical avant-garde (Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism) "Whitechapel Experiment''', op.cit., P.7S; Oiticica, 'Eden', politics that is not based on activism or the assertion of emerge between complete entities, such as contradiction
family, Samaras continues: 'the mirror had connotations the viewer enters, as if to abandon the sanctuary of self for to blur 'art and life' - which for Burger is more accurately op.cit., p.I 3. individual will, but on the incessant fading and [A-notA] or 'real difference' [A-B]. For example, we all
of devilry and vanity'. someone else's mind and body.' Wayne Baerwaldt, Janet art and political praxis - is a key reference point for much 20 Oiticica, in Brett et aI, op.cit., p.I38. impossibility of ' communion'. jean·Luc Nancy, The hold a number of mutually contradictory belief systems
20 Ibid., p.2. Cardiff, New York, 2002, p.IS!. of the work discussed in this chapter. 21 The poet Silvano Santiago, quoted in Catherine David, Inoperative Community, Minneapolis, 199 I. (there are materialists who read horoscopes, and
21 Arnold Glimcher, cited in Levin, op.cit., p.7l. Samaras 33 Cardiff, quoted in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 'janet 3 Beuys, 'Introduction' (r979), in Carin Kuoni (ed.), Energy 'The GreatLabyrinth', in ibid., P.2SS. 32 Gonzalez-Torres, cited in Nancy Spector, Felix psychoanalysts who send Christmas cards) without this
said of the work: 'With this room you actually did damage Cardiff', tema celeste, no.S7, 2001, P.S3. Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America, New 22 The price for this, as Basualdo notes, was the Gonzalez-Torres, New York, r99S, p.rso. Given the resulting in antagonism. Nor is 'real difference' [A-B]
yourself ninety per cent of the time. It was pretty letha!" York, r990, p.r9. impossibility of exhibiting these works in public, and heightened anxiety around bodily fluids as the AIDS equal to antagonism: since it concerns full identities, it
22 Margaret Iversen, Art Beyond the Pleasure Principle 4 Beuys, 'We are the Revolution. A free and Democratic their complete exclusion from the art circuit; it was only crisis reached its peak in the late r980s, the use of sweets results in collision -like a car crash. Antagonism, by
(forthcoming publication). Socialism' (r2 April r972, Palazzo Taverna, Rome), in '992, twelve years after Oiticica's death, that it became (and by implication saliva) in the work acquired a subtly contrast, occurs when the presence of the 'Other' prevents
23 Michael Newman, 'From the Fire to the Light: On reprinted in Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, The Felt Hat- possible to present a Cosmococasinstallation in public. transgressive edge. me from being totally myself, because this presence
Richard Wilson's installations', Richard Wilson, Joseph Beuys-ALife Told, Milan, '997, P.I40. See Basualdo, op.cit., p.S2. 33 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Presses du Reel, 2002, makes my identity precarious and vulnerable; the threat
London/Oxford /Bristol, 1989, n.p. 5 Beuys, quoted in Gotz Adriani et aI, Joseph Beuys Life and 23 Oiticica, cited in Catherine David, 'HeIio Oiticica: P·I4· that the Other represents thrusts my own sense of self
24 Monica Petzal, review oi20:50, Time Out, r8-2S Works, New York, r979, PP.246-9. Brazilian Experiment', in From the Experimental Exercise of 34 Ibid., P.I3. One could argue that this idea underpins into question.
February 1987, no.86r, p.33;Andrew Graham-Dixon, 'An 6 Haacke's exhibition had been cancelled due to the Freedom, Los Angeles, 1999, P.I99. most of the work discussed in this book - perhaps not as 44 See my article 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics',
oil well that ends well', The Independent, 18 February r987. inclusion of Shapolsky et al: Manhattan Real Estate(r97I), a 24 judge Bruce Wright, New York State Supreme Court, a riposte to cyberspace, but certainly to a perception of October, nO.r ro, Fall 2004.
