Installation Art

Prior to reading Coulter-Smith's Installation Art, I had some ideas about what constitutes "installation art" from briefly studying its radical origins in the 1960s and 1970s in my Modern Theater class last semester. However, Coulter-Smith's Introduction in the book was especially helpful in offering a workable definition for this kind of art.

Installation Art, according to Coulter-Smith, is "gallery-bound expanded sculpture... that one can walk into," that "presents the viewer with fragments that must be explored and assembled in a manner that ‘activates’ the viewer," and that attempts to "create a more direct involvement between the viewer and the work of art" (Introduction, Coulter-Smith). Installation art has its roots in other art movements earlier in the 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Avant-garde, and Performance Art.

Like the Avant-garde and Dada movements, Installation Art was born out of the desire to overcome the eliteness surrounding art and its bourgeois connotations, to instead make art available to everyone, to take it out of the gallery and put it into the hands of the working and middle classes, and to make it universally accessible and free. However, Coulter-Smith acknowledges a problem with Installation Art that shows that it has not lived up to its own aspirations. Since part of its definition is that Installation Art is a constructed environment and a space, and since contemporary Installation Art is primarily shown in galleries, it could be said that Installation Art is elitist, bourgeois, and only accessible to a few. Coulter-Smith sums up this problem: "...transgression has become a civilised activity to be protected and preserved by the art museum and framed as the product of extremely remarkable individuals" (Introduction, Coulter-Smith).

The image I have posted is a photograph of an Installation Art exhibition of twelve horses by Jannis Kounellis in the Galleria L'Attico, Rome in 1969. This example illustrates Coulter-Smith's definition of Installation Art because by installing a set of twelve horses in a gallery, the artist is making a bold statement about what is art and what belongs in a gallery. The horses are clearly everyday objects that can be found outside of a gallery, but by placing them in the context of a spatial environment in which they are to be looked at as "art," the viewer experiences the horses in a different way than if the viewer saw them in the everyday world. In this way, the artist forges a new relationship between art and everyday life.

Personally, I find Installation Art fascinating. I'm already bubbling with ideas on what I will construct for my Final Project Installation.