Search Results

This chapter has three objectives. First, it argues that apprehending an installation artwork is similar to apprehending an artwork for performance: in each case, audiences must recognize a relationship between the performance or display one encounters and the parameters expressed in the underlying work. Second, it considers whether realizations are also artworks in their own right. It argues that, in both installation art and performance, a particular realization is sometimes an artwork in its own right (even as it realizes another work). It offers criteria for determining when this is the case. Application of the criteria yields the verdict that performances are sometimes artworks in their own right, while displays of installation artworks rarely are. This difference, though, is merely contingent on the conventions of the respective art forms. Third, the chapter addresses ontological concerns about entities that are both abstract and temporal, as many artworks are on this analysis.

Chapter Four considers worlding, or the city’s positioning as a cosmopolitan center on an international stage, as a philosophical construct and tangible phenomenon tied to the development and promotion of present-day Shanghai and contemporary Chinese art. The chapter presents three Shanghai-based installations by transnational art stars Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, and Cai Guoqiang. Disrupting the East-meets-West soundbites surrounding discussions of these works, this chapter interrogates the artists’ privileged subject positions, arguing that such artworks function as branding campaigns that world Shanghai. The chapter also discusses the loaded cultural geographies of these installations’ shared sites: the Bund, once the heart of Shanghai’s British and US-controlled International Settlement, and the Pudong Skyline, considered the shining jewel of China’s post-socialist economic rise. The chapter concludes by discussing a more critical recent project by Cai Guoqiang that acknowledged the migrant labor fuelling Shanghai’s urbanization in the face of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, and a related urban intervention by artist Ai Weiwei.

The audiovisual history charted in chapter two is here revoiced in terms of spatial expansion. It is argued that video technology did not initiate a new form of creative engagement with its performance spaces, but rather represented the peak of a spatial expansion that had been gathering pace throughout the twentieth century. As musicians explored their spatial parameters and artists included time in their work, attention was drawn to traditional viewing and listening procedures. Drawing on the theories of László Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Giedion, Christopher Small and Brian O’Doherty, this chapter compares the conventions of gallery exhibition and display, viewing procedures and audience behaviour with the customs and aesthetics of listening in the traditional concert hall. Performance and installation art, aleatoric music and communal composition are used to propose a theory of spatialised creativity, audience activation and performativity.

This chapter examines the legacy of performance art in the installation of a moving image. Installation art of every kind emphasizes the role of the public as both participants and informed consumers of art. Performance art, while similarly emphasizing collaborative interaction with audiences, in fact reinstates the artist, or her surrogates, as the embodied focus of aesthetic meaning. The artist becomes the unequivocal presence that hails the assembled company and demands a human, relational response. Performance art shares with theater the liveness of this encounter, but when it emerged as a more or less discrete practice in the early 1980s, it broke with theatrical tradition. The activation of the audience in performance was followed by the second break with theater: the abandonment of scripts, while also renouncing the impersonation of fictional characters by actors. Much live art and installation is organized around the participation of spectators, regarded as performative elements in their own right.

This chapter discusses three installations by Lawrence Malstaf, which rework religious motifs, or literally set them in motion to reinterpret the idea of the incarnation and the oppositions between body and soul, flesh and spirit, which are still implicitly present in contemporary notions of mediality. Madonnapresents an iconographic inversion of the motif of Annunciation, and situates itself in the broad network of cultural meanings associated with air and breath. The work has broader resonances with iconic images belonging to different periods. It can be seen as a survival from the past which, in the sense of Aby Warburg, displaces and inverts the meaning of the borrowed motif to transform it into a critical commentary. Next to that the co-presence of the technical and the iconic, the imprint and the iconic resonances in the installation Shrink, and the transformation of the motif of Jesus writing in the sand in Sandbible.

This chapter examines the political aspects of the visual representations of South African Bushmen. It describes three episodes in the history of these visual representations. These are the creation of an archive of /Xam traditions in the 1870s and 1880s, the making of a diorama at the South African Museum in Cape Town and the author's own installation of an art exhibit at the South African National Gallery in 1996. This chapter explains that the archive was a collaborative project in which the /Xam were offered a means to express themselves and the diorama was a European construction of the primitive hunter-gatherer.

