Sources Part 2
Source 5:
A Brief History of Installation Art by Heather Harvey
https://artsmagazine.info/articles.php?view=detail&id=201007251946141353
This short article is very descriptive and, probably, even naive. The author writes about installation art as it was her child, no critics at all. But she briefly mentions spiritual experience.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, though, something distinctly new begins to occur in visual art. Some artists start to question the Renaissance traditions. They are no longer convinced that the best art is necessarily the most realistic. These avant-garde artists look for new approaches and new potentials. They feel that the virtuosic realism of the Renaissance tradition has grown stale and overly academic. It has lost its power to inspire, awe, or surprise. The avant-garde artists hope to reclaim this power by exploring states of mind, emotions, psychological or spiritual experience, political aspirations, and philosophical insights in their art. They begin to intuit that abstraction and other expressive approaches are capable of conveying these sorts of poignant, important, and ephemeral truths.
Heather Harvey opens a very interesting question (not deliberately, I assume). She writes:
Installation also releases artists from the typical constraints of the art market because most installation art is difficult to sell or collect. So artists worry less about the dollar value of their art and concentrate on the meaning and experiences they are creating. This allows them to return once again to the roots of art — to inspire, transform, rethink, and contemplate the human condition.
Source 6:
THE IMMERSIVE ARTISTIC EXPERIENCE AND THE EXPLOITATION OF SPACE by Bonnie Mitchell
https://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_ca10_s3paper2.pdf
The paper mostly focuses on virtual reality system. The author also talks about early installation art. Here are some quotes:
Over the past fifty years, artists have explored the computer’s potential to create both virtual and physical art forms that embrace the concept of space. Through the use of immersion, interaction, and manipulation of both virtual and physical space, computer artists have created powerful aesthetic environments that enable audiences to experience alternative realities. Immersive installations that respond the human body and online multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life satisfy the viewer’s inherent desire to escape physical reality and become part of the art experience itself.
***
In 1968, Ivan Sutherland created a virtual reality system that gave the user the ability to occupy the same “space” as a computer-generated wire-frame object. Through the use of a head- mounted display, the user was able to interact with and manipulate the object. This revolutionary experiment paved the way for artists, such as Myron Krueger, who developed a series of art installations that strived to embrace and mimic real world interaction. Krueger coined the term “Artificial Reality” to describe a new genre of work in which the user’s physical body influenced the unfolding of meaning in the work of art. From his earliest interactive artworks, “Glowflow” and “Videoplace” in 1969, to his experiments in the 90’s with hand-gesture interfaces, Krueger strove to create responsive environments that used computer-mediated physical space to construct the aesthetic experience. [7] According to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the art community at first rejected Krueger’s work, possibly because it focused on “response” rather than the creation of aesthetic objects. During this same period, however, Allan Kaprow, an artist already accepted as a member of the fine art community received applause for his rejection of the physical object. [15]
***
Fascination with constructed reality appears to be inherent in the human psyche. From the beginning of recorded history, humans have engaged in storytelling. Cave paintings, petroglyphs, ancient artifacts and rituals mirror our contemporary obsession with worlds that extend beyond our concrete physical environment. An inherent desire to experience that which transcends our physical confinement to limited environments, has resulted in the popularity of books, movies, television, video games, theatre, and other forms of escapism.
When coupled with the ability to directly affect the outcome of the experience by utilizing our bodies as an interface, the constructed world comes closer to mimicking the real world. If one of early computer art’s goals was to create worlds such as the nursery and holodeck, fifty years later we have still completely missed the mark. Although there are research projects and artistic endeavours that still seek to create virtual spaces indistinguishable from physically real spaces, new directions have emerged, spurred on by technical and philosophical issues resulting from past attempts to create such spaces.
***
Through their nascent efforts to create intelligent, holodeck-like spaces, artists and computer scientists have discovered that human perception of reality relies on a large, complex combination of factors. In the past fifty years, many of these factors were employed in a variety of ways to create aesthetic experiences that differ markedly from original attempts at virtual realism. The sensation of “being there” depends heavily upon sensory absorption within the environment. One must feel immersed in the space and physically a part of it. Sensory immersion is fundamental to our relationship with the natural environment.
