Installations

Author(s): Charles Molesworth

Source: Salmagundi, No. 120 (FALL 1998), pp. 45-51
Published by: Skidmore College
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The Art Scene
^^
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Installation art
may
be the most
definitive
category
of work that
separates
modernist from
postmodernist
art. The
category,
however,
presents
considerable difficulties to
anyone
trying
to define it. Part
sculpture, part
environment,
part assemblage,
installation art revels in its
impurity
of
genres, mixing
the traditions of
stage
sets,
architectural
models,
happenings,
dioramas,
and other forms of
three-dimensional
presentation.
Mix in the videos or audio
recordings
that
are a
frequent
feature of installation
'pieces'
and
you begin
to
approach
a
level of
heterogeneity
that feels like
happenstance.
Of
course,
some
installation art is
drably
literal or
thematically
overdetermined,
while other
examples
are stuck in terminal
whimsy.
Many 'typical'
works
(if
such an
adjective applies
at
all)
of
installation
art, however,
are
preoccupied
with what is too
readily
referred
to as the
problem
of the simulacral. If
reality
seems more in thrall
to,
or
based
on,
the mechanics of
reproduction
rather than
originality,
shouldn't
art abandon its valuation of the
original
and
simply manipulate
models and
copies
and
reproductions
in an endless
play
of
juxtapositions
and incon-
gruous perspectives?
This
play
element all too often
gives
to installation
pieces
their air of
being
mockeries of
display
and
presentation.
Whether or not such
play might seriously challenge
a
faulty
sense
of
reality
or
just
celebrate its
polymorphous possibilities
remains an
open
question.
Yet some have claimed that installation
pieces
can be
opposi-
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46
CHARLES MOLESWORTH
tional,
making
all forms of
representation, especially
the museum and art-
world
systems
themselves,
less and less stable as a
way
of
calling
all
meaning-making arrangements
into
question.
What installation art
might
embody
most
convincingly
is a deferral of all
questions
of
meaning
and
value,
replacing
them with a
bedeviling
lack of formal coherence or
stylistic integrity.
This would
certainly help
make installation art one of
the central
expressions
of
postmodernism,
but at the same time it would
leave
open
the
questions
of how
good
is
it,
and how
seriously
should we
consider it? Three
examples,
visible
during
the
Spring
1998 art season in
Paris,
demonstrate the weakness and
strength
in the form and
help
answer
these
questions.
Annette
Messager
is a French installation artist whose
reputation
is secure in the international art world. She was invited to install a work at
the Museum of African and Oceanic
Art,
near the Bois de Vincennes in
Paris. This museum contains an enviable collection of Benin bronzes and
other tribal
artifacts,
including
some of the most
striking
masks I have ever
seen.
Messager displayed
a
large
human
figure
on the floor of the entrance
hall,
and
placed
whimsical anti-exhibits in various cases. Her work seemed
stitched into the fabric of the
museum,
in
something
like an act of
camouflage.
The main
part
of the
installation, however,
was in a basement
room where four
large display
cases from
another,
earlier
anthropological
era were
gathering
dust. There she installed about four dozen
sculptures,
arranged
in two
groups separated by
an
aisle;
the older
display
cases
remained
against
the
wall,
looking anachronistically
forlorn and
unselfconsciously
racist.
Messager'
s
sculptures
were small wooden
crosses,
about two feet
high,
on which were attached the "skins" of stuffed
toys
with a
photographed pair
of
eyes
that stared out
blankly
at the viewers.
Each cross was
topped
off,
as it
were,
with a small
plastic bag
filled with
garbage
and tied at the
top
-
the sort
ofthing
most of us
drop
down a chute
or
put
in a covered can
every day.
The thematic
point
was
fairly
obvious:
modernity
has its totemic
objects,
the masks and fetishes that enable us to mediate the liminal
spaces
between states of
being, just
as did our
"primitive"
ancestors.
Except
our
totems are
mass-produced objects
of
stunning
and ironic
banality
-
the
stuffed animals returned to a state of nature
by being
"skinned"
-
and
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The Art Scene Al
pieces
of our
everyday object
world,
now
mindlessly repackaged
in non-
biodegradable plastic.
But
surely,
the
piece
seemed to
say
at its other level
of
resonance,
the tribesmen who made the masks elsewhere on
display
in
the
museum,
weren't
consciously making
art;
they
were
simply using
the
detritus of their civilization to cobble
together something
that would take
the fear out of their transitions. The
objects
in the museum were now intent
on
questioning
the
very
nature of "museum status."
The
contemporary
work was an environment inside an environ-
ment.
This, however,
complicated
the
meaning
in a
way
that
Messager
may
not have intended and would not
accept.