25 Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order ofArt, London, work that detailed the ownership of slum housing in quoted by Group Material as the epigraph to their article mass-media spectacle as numbing and pacifying. 45 Udo Kittelmann, 'Preface', in Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled
r967, P.I34. Ehrenzweig's ideas were influential on a Manhattan and found one family to have the monopoly 'On Democracy', in Brian Wallis (ed.), Democracy: A Project 35 Ibid. (tomorrow is another day), 1996, n.p.
number of artists in the United States during the 1960s, on properties. The Guggenheim felt that the piece was by Group Material, Seattle, 1990, p.l. 36 Other artists mentioned frequently by Bourriaud 46 Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside
most notably Robert Morris (who used Ehrenzweig's ideas 'muckraking' and had political intentions - even though 25 Group Material began with fifteen members, which include Liam Gillick, Phillippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, cardboard boxes, Kunst-Werke, Berlin, September 2000. Six
to theorise 'anti-form' sculpture) and Robert Smithson. Haacke had simply presented publicly available soon dropped to three (julie Ault, Mundy MCLaughlin, Carsten Holler, Christine Hill, Vanessa Beecroft and workers remained inside the boxes for four hours a day
This sense of engulfment is found in the original press information with no evaluative comments. Tim Rollins); Doug Ashford joined in r982 and the four jorge Pardo. for six weeks.
release for 20:50, in which Richard Wilson included a 7 Buchloh is referring to the final pages of Walter collaborated until r986. McLaughlin left in 1986, Rollins 37 Further examples might include Surasi Kusolwong 47 As Laclau and Mouffe conclude, politics should not
passage from Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of a year later. In 1988 Ault and Ashford were joined by Felix filling the gallery with mattresses on which candidates found itself on postulating an "'essence of the social" but,
Glass(I872): 'Oh, Kitty' How nice it would be if we could Mechanical Reproduction' (1936). Gonzales-Torres. The majority of problems around for a massage were asked to lie down (Kwangju Biennial, on the contrary, on affirmation ofthe contingency and
only get through into Looking Glass House! Let's pretend 8 Thierry de Duve, 'joseph Beuys, or the last of the membership centred on whether what they were doing 2000), or jorge Pardo's Pier(Skulptur.Projekte Munster, ambiguity of every "essence" and on the consitutive
there's a way of getting through into it somehow, Kitty. proletarians', in Octoberno.4S, Summer 1988, P.SS. was viewed as art, curating or activism. 1997), a sam long jetty of Californian redwood with character of social division and antagonism.' Laclau and
Let's pretend the glass has got soft gauze, so that we can 9 The latter became a real concern for Oiticica after 26 Group Material, 'Caution! Alternative Space" (r98r), a small pavilion at the end. The work was a functional Mouffe, op.cit., p.r93.
get through.' Alice's mirror finds its horizontal equivalent moving to New York in r970, supporting himselfby quoted in Nina Felshin (ed.), But is it Art? The Spirit ofArt as pier, providing mooring for boats, while a cigarette 48 Thomas Hirschhorn, in Alison Gingeras, 'Striving to
in the silvery, filmy appearance of the oil in 20:50, and working night-shifts as a telephone operator and doing Activism, Seattle, r99S, p.88. machine attached to the wall of the pavilion encouraged be stupid', Thomas Hirschhorn London Catalogue, London,
Alice's desire to pass through it parallels the oft-cited urge other menial jobs. 27 These included an exhibition of posters on subway people to stop and look at the view. 199 8, P·S·
of viewers to fall through the oil's pristine, yielding 10 Oiticica, 'General Scheme of the New Objectivity', trains in New York, and a display of illegally pasted 38 jerry Saltz, 'A Short History of Rirkrit Tiravanija', Art in 49 Hirschhorn, in interview with Okwui Enwezor, in
surface into the space below. '967, reprinted in Brett et aI, op.cit., p.rr8. posters in Union Square (DA ZI BAOS, 1982). America, February 1996, p.r06. Thomas Hirschhorn: Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, Chicago,
26 Robert Smithson, 'A Cinematic Atopia', in Jack Flam 11 The geometric planes of the Parangoleswere often 28 Group Material, in Wallis, op.cit., p.2. In such 39 Udo Kittelmann, 'Preface', in Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled 2000, P.27.
