Installation Art as the Newest Form of Expression - Essay Example

Contemporary Art: Installation Art as the Newest Form of Expression Current art practices have veered away from the traditional expressions of two-dimensional paintings that appeal to the eye or alabaster sculpture that appeal to the senses to more interactive pieces that attempt to engage the audience on a variety of levels at once. One of the contributing factors to this shift in artistic expression has been referred to as the “politics of representation.” The idea behind this expression is that there is a difference between the form of the image and the actual content of the image. This can also be thought of as the difference between the visual image and the sublime connotations of the image. Although the sublime element is, by its very nature, shapeless and indefinable and therefore cannot be placed within a specific visual form, the visual form, by its very nature, must suggest some element of the sublime. Every visible form is capable of suggesting some deeper meaning to an audience at varying levels of meaning regardless of the intentions of the artist. This is because art is not the static element it was once perceived to be. Instead, it is a constant interaction between the artist and the viewer, between what the artist created on the canvas and how the viewer interprets these forms based on his or her own experiences, understandings and context. The postmodern movement, with its emphasis on illuminating the sublime, brought these ideas to the forefront leading eventually to today’s trend to engage more of the viewer’s senses in this interaction. “The political and the aesthetic are inseparable, simultaneously present, faces of the postmodern problematic” (Burgin, 1982). Understanding this concept of the eternal relationships between content and sublime, artist and audience, is essential to understanding today’s movement toward installation art through artists such as Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer and Sarah Lucas. One of the charges to today’s artists is to discover how to produce ‘incommunicable statements’ to modern society without resorting to the conformism and passé qualities of realist art. In his “Appendix Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote that the “only definition” of realism is that “it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that art” (1984). His primary complaint against realism is the artist’s tendency, when pursuing this approach, to “pursue successful careers in mass conformism by communicating by means of the ‘correct rules,’ the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations capable of gratifying it” (Lyotard, 1984: 75). He compares this ‘selling-out’ quality of realist artwork to the expressions of the avant-garde, in which experimental innovations are applied to both technique and structure as a means of trying “to make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible” (Lyotard, 1984: 78). This “something that can be conceived but not seen nor made visible” can also be called the sublime, defined as a quality of transcendent greatness “with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation” (Wikipedia, 2006). The presence of this sublime element within the artwork, even when not in a recognizable form, can then strategically inspire audience’s imagination in a specific direction through the artist’s decisions regarding which elements will remain visible or understandable. The significance of today’s art is in the way in which the artwork focuses attention on the uncertainty of meaning discovered in the work. In the end, the audience must realize that no resolution makes itself apparent so any resolution discovered is through the process of the viewer’s own interpretation. The division between the artistic practice of attempting to represent ‘reality’ versus one in which conventional approaches are challenged with the focus being a search for “something which does not allow itself to be made present” (Lyotard, 1984: 80) is, Lyotard insisted, central to a definition of postmodernism itself. Lyotard argued that a “postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. The rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for” (Lyotard, p. 81). While Lyotard’s theory is an idealistic conception of artistic production, implying that the avant-garde artist can produce an ‘innocent’ text, his ideas are illuminating in attempting to understand what the installation artists are attempting to achieve by freeing themselves of the canvas. Essentially, what Lyotard is suggesting, is that the old familiar methods of expression simply replicate established rules rather than challenging audiences assumptions and leading to a spark of enlightenment through an encounter with the sublime. Immanuel Kant provides a different theory of the sublime. In his view, “the aesthetic of the sublime is where modern art (including literature) finds its impetus, and where the logic of the avante-garde finds its