Installation art is an artistic genre of

three-dimensional Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determine the position of an element (i.e., point). This is the informa ...

works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called

public art Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically acce ...

, land art or

art intervention Art intervention is an interaction with a previously existing artwork, audience, venue/space or situation. It has the auspice of conceptual art and is commonly a form of performance art. It is associated with the Viennese Actionists, the Dada mov ...

; however, the boundaries between these terms overlap.

History

Installation art can be either temporary or permanent. Installation artworks have been constructed in exhibition spaces such as museums and galleries, as well as public and private spaces. The

genre Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other for ...

incorporates a broad range of everyday and natural materials, which are often chosen for their " evocative" qualities, as well as

new media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...

such as

video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syst ...

sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' b ...

, performance,

immersive virtual reality Immersion into virtual reality (VR) is a perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. The perception is created by surrounding the user of the VR system in images, sound or other stimuli that provide an engrossing total enviro ...

and the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. Many installations are site-specific in that they are designed to exist only in the space for which they were created, appealing to qualities evident in a

immersive medium. Artistic collectives such as the Exhibition Lab at New York's American Museum of Natural History created environments to showcase the natural world in as realistic a medium as possible. Likewise,

Walt Disney Imagineering Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, Inc., commonly referred to as Imagineering, is the research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company, responsible for the creation, design, and construction of Disney theme parks and attra ...

employed a similar philosophy when designing the multiple immersive spaces for

Disneyland Disneyland is a theme park in Anaheim, California. Opened in 1955, it was the first theme park opened by The Walt Disney Company and the only one designed and constructed under the direct supervision of Walt Disney. Disney initially envision ...

in 1955. Since its acceptance as a separate discipline, a number of institutions focusing on Installation art were created. These included the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, the Museum of Installation in London, and the Fairy Doors of Ann Arbor, MI, among others. Installation art came to prominence in the 1970s but its roots can be identified in earlier artists such as

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...

and his use of the readymade and Kurt Schwitters' ''Merz'' art objects, rather than more traditional craft based

sculpture Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable ...

. The "intention" of the artist is paramount in much later installation art whose roots lie in the

conceptual art Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...

of the 1960s. This again is a departure from traditional sculpture which places its focus on form. Early non-Western installation art includes events staged by the

Gutai group The was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954. The group, today one of the most internationally-recognized instances o ...

in Japan starting in 1954, which influenced American installation pioneers like

Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the " Environment" and " Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well ...

. Wolf Vostell shows his installation ''6 TV Dé-coll/age'' in 1963 at the

Smolin Gallery The Smolin Gallery was an avant-garde art venue and gallery on 57th Street in New York City, at its peak in the 1960s. It was known for its involvement with installation art, performance art and experimental art, and was best known for the Allan K ...

in New York.

Installation

''Installation'' as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently; its first use as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1969. It was coined in this context, in reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century.

used the term "Environment" in 1958 (Kaprow 6) to describe his transformed indoor spaces; this later joined such terms as "project art" and "temporary art." Essentially, installation/environmental art takes into account a broader sensory experience, rather than floating framed points of focus on a "neutral" wall or displaying isolated objects (literally) on a pedestal. This may leave

space Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually cons ...

and

time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...

as its only dimensional constants, implying dissolution of the line between "art" and "life"; Kaprow noted that "if we bypass 'art' and take nature itself as a model or point of departure, we may be able to devise a different kind of art... out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life".

Gesamtkunstwerk

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

Gesamtkunstwerk A ''Gesamtkunstwerk'' (, literally 'total artwork', translated as 'total work of art', 'ideal work of art', 'universal artwork', 'synthesis of the arts', 'comprehensive artwork', or 'all-embracing art form') is a work of art that makes use of al ...

'', or an operatic work for the stage that drew inspiration from ancient Greek theater in its inclusion of all the major art forms:

painting Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...

writing Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Writing systems do not themselves constitute h ...

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...

, etc. (Britannica). In devising operatic works to commandeer the audience's senses, Wagner left nothing unobserved:

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

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

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

and virtual reality environments".

Art and Objecthood

Franzoesischer Dom - Festival of Lights 2011

In "Art and Objecthood", Michael Fried derisively labels art that acknowledges the viewer as "

theatrical Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actor, actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The p ...