This chapter focuses on the mimeographic labor of conservation that takes place around contemporary art forms such as performance, installations or conceptual art. Specifically, the chapter asks: How can conservators and curators sustain modern boundaries between original and copy, between past and present, between subject and object, between content and context, when dealing with artworks that have been explicitly created to undo those boundaries? The chapter introduces the idea of "elusive objects" to describe contemporary artworks without clear boundaries. It then explores the mimeographic labor through which these elusive objects are taken care of in the museum by focusing on two specific cases: the conceptual installation Office of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels by David Lamelas, and the performance Huddle by Simone Forti. The chapter concludes by exploring how the mimeographic labor of conserving these elusive objects feeds into contemporary trends of commodification and display in art museums.

This chapter charts the history of video installation. By the mid-1960s, the viewing public was already fluent in the representational language and spectatorial codes of television when artists engaged with and re-cast television as installation art. This chapter begins with an overview of video installation's television roots as well as the history of video before turning to a discussion of the mirroring effect of video that distinguished the medium from film. It then considers the capacity of video to parallel real time, to run alongside our own passage through life, in synch with what David Hall called the “real-time continuum.” It also examines the congruence between the artist's studio and the gallery space, along with the strategy of precipitating technological malfunctions, with the audience as accomplice. Finally, it analyzes the BBC documentary Family History (2006) and the way it interrogates the role broadcast media plays in shaping the beliefs we hold about the world beyond the membrane of our homes.

This chapter demonstrates how sculpture departs from aesthetic beauty or pure form to engage in subjects involving minors or the marginalized, and how it addresses critical issues such as birth control policy, discrimination toward the disabled, and traumatic memory. Central to the examination are the social implications of a dialectical relationship between ephemeral bodies and the visual medium. It investigates first how articulation of a subject and concept becomes possible through material subversion. Taking Jiang Jie's wax sculptures as examples, the analysis shows how the sculptor creates a fetus–infant subject through vulnerable and mutable materials such as wax. The material's properties correspond to abortion issues in China and center attention on the ephemeral fetus–infant body. Chen Qingqing's diorama installations transform ready-made and inanimate everyday objects into allegorical narratives and theatrical characters, enacting human drama and catastrophe. Each diorama box contains a segment of a dramatic series that unfolds traumatic experience and black memory to expose contemporary social problems. In addition to experiments with alternative materiality, the female artists also explore the sensation of tactile quality in sculpture and installation art. Li Xiuqin, for instance, incorporates the language of braille in the language of sculpture when she inscribes braille patterns on rocks, wood, and stone sculptures, thus communicating with people who are blind and providing them with legitimate access to fine art.

This chapter introduces the category of screen-reliant installation art as a way of producing and critiquing gallery-based media art since the late 1960s. It begins by considering the diverse models of spectatorship as representative of the differences between experimental film and film installation. It states that the installation’s mode of presentation have a different effect, which complicates theatrical cinematic spectatorship.

The sixth chapter examines the role of inner and outer space in cultural productions of black post-blackness. Crawford develops a theory of black public interiority (a theory of black cultural movements’ ability to create a sense of shared interiority within the public space of the collective). She argues that the Black Arts Movement was aspiring for public art that could be experienced as both a black interior and an open space created by a collective. This chapter analyzes a range of installation art and other visual art, film, and letter writing that dramatize the black interior being experienced as the black outdoors. Crawford demonstrates that the BAM set in motion a vital process (that black aesthetics continue to engage) of refusing to allow black interiority to be defined as the province of the black bourgeoisie. The art examined includes installation art created by Kara Walker, outdoor murals, the film Night Catches Us, the letter writing of Carolyn Rodgers and Hoyt Fuller, and more.

This chapter explores the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture. The ancestry of installation art has been linked variously to the radical theater and cross-media events of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s, and later, Black Mountain College (1933–1957). By the 1980s, Minimalist artists were developing a heightened sensitivity to the space in which a work was installed, and they explored a four-fold relational dynamic between objects, their surrounding space, its architectural frame, and the body of the viewer, in which architectural form was a given parameter of the exercise. An ancestral line for installation and the moving image comes down from the nineteenth century and its fascination with the optical toys, magic lantern shows, zoetropes and dioramas, the proto-cinematic gadgets that led to the invention of motion pictures. This chapter considers how the architectural setting became a major factor in the conception and execution of an installation and how the movement paths were structured by the architecture itself—galleries leading directly into other galleries or radiating from a central rotunda.

