Aesthetics of Installation Art

Installation Art Juliane Rebentisch Translated by Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson
Sternberg Press+
..... Theatricality and the Autonomy of Art (Michael Fried) 39
....... I. Literalness and Meaning 49
...... 2. "Theatricalization" and Aesthetic Reflection 62
..... INTERMEDIALITY 74
..... I. Progress and "Aesthetic Spirit" 103
..... 2. Progress and "Fraying" 115
..... 3. Progress and Autonomy 127
..... Spatial and Time-Based Art (G. E. Lessing, Jacques Derrida) 141
..... I. The Temporal Space of Landscape Theater (Gertrude Stein) 146
..... 2. The Spatial Time of Theatrical Installation (Ilya Kabakov) 155
..... 3. Cinematographic Installation (Boris Groys, Walter Benjamin) 171
..... 4. Sound Installation (Theodor W. Adorno, Stanley Cavell) 197
.... SITE SPECIFICITY 220
.... I. Places and Spaces 227
.. 2. Setting Up, Setting Forth: The Ge-Stell 230
... 3. The Interplay of Art and Space 240
... Installation and Intervention 251
... I. Institutional Critique 252
... 3. Aesthetic Subjectivity 267
Introduction
First, a warning: the following is not an attempt to distill typologies
out of the various artistic experiments that fall into the category of
installation art in order to arrive, finally, at a clearly circumscribed
genre definition. Certain general traits of installation art can indeed
be named, and they will be subject to discussion in the following text.
But to create a typology beyond such general traits seems not only
difficult, but also not very sensible, given the wide range of phenomena
and practices designated by the term "installation." Why codify
what is in flux? Neither will I attempt to reconstruct the genesis of
installation art or offer a provisional survey of its current variety.
If the title of this book has led the reader to expect art historical
classifications that would lend structure to an as of yet relatively
amorphous art form, this reader will be largely disappointed. For
Aesthetics of Installation Art should be taken to refer to philosophical
aesthetics.
But given the fact that philosophical aesthetics concerns itself with
the notion of art in general, what can it have to say about a particular
art form? And, moreover, about one that is as varied and continuously
evolving as installation art? What might be the promise of such an
undertaking? We are familiar with the sad picture such philosophical
business presents. Sometimes the chosen art form is declared, in
daring theses, to be the paradigm of art-as-such; sometimes it is used
simply to illustrate a general structure that might be equally well
demonstrated by any number of other examples. But even with these
two extremes set aside, aesthetics, by virtue of the very questions it
poses, cannot renounce its tendency toward generalization. What,
then, would the point of departure for an "aesthetics of installation
art" be?
We can approach the issue, as I will do in greater detail in the
following, if we turn our attention away from philosophical aesthetics
and toward debates in art criticism, or, more narrowly, in art theory.
These debates have been waged since the sixties within the arts, and
above all within the visual arts, over works which only later-at
the earliest, I would say, since the late seventies-came to be called
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from non-English titles have been translated by Daniel Hendrickson and Gerrit Jackson.
7
INTRODUCTION
installations.1 Surprisingly enough, it is precisely here that the general
questions of philosophical aesthetics resurface. To concede or deny
that installations are works of art also means to advocate a particular
conception of art. In normative debate, the very concept of art is at
stake as well. This, of course, is not a peculiar feature of the debates
revolving around the art of installation. The entire history of modem
art is one of struggles with the notion of art. On the other hand,
however, the art of installation does not simply mark the most current
threshold of this debate. What is interesting about installation art
is not its relative novelty, but the fact that it throws the fundamental
problems of modem aesthetic discourse into sharp relief in their
most contemporary form. I will return to this point later. For now, what
is important to me is that, because of the internal connection between
art criticism and the question of the concept of art, much can be
gained from reading this criticism philosophically, that is, against the
backdrop of philosophical aesthetics.