" (Fried 45). There is a strong parallel between installation and theater: both play to a viewer who is expected to be at once immersed in the sensory/

narrative A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional ( fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc. ...

experience that surrounds him and maintain a degree of self-identity as a viewer. The traditional theater-goer does not forget that they have come in from outside to sit and take in a created experience; a trademark of installation art has been the curious and eager viewer, still aware that they are in an exhibition setting and tentatively exploring the novel universe of the installation. The artist and critic

Ilya Kabakov Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov (Russian: Илья́ Ио́сифович Кабако́в; born September 30, 1933), is a Russian–American conceptual artist, born in Dnipropetrovsk in what was then the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union. He worked f ...

mentions this essential phenomenon in the introduction to his lectures "On the "Total" Installation": " neis simultaneously both a 'victim' and a viewer, who on the one hand surveys and evaluates the installation, and on the other, follows those associations, recollections which arise in him he is overcome by the intense atmosphere of the total illusion". Here installation art bestows an unprecedented importance on the observer's inclusion in that which he observes. The expectations and social habits that the viewer takes with him into the space of the installation will remain with him as he enters, to be either applied or negated once he has taken in the new environment. What is common to nearly all installation art is a consideration of the experience in toto and the problems it may present, namely the constant conflict between disinterested criticism and sympathetic involvement.

Television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

and

offer somewhat immersive experiences, but their unrelenting control over the

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...

of passing time and the arrangement of images precludes an intimately personal viewing experience. Ultimately, the only things a viewer can be assured of when experiencing the work are his own thoughts and preconceptions and the basic rules of space and time. All else may be molded by the artist's hands. The central importance of the subjective point of view when experiencing installation art, points toward a disregard for traditional

Platonic Plato's influence on Western culture was so profound that several different concepts are linked by being called Platonic or Platonist, for accepting some assumptions of Platonism, but which do not imply acceptance of that philosophy as a whole. It ...

image theory. In effect, the entire installation adopts the character of the simulacrum or flawed statue: it neglects any ideal form in favor of optimizing its direct appearance to the observer. Installation art operates fully within the realm of sensory perception, in a sense "installing" the viewer into an artificial system with an appeal to his subjective perception as its ultimate goal.

Interactive installations

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

frequently involves the audience acting on the work of art or the piece responding to users' activity. There are several kinds of interactive installations that artists produce, these include web-based installations (e.g., Telegarden),

gallery Gallery or The Gallery may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Art gallery ** Contemporary art gallery Music * Gallery (band), an American soft rock band of the 1970s Albums * ''Gallery'' (Elaiza album), 2014 album * ''Gallery'' (Gr ...

-based installations, digital-based installations,

electronic Electronic may refer to: *Electronics, the science of how to control electric energy in semiconductor * ''Electronics'' (magazine), a defunct American trade journal *Electronic storage, the storage of data using an electronic device *Electronic co ...

-based installations,

mobile Mobile may refer to: Places * Mobile, Alabama, a U.S. port city * Mobile County, Alabama * Mobile, Arizona, a small town near Phoenix, U.S. * Mobile, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Mobile ( ...

-based installations, etc. Interactive installations appeared mostly at end of the 1980s (''Legible City'' by Jeffrey Shaw, ''La plume'' by

Edmond Couchot Edmond Couchot (16 August 1932 – 26 December 2020) was a French digital artist and art theoretician who taught at the University Paris VIII. Life and work Couchot was a Doctor of aesthetics in the visual arts. From 1982-2000 he headed the depar ...

, Michel Bret...) and became a genre during the 1990s, when artists became particularly interested in using the participation of the audiences to activate and reveal the meaning of the installation.

Immersive virtual reality

With the improvement of

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and Reproducibility, reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in me ...

over the years, artists are more able to explore outside of the boundaries that were never able to be explored by artists in the past. The

media Media may refer to: Communication * Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data ** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising ** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass e ...

used are more experimental and bold; they are also usually cross media and may involve sensors, which plays on the reaction to the audiences' movement when looking at the installations. By using virtual reality as a medium,

art is probably the most deeply interactive form of art. By allowing the spectator to "visit" the representation, the artist creates "situations to live" vs "spectacle to watch".

Gallery

File:Firoz Mahmud Sucker Aichi Triennale 13.JPG, 'Sucker'wfp21' aircraft sculptural installation by Bangladeshi artist Firoz Mahmud at Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya, Japan File:NEORIZON.jpg,

Maurice Benayoun Maurice Benayoun (aka MoBen or 莫奔) (born 29 March 1957) is a French new-media artist, curator, and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong. His work employs various media, including video, computer graphics, immersive virtual reality, th ...