The African and Oceanic
masks are of such
stunning beauty
and
complexity
of texture and
sugges-
tion that
they only
served to redouble the
banality
of
Messager's
materials.
Does this mean her
conception
was also banalized? Hadn't her
irony
become too
affectless,
too flattened to be in
any
sense
"oppositional"
to
modern values? It
simply registered
as a rather
empty joke,
neither subtle
enough
to be
provocative
nor cruel
enough
to be corrective.
However,
when we "read" the installation work in and
against
the site where it is
installed we are
accepting
the aesthetics of the
category.
And our habit of
valuing "primitive"
masks as artistic
masterpieces
is
itself,
of
course,
a
historically
derived
part
of
modernism,
a cultural habit that
Messager
might subtly
be
calling
into
question. Thinking
about installation art
usually
involves
meditating
on what
contains,
and what is contained
in,
any
environment.
Christian Boltanski is another French artist with an international
reputation,
and his show at the Muse d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
gathered together many
of his
previous
themes in an extensive exhibition.
Spread
over several
rooms,
the installation featured rooms
variously
filled
with black and white
photographs,
floor to
ceiling;
shelves of discarded
clothing; strange
beds covered with
plastic
sheets;
and
cans,
with
photo-
graphs
or names of
children,
that contained their
personal
effects. The
overwhelming
effect was of loss and
forgetfulness,
a
grim
environment
permeated by objects arranged
in
ways
that rendered them at once
insistently
sinister and
implacably
inert.
Boltanski' s
arrangement
dictated that the viewer had to move
from room to
room,
each chamber filled with a different sort of
object
in
a different classification
system. Surely
it was all connected
somehow,
yet
the
very
number of
objects
insisted on a level of
particularity
that defied
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48
CHARLES MOLESWORTH
abstraction or
categorizing
reflection.
Though
the work
generated
consid-
erable and
disturbing
emotion
(in
a
way
that wasn't
typical
of installation
art),
it turns out that it was not the Holocaust that was
being "represented",
but rather the child laborers at a mine in
Belgium.
I
strongly suspect
that
seeing
the exhibit without the benefit of the wall text or
catalogue essay
would
produce quite
a different
reading
from one informed as to the
historical references of the
photographs
and other
objects.
Installation art often uses the
phenomenological experience
of
actually present
viewers to call into
question
the
conceptualizing impulse
of traditional
spectatorship.
This
may put
a
premium
on
knowing
the
historical
specificity
of what is
being represented,
but of course it doesn't
prevent
the viewer from
trying
to abstract or thematize his or her
experi-
ence. One wonders whether or not Boltanski meant to invoke the overtones
of the
Holocaust,
or whether he would
argue
that all cases of
systematically
denying large groups
of children a full existence are forms of mass
extinction.
Indeed,
the shelves of items
-
each
tagged
and
arranged
into
groups
-
are from the lost and found
department
of a
major city;
their
previous
owners
may
not be victims in
any
real sense. Yet the shelves filled
one with an
empty
sadness.
Perhaps
Boltanski is
playing
off several instances of a historical
specificity against
an abstract
category, something
like the
singular yet
forgettable object
that memorializes the universal but
intangible experi-
ence of loss.
Postmodernism,
by abandoning grand
meta-narratives,
loses
faith in
abstraction,
and turns to
something
like a
nominalism,
often
trusting
to historical
referentiality
as a
challenge
to what it sees as the too-
easy
formalist abstraction of
"high"
modernism. Yet at the same
time,
postmodern
artists often
play
with
styles
and
representational
frameworks,
and this
play
-
as the work of
Messager
and Boltanski demonstrates
-
can
often end
by defusing
its own
irony.
What is left is
something
like a
period
style,
but one in which
repetition,
flatness,
and
delay
have
replaced
the
artistic will of the
expressive
individual.
Installation art reaches a
height
of sorts in the basement of the
newly opened
Muse Maillol in Paris. The lowest level of the museum is
completely occupied by
a
single
work of the Russian artist
Ilya
Kabakov.
It consists of one room filled with dozens of kitchen utensils
suspended
from the
ceiling
and attached to the walls. A sound track in Russian is
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The Art Scene 49
running constantly (though
a
printed
French translation is
supplied);
it
contains the voices of
people
who lived in the social environment that the
installation "recreates". The utensils are all
actually
taken,
we are told
by
the curatorial staff in a wall text
just
outside the
room,
from a communal
kitchen,
the sort used in Soviet Russia when the
housing shortage
caused
many
families to share the
very meager cooking
and
eating spaces
available.
Visually
there is no
apparent
order to the
way
the utensils are
placed, though
the
larger
ones are
generally
fastened to the wall while the
smaller are
suspended
from wires.