Still, the fact that the general questions of philosophical aesthetics
are not so general-as is demonstrated by the role they play in art
critical discussions-is significant also with respect to philosophical
aesthetics itself. For the questions of philosophical aesthetics do
not, strictly speaking, or at least not in any interesting way, arise as
general questions; they arise with a prospective or retrospective
view of a concrete aesthetic practice. Philosophical aesthetics can paint
a picture of its object-aesthetic practice-only by (re)constructing
it in an act of interpretation. Conceptual and aesthetic practice are
therefore not simply opposites but imply one another; here, too,
object and theory can obviously not be unambiguously separated, but
are, as it were, sutured to one another. Just as art criticism, if it does
not wish to be arbitrary, must necessarily treat general philosophical
questions, philosophical aesthetics, if it does not wish to lose
contact with its object, thereby becoming irrelevant, must always have
art critical momentum. The respective foundational discourses of
art criticism and of aesthetics, although not identical, depend on one
See Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xi-xii; and Nicholas de Oliveira et al., Installation Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 8.
8
another. If philosophical aesthetics is conscious of this condition,
its task can neither consist in establishing norms alien to actual artistic
practice, nor can it limit itself to classifying art as it finds it. Rather,
the task of philosophical aesthetics consists then, among other things....,­
Adorno in particular clearly saw this as a fundamental problem of
all critical philosophy-in the attempt to offer a plausible mediation
of deduction and induction.2 Still, as debates within aesthetics over
Adorno's aesthetic judgments and their dialectical legitimation clearly
demonstrate (see also 2.2), how this theoretical task is to be accom­
plished after the end of idealistic systems remains a central problem.
In recent years, however, an observer of philosophical aesthetics
might have been able to form the impression that the discipline
has generally distanced itself from Adorno's art critical ambitions and
has now hardly anything to do with artistic practice or with the
normative question of aesthetic judgment. Instead, the philosophically
relevant debates in recent years, at least in Germany, have focused
largely on what constitutes the practice of engaging aesthetic objects
and, hence, the specific structure of aesthetic experience. 3 The
question of what constitutes aesthetic objects has been subordinated to that of the specific structure of our experience of them: aesthetic
objects, in this view, are in general those objects that provide the
occasion for a particular, specifically aesthetic experience. Accordingly,
2 See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 343. To list just a few: Rudiger Bubner, Asthetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989); Christel Fricke, Zeichenprozej3 und iisthetische Erfahrung ( Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001); JosefFriichtl, Asthetische Erfahrung und moralisches Urteil: Eine Rehabilitierung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996); Hans Robert Jaul3, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Andrea Kern, Schone Lust: Eine Theorie der asthetischen Erfahrung nach Kant (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art.· Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Willi Oelmiiller, ed., Asthetische Erfahrung ( Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh Verlag, 1981 ); Martin See!, Die Kunst der Entzweiung: Zum Begriff der as thetis chen Rationalitiil (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985); Ruth Sonderegger, Fiir eine ,{,/hetik des Spiels: Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktion und der Eigensinn der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); Albrecht Wellmer, "Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation: Adorno's Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity," in The Persistence of" Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Pas/modernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 1-35.
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INTRODUCTION
it is still considered protocol that academic specialists in aesthetics have
some familiarity with art; this knowledge, however, would not seem
to be a necessary component of their conceptual labor-in contra­
distinction to the traditional aesthetics of production or of the work of
art. One might think that philosophical aesthetics has tended to
retreat to the refuge from which Adorno's emphatically argumentative
project (with and against Hegel) sought to release it in the name of
artistic modernism-to the domain, as subjectivist as it is alien to art,
of an aesthetics of the judgment of taste.4 No wonder, one might
then think, that the conversation between aesthetic theorists on the one
hand and practitioners on the other has once again largely come to
a halt. Nowhere is this gap between the two contexts of discussion
clearer than with respect to the discourse on aesthetic autonomy.
While philosophers continue to talk a great deal about aesthetic
autonomy-notably the autonomy of aesthetic experience from the
domains of theoretical and practical reason-in the world of more
advanced art, the term has seemingly become a slur.
