The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums

Site-specific installations are created for a specific location and are usually intended as temporary artworks. The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums. Staging Contemporary Art shows that these artworks consist of more than a singular manifestation and that their lifespan is often extended. This book provides an in-depth account of the paradoxical situation when site-specific installations are being preserved and put on display in a museum context. Tatja Scholte offers a conceptual framework for scholars and professionals in order to better understand the transformative nature of site-specific installation art and to support decision-making in museums as to conserving and presenting these artworks over time. The case studies provide insight into the diversity of artistic production over the last forty years. They explore how site-specific installations gain new meanings and forms in a museum context, and, vice versa, how these artworks become agents for change of professional routines and museum strategies.

Site-Specific Installation Art in Historical Perspective

The argument in this chapter starts with a discussion of the art historical discourse on site-specific installation art. Artists as well as critics have explored various notions of site specificity, usually in concordance with successive art historical periods: the first “wave” of site-specific installations created during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a second period, from the 1980s and early 1990s until today. The chapter elucidates several art historical perspectives on both periods and the shifts occurring in the relationship between artists and museum institutions, between the artwork and the site. Furthermore, it is important to realize that site-specific installation artworks are highly diverse in form, content, and meaning. For the current purpose of developing a model with an eye to the artworks’ perpetuation, a chronological approach is only partly effective. A further abstraction in categorization is needed, focusing on the network of site-specific functions and their changes over time. To this end, a selection of relevant notions elucidate the extended lives of site-specific installations, which I derive from case studies and observations made by artists and art historians in this respect. The discussion is a prelude to chapter 3, in which I take the vocabulary for site-specific installation artworks one step further by employing a triadic set of spatial functions, which I derive from Henri Lefebvre’s theory on space.

The Problem of the Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Art

In the summer of 1961, Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) installed dozens of used car tyres in the courtyard of the Martha Jackson Townhouse Gallery in New York City. The artist had collected these tyres from a nearby garage and invited his friends and fellow artists to participate in the Happening called Yard.2 There was no audience except for the participants who jumped over the heaps of tyres and moved them around. Photographs of Yard show Kaprow arranging the tyres within the small space of the courtyard, which was officially the sculpture garden of the gallery. Apart from the photographs, accounts of the event are scarce, and the press hardly paid any attention to it. And yet, Yard became one of Kaprow’s seminal Happenings. The work has been acquired for many museum collections and was re-executed on numerous occasions, both by Kaprow and others, at different places and with other participants.

Conclusion and Further Discussion

The readers of this book have taken note of the history of site-specific installation art and were offered an analytical model for examining the perpetuation of the artworks in a museum context. As the term suggests, site-specific installations are physically tied to the surrounding space and would, strictly speaking, have no afterlives after their initial manifestation. However, as demonstrated with many examples, site-specific installations can have extended lives and are frequently relocated to different contexts and times. Hence, rather than defining site specificity as a “fixed” characteristic, this study took a broader perspective by looking into the biographies of the artworks in relation to the exhibition site, ongoing institutional engagement, the locations of production, and the visitors’ interaction in the here and now.

Crossing the Threshold between Spatial Installation Art and Interior Architecture

<p><b>This thesis explores opportunities to challenge how the nature of spatial installation art might be conceived within the medium of habitable architecture. It explores how spatial installation can take a shift in spatial qualities from space that is occupied to space that is inhabited. It focuses specifically on precedents and opportunities for the use of architectural vocabulary along with materiality, context, ordering systems, and identities to engage the occupant with spatial experience that challenges the boundaries between art and interior architecture. The intent of this thesis is to investigate how such vocabularies can be applied to interior architecture in order to formulate architectural space that society actively interacts in and through. The macro approach embraces multi - functionality allowing freedom for the space to metamorphose when confronted with a new set of social demands by the inhabitant without the space actually needing to physically change.</b></p> <p>The thesis investigates the threshold between the realms of conceptual spatial art and programmed habitable architectural space. It examines how an ‘installation’ can respond to multiple programmatic requirements and the requirements of habitation, as a means of redefining our presumptions of interior architecture. This thesis investigates the liminal boundaries defining a construction as a work of architecture versus a work of art by considering interior architecture as a vital transition between architecture and art. As a site for this investigation the thesis explores ‘interior architecture’ opportunities along a pedestrian pathway in Wellington, one which is spatially contained by urban buildings on either side. The selection of this site for an investigation of interior architecture immediately challenges traditional presumptive boundaries between interior architecture, architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. Such a site provides a critical vehicle for investigating the nature of program and habitability within a constructed installation space that crosses the boundaries into architecture.</p>