Capitalizing on the psychological power of immersion, contemporary artists have created immersive spaces that enable the audience to escape to other realms and experience genuine emotional responses. The power of artistic illusion, as well as the human desire to create realities within realities, enables us to suspend our belief in our physically situated world and accept artificial constructs. Our obsession with video games, short stories and films demonstrates our desire to enter symbolic space and actively engage with alternate realities. In The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Michael Heim asks, “Are not all worlds symbolic? Including the one we naively refer to as the real world, which we read off with our physical senses?”
***
Through the definition, creation, and manipulation of both virtual and physical space, computer artists have created powerful aesthetic environments that enable audiences to experience alternative realities.
Source 7:
A History of Installation Art and the Development of New Art Forms : Technology and the Hermeneutics of Time and Space in Modern and Postmodern Art from Cubism to Installation by Faye Ran
I think that this book will be helpful for writing the second part of the thesis body, where I’m planning to talk about Installation art, its history, development and influences.
Today Installation art has moved from its position as experimental practice, into the mainstream of Contemporary art practice. Navigating the currents of Modern and Postmodern art, author Faye Ran provides a historical framework for the understanding of Installation, and much else besides.
The onset of Modernity through the industrial revolution coincides with disappearance of ‘lived time’ which is replaced by consumable time. In the author argues, technology is the single most important factor of in modernism and the avant-garde. Multiple (and reproducible) of time and space are offered by photography and film, quite unrelated to the experience of our lives. In short, as technologies change, conceptions of time and space are altered and, as a result, art changes.
According to Faye Ran, modernist critics, among them Benjamin, Mumford, and later Fried address the artwork through form and aesthetic experience, locating it as unique and specialized, whereas Postmodern theories revolve around context, and material and social relationships. Ran’s account covers an amazing amount of ground, zigzagging through a wide array of ideas and cultural materials, yet, all the while, she approaches installation art, her final frontier.
Source 8:
Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being by Char Davies
http://www.immersence.com/publications/char/1998-CD-Virtual_Dimension.html
Despite the fact that the author’s main focus is virtual reality, he discusses experience of ‘changing space’ from psychological perspective.
Thirty years ago, in The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard examined the psychologically transformative potential of "real" environments like the desert, the plains, and the deep sea, immense open spaces unlike the urban environments to which most of us are accustomed:
By changing space, by leaving the space of one's usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. … For we do not change place, we change our nature.[3]
Char Davies quotes Arthur Deikman's (was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California) ‘Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience’, where Deikman suggests a concept of Deautomatization. This concept derived from Hartmann's discussion of the automatization of motor behaviour: "In well-established achievements, they (motor apparatuses) function automatically: the integration of the somatic systems involved in the action is automatized, and so is the integration of the individual mental acts involved in it. With increasing exercise of the action its intermediate steps disappear from consciousness . . . not only motor behaviour but perception and thinking, too, show automatization."
Bachelard's poetic insight into the psychological effects of "changing space" is echoed by psychologists documenting the effects of traditional contemplative practices in terms of altering states of consciousness. According to Arthur Deikman's "Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience," the conditions fostered by such practices involve a dehabituating or "deautomatizing" of perceptual sensibilities.
Deautomatization is an undoing of psychic structure permitting the experience of increased detail and sensation at the price of requiring more attention. With such attention, it is possible that deautomatization may permit the awareness of new dimensions of the total stimulus array—a process of "perceptual expansion."
… Deautomatization is here conceived as permitting the adult to attain a new, fresh perception of the world by freeing him from a stereotyped organization built up over the years and by allowing adult synthetic functions access to fresh materials.
… The general process of deautomatization would seem of great potential usefulness whenever it is desired to break free from an old pattern in order to achieve a new experience of the same stimulus or to open a perceptual avenue to stimuli never experienced before.[4]
This dehabituating of perception tends to occur as a result of certain psychological conditions, such as when the participant's attention is intensified and is directed toward sensory pathways; when there is an absence of controlled, analytic thought; and when the participant's attitude is one of receptivity to stimuli rather than defensiveness or suspicion.[5]
Most often attained through rigorous training in age-old meditation techniques (drug-induced experiences are outside the scope of this essay), such conditions lead to an undoing of habitual perceptions—in favour of alternative sensibilities. While these may be less efficient in terms of biological or psychological survival, psychologists believe that they permit experience of aspects of reality previously ignored.
In terms of Installation art, artists mainly work with familiar objects/materials, giving them a new form and meaning. Thus the 'familiar' becomes the unusual.
This creates room for other modes of perception: instead of the mind being on autopilot it begins to pay attention, in the present, to what is unusual and unknown.