(ed.), The Collected Writings ofRobert Smithson, Berkeley, emblazoned with agitational and poetic slogans such exhibitions, of course, it is possible to say that artists (tomorrow is another day), Cologne, 1996, n.p. 50 Ibid., P.29. Hirschhorn is here referring to the idea of
1996, pp.I 38-42. All following Smithson quotations are as 'I embody revolt' (PI S cape II, 1967), or 'of adversity we bite the hand that feeds them: the political potency 40 Historical precursors for this type of art include quality espoused by Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried
from this article. live' (PI6 cape r2, 1964), 'sex, violence, that's of such gestures is, some argue, neutralised by Michael Asher's untitled installation at the Clare Copley and other modernist critics as a criterion of aesthetic
27 For a fuller discussion of the connections between what pleases me' (cape 7), 'out of your skin/grows the conforming to the institution's own wish to be seen Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1974, in which he removed the judgement.

138 139
NOTES FURTHER READING CREDITS

Conclusion
51 The location of these works has on occasion meant 1 Hal Foster, 'Trauma Studies and the Interdisciplinary', Bruce Altschuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition: New Art in Exhibition catalogues Photographic Credits Copyright Credits
that their contents have been stolen, most notably in de·, dis·, ex-, vol. 2, 1998, p.I6S. the Twentieth Century, New York 1994 Ambiente, parteeipazione, strutture eulturali, Edizione La Unless otherwise stated photographs have been supplied All works © the artist or the artist's estate with the
Glasgow, 2000, before the exhibition had even opened. 2 This in turn presupposes that the 'modern subject' Michael Asher, Writings 1973- I 983 on works 1969-1979, Biennale di Venezia, Venice 1976 by the exhibiting gallery: following exceptions:
52 Hirschhorn, in op.cit., P.27. from Descartes onwards can be generalised in such Halifax, Nova Scotia 1984 Blurring the Boundaries; Installation Art 1969-1996, Museum Courtesy the artist 61,67-8 Works by joseph Beuys, Ilya Kabakov, Carsten Holler,
53 It is worth recalling Walter Benjamin's comments in a way- an assertion that should be made with caution. Walter Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer', in Benjamin, of Contemporary Art, San Diego '997 Courtesy the artist and Haunch of Venison 97 El Lissitzky, Gregor Schneider and Kurt Schwitters
'The Author as Producer' (1934), where he praises 3 Fisher, op.cit., PP.I9-20. Reflections, New York 1978 Cinquante Especes d'Espaces, Musee d'Art Contemporain, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York 38 ©DACS 2005
newspapers because they solicit opinions from their 4 To requote: 'all the time you're there, getting into the act' Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Paris 2002 Marseille 1999 Courtesy Pablo Leon de la Barra 12I (top) Works by Christian Boltanski © ADAGP, Palis and DACS,
reader (via the letters page) and thereby elevate him/her to (Kaprow, 'Happenings in the New York Scene', op.cit., Guy Brett, Catherine David, et aI, Helio Oiticica, Rotterdam Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europaische Utopien stit © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz 200s/jorg P. London 2005
the status of a collaborator: 'The reader is at all times ready p.I6); 'the spectator can be drawn into the space and 1800, Kunsthaus, Zurich 1983 Anders 12 Works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres © The Felix Gonzalez-
'99 2
to become a writer,' he says, 'that is, a describer, but also a involved with the experience of real time ... It's only in Benjamin Buchloh HD (ed.), Broodthaers: Writings, Out ofActions: Between Performance and the Object Courtesy Castelli Gallery 51-2 Torres Foundation
