this new millenium and its so-called art
So I read through page 77 of this book entitled "Installation Art in the New Millenium," and I must say I found Leong's notion of the "control space"(p.49) deeply disturbing.
I once had an issue of a comic book series about a superherion from the semidistant future; her name perhaps runs away from me. "Cyberella," I think it was. In her neo Western land of absolute urban chaos and compressed innercity violence, spiriting oneself away to the boundless sanctuary of Virtual Reality became a trend amongst the middle class.
Not just sporadic escape, but total escape. Those who could afford it would climb into their cellular imagination pods and be transported into a simplified hyper-reality they had just purchased. The available options for their psuedo-engagements might include, but were not limited to, nice virtual apartments, good-looking virtual boyfriends and better tasting food. The only precondition for having these programs installed was a fee.
With respect to the debate about installation art being or not being accessible to a wide audience, I allege that the size of a given work's viewership is not what makes it elitist. What makes it elitist is its rejection of all unpredictable elements. Its dismissal of the illimitable presence of temporality and decay. When installation art does this, it does not matter what kind of point it is trying to make. The intended message is usurped by a deeply classist and priviledged assumption about what it means to experience things. In an environment where there is total control, pleasure and abandonment are the context, even if they are not the outcome.
Accessing "the quest for outer limits and the realization of fantasies" which are "at the heart of existential experience"(51), we are "cocooned" inside the lush installation. I think I want to reject this kind of art.
2 Questions:
There is in the Forward some debate about installation being like a formal medium, and its influence being temporary. I don't understand how either of those notions would work. Installation is a concept, not a medium. A medium involves some kind of specific material. And the possibility of forms of installations soon being discarded like a passing fad, is that even to be considered?
Um, I used to have a dollhouse. Would that be a hetertopia?
