Installation Art in the West

Installation Art began in the late 1950's and early 1960's in the United States and Europe and has flourished from the 1970's to the 1990's. Installation art is arranged from assemblage, tableaux, the environment and a site-specific artwork. It is a post-modernist response to the social, political and cultural conditions of the 20th century. Representative installation work encompasses a wide range of concepts, subject matter and ideas presented in many diverse ways. The form of installation art influenced Southeast Asian artists during the mid 1970's. It offered a new way, a renaissance in presentation, of accepted ideologies and indigenous cultural materials.






Ed Kienholz

Ed Kienholz- A Los Angeles artist, who during the late 50's and early 60's made assemblage and installation works that illustrated the squalor of the urban environment, stressing psychological and social dimensions. His tableaux installations often found inspiration in beat poetry and in the surrealist juxtapositions of images and materials. The "Full scale walk-in tableaux", is his best known piece from the 1960's. His installation, "The Wait" (1964-1965), is noteworthy. He constructed an aged lady out of desiccated animal bones. Her head was a plastic-encased photo of a young woman's face, creating the illusion that the youthful woman still lives on in her mind. She sits patiently waiting in her heavy, dark antique chair, dressed in brittle, yellowed garments. A necklace of jars around her neck seems to contain tokens of memories. The old lady's knitting and shawl lie at her feet along with a nostalgic display of old photographs resting on the table beside her. Her immobility is set off by the sounds of a live canary, chirping in a cage that stands off to one side.





George Segal

George Segal, made his walk-in painting out of wire, plaster and burlap in the form of life-sized three-dimensional figures. Three-dimensional environments of real objects also added to his figure sculptures. His work "The Subway" 1968, not only had a real subway car interior but lights flashing through outside darkened windows. The installation is meant to urge the observer to enter a literal space; to give the total experience of real material with real space.



Robert Morris

Robert Morris' minimalist work, "Installation view of one-person exhibition" was made in 1964. This work aimed to make the viewer aware of perception as an activity, carried on bodily, rather than a passive droning of awareness. He explains, new sculptural installations, his own included, "take relationships out of the work and make them a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision." The object is only one of the terms in the newer aesthetic. It is in some way more reflective because one's awareness is heightened with it's many conflicting internal relationships. His installation emphasizes the aesthetic relationship in perception that occurs between the object, its' space and the viewer.



Mario Merz

Mario Merz is a European artist whose installation, "Igloos"(1968-1969), brings about a fusion of natural elements with fragments of urban society in a way that also seem to suggest the idea of nature overwhelming culture from within. For Merz, the artist is like a nomad using humble materials from everyday life. These materials are taken from culture and from the organic world, mediating between the two. He covered segmented metal armatures in nets, wax, mud, glass and bundles of twigs. These small hemispherical dwellings use the materials indigenous to the sites at which the exhibitions take place. Merz thus creates a hypothetical artist who is at home everywhere. The Igloo is architecture, shelter, and an abstract idea associated with the nomad. It is a skin that embodies the receptivity of the artist to nature and culture.



Allan McCollum

Allan McCollum's installation, "Plaster Surrogates" (1983-85), has a wonderful complexity embedded in its' matter-of-fact treatment of the drawing as infinitely re-combinable prefab units, stacked in a store. He probed the issue of commodification artistic language by making "art surrogates" or neutral vehicles to see in what way one can separate and perfect the forms in artistic language as if they were mass production goods. Allan McCollum, like other artists in the 1980's, used installation art to deal with the imaginative possibilities of mass-market consumerism. They found aesthetic pleasure in a contemporary consumer culture. This presented a commodification of art as a fascinating new aspect of contemporary culture.


Sources:

1. Baker, Kenneth. "Minimalism" Cross River Press 1988, PP 67-77

2. "Allan McCollum", New York 1989

3. "Mario Merz", Rizzoli, New York 1989

4. Seitz, William C., "Segal", Harry N. Abrams, New York 1972

5. Hopps, Walter."Kienholz Ð A Retrospective" Whitney Museum of American Art


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