axioms” (Kant, 1790: 10). In this view, the sublime is a feeling of both pleasure and pain experienced at one and the same time. This is because one feels pleasure in understanding the pain inherent in the conflict between the subject’s capacity to conceive something and to represent it. While we may have an idea of what love is, we are not able to make a definitive, all-inclusive representation of it. Modern art devotes itself “to presenting the existence of something unpresentable”; “it will make one see only by prohibiting one from seeing” (Kant, 1790: 11). Systems of reasoning used to justify such art “remain inexplicable without the incommensurability between reality and concept,” an incommensurability that they cannot but disguise (Kant, 1790: 12). New artists “continually expose the artifices of presentation that allow thought to be enslaved by the gaze and diverted from the unpresentable” (Kant, 1790: 12). For many artists in the postmodern era, the best way to accomplish this has been to shock and surprise gallery and museum visitors with presentations of the unexpected in contexts and formats that are unusual because of their inclusiveness. Arguably the artist that brought the installation approach into vogue was Young British Artist Damien Hirst. Hirst’s first show might not have received a great deal of media attention at the time, but his activities since then continue to inspire future artists because of his ability to cut through society’s typical barriers to incite emotional reaction. Shows such as Modern Medicine and Gambler (Andipa Gallery, 2006) reveal his unique style and morbid concern as well as demonstrate his mastery of the installation approach. Now characterized by his shocking attempts to shake up the art world with installations of dead animals preserved in tanks of formaldehyde, Hirst acknowledges his goal was to shock people into considering the things they take for granted as well as those things they are ignoring. “Art is like medicine – it can heal. Yet I’ve always been amazed at how many people believe in medicine but don’t believe in art, without questioning either” (Andipa Gallery, 2006). More than simply presenting dead animals to an unsuspecting public, Hirst’s statement illustrates how he had much higher ideas in mind when he created these pieces. “As with scientific discoveries, the museum is frequently seen to provide a utopian vision. In Hirst’s work the museum’s paternalistic role is questioned, the benefit and scope of its taxonometric functions being reduced to ‘subjective’ themes and preoccupations more generally associated with the history of art: love, death and beauty” (Mulholland, 2003: 132 regarding Modern Medicine). By being faced with these images and their symbolic implications, unwarned visitors are forced to confront inner conceptions regarding death and life and the function of the establishment. Although he is famous for these tank pieces, Hirst has also worked in other mediums that require a blending of traditional show and installation art. “Hirst’s work is an examination of the processes of life and death: the ironies, falsehoods and desires that we mobilize to negotiate our own alienation and mortality … The paintings divide into spot and spin paintings. The former are randomly organized, colour-spotted canvases with titles that refer to pharmaceutical chemicals … For the cabinet series Hirst displayed collections of surgical tools or hundreds of pill bottles on highly ordered shelves” (Rosenthal & Adams, 1998). A series of butterfly paintings, in which are featured thousands of wings pulled from the bodies of tropical butterflies caused widespread angst among various groups, including PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Gibbons, 2003). Selling for more than £1 million, the sculpture “Hymn” (1996) featured “an anatomically correct bust of a human figure, sans skin, which reveals brightly colored internal organs … allegedly modeled on a popular toy called Anatomy Man” (Damien Hirst, 2002). This use of a toy design to create fine art that was also shocking in its content and thought-provoking in its sublime element was upsetting as well to the original toy makers because their toy had been used in this way as well as the designer because Hirst had ‘stolen’ the big money for his design. It is this talent Hirst has for finding the new and placing it in a context that shocks and inspires that keeps him in the public eye. “A lot of the work from his contemporaries is already starting to look a bit dated and gimmicky. That’s not happening with Hirst, and that’s what people are responding to” (Moyes, 2000). A great deal of Hirst’s flexibility is found in his willingness and ability to use installation art in new and unusual ways, always remembering that he is not locked into a form as he explores his concept. Rather than clinging exclusively to the idea of an ‘innocent’ text, artists such as Jenny Holzer have moved from Hirst’s examples to readjust various symbolisms to help define their own interpretation