How To Make Sense of Installation Art - For The Common People - Part 1

This is the year where I should be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. University is not over yet but I can at least start thinking of my dissertation and in fact they even let me write a 3,000 word ''mock dissertation'', as I call it.

Because I am interested in new forms of art (as the daily office life is so utterly boring and London is constantly grey, or white lately, but still grey) and in understanding how values in our society are changing, I have decided to focus on installations.

Alternative art first caught my attention a couple of years ago when I went with Pino to visit a small alternative gallery in London that exhibited shit work - literary I mean sculptures, a lot of them, that had been made by what I recall being a Spanish or South American artist who employs faecis to turn them into artistic pieces. Then there was a dog by the same artist, whom he let die of starvation and called the process "modern art". I may well be making this up, however these information got so stuck into my head that I decided to take nude pictures of myself, urinate on them, tag them as post modern art, make a million dollar contract and leave the office. This clearly never happened so here I am.


What's the best place to start an exploration of installation art if not from Tate Modern and the Turbin Hall?
This year, Polish artist Miroslaw Balka is present in this gigantic space with his gigantic installation "'How Is It''. Some say this work wants to steer our attention to the Holocaust; Balka however never mentioned the Holocaust. But because he is Polish, he can't escape his past. It's like me, being Italian, pretending to have a proper meal without pasta.

Taking it from a cultural studies perspective, what I really want to look at is the Foucauldian discourse that "authorities" - or better, those agents who have the right to talk, to express an opinion and thus influence the public opinion and the common people - have enabled in the discussion of this installation. What can be said about installation art? How can we talk about it? What position is this form of art acquiring within society? And, more importantly, what are the changing values in culture and society that installation art represents and fosters?

To find out, I will start my research by looking both at marketing material issued from the museum (Tate Modern in this case) as well as at press articles.

Even though I am just at the start of my research, what I notice is that there's hardly any text that deals specifically with installation art so part of the difficulty here is in adapting other academic writings and publications that non specifically touch on this form of art to my ends.

This vacuum in the academia is pretty suprising as it's undeniable that exhibitions revolving around installation art have taken over, at least from the '90s on. More in details, what has noticeably increased is that type of installation art defined "interactive".

By saying "interactive" I am already touching on one of the main feature not only of contemporary art but also of our societies and media: audience participation.

This is a characteristic that has already become prominent in journalism at least since the beginning of the XXI century and especially during the reporting of global crisis. Many are those who date back the beginning of participatory journalism to events such as the Tsunami of 2004, when people started for the first time to act as reporters by sharing their photos, videos and stories of the disasters. The 9/11 is another clear example of an audience that is not passive anymore.

Similarly, art has also started to involve some form of participation and Balka's installation exemplifies this: the audience must walk inside the black box to experience what it is about; it is not enough anymore to stare at it like you would have once done with a painting or with an opera.

As I start off with my research then, I soon realize that to understand the value of art today and to grasp the discourse that not only surrounds but also constructs its meaning, I have to relate art to its context and therefore, in primis, to our culture.

As post modern is by many highlighted as the main feature of contemporary societies, this in turn means that I have to unpick this concept and apply it to Balka's installation if I want to fully understand it.

However, the first doubt I am confronted with is: if everything is relative, as post modern values seem to syndicate, how can I even know that what I am looking at is an artwork after all?

Before I even start my investigation on installation art, I must first understand what art nowadyas means.

George Dickie, a contemporary American philosopher, has elaborated in recent years what has come to be known as "the institutional theory of art". There is no evaluative principle at the core of this theory whose main point rests in its assumption that a work of art can be defined as such when just a person conceives of it as a work of art. Dickie specifies that such recognition must come from an artworld public, however this is not the point. The main point that we must read in Dickie's elaboration is that his theory is non-evaluative of art. It does not allow us to judge good art and distinguish it from bad art. If some have criticised such a theory for its circularity, still an important fact remains: this is the only theory of art that we might be able apply today - think of the pornographic work of Koons; think of Andi Wharol and his cans. How could we dare to say that Duchamp's Urinal is art if not by applying this theory? How could we think of Hirst's skulls as of objects that have an artistic value otherwise? Certainly a Kantian vision of art would not help us.

Together with post modernism, if I am to understand installation art, I must take into account consumerism theories that to it relates. We can't overlook the fact that talking about art means to also talk about a market, and an extremely prosperous one.

While Marxist theories are never appreciated these days, as all Marxists have anyway turned their back to communism (a failed proposition after all) we can instead employ more sophisticated theories to basically state the same: that all turns around money.

So, to cut a long story short, I will have now to list for my own utility and amusement the resources that I have up to now found and that will hopefully help me to give a deeper meaning to Balka's work, the Turbin Hall, the mass media and our society.

Any help or suggestion would be highly appreciated.