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.

Reading 1: "Extended and Prosthetic Bodies"

Reading.

It seems that using "the body" as art automatically sets a subject that the art addresses, whether it is personal space, or relations between people or between a person and his or her environment, or what have you. By starting the work with people, it becomes about people in some way. It makes perfect sense that it does so, however. As people, we see the world in terms of ourselves, so it makes sense that if the body is used as a medium or vehicle for a work, then the work, in turn, becomes about the body. I just find it interesting that other more traditional mediums are less charged. For example, if one were to paint a still life, the audience won't immediately assume that the artist was making a statement about using paint (unless, of course, that was the artist's intent). Maybe these other, more traditional, mediums are less charged than the body simply because they are more traditional and have the weight of a few thousand years of history behind them; maybe because we are humans and possess bodies, it is more difficult for us to witness someone else do something to their own bodies.