prescriber ... he gains access to authorship.' Walter the context of reading in the installation that the writing Interviews, Photographs, Cambridge, Mass. 1988 1949-1979, The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum © photo CNAC/MNAM Dist. RMN 15,18-19,42 Works by Robert Irwin, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman
Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer', in Benjamin, has its full effect' (Kelly, Imaging Desire, op.cit., p.I88); Daniel Buren, 'The Function ofthe Studio' (1971), October, of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1998 © photo CNAC/MNAM Dist.RMN/© Phillipe Migeat 73 © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2005
Reflections, '978, P.22S. Even so, the newspaperretains an The main actor in the total installation, the main centre nO.lO, Autumn 1979, pp. 51-8 The Whitechapel Art Gallery Centenary Review, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ 43 Works by Robert R MCElroy © Robert R McElroyIVAGA,
editor, and the letters page is but one among many other toward which everything is addressed, for which Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-garde, Minneapolis 1984 Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 200! Documenta Archive 105 New York/DACS, London 2005
authored pages beneath the remit of this editor. everything is intended, is the viewer ... the whole Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, New York 1994 You Are Here, Pale Green Press and Royal College of Art, © les films de l'equinoxe-fonds photographique Work by Claes Oldenburg © Claes Oldenburg and Coosje
installation is oriented only towald his perception, and Nicolas de Oliviera, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry (eds.), London 1997 Denise Bellon 21 van Bruggen
any point of the installation, any of its structures is Installation Art, London 1994 Courtesy Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York 117-19 Works by George Segal © The George and Helen Segal
oriented only toward the impression it should make on johanna Drucker, 'Collabolation without Object(s) in the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf/ Klein 33 FoundationlDACS, LondonlVAGA, New York 2004
the viewer, only his reaction is anticipated' (Kabakov, On Early Happenings', Art Journal, Winter 1993, pp.SI-8 Kunsthalle Dusseldorf/Tischer 34-5 Works by Paul Thek © Alexander and Bonin, New York, as
the Total Instal/ation, op.cit., P.llS); 'the relationship Umberto Eco, 'The Poetics of the Open Work' (1962), in Courtesy Elena Filipovic 20 agent for the Estate of Paul Thek
between art and viewer is all first hand now experience, Eco, The Open Work,Cambridge, Mass. 1989 Courtesy Barbara Gladstone 43
and there is no way that it can be carried to you through john Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, London 1985 Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York/Thibault jeanson 39
any kind of secondary system' (Irwin, in Transparency, Hal Foster, 'The Crux of Minimalism', in Foster, Return of Courtesy Kusama Studio 88-90
Reflection, op.cit., p.88); 'Hopefully, they were completely the Real, Cambridge, Mass. 1996 Photograph by Charles LaBelle 121 (bottom)
compromised as soon as they walked into the gallery, onto Michael Fried, 'Art and Objecthood', Artforum, Summer Courtesy Lisson Gallery and the artist 122
the ramp -they were implicated' (Acconci, interview by '967, pp.I2-22 Courtesy Barbara Gladstone/Werner Maschmann 125-7
Liza Bear, Avalanche, no.6, Fall 1972, P.73); Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power, Cambridge, Mass. Courtesy Matt's Gallery 9,46-7
'I was more interested in what happened when spectators '999 RobertRMcElroy 24-6
