From the Merzbau to the Total Installation

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.