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.
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