saw themselves looking at themselves or looking at other Dan Graham, Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects Courtesy Victoria Miro 96
people' (Graham, in Forum International, September '99', 1965-1990, Cambridge, Mass. 1993 Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin and Tanya
P.74); 'the reality of "being here" in the "lived moment" is Ilya Kabakov, On The Total Installation, Bonn '995 Bonakdar Gallery, New York 78-9
more than its representation' (Oiticica, 1973, quoted in Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York 29,83
Basualdo, Quasi-Cinemas, op.cit., P.39). Salvador Dali and the Surrealist Exhibition, Cambridge, Photo: Kira Perov, courtesy Bill Viola Studio 98
5 Graham, 'Public Space/Two Audiences', Two- Way Mirror Mass. 2001 Courtesy Projeto Helio Oiticica 62,103, ro8-9
Power, op.cit., p.I 57. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Museum
6 'Structuralism, deconstruction, historicism ~ so many of New York 1966 of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 114
our contemporary discourses have announced the .. Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring ofArt and Life, ed. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and
atomisation and demise of the subject, that one cannot jeff Kelley, Berkeley and Los Angeles '993 Serpentine Gallery, London. Photo: Stephen White "3
help but be struck by the very thoroughness of its Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modem Sculpture, London Courtesy Saatchi Gallery, London 2-3,93
effacement.' joan Copjec, 'Introduction', in Copjec (ed.), '977 Courtesy Schipper & Krome, Berlin 49
Supposing the Subject, London, '994, p.xi. Copjec is Rosalind Krauss, 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field', in Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt! Norbert Miguletz 27
thinking of Lacan's positioning of the subject as split (ex- Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-garde and other Kurt Schwitters Archive at the Sprengel Museum,
centric to the Freudian ego), of Roland Barthes's 'death of Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass. 1985 Hannover/Michael Herling/Aline Gwose 40
the author', of Foucault's subject as an effect of discourse, Rosalind Krauss, Yl. Voyage on the North Sea', Art in the Age of Courtesy Through the Flower 36
and ofDerrida's re-inscription ofthe subject as one of the Post-medium Condition, London 2000 Tate Photography Marcus Leith/Andrew Dunkley 7
differance, destinerrance and alterity. Robert Morris, 'Notes on Sculpture Part 2' and 'The Present Courtesy Barbara Weiss Galerie, Berlin 101
7 Michael Fried, 'Art and Objecthood', Artforum, Summer Tense of Space', in Morris, Continuous Project Altered Whitney Museum of American Art, New York/ Geoffrey
1967, p.22. Daily, Cambridge, Mass. 1995 Clements I I I
Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube, the ideology of the
gallery space, Berkeley and Los Angeles '999
On Installation, special issue of Oxford Art Journal, vol.24,
nO.2,2001
julie Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces ofInstallation
Art, Cambridge, Mass. '999
Mark Rosenthal, Understanding Installation Art: From
Duchamp to Holzer, Munich 2003
Erika Suderberg (ed.), Space, Site, Intervention: Situating
Installation Art, Minneapolis 2000
Anne Wagner, 'Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of
Presence', October, nO.9', Winter 2000, PP.S9-80
Cecile Whiting, A Taste for Pop, Cambridge 1997

140 141
INDEX
1
Page numbers in italic type
refer to illustrations.

A C F H K M
AbstractExpressionism 23,54,55 Cage, john 23-4 feminism 13,32,35-7,66,68,69,76, IrO, 128 Haacke, Hans 105 Kabakav,I1ya 44 Magritte, Rene 22,33
