Installation Art

“Installation art” is a term applied to room-sized works of art that are large enough for the viewer to enter. While the term has been in use since the end of the 1980s, large-scale spatial works appeared sporadically in Europe beginning decades earlier and have been retroactively seen as precursors of this contemporary practice. In the 1960s and 1970s, a few scholars began to identify an increasing tendency for artists to create room-sized works of art. They variously called these works environments, art spaces, or situations and proposed art historical lineages for them, particularly the work of the Italian Futurists, El Lissitzky, and Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau. Initially the holistic ideals that led De Stijl and Russian Constructivist artists to create three-dimensional environments were cited alongside the gestures of Dada artists and Marcel Duchamp. A distinction between the latter and Modernist sources is more evident in recent scholarship. By the end of the 1990s, there were a considerable number of artists producing installation art in Europe and the United States, and the literature soon caught up, growing rapidly in the first decade of the 21st century. Initially, emphasis in the literature was on installation art’s formal qualities. Encyclopedias and glossaries of art identified ephemerality and response to the properties of a physical site as its key characteristics. However, this focus shifted as installation artists increasingly began engaging with cultural and social contexts, expanding the discussion of space to include these less tangible concerns. In recent years viewer participation has emerged as a central critical issue for installation art. While an emphasis on the viewer’s experience was discussed in response to some 1960s and 1970s installations, by the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, viewer participation was foregrounded as a major entry point for analyses, and recent scholarship has continued this trend. Installation art defies traditional divisions between specific mediums, which continues to earn it both support and criticism. As a medium it challenges not only critics but historians as well. Ephemeral in nature, installation art initially posed similar difficulties to the historian as performance and body art, leaving few material remains. This has changed to a degree, as installation art is no longer assumed to be uncollectible. Conservation and preservation issues have also captured significant attention in recent years. Projects involving the sharing of information by international teams of curators, conservators, and artists not only have addressed practical concerns but also have raised questions about the essence of an installation that was conceived for a given space at a particular moment in time. The debate on reinstallation is a testament to installation art’s challenging nature and is an important consideration for the art historian.