Fragile Abysm

French psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski talked about the different characters of lights in his book "Lived Time". He described daylight as something creating "distance, extension, and fullness", and dark night as "personal, invades the body rather than keeping its distance". In his words, the darkness could " touch me in a more intimate way, penetrating my body."

This idea provided a different direction in thinking about how to capture the human perception by creating an immersive installation piece. Some installation works made by Lucas Samaras, James Turrell, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Morris and Yayoi Kusama are not trying to heighten the perceptual awareness of our bodies but rather to reduce it, "by assimilating the viewer in various ways to the surrounding space".

I like the idea of relating the dark installation with the feeling of dissolution in senses. Darkness, as a saturated color does seem infinite and penetrating to me. Since our perception is highly dependent on the visibility, there would be no perceptible space between the selfness and the external surroundings in a total darkness, where the body's physical limits are established and our relationships to the external space are destroyed. Being in a total darkness is like being in an out-space situation, with no gravity, no relation to the earth. Inside a conceptual infinite universe, viewers who are experiencing a dark installation will see themselves in the lack of vision and orientation, in the lack of security and control, and then in the lack of boundaries of their own bodies and the relationship to the Others. This is why people would feel "decentred" in this kind of installations, when we are no longer the centre of our spacial sensibilities.

This "decentred" experience is the core in understanding James Turrell's work. Inside his creation of those opaque but evanescent color spaces, viewers are confronted with their imaginative seeings and lost their senses in the distinguish between seeings from the inside mental and the seeings from the outside world. This kind of experience is spiritual and absolute.

The world is all around, so is your perception

El Lissitzky said, "Space is not there for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it... We reject space as a painted coffin for our living bodies." I like this quote a lot in thinking about the action of viewing an art piece. Since the space is multi-sensible, it is certainly not just for the eyes, it is for the body, with the mind for reading it, interpreting it, and for forgetting it. The space is the location of a kind of "being", in one moment. The space is existing within the present, the past, and the future. Therefore a site is filled with possibilities of inventions and reconstruction. The meaning of a space is forever-changing, just like our perception of it.

Installation work, as an art practice that aimed to create an immersive environment, an absorptive moment for the viewers, certainly establishes a particular "space" for the spectators. Viewers' reading on the work is always significant in adding another layer of meanings to the work of its own. Therefore, installation art is always incomplete to its full meaning, and is alway partial to its whole contexts. Viewers' physical and mental engagements can always contribute to the core of the work within their conscious knowledge and unconscious association. The reading process of a work can certainly be influenced by the way it presented, by the circumstance of the display, but the action of "entering into" from the inner spirit of the work toward the feeling of a viewer is always unclear, sacred, and uncanny. How subjectivity is unfolded through the observation of objectivity is the question for a metaphysical concern.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is absolutely helpful when we thinking about how visuals become knowledge, as the way art objects become meanings. So Merleau-Ponty's claim that the perception is never just about the visuals is so true that we need to consider the reading of an installation work on the behalf of the whole body, with multiply sensibilities. The interaction between the selfness and the rest of the world is a question about the human perception, with the physicality of one's presence and conceptual layers that constitute the presence. Just as Bishop's words, " the world is all around me, not in front of me." So when discussing the use of Theatricality in installation art in responding to Minimalism, artists create a specific space for viewers to enter into and then invite them to play the role of "actors". And the artist is the director of this constructed dramatic play. In thinking about the formal aspect of the sculptural elements in this kind of installation work, every piece of object is functioning as a part of the "plot". Objects with their use values/ practical capabilities and their sign values/ cultural meanings enter into the readers' minds, and then provoke the spectator to recall their relationships to those objects or events. All of these elements, material objects and conceptual feelings or memories come together inside the viewers' mental world to contribute to their experience with the piece.

Art as Critique

In the 1964, Bianchini Gallery had an "American Supermarket" exhibition. A new role of installation art brought the art world's attention. Within the wide and wild usage of everyday objects and already-mades, a close relationship between artworks and the notion of "retail experience" became the focus of discussion. Those commercial objects and our relations with them entered into the so-called "high-browed" fine art places. Actually, there're several groups of art critics are working on the discussion on the relationship between the art objects and the everyday objects. Following the Marxism philosophy, all art objects are essentially commodity, and then must obey the rule of "use value, exchange value and sign value". It is interesting to think about that in relating the role of installation artwork within its critical function in commenting on the relation between viewers/consumers and arts/commodity, as well as the critique of the global capitalized situation.

So that makes me think about the role of installation art working as a critique more when Claire Bishop articulated the idea of Institutional Critique. After Vietnam war and the rise of Feminism, scholar like Richard Flood pointed out that the younger generation started to acknowledge that the politically disengaged art could be seen as complicit with the status quo, and argued that any art object that gratified the market implicitly supported a conservative ideology in which capitalism dovetailed with patriarchy, an imperialist foreign policy, racism and a host of other social problem.

Therefore, the work of Hans Haacke made us rethink about the relationship between artists and museum patrons, trustees, politics and business, I thought about Haacke's project "Calligraphie" as the perfect example to support his idea on that. The "Calligraphie" proposal was finally turned down by the museum because the artist's choice on the Arabic translation of the French declaration of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", which was ironic because the spirit of those three words should not be limited by language or the ideology behind a language. But the museum's rejection on that actually was expected and made the soul of the critical role of Haacke's piece.

Absorptive Dreams

Freud interpreted dream in its three characteristics: it is primarily visual; it has a composite structure; and dream has the ability to let each element to be replaced by an associative word or syllable.

This structure could be useful in deconstructing various genres of art practices, not just installation art, but also films, fictions, paintings, and so on. Actually, all of these cultural elements could be used, manipulated and represented in a certain way to create an immersive environment within one installation work.

In reading Claire Bishop's book, Installation Art, I like the term of "physically immersive" and "psychologically absorptive" she used to describe Ilya Kabakov's work that functions as a "total installation". Besides providing an external appearance of the work, which is the primary visual in thinking about a dream-image, installation artists are supposed to create an environment to establish a composite structure to let the viewers enter into the place that is filled with elements open for free-associate. Just like interpreting a dream, viewers enter into a sphere created by the artist and read the visible to come up with a meaning, with sensory immediacy and conscious perception, also with unconscious imagination and self-reflecting. The external aspects of an installation would transfer into something like internal spirits and then enter into the inner central part of the viewers' cultural and historical memory. Memory and dream are always one step away from the spectator's presence within the moment within the space; however, they are both haunting the core of how we view the status quo despite its appearance or platforms.

So it is true to agree with John Dewey's idea that "art is experience", which functions as "heightened vitality" and "complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events". Environments, as moments of being with a high degree of associated meanings can always provoke or confirm the reader's sense of self-presence.