But this opposition, I think, is deceptive. Both positions-the
academic defense of aesthetic autonomy and its disavowal in artistic
practice-encounter one another in a critique of the concept of the
work of art. And in both cases, it is a particular concept of the work
of art that is seen as discredited. This convergence is indicative. It
permits us to view the philosophical aesthetics and artistic practices of
the recent past in interrelation: an interrelation that would be lost if
we saw on the one side a Kant revival-at best provincial but at
worst indifferent to current artistic practice-and on the other side
an abstract negation of aesthetic autonomy. The interrelation I am
interested in is one between the anti-objectivist impulse of theories of
aesthetic experience and the impulses toward the dissolution of
the concept of the work in artistic practice. As early as 1973, Rudiger
Bubner understood his call for a return to Kant in philosophical
aesthetics-aimed against the objectivism of the aesthetics of the
work-also as a reaction to the destruction of the traditional unity
of the work in contemporary art.5 Whereas Bubner, probably only
4 See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 333-5.
10
ostensibly drew the conclusion that theory should dispense with the
concept of the work of art entirely,6 I would like to interpret the
philosophical "turn" to aesthetic experience introduced by Bubner not
as a turn away from the concept of the work of art, but as, among
other things, an alternative proposal for an anti-objectivist version of the
concept of the work of art. 7 Of course, this implies a significant
divergence from Kant. Corresponding to and in critical engagement
with some of the existing theories of aesthetic experience, the latter
will here be understood not in a Kantian sense, as the pleasure the
subject takes in itself (or in its faculties), but as a process that is
essentially played out between subject and object. Aesthetic experience,
as I will explain in greater detail, exists only in relation to an
aesthetic object; conversely this object becomes aesthetic only by
virtue of the processes of aesthetic experience. The aesthetic object
cannot be objectified outside aesthetic experience, nor does the
subject ultimately become, on the occasion of an object that must be
hracketed, the object of its own experience. The new conception
of aesthetic experience as a process that comprehends the subject as
well as the object of this experience to the same degree and equipri­
mordially, and which therefore cannot be attributed to either of these
entities alone, follows a new conception of aesthetic autonomy as
well. Art is not autonomous because it is constituted in this or that way,
but because it allows for an experience distinct from the spheres of
practical and theoretical reason, by virtue of the specific structure of
the relation between its subject and its object.
These general and, with respect to criteria that would be useful
to art criticism, decidedly ascetic definitions nonetheless have an art
critical point if we relate them to the normative debates about
RUdiger Bubner, "Uber einige Bedingungen gegenwartiger Asthetik," in Neue 1/efiefiir Philosophie 5 (1973): 38-73; reprinted in Bubner, Asthetische Erfahrung, esp. 19-20, 33-34, 44 .
c. In any case, Bubner later defended a rather conservative conception of the work. See RUdiger Bubner, "Demokratisierung des Geniekonzepts," in A'sthetik der lmzenierung, eds. Josef FrUchtl and Ji:irg Zimmermann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 77-90. It is significant that the academic discourse on art emphatically gestures in this direction. See Gottfried Boehm, "Das Werk als Prozel3," in Das Kunstwerk, ed. Willi OelmUller (Paderbom: Ferdinand Schoningh Verlag, 1983), 326-38.
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INTRODUCTION
contemporary art. For, in art critical arguments concerning the
concept of art, it becomes clear that the question of what constitutes
an aesthetic object always already implies the question of what
constitutes aesthetic experience. The two questions are two sides of
the same coin. This can be demonstrated precisely with respect to
those positions of the aesthetics of the work against which the concept
of aesthetic experience is directed. Yet whereas the concept of the
work of art remains prior for those positions, theories of aesthetic
experience claim the primacy of this experience over its object (and its
subject; see 3.2.3). If work-aesthetic positions can be criticized in
light of a methodological primacy of aesthetic experience as objec­
tivist, this is not because the work is conceived as entirely divorced
from its relation to the experiencing subject in work-aesthetic
positions. It is much more a question of how the relation between
work and experience should be understood.
It is certainly not by chance that the argument concerning the
concept of art-which in this sense is always a double argument, one
concerning both the work and the experience of it-has since the
sixties revolved around installation art with particular vehemence.
Installation art, in its diverse manifestations, clearly condenses qualities
that have proven to be incompatible not only with the conventions
of form in aesthetic modernism but also with the versions of aesthetic
autonomy delineated by positions in production and work-aesthetic
theory that were associated with these conventions. In art criticism,
these incompatibilites resulted in a clear front line that remains in
effect to this day: on the one hand, defenders of aesthetic modernism
repudiated installation art as no longer autonomous art; while advocates
of aesthetic postmodernism, on the other hand, repudiated the concept
of aesthetic autonomy rather than the new art form. Both sides, as I
hope to demonstrate, are simultaneously right and wrong. Both sides
are right in that the various forms of installation art can indeed probably
no longer be called autonomous in the sense of the definition of aes­
thetic autonomy associated with the standards of aesthetic modernism.