Acconci, Vito 66,68,96, IIO, 118 Caillois, Roger 82,93 film see cinema Manet-PROJEKT 7432 The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment 14-17, Malevich, Kazimir 41

Command Performance 68, 68, 69 'Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia' 84,90, lor Fisher, jean 128,130 Hamilton,Ann 37, 39,4r 15,18-19 Mapplethorpe, Robert r r 3
The People Machine 68 Campus, Peter Flood, Robert 32 between taxonomy and communion 39 On The Totaiinstallation 17 Marcuse, Herbert r08
Red Tapes 96 dar 69 Fontana, Lucio indigo blue 39 Ten Characters 16-17 Meire1es, Cildo 37,39,64
Seedbed 66, 67, 68 mem 69 Cubo di specchi 87,90 privation and excesses 41 Kachur, Lewis 22 LaBruja 39
VD Lives/TV Must Die 68 Cardiff, janet 99-101 Foster, Hal r 28 tropos 39,39 Kandinsky, Nina 41 Entrevendo 39
(Where We Are Now. ..) 68 The Missing Voice-Case Study B 99 Foucault, Michel 13,76 Happenings 8, 22-6 Kandinsky, Wassily 13 EurekaiBlindhotland 39
action-painting 23 The Paradise Institute 99-100, IOI found materials 41-2 Hatoum, Mona 37 Kaprow, Allan 23-4,41,44,55, ll8 Missao/Missoes(How tp Build Cathedrals) 38,39
activatedspectatorship II, IOlf!, 128, r31 Playhouse 99-100 Franceso di Giorgio Martini Heizer, Michael An Apple Shrine 24,26 Red Shift 39,64
Ahtila, Eija-Liisa 75 Cartesian subject I I Architectural View 12 Double Negative 54 Words 24,25 Volatile 39. 64
Today 96 Cattelan, Maurizio 116 Frazier, Susan Hill, Christine r27 Kelley, jeff 24 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 50,53-4,57,60,64,69,90,128
Aitken, Doug 75 Chicago, judy Nurturant Kitchen (with Hodgetts and Weltsch) 36,37 Volksboutique I I 6 Kelly, Mary 35-7 'Cezanne's Doubt' 50
Almeida, Neville d' 108 Menstruation Bathroom 36-7 free-association 16,35,47 Hiller, Susan 75 Post-Partum Document 36 'Eye and Mind' 50
Althusser, Louis IIO Womanhouse(with Schapiro) 36-7,36 Freud, Sigmund ro,93, 128, 133 From the Freud Museum 35 Kienholz, Ed 27,28,44,55 The Phenomenology ofPerception 10,50, r 33
The American Supermarket 26-7,27 cinema 75,94-6,99-101 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' ro Hirschhorn, Thomas r06, 123-7 Kittelmann, Udo II9 The Primacy ofPerception 50,76
Andre, Carl 50,85 Clark, Lygia 63,64,106 death drive, theory of ro, 84, 94 altars r24 Krauss, Rosalind 53,69,71 The Visible and the Invisible 71-2
anechoic chamber 85 collection of installation pieces 17,42 The Interpretation ofDreams 16 Bataille Monument 124, 125, 126, 127, 127 Passages in Modem Sculpture 53-4 Metz, Christian
antagonism 120,123 Compton, Michael 35 Fried, Michael 66,120,133 Laundrette 124 Kruger, Barbara II2 'The Imaginary Signifier' 75,95
Arp, Hans 41 Conceptual art 113 'Art and Objecthood' 53 Pole-Self I 24 Kubota, Shigeko Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 41
ArtePovera 37,120 Concretism 63 Hodgetts, Vicki Vagina Painting 68 Minimalism 8, ro, 28, 50-6, 66, 68, 71, 72-3, 76,
Artist's Co-op 28 Craig-Martin, Michael G Nurturant Kitchen (with Frazier and We1tsch) 36,37 Kusama, Yayoi 90-2 80,82,85,113,120, 127
Asher, Michael 56,59-60,77,80,105 Face 87 Gabo, Naum 41 Holler, Carsten 48,80 Dots Obsession 90-1 Minkowski, Eugene
Untitled 56,60,61 Cubism 13 Ganzfeld 85,87 Flying Machine 48, 1]2 Dots Obsession: New Century 88-9,90-1 Lived Time 82,84
audio-installations 20,28,39,99-101 curator, role of 20,37 Glimcher, Arnold 92 Lichtwand 48, 49 Flower Obsession Sunflower 90 mirrors, use of 8, 72-5, 87, 90-4, ror
Godard, jean-Luc 95,127 Pealove Room 48 Kusama's Peep Show or Endless Love Show 90, 90-r Modernism 72
B D Gonzalez-Torres, Felix Il2, 113, I I 5, 116, 119 Slides 48 Love Forever 9 I Mondrian, Piet 13,41
Bakhtin, Mikhail r08 Dali, Salvador 20,22 candy spills II 5 Hugnet, Georges 14,20,22 Love Room 91 Morris, Robert 50,51,53,55,56,85
Barthes, Roland 10, 13,99-100, ror, r 28 dark works 8,82,84-7,101 paperstacks 113, II3 Mirror Room (Pumpkin) 90 'Notes on Sculpture 2' 53
