Installation Art

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The history of installation art is a history of the room slowly becoming the artwork. Its most famous ancestor stood in a private house in Hanover, where Kurt Schwitters transformed several rooms of his own home into the construction he called the Merzbau, dated to 1933 and recorded as the first of the environment rooms, spaces with specially shaped and surfaced walls, special lighting and contents of many kinds, before its destruction in 1943. What Schwitters had made in private became a public practice in the United States a generation later. From around 1957, Allan Kaprow began building what he called environments, and his own account of the first of them captures the shift the form required: he simply filled the whole gallery up, so that a visitor opening the door was immediately in the midst of an entire environment rather than in front of a picture. From the 1960s onward the practice widened rapidly. Edward Kienholz built nightmare tableaux such as Roxy's in 1961, George Segal placed casts of clothed figures in frozen, casual attitudes within furnished interiors, and mirror rooms such as Yayoi Kusama's Endless Love Room made the endlessly reflected spectator part of the total effect. Bruce Nauman repurposed the narrow corridors of his studio performances into installations that invited observers to experience constricted space for themselves, among them Green Light Corridor of 1970. A further turning point came in the early 1990s, when the art market crash of the late 1980s renewed interest in conceptual art and installation expanded into one of the dominant forms of the contemporary museum. By then the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov had given the mature form its clearest theory, the total installation, organized entirely around the person who walks into it. The line from a Hanover house to the vast commissioned halls of the present is continuous: at every stage the decisive act is the same, the replacement of the object on view with a world to be entered.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Museum of Modern Art defines installation in a single spare sentence, as an art form that comprises visual elements in any medium and the space they inhabit. The second half of that definition carries the weight, because the inclusion of space is precisely what divides installation from the sculptural tradition it grew out of. A traditional sculpture, however dynamic its form, is a fixed object that the viewer walks around. The environmental work reverses this: it no longer confronts the spectator as an object but surrounds the spectator, who moves within it as within a stage set, a garden or an interior. Installation art is large-scale, mixed media construction, often made for a specific place or a temporary period, that offers a complete unified experience rather than a display of separate, individual artworks. The materials follow from that ambition: miscellaneous materials, light and sound have remained fundamental to the form, and environmental art pursues concreteness by including more of reality itself, real clothes, actual objects, actual lighting effects and real items of furniture, rather than by representing reality more accurately. Works in major museum collections show the range this allows, from James Turrell's light work Frontal Passage of 1994 to Pipilotti Rist's video environment Ever Is Over All of 1997 and Sarah Sze's Triple Point of 2013. The deepest consequence concerns the audience. Because the work is a space, the visitor's body is inside the medium, and the visitor's movement and attention become material the artist composes with. Ilya Kabakov, the form's most influential theorist and practitioner, stated the principle directly: the main actor in the total installation, the main center toward which everything is addressed, is the viewer. Whether this makes installation an offshoot of sculpture, as some critics still hold, or a category of its own, the practical test is simple. If removing the surrounding space would leave the work intact, it is sculpture. If the space is the work, it is an installation.