Installation proposal

Edit: Some things have changed, in connection with this project.

The den will most likely be quilts over a wire frame, the outside treated (with paint?) to look like rock and dirt, evoking animal-made safe space. The inside will still be quilts, evoking human-made safe space.

Sketches:

(click for big!)

What is still up in the air is the speakers idea.

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My main idea is to create an animal den, something that the viewer/participant has to crawl into (or otherwise change their body shape in which to enter).

The den will be created to be a safe space, as it will have one entrance/exit. It will also incorporate more than one sense in that it will be more of an experience than just looking at something. One can look at it, but one can also enter it, and the experience will be "fleshed out" in that I'm planning on concealing speakers inside that will play nature sounds and other white noise.

I'd like to place this by the mass of forsythia by Monty, close enought that the forsythia become part of the work by overlapping it.

Coming soon: sketches, library research, and art event write ups! Hurrah.

Reading: "Introduction: Site-specifics"

This reading was rather dense and somewhat confusing. I could understand some points that the author was making, but then he started to compare things to linguistics, which didn't help at all.

I do understand that spaces can be read as different places and locations depending on their use, and how they are used defines them. An artist can take advantage of the means of defining a space for their own purposes.

However, the author did not have to explain it in such a convoluted manner.

Reading: "But is it installation Art?"

Rather, the best installation art is marked by a sense of antagonism towards its environment, a friction with its context that resists organisational pressure and instead exerts its own terms of engagement.

This again asserts the definition of installation art creates an environment, and that the experience isn't totally about the works that are on display (if there are any works on display) but about the viewer and how they interact with their environment. However, interactivity isn't really defined as the viewer pushing a button or whatever; interactivity with an installation can be as subtle as the viewer having to move around things. (It doesn't have to be, of course.)

I think that this quote is going back to "The Museum Problem" and dealing with the institutionality of galleries, and the writer thinks that installation art should define itself by defying the institution or something like that, but I think that installation art can work as an addition to its surroundings, rather than struggling with its surroundings.

Reading: "The Museum Problem"

Merzbau, Kurt Schwitters 1923-1948.

This piece creates a more direct relationship to the viewer in that the viewer is not a passive viewer, but immersed in the presence of this room and house. It "activates" the viewer by being made up of many complex pieces that need to be taken in individually, and then taken in in relationship to the surrounding pieces, then in relationship to the whole, then in relationship viewer. It's complex and absorbing viewing that surrounds the viewer and creates an unique experience.

The piece defies galleries and other insitutions by being in the artist's house, and did not require an initial association with a museum. Also by being in the artist's house, it tries to integrate art with the everyday, even though the shapes of which it is made certainly don't look everyday.

Installation art

Embankment, Rachel Whiteread 2005-6




Read about it here and here.

There's a whole list of artists here but I found Whiteread's work particularly interesting due to its scale and relationship the the viewer.

Maybe it's because I'm kind of hungry, but it reminds me of sugar cubes.