Both sides are wrong in concluding that the acceptance of installation
art as art inevitably entails that the idea of aesthetic autonomy must
be renounced altogether. For without a concept of aesthetic autonomy,
12
I would maintain, the term "art" is conceptually empty. This may be
one of the reasons why art critics have recently tended to justify
contemporary art as theory or politics. Correspondingly, the discursive
competence of many artists, a relatively new phenomenon that
contrasts with the position of theoretical naivete traditionally ascribed
to them, concerns primarily problems of political philosophy
(catchwords: postcolonial, gender, and queer studies) rather than­
this blind spot is symptomatic-those of aesthetics. In order to
counter this trend toward obscuring aesthetic questions in the discourse
or art criticism and art practice (which is not to say that I wish to
diminish the political dimensions of this discourse), I would like to
make the case, in light of a new conception of aesthetic autonomy
based on a theory of aesthetic experience, for seeing the tendencies
toward boundary-crossing in art in conjunction with its autonomy­
expressly with a view to the (time and again) contemporary boundary­
crossings between art and life, art and politics, or art and theory
(see 3.2).
Installation art is certainly only one example of this tendency toward
boundary-crossing, but, I would maintain, an especially instructive
one precisely because of its far-reaching genealogy and its unclear
boundaries with other, traditional art forms. Regarding its genealogy,
it is notable that a list of the potential precursors of installation art
reads like a list of classical and neo-avant-garde movements. Particu­
larly those that demonstrate that the history of modern art was already
rundamentally shaped by tendencies toward boundary-crossing that
some contemporary critics would ascribe in toto to so-called post­
modemism.8 Yet if we indeed assumed a fundamental break between
modernism and postmodernism, such continuity could not be ex­
plained. Instead, as I would like to show in the example of installation
s The Thames & Hudson monograph Installation Art cites as precursors: "the inclusiveness of Futurist Cubist Collage; Duchamp's readymades; Dada and the constructions of Schwitters and Baader; El Lissitzky and Constructivist approaches to space; Duchamp again and his contributions to the Surrealist exhibitions in 1938 and 1942; Fontana's 'spatialism'; assemblage; happenings; Klein and Manzoni; the Pop tableaux of Kienholz, Oldenburg, Segal and Thek; Fluxus; Minimalism; Pop Att; Arte Povera; Process Art; Conceptualism; [ ... ]." De Oliveira et a!., lmtallation Art, 9.
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INTRODUCTION
art, we should interpret tendencies toward artistic boundary-crossing
not as a break from but, on the contrary, as a radicalization of the
principles of aesthetic modernism. Hence, the impulse to transgress the
boundaries of the modernist concept of the work of art would be
postmodern only in the sense of an impulse toward a critical over­
coming of modernism by and through itself. For what such trans­
gression attacks is not the idea of autonomous art but an objectivist
misunderstanding of it.
conventions of form, throw the central problems of modernist aesthetic
discourse into sharp relief, they emphatically call for a different
philosophical reflection on the concept of art-and that of its experi­
ence-a reflection, moreover, that is, as I will show, decidedly
post-metaphysical. This is not to say that only installation art offers
an experience of what art, correctly understood, really is. But neither
is installation art merely an arbitrarily chosen object for such reflection.
Rather, installation works seem to function in a particularly explicit
way against an objectivism that is already inadequate with respect
to interpreting traditional works. What we could call the anti-objec­
tivist effects that installation works have on the concept of art might
also be the deeper reason why critics continually extend the concept
of installation (even retroactively) to the point where, at least with
regards to certain aspects in each individual case, it now seems appli­
cable to nearly all art. The fact that installation art, despite-or rather,
because of-its ubiquity, offers a peculiar sort of resistance to a
neat definition as a genre would then be an indication not only that
what is conceived by the open term "installation" is still in dynamic
motion, but also that it would be pointless to discuss the theoreti­
cally relevant traits of installation art in the framework of a discussion
of the characteristics of a new genre.
In any case, installation art resists an objectivist concept of the
work by transgressing the boundaries of the traditional arts into
ever new fields of intermedia hybridity (see 2.3). As such, the diver­
sity of installation art does not constitute a new genre. What is
created under the umbrella term "installation" is not so much works
but models of the possibility of works; not so much examples of a
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