This chapter discusses major events related to the author's attempts to prove her sole authorship of the 1989 installation art work Dialogue and the shooting performance. She wrote the first draft of “Explanation of Dialogue, the Work Which was Shot with a Gun at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing in 1989” and in October 2005 Song Liwei published an essay refuting her claims. During the same month in 2005, she raised objections about Song's reappraisal of her explanations and she published all pertinent videos and photographs to prove her claim. In November 2006, her work was auctioned and sold for 2,310,000 yuan renminbi.

Art historical interpretations of the production and exhibition of moving-image works in art spaces often rest on a reductive oppositional pairing of the “white cube” of the museum or gallery space and the “black box” of the movie theatre. This introduction challenges that approach, arguing that new methods and research drawn from media and cultural studies—rather than art history—are critical to contextualizing the origins and significance of such art. It demonstrates how these works and the terms of their display may diverge from the standards of the move theatre while including aspects of other forms of popular film and video culture, from the drive-in to the peep show. It concludes by laying the groundwork for a more inclusive and historically rooted approach to the relationship between art and popular media, one better suited to identifying and measuring the artistic influence of an extraordinary range of popular media forms and practices.

This chapter analyzes the lawsuit between the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) and Christoph Büchel in terms of my dual-intention theory of authorship. The Mass MoCA case represents a significant challenge to the widespread art world intuition that the creative freedom of the artist should be given virtually absolute precedence in decisions about the creation, exhibition, and treatment of artworks. The chapter argues that this view is incorrect: respect for the artist’s moral rights does not require deferring to the artist’s wishes in every case. It shows that the distinction between artifactual ownership and artistic ownership that underlies the notion of artistic moral rights also serves to establish limits on those rights.

Explores the 1955 Movement exhibition in Paris as a early turning point in the emergence of the moving image in postwar art practice. The recovery of Duchamp’s interest in the 19^th century philosophical toy presented a model for artists wishing to engage the moving image at a critical distance from the specific conditions of the cinematic theatre to which it had become historically conjoined. Breaking the synthetic coherence of the motion picture into its component parts, Robert Breer’s folioscopes and mutoscopes of the ‘50s and early ‘60s mined the prehistory of industrial cinema to create works which functioned simultaneously as both film and sculpture. The revival of the philosophical toy allowed the moving image to enter the institutional space of the art gallery, where it could engage directly with the transformations taking place within late modern painting and sculpture. Concludes by situating the more canonical early works of audiovisually-mediated sculpture from Robert Morris, Nam June Paik, and Robert Whitman within this model of bifurcated aesthetic spectatorship and the challenge to institutional norms it necessarily entailed.

Chapter 4: the focus of this chapter is on the video installtions of artists Tacita Dean, Teressa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, and IñigoManglano-Ovalle; discusses various concepts of roaming spectatorship only to show that the work under discussion succeeds quite well to hold the viewer’s attention, redefine the long take as a perceptual rather than representational logic, and in so doing clear perceptual ground for the possibility of wonder

Chapter 1: traces the history and theory of the long take in twentieth-century art cinema to make a case who and why twenty-first century moving image practice differs from the past and its concepts; shows how contemporary long take practice absorbs the recalibrates the dual legacies of expanded cinema and art cinema of the 1960s, and how it asks to rethink our concept of art cinema today, and why its study neither belongs to film scholars nor art critics alone today

This chapter discusses the inspiration behind the author's installation art work titled Dialogue, which was featured at the 1989 China Avant-garde Art Exhibition held at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in February 1989. It explains that when she was in college she tried to have a boyfriend but she could feel no love. She called Wei Bo to blame him for her seemingly lack of emotion and as she left the telephone booth a pictured appeared before her eyes. It was that of the telephone booth, a male-female conversation, a dangling telephone receiver, an engaged signal.