of the sublime. Rather than presenting images as truth, Holzer presents words as truth. She does this by resorting to culturally familiar slogans removed from the familiar in her display series Truisms (Kukje Gallery, 2005). Holzer displays these running texts in the public sphere, typically choosing locations more usually occupied by commercial advertising instead of confining herself within the halls of a museum. In doing so, she challenges the conventional idea that art should be preserved within designated enclosed spaces opened only for select few. Holzer visually challenges her audience to ‘hear’ culturally accepted sayings that are casually thrown about, but largely ignored by including many cliché-type slogans in her digitized electronic sign display. What isn’t explicitly communicated, but is understood in the subtext, is that the audience is expected to consider what these slogans really mean. This introduces one level of the sublime into the public realm. However, her message can be taken a level or two deeper when it is realized that not all of the slogans she uses are necessarily considered a cliché. To shake up her audience, Holzer often throws in occasional personal statements of wisdom such as “Extreme self-consciousness leads to perversity” (“Jenny Holzer”, n.d.). These aren’t necessarily accepted social views, but are considered more of an individual view. By including these ideas, Holzer also introduces the idea that while we may all share a common cultural background even brothers and sisters do not share the same assumptions regarding the topics Holzer addresses. First challenging the notion that common phrases in the public sphere are meaningless sound and that the clichés of childhood have ceased to carry wisdom, Holzer introduces the realization that we are not all culturally identical and suggests wisdom can be found in the words of others. In sending this message, though, the only words ever actually viewed by the audience are the slogans themselves. Holzer presents her ideas in as minimalist a form as possible providing only slight changes in ‘voice’ through different colors or fonts based on the limited range of the electronic board. For Holzer, it was when she took her Truism series out of the context of the lengthy text, image and interior spaces and into the streets in bold, clear, concise statements that she found fame. “The ‘Truism’ dramatized a depersonalized and amoral information landscape throughout juxtapositions. Holzer has since produced a variety of texts with points of view ranging from inflammatory manifesto to feminist or parental concern to bleak resignation. In all of her work she links ideological statements with the forms and meanings of architecture” (Stuart Collection, 1992). Her entire series is about trying to defamiliarize reality from within accepted symbolic systems. In the image, the Guggenheim Museum takes on a special tri-color LED displays in 1990 to display Holzer’s slogans in a rare interior exhibit that demonstrates how the installation is applied to a more public space. http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_65_1s.html Another surprising installation artist is Sarah Lucas. Together with Damien Hirst, she was one of the original Freeze artists who went on to continue the installation art trend as a means of introducing greater shock through redefining contexts (Collings, 2002). “Sarah Lucas may not be the most talked about of the Young British Artists, but she has always been one of the most important … Lucas challenged the street slang used to describe women by turning it into physical forms. She replaced anger and embarrassment with humor, portraying breasts as melons or fried eggs, catching public attention with hard-hitting sculpture and spreads from The Sun … she moved the discussion further along than any amount of protest art” (Cruz, 2005). Perhaps her most recognized installation piece is Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992). In this seemingly innocent piece, Lucas symbolizes the more recognizable elements of a woman’s naked body through the use of a table as the body itself. She then strategically positioned two freshly fried eggs and a kebab on the table as genitalia. Another famous work in this style is Au Naturel (1994). In this piece, she employs an old mattress to suggest a bed. This is leaned against a wall on which she positioned two oranges and a cucumber in such a way so as to represent male genitalia. Next to this, she placed two melons and a bucket to represent the female. Throughout her work, Lucas continuously uses heavy metaphors and blatant symbolism as a means of transforming the innocent concepts of food or other ready-made objects to suggest crude and usually sexually explicit images that question the established social norms (Collings, 2002). Lucas started her career as a student at Goldsmiths College, the same college Hirst attended, and gained her first major client in the warehouse shows, in which these renegade artists used as much space