Blog #8: Installation Art

For this weeks blog, I am going to take a look at Installation Art, which grew in popularity during the late 50s and early 60s.  Installation art is a style of three dimensional work that is generally site specific, as the sculpture or other objects are installed in a specific location and cannot be moved generally.

From the era in which this genre of art first started, one example of early installation art was Allan Kaprow's Words.

Allan Kaprow was one of the most influential artists involved in both Happenings and installations, and in this installation in New York, 1962 at the Smolin Gallery, Kaprow combined a vast amount of paper with random arrangements of words backed by music played by multiple record-players, creating a massive chaotic mess of surroundings for people to walk into and experience.

With this style, the purpose is to take the experience that spectators can have with art in its traditional mediums such as on a canvas, and then expand it to becoming complete environments or structures to envelope  people, or at minimum allow people to walk in and have the art around them rather than simply hung on the wall.  Kaprow subscribed to this line of thought whole-heartedly, moving art away from canvases and wall hangings, to expanding what mediums could be used to create art, removing it from a traditional pedestal.

The main limitation, or possibly even a strength, is that once planted down and installed, it shall never be imagined in the same manner again, creating many temporary works and structures that only exist in one place, and cannot move from that point.  Nevertheless, the medium that is made of many possible mediums is growing stronger due to the new fronts provided by technology and virtual reality in installations.  With these newer technologies, pieces can be moved more easily and replicate similar experiences, or even adapt to fit a different audience using dynamic visuals or interactivity with an audience, making the art more conceptual, with the final piece being less important when compared to the theory or idea behind the piece.

In more modern interpretations of installation art, digital media and technologies have been used to produce similar effects, but with the interactivity and dynamic reactions made possible through the technology.  One example that holds a similar goal to Kaprow's early installation is Screen by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a professor at the Universtiy of California Santa Cruz, who conducts research into storytelling through games.  In Screen (2003), people walk into a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, a massive room of virtual reality displays.  They begin the experience by reading and listening to the "Memory texts", random storylines, then the words become loose, and the observer finds they can interact and push these wods floating about then and across the walls.  This interaction with the words distorts their meaning and order, and can end with either the words being misplaced or simply collapsing to the floor if too many are removed at once.  Holding relevance to Wardrip-Fruin's interests, the whole experiences purpose was to introduce storytelling in a game-like fashion, and look at the reading, listening, and manipulation of the surrounding text to become a story that utilized multiple senses.

Overall, the genre that is installation art is an extraordinary one, capable of many new things since its conception in the 1950s and 60s, with new mediums finding a way to progress the possibilities of this style of art.

~~~~~Nathaniel Hendrix~~~~~~