INSTALLATIONS.
Why have installations become such a focal point of
post-modernism? They may be regarded as the ideal manifestations of the
deconstructionist idea of the world as "text," whose intent can never be
fully known even by its author so that "readers" are free to interpret
it in light of their own understanding. The
installation artist creates a separate world that is a self-contained
universe, at once alien and familiar. Left to their own devices to
wander this microcosm, viewers bring their own understanding to bear on
the experience in the form of memories that are elicited by the novel
environment. In effect, then, they help to write the "text." In
themselves, installations are empty vessels: they may contain anything
that "author" and "reader" wish to put into them. Hence, they serve as
ready vehicles for expressing social, political, or personal concerns,
especially those that satisfy the post-modern agenda. The installation as text can become deliberately
literal: it is often linked to a text that makes the program explicit.
Ilya Kabakov.
Russian artists have a special genius for installations. Cut
off for decades from contemporary art in the West, they developed mostly
crude, provincial styles of painting and sculpture. Yet that very
isolation allowed them to cultivate a unique brand of Conceptual Art
that in turn provided the foundation for their installations. The first
to gain international acclaim was
Ilya Kabakov (born
1933), who now keeps his studio
in New York. "Ten Characters" was a suite of rooms like those of a seedy
communal apartment, each inhabited by an imaginary person possessed of
an "unusual idea, one all-absorbing passion belonging to him alone." The
most spectacular was The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment
(fig. 1257): he
achieves his dream of flying into space by being hurled from a catapult
suspended by springs while the ceiling and roof are blown off at the
precise moment of launching. Like the other rooms, it was accompanied by
a text of Dos-toyevskian darkness written by the artist, reflecting the
Russian talent for story-telling. The installation was more than an
elaborate realization of this bizarre fantasy, however. The extravagant
clutter was a sardonic commentary encapsulating a wealth of observations
that reflect the peculiar dilemmas of life in the former Soviet Union—its
tawdry reality, its broken dreams, the pervasive role of central
authority.
1257.
Ilya Kabakov. The Man Who Flew into
Space from His Apartment,
from "Ten Characters."
1981-88.
Mixed-media installation at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,
New York.
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Ilya
Kabakov
Ilya Kabakov, Russian Èëüÿ Èîñèôîâè÷ Êàáàêîâ (1933) is an
American conceptual artist of Russian-Jewish origin, born in
Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in
Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. He now lives
and works on Long Island. He was named by Art News as one of
the "ten greatest living artists" in 2000.
Throughout his forty-year plus career, Kabakov has produced
a wide range of paintings, drawings, installations, and
theoretical texts — not to mention extensive memoirs that
track his life from his childhood to the early 1980s. In
recent years, he has created installations that evoked the
visual culture of the Soviet Union, though this theme has
never been the exclusive focus of his work. Unlike some
underground Soviet artists, Kabakov joined the Union of
Soviet Artists in 1959, and became a full-member in 1965.
This was a prestigious position in the USSR and it brought
with it substantial material benefits. In general, Kabakov
illustrated children's books for 3–6 months each year and
then spent the remainder of his time on his own projects.
By using fictional biographies, many inspired by his own
experiences, Kabakov has attempted to explain the birth and
death of the Soviet Union, which he claims to be the first
modern society to disappear. In the Soviet Union, Kabakov
discovers elements common to every modern society, and in
doing so he examines the rift between capitalism and
communism. Rather than depict the Soviet Union as a failed
Socialist project defeated by Western economics, Kabakov
describes it as one utopian project among many, capitalism
included. By reexamining historical narratives and
perspectives, Kabakov delivers a message that every project,
whether public or private, important or trivial, has the
potential to fail due to the potentially authoritarian will
to power.
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Ann
Hamilton.