as they wanted for their questionable installation pieces. These shows were attended by Charles Saatchi who purchased Two Fried Eggs and Kebab and gave many of these artists the recognition they needed for success (Roberts, 2003). Her first solo exhibition, City Racing, was in 1992 and she went into business with Tracey Emin in 1993 with The Shop, a retail outlet designed to sell art multiples (Sarah Lucas, 2004). Recognized within the Young British Artist genre, she was included in the Sensation tour and has become well-known at home and internationally for her bold feminist or empowering statements. For example, while empowering the assumed ‘underdog’ in the form of nature in This One’s for the Pigeons (In Pictures, 2003), she also illustrates the reality that nature is going to win in the end. The ready-made sculpture intended to be placed on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square consisted of an ordinary, everyday family car typical of the middle or lower class that had been painted with resin and acrylics to make it look as if it were entirely covered with the refuse of the square’s most common visitor, the pigeon. Although the square is cleaned every day to provide the illusion that even nature respects the sanctity of the place, the reality is that it must be cleaned each day. “Much of the work quite obviously deals with old-fashioned stereotypes of gender and class. By appropriating the attitudes and accessories of blokedom – the tabloid pin-ups, the donkey jacket, the beer cans and fags – and then turning them into art, Lucas makes them funny or slightly sad or undermines them just by being female. Not that she’s taking sides” (Roberts, 2003). Thus, through her installation art, Lucas also strives to engage the audience by providing a shock to more than a single sense, appealing to the element of the sublime within the message to force her audience to reconsider their semi-conscious social assumptions and challenge their deeper inner beliefs. Representation, whether expressed in words or images, is therefore demonstrated to be neither a neutral nor an innocent activity, but instead an activity having potentially profound effects on everyday lives. Although some might suggest that postmodern art relies on a non-definition of societal symbols and forms to provide the ultimate expression of the sublime, the reality is that this is not possible. In truth, there are no forms that have not attached to themselves specific societal meanings, although these may change from one culture to another, thus simply introducing different meaning, not necessarily an absence of meaning. Current examples within the art world, particularly illustrated through the installation piece because of its ability to shock audiences and force engagement on a variety of levels, demonstrate how artists have been working to redefine some of these more commonly understood symbols by taking advantage of the sublime to influence contemporary thought. This is an inexact science because of the indeterminate nature of the message contained in the sublime. However, by challenging our ideas of specific images, these art forms become powerful tools in reshaping political and/or societal views and blurring the boundaries of what we thought we knew. Works Cited Andipa Gallery. “Biography: Damien Hirst.” February 4, 2006. March 20, 2009 Burgin, Victor. Thinking Photographically. New Jersey: Humanities Press Intl, (March, 1982). Collings, Matthew. Sarah Lucas. London: Tate Publishing, 2002. Cruz, Gemma (de). “The ‘Drinking Man’s Rachel Whiteread’ at Tate Liverpool.” BBC Collective. November 3, 2005. March 20, 2009 “Damien Hirst.” Brain-Juice. 2002. March 20, 2009 < http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=117> Gibbons, Fiachra. “Hirst Accused of Sadism Over Butterfly Collage.” The Guardian. August 15, 2003. March 20, 2009 Guggenheim Museum. “Untitled.” March 20, 2009 “In Pictures: Art for Trafalgar Square.” BBC News. December 11, 2003. March 20, 2009 “Jenny Holzer”. Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. (2006). Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. New York: Simon & Schuster, (1970). Kukje Gallery. “Jenny Holzer.” DesignBoom. (January 23, 2005). March 20, 2009 Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Moyes, Jojo. “New York is Aflutter as Hirst’s Butterflies Make a Record $750,000.” The Independent. November 16, 2000. March 20, 2009 Mulholland, Neil. The Cultural Devolution: Art in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century. London: Ashgate Publishing, 2003. Roberts, Alison. “Rude Girl.” The Observer. April 20, 2003. March 20, 2009 Rosenthal, Norman & Adams, Brooks. Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. London: Thames & Hudson, 1998. “Sarah Lucas.” Tate Liverpool. August 10, 2005. March 20, 2009 Stuart Collection. “Jenny Holzer.” San Diego, CA: (1992). March 20, 2009 Wikipedia contributors. Sublime (philosophy). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. (2006). March 20, 2009 Read More