CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Installation
Art that treats a whole space as the work, arranging objects, materials, light, sound or video for viewers to enter and move through.
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About
Installation art treats a whole space as the work: objects, materials, light, sound or video arranged so that the viewer walks in and among them rather than facing a single object. Many are made for one site and survive only through photographs, plans and instructions.
Early examples came from the avant-garde. Kurt Schwitters spent years turning rooms of his Hanover house into the sprawling Merzbau (about 1923–37), and Marcel Duchamp hung coal sacks from the ceiling of a Surrealist exhibition in 1938. The term became common in the 1970s. Walter De Maria filled a New York loft with soil in The New York Earth Room (1977), and Robert Irwin reshaped rooms with translucent scrim and daylight. Ilya Kabakov built what he called 'total installations', such as a cramped communal-apartment room from which a man has apparently launched himself into space. Meaning comes from arrangement, scale and the viewer's path.
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