Reading
the
piece (if
I can still use that rather old-fashioned
word)
would of
necessity
involve
knowing
that Kabakov was indeed
Russian,
and that he worked in or under the old Soviet totalitarian
society;
it would also include a
description
of what it is like to
engage
the
piece
at
the
sensory
level,
beginning
with one' s
approach
down a
flight
of
clumsily
painted
wooden stairs
(much
different in texture from the stone walls of the
building
and the
lighting system
of the rest of the
museum,
so the
"gate"
is
"straight"
from the
very beginning);
and,
of
course,
the sense of a social
order under the Russian
dictatorship
is an essential
ingredient
in
complet-
ing any
account of the aesthetic of the
experience
of
being
inside this
"communal kitchen".
But notice how the formal
questions
have been subordinated: we
do not ask
about,
nor are we meant
especially
to
explore,
the "structure"
of the work in
any
abstract
way;
a certain literalness of
presentation
has
taken over. Citation of
previous
uses of the "utensil
motif,
or the
way
the
work recalls a shared sense of
spatial
order with other works
by
other
artists,
seems
completely
beside the
point, though
such concerns were
dominant in traditional art
history.
This is not to dismiss the formal
dimension
completely,
however,
since the
suspension
of the utensils
-
and
their
very
dailiness
-
suggests
a dream
landscape
that is both oneiric and
yet
familiar. Likewise with the historical
referentiality
of the
piece:
consider how
differently
the installation reads now that the Russian
system
has
collapsed.
Yes,
the effect of
political oppression
is still a
part
of the
work,
but there is more a sense of
pity
than the
feeling
of
righteous anger
that Kabakov
very likely
intended. Works of art become "dated" at
different
rates,
but here one
feels,
I
think,
a
qualitative
shift in the
resonances of the work. The rate of
change
has itself
changed,
in
part
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50
CHARLES MOLESWORTH
because the
postmodern
artist does not use abstraction in the same
way
the
modernist artist did. What was
likely
conceived in sullen
anger
now seems
almost
nostalgic.
All this
said,
it remains to add that the work is
eerily
effective.
Kabakov has
high standing
in the world of
contemporary
art,
and he is also
capable
of droll humor. The
Stedeljik
Museum in Amsterdam
recently
showed some of his "mathematical
series",
which
employ
abstruse sets of
permutations
to
generate
a linked
group
of handmade
drawings,
some of
which were schematic and
dry
while others relied on social satire and were
very funny.
I heard no one
laugh,
however;
perhaps
the
juxtaposition
of
tones was too
unsettling,
and
obviously part
of the intention. His work is
animated
by
a
sensibility
that stretches from the
knowing
satire of his
countrymen,
Komar and
Melamid,
to the almost innocent fascination with
natural
history
and
classificatory systems
in artists such as Mark Dion and
Alexis Rockman. Installation art
challenges
conventional forms of
representation, by recreating
them in some
partial
or
hybrid
form that
neither confirms nor denies the
possibility
of
replacing
the standard forms.
Michael Fried warned some
years ago
that
contemporary
art was drawn to
the sense of theater and risked
losing
the
objecthood
that made art
distinctive. His fears
might
seem all too realized with installation art.
The
spirit
of Kabakov' s work combines a
memorializing impulse
with a
viciously
understated
jeremiad (allowing
for the
oxymoron)
attack-
ing
the cruel insufficiencies of a
system
devoted
chiefly
-
if not
solely
-
to
its own
perpetuation.
There is also a sense in which Kabakov
might
be
commenting
on the sadness of
anthropology, presenting
a
post-Levi
Strauss sense of
epistemological guilt. (Indeed,
I
suspect
installation art
owes
quite
a bit to the
spirit
of the French
anthropologist.)
For a non-
Russian
speaker,
the
incomprehensible
nature of the
spoken testimony
only
increases the sense that the
piece
both mocks and
pays
tribute to the
unspeakable.
At its best installation art raises
questions
about the
translatability
of historical
experience.
It also
questions
the
way
our
phenomenological
presence
in
any
environment is
always
an answer
-
in both senses of the
word
-
to some
conceptual
scheme. For if we find ourselves in a structured
environment,
then in a
mulishly simple way,
someone has
put
it there for
us to be in
(as
if we were
enslaved),
but it
may
be that we can
only
find
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The Art Scene 51
ourselves in a world of our own
making (as
if we were
free).
If modernism
has a secular
side,
as
surely
it
does,
postmodernism
extends it
by challeng-
ing
us to see how
-
or if
-
we can
go beyond
the fetters of nominalism.
Perhaps
this is
why
the best that installation art can offer is a
thorough
restatement of an old belief: as we make our world it makes
us,
but not
always
as we will.
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