When reading through the interpretations and assessments of authors Oliveira, Oxley, and Petry, I’m often asking myself how effective many of the pictured Installations are in delivering the effects the authors claim the Installations provide. For example, the picture of British artist Renato Niemis’ project [i] does little, in my opinion, to make an participant feel isolated by simply entering onto a wooden catwalk that apparently leads nowhere. More than anything, it would seem to create an annoyance that such projects receive funding in the first place. I can’t help to ask ‘why’, and then ‘so what?’ One can’t feel isolation in an abandoned building, or in the woods? This current trend of working away from gallery space, or moreover, altering space to fulfill the intention and needs of the artist and the Installation seems necessary for a more effective work since place is so critical to a project’s feel. However, when looking at pictures of Elmgreen & Dragsets’ Powerless Structures (97), is there anything within the work that would prompt a viewer to think about gay sexuality? Does destroying the gallery prompt me to think about “the [upheaval] generated by destruction and rebuilding” as the authors have claimed? I try to think about how I would feel as a participant walking into a gallery to view an art installation that merely destroyed and subsequently rebuilt the gallery—what a waste of resources in the name of art. No doubt, others will have a different opinion as it may impact them differently.
As the authors have so keenly observed, photographing temporary installations have become “a major means of viewing the Installation art, and that it has superseded witnessing the actual work in situ (79).” This of course, takes a great deal away from works that strike to induce particular sensations and feelings in the participant. By offering only a photograph or video with some documenting words, the participants lose the intimacy of experiencing the work first hand. A large effect is lost. In the case of Niemis’ catwalk of isolation, a photograph does little to capture the feeling of being there in actuality. I don’t see the building I enter, nor know much about the neighborhood or surrounding culture. The experience is lost and the memory of it only partial. This is why I believe Ms. Lord finds it so very necessary that our class visit museums to gain a ‘total experience’ with an Installation. The shift from “presence to reproduction” alters the perception of the work, rendering the documentation of Installation as nothing more than a visual aid and memoir of the work.
On another note, the idea that a layman unschooled in the arts would interpret many of these Installations in the manner and depth of thought that these authors give is folly. Unless these Installation artists are exclusively producing some works for the art community, interpretations might run the gamut and cause a great deal of confusion and misinterpretation. I attempted to make sense out of Luchezar Boyadjiev’s country cinema Installation entitled Gazebo, granted through a mere photograph, but came up with an interpretation a bit different than the authors (86). I felt that it suggested humanity’s disconnection with nature and sought to refocus the thoughts on what was simple and beautiful in the face of the grind and push of the overly stimulated city life. The authors claimed that the project “evoked a metaphor for the cinematic frame and revealed the artificiality of perception, thus allowing for the contemplation of landscape to appear as a culturally constructed utopia (86).” Again, perhaps if I had more information on the Installation and the artist at work, and experienced the Installation in its place of conception and known the history of that place, the Installation would have generated a different interpretation.