Installation Art
© Werner Hammerstingl, 1998
 

Installation art has matured. In the 60's it was in it's infancy as a practice. Marcel Duchamp,Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, Joseph Beuys,Christo and others are now well known as pioneers toward this new form of artistic expression.

Many of the now less remembered contributors to the evolution of this medium can be found at least in citation in the excellent 1994 Thames and Hudson publication 'Installation Art'which is written by Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry.

Installation art has it's heritage in the 'gesamtkunstwerk' idea proposed first by the composer Wagner. The concept of the 'gesamtkunstwerk' embodies a sythesis of the various visual art and performance art media on the 'stage'.

The ideas of Wagner resurfaced in the ideologies and works of Futurists, Dadaists, Constructivists and the Bauhaus.

It was however the new experimental, exlorative and anti-establishement culture in the arts that surfaced from the late fifties onwards that resulted in the works that now classicaly fit the installation art mantle.

For a detailed article describing Installation art (by Nicholas Zurbrugg) click here.

A brief History of installation art and events contributing to it's evolution:

• 1920 Johannes Baader presents his installation Das Grosse Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama at the International Dada fair in Berlin
• 1920 Kurt Schwitters begins his first Mertzbau which was also known as the K de E or Cathedral of erotic woes
• 1933 John Price becomes the inaugural director of Black Mountain College in North Carolina where MerceCunningham, John Cage, Robert Raushenberg and others will work and teach new approaches to art and sound.
• 1938 Duchamp organises the Paris surrealist exhibition and contributes his work 1200 bags of coal
• 1941 The Surrealist exhibition"Papers of Surrealism" opens at 551 Maddison Avenue in new York and features Duchamp's 'Mile of string' installation.
• 1952 John Cage organises the first 'Happening' at Black Mountain College
• 1955 The first Kassel documenta exhibition opens in Germany
• 1958 Christo makes his first wrapped objects(empaquetages)
• 1961 George Segal exhibits 'Man at a table' in New York
• 1962 Andy Warhol exhibits '200 Campbell Soup cans'
• 1962 Wiesbaden , Germany experiences the Fluxus International festival. The artists whose work is featured include Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Robert Filou, On Kawara, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell.
• 1963 Hans Haake begins his Water plus Wind sculptures in New York
• 1963 Nam June Paik makes first use of video in an installation that also includes prepared pianos and noise machines at the Gallerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany.
• 1964-5 A diversity of Happenings, Actions and Performance installations take place in Europe and the US. Special mention must be made of Carolee Schneeman "Meat joy' performance at Judson Memorial Church, New Your in '63 and Joseph Beuys' happening in Wuppertal, Germany entitled '24 hours'.
• 1965 The Vienna artists Guenther Brus and Rudolph Schwarzkogler begin their 'self-mutilations'
• 1966 The first earthworks are made by Richard Long, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson in the US.
• 1966 James Turrel (California)makes his first light piece in the form of a projection called'Proto Afrum'
• 1967 Claes Oldenburg makes 'Invisible sculpture' which consists of a trench first dug and then filled behind the Museum of Modern Artin New York.
• 1967 Gilbert and George call themselves 'Human scuptures' and claim that everything they do is sculpture (London).
• 1968 Installation art goes beyond the confines of this planet when James Lee Byars sends a 'mile long thread of gold' into outer space via a helium baloon from CBS plaza, 53rd Street,New York.
• 1969 James Turrell and Sam Francis wok with planes and clouds to make 'airborne works' in Pasadena, California.
• 1969 Christo wraps one million square feet of Little Bay near Sydney.
• 1970 Robert Barry exhibits a closed art gallery in Los Angeles.
• 1970 Robert Smithson produces the Great Salt lake 'Spiral Jetty'
• 1971 Rothko chapel opens in Houston Texas.
• 1972-6 Christo's 'Running fence' at Marin County, California
• 1979 Judy Chicago's 'Dinner party' opens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Environmental installation case-study

Environmental and earth art installations of monumental scale always tend to bring Christo to the forefront but there are other artists that should also be mentioned.

Robert Smithson for instance became famous for his monumental earthwork "Spiral Jetty" 1969.

Concerning Robert Smithson's work: Lawrence Alloway has defined the relation of site to nonsite in a way which helps us to see this reversibility. The nonsites, he says, constitute "a sculpture of absence": "The site is identified [initially, at the nonsite, in the gallery] by information supplied by the artist in the form of maps, photographs, analogical objects (bins and trays cued by the original lay of the land), rock samples and verbal captions. The nonsite, by this accumulation of references, acts as the signifier of the absent site." And yet, in a dialectical play that Smithson himself surely understood, in the experience of it, the nonsite is itself a site that redefines the original site as the nonsite.

[Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance (page 229)]

Large-scale installation case study

Wrapped Reichstag,1995 Christo

After a struggle spanning through the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, the wrapping of the REICHSTAG was completed on June 24th, 1995 by a work force of 90 professional climbers and 120 installation workers. The Reichstag remained wrapped for 14 days and all materials were recycled.

Paintings in/as installation case study

In the late 1970s Andy Warhol produced some of his most ambitious paintings, often in series. Shadows (1978) is a sequence of 102 large paintings, exhibited side by side on all four walls of a large room, so that all the paintings become a dramatic and colorful environment. The images appear to be completely abstract, but in fact the black silkscreened ink, on variously colored backgrounds, depicts enlarged details of a photograph, probably of the corner of a room. The paintings have a flickering quality, reminiscent of the repeated frames of a film strip. Warhol thought of the room as a discotheque-like space where people could meet, socialize, or dance, as they did at the Studio 54 nightclub which he frequented at the time.

Shadows was first shown in New York in January 1979. It was acquired by Dia Center for the Arts and has been shown only once since, at The Menil Collection in Houston.