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

Eberhard Bosslet Eberhard Bosslet (born 1953) is a German contemporary artist who has been producing site-specific art and architectural-related works, such as sculpture, installation, light art and painting, all indoors and outdoors, since 1979. Biography ...

, Anmaßend I, documenta 8, Kassel,

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

1987 File:Aleya-milton-becerra.jpg,

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

Ale'ya, Durban Segnini Gallery,

Miami Miami ( ), officially the City of Miami, known as "the 305", "The Magic City", and "Gateway to the Americas", is a coastal metropolis and the county seat of Miami-Dade County in South Florida, United States. With a population of 442,241 at ...

, 2009

Book Analysis of a process over time - 2007 - File:Vasiliy Ryabchenko. "Big Bembi", installation, barrels, linear lamps, deer horns, 1994.jpg,

Vasiliy Ryabchenko Vasiliy Ryabchenko (born 23 July 1954, Odessa, USSR) is a Ukrainian painter, photographer, and installation artist. One of the key artists in contemporary Ukrainian art, and the " New Ukrainian Wave". Biography Vasiliy Ryabchenko was born on ...

, ''"Big Bembi"'', 1994 File:Christian Boltanski. Signatures.jpg,

Christian Boltanski Christian Liberté Boltanski (6 September 1944 – 14 July 2021) was a French sculptor, photographer, painter, and film maker. He is best known for his photography installations and contemporary French Conceptual art, conceptual style. Early li ...

, ''Signatures'', 2011. File:Dombis 1687.jpg, Pascal Dombis, ''Irrationnal Geometrics'', 2008. File:My Inner Beast portrait.jpg, '' My Inner Beast'', 1993 sculpture by Danish artist

Jens Galschiøt Jens Galschiøt (born 4 June 1954) is a Danish sculptor best known for the ''Pillar of Shame''. Galschiøt moved to Odense in 1973, and in 1985 he opened a combined foundry, studio, Gallery Galschiøt and sculpture park. In 1990, Galschiøt, Er ...

. Exhibited in twenty cities across Europe without permission of the authorities. File:Test Site by Carsten Höller.jpg, Carsten Höller. '' Test Site'',

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It ...

, 2006. Members of public slid down as much as five stories inside tubular slides. File:Electronic Superhighway by Nam June Paik.jpg,

Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super h ...

, ''Electronic Superhighway'', Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii 1995 File:Wolf Vostell, Fiebre de Automóvil, 1973, Instalación.JPG, Wolf Vostell, ''Auto-Fever'', 1973, Museo Vostell Malpartida. File:African Adventure, Tate Modern, November 2016 (01).JPG, ''African Adventure'' by

Jane Alexander Jane Alexander (née Quigley; born October 28, 1939) is an American actress and author. She is the recipient of two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, and nominations for four Academy Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. From 1993 to 19 ...

,1999-2002,

, Bankside, London, England, November 2016 File:DavidSpriggsArt.jpg, David Spriggs, ''Vision II'', 2017. File:H Cronhammar.JPG, Installation by Ingvar Cronhammar in

Frederiksberg Frederiksberg () is a part of the Capital Region of Denmark. It is formally an independent municipality, Frederiksberg Municipality, separate from Copenhagen Municipality, but both are a part of the City of Copenhagen. It occupies an area of ...

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...

2015.

References

Bibliography

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

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

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

* Murray, Timothy, Derrick de Kerckhove, Oliver Grau, Kristine Stiles, Jean-Baptiste Barrière,

Dominique Moulon Dominique Moulon (born 1962) is a historian of art and technology, art critic and curator, specializing in French digital art. He is the author of the books ''Art contemporain nouveaux médias'' and ''Art Beyond Digital''. Background Dominiqu ...

, Jean-Pierre Balpe, ''Maurice Benayoun Open Art'', Nouvelles éditions Scala, 2011, French version, * Kabakov, Ilya. On the "Total" Installation. Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz, 1995, 243-260. * Kaprow, Allan. "Notes on the Creation of a Total Art." In Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. * Mondloch, Kate. ''Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. * Nechvatal, Joseph, ''Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances''.

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing Omniscriptum Publishing Group, formerly known as VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, is a German publishing group headquartered in Riga, Latvia. Founded in 2002 in Düsseldorf, its book production is based on print-to-order technology. The company publis ...

. 2009. * * Reiss, Julie H. ''From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. * Rosenthal, Mark. ''Understanding Installation Art: From Duchamp to Holzer''. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2003. * Suderburg, Erika. Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

External links

Dossier: Site-specific Installations in Germany

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

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

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