Kabakov was inspired in part by the example of Beuys, who
was also an influence on the young American installation artist Ann
Hamilton (born
1956). Her
work is about loss, be it from personal tragedy or distortion of a
natural relationship. Unlike Beuys, she seeks only to raise issues, not
to resolve them, a matter that is left to the visitor. Yet she uses many
of the same means: her installations involve all of the senses through
the use of unusual materials, often in disturbing ways, in order to
present a paradox that lies at the center of each work. She exercises
these choices through a train of free association until the idea
crystallizes. Her installations are labor-intensive—obsessively,
even ritualistically, so. Thus parallel lines for the
1991 Sao Paulo Bienal (figs.
1258 and
1259) began with assistants
coating the walls of one gallery with soot from burning candles, then
attaching sequentially numbered copper tags to the floor (an interest in
seriality that is basic to Conceptual Art). Finally, a huge bundle of
candles was placed in the room, so as to dominate it. A second room,
covered entirely in the same copper tags, held nothing but two glass
library cases containing turkey carcasses that were slowly devoured by
beetles. This assault on the viewer's senses—and
sensibilities—was intended
to pose a number of questions. What is collected, why, and by whom? What
is the moral difference between showing candles made by people from the
fat of dead animals and exhibiting a dead bird with beetles carrying out
their natural role as scavengers? Although death is treated
matter-of-factly, there is a strangely mournful air to the entire
installation, which invites us to ponder these matters and to arrive at
our own conclusions.
1258, 1259. Ann
Hamilton. parallel lines.
Installation at the Sao Paulo Bienal,
September-December
1991. Mixed media. Courtesy
Richard Ross
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Ann Hamilton
Ann Hamilton (born June 22, 1956, Lima,
Ohio) is a contemporary American artist best known for her
installations, textile art, and sculptures, but is also
active in the fields of photography, printmaking, video, and
video installation.
She trained in textile design at the
University of Kansas and later received an MFA from Yale
University in sculpture. She taught at the University of
California at Santa Barbara from 1985 to 1991 and won the
MacArthur Fellowship in 1993.
In 1999, Hamilton was the American
representative to the Venice Biennale with an installation
of walls embossed with Braille, which caught a red powder as
it slid down from above.
Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania is one of her major commissions.
Ann Hamilton was named a 2007 Agnes Gund
Foundation Fellow and awarded a $50,000 grant by United
States Artists, a public charity that supports and promotes
the work of American artists.
In 2008, she won the 14th Annual Heinz
Award for Arts and Humanities.
In February 2009, Hamilton installed human
carriage in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, New York
as part of the exhibition “The Third Mind: American Artists
Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989”. Her formal description of
human carriage reads “Installation of cloth, wire, bells,
books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air,
and sound,” and the Guggenheim Museum described its working
thus: “Hamilton devises a mechanism that traverses the
entire Guggenheim balustrade, taking the form of a white
silk ‘bell carriage’ with Tibetan bells attached inside. As
the cage spirals down along the balustrade, the purifying
bells ring, awakening viewers. The mechanism is hoisted back
up to a post at the uppermost Rotunda Level 6, where an
attendant exchanges weights composed of thousands of cut-up
books that counter the pulley system that propels the
mechanism itself."
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Ann Hamilton with Jensen Architects.
Tower
Ann
Hamilton. Molecular and Ceullular Biology Building
Ann
Hamilton. Hands
Mildred Howard.
Mildred Howard (born
1945)
uses many of the same principles as Hamilton, but
constructs her installations as specifically African-American
statements. A social activist, she draws chiefly on her own life to
define the black experience. To her, memory is both individual and
ethnic. Thus Tap: Investigation of Memory (fig.
1260) resonates with multiple
layers of personal and cultural meaning. It celebrates the importance of
this dance form to the artist's family during her childhood, as well as
the special contribution African-Americans have made to it. The taps,
labeled "Traveler" significantly enough, are lined up ritualistically in
rows, with shoes in solemn procession down the center aisle, before a beat-up shoeshine stand which becomes a
shrinelike altar. The spiritual references are intentional. Movement is
closely identified in Howard's mind with African-American worship—especially
as practiced in storefront churches, the subject of another of her
installations—in contrast
to the somber introspection traditional to Western churches. Yet Tap
succeeds precisely because of the contemplative atmosphere, which
evokes a broad range of associations.
1260. Mildred Howard. Tap: Investigation of
Memory. 1989.
Travelers' shoe taps, in antique 3-seat shoeshine stand,
assorted
painted shoes, and delayed playback of an ambient sound,
3
x 4
x 15.5
m.
Collection the artist. Courtesy
Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco
Mildred Howard.
Crossings
Mildred Howard.
In the Line of Fire
Mildred Howard. "6639"
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