'Leaving the Movie Theatre' 95,96 decentred subject 11,13,69,71,84,128,130-1,133 Untitled (Arena) II5 Untitled (L-Beams) 52,53-4,59
Basualdo, Carlos 107 dematerialism 76 Untitled (Loverboys) r r 5 ideological hang 20 L Untitled (mirror cubes) 87
Bell, Larry 56 Derrida, jacques 13,76 Untitled (March 5th) I I 5 installation art, use ofterm 6,123 Lacan, jacques la, 13,92,95, IIO, 119, 128,133 multi-perspectivalism 35-7
Benjamin, Walter 105 Dewey, john Untitled (Perfect Lovers) I I 5 institutional critique 32-3,35 'The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis' Mulvey, Laura
Beuys, joseph 31,37,41,102-6, Ir 5, r r8 Art as Experience 24 Untitled(Placebo) rr3, II4, 115 institutionally approved art 8 90 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' 95
7000 Oaks 105 Didi-Huberman, Georges 85 Gordon, Douglas Irwin, Robert 56,57,59,85 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the [' museum system
Beuys Block 3r, r04 Dine,jim 23 Between Darkness and Light 96 BlackLine Volume 57,58 72 ,73,9 0 collection of installation pieces r7
The Bureaufor Direct Democracy r04-5, 105 Dion, Mark Graham, Dan 72-6,77,87,110,130-1 Fractured Light-Partial Scrim-Ceiling-Eye-Level Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal institutional critique 32-3,35
Social Sculpture 102-6,123 The Department ofMarine Animal Identification ... 35 Cinema 75 Wire 56,57 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy ro, II9, 120, 128, 131 role of curator 20,37
Bey,Hakim documentation I I, 17 Opposing Mirrors and Monitors on Time Delay 75 Laplanche, jean 28
T.A.z. 45 Doesburg, Thea van 41 Present Continuous Pastes) 74,75 J Levin, Kim 9 1 ~ 2 N
Bianchini, Paul Douglas, Stan Public Space/Two Audiences 73,73,75 janis, Sidney 27 Light and Space 56-60,72-3,76,77,85 Nancy, jean-Luc II9
The American Supermarket 26-7, 27 Win, Place or Show 96 GroupMaterial IIo-13,II5 johns, jasper 26-7 Lippard, Lucy 55 Nauman, Bruce 69,71-2,85,93,131
Binaural recording 99 Duchamp, Marcel 8, r06 Alienation Film Festival r r 2 jonas, joan 96 Lissitzky,EI8,r3,4 r,48,80-1 Acoustic Wall 56,69,77
Birillo, Ben 26 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition 20,20,2 I Americana 111,112,113 Vertical Roll 96 Pangeometry 13 Green Light Corridor 69, 70, 76
Boltanski, Christian 42 MileofString 22-3 The Castle II 2 jones, Jonathan 47 Proun Room 81 Live-Taped Video Corridor 7 r
Reserve 42,42 Duve, Thierry de r06 Democracy I I 3 judd, Donald 50,53,55 'Proun Space' 80-1 Yellow Room (Triangular) 76
Bourgeois, Louise 37 Food and Culture II 2 julien, Isaac Nelson, Mike 44-7
Bourriaud,Nicolas 116, lIS, 119, 120 E ThelnauguralExhibition 110,112 Baltimore 96, 96 The Coral Reef 45, 46, 47
Brazilian artists 37,39,60,63-4,66, 106-ro Ehrenzweig, Anton The People's Choice II 2 jung, e.G. 31 The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent 9,45
Brecht, Bertold 95,127 The Hidden Order ofArt 93-4,101 Gullar, Ferreira 63 The Deliverance and the Patience 44-5
Breton,And,,' 22,26 Eliasson, Olafur 76-80 Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted 47
Brett, Guy r 07 360 degree room for all colours 76 Neo-Concretism 60,63
Broodthaers, Marcel Beauty 76 Neto, Ernesto 64
Musee d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles 33-5, The Mediated Motion 77,78-9 Walking in Venus Blue Cave 65
33,34,35,3 6,113 RoomforOneColour 76 New Realism 27
Buchloh, Benjamin r05-6 The Weather Project 7, 77, 80 Nordman, Maria 56,85
Buren, Daniel 32-3,42,80, r05 Your intuitive surroundings versus your surrounded
Burroughs, William intuition 76,77
Cities ofthe Red Night 45 Your natural denudation inverted 76
Your windless arrangement 76
Emin, Tracey 37
Environments 8,22-6,54-7

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