Installation Artists Working with Wood
 Part II: The Theoretical

Stephanie Cristello

“Art is a matter of adjusting material reality to create a sense of life”
-Darby Bannard

Large-scale installations, by nature, encompass an awareness of the interaction between a piece and its viewer.  This was discussed at length in Part I: The Aesthetical, through the artists’ explanations of their individual processes and overall studio practices.  However, what has yet to be touched upon are the implications of the artists’ awareness of this interaction; at the core of installation art’s theoretic component is how the adaptation of a viewer’s perception can both alter the space as well as the onlooker’s experience of their surroundings, therefore making it a study of the relation between person and place.  Having spoken with Rea, Freiburg and Kaczynski in Part I about the guidelines of their processes and material considerations, there was a commonality among the threads of “rules” that these artists followed within the boundaries of Installation: the arrangement of specific elements is in many ways the driving force of the conceptual product.  Our perception of an installation artist’s chosen elements is heightened due to the importance of our existence as a viewer within the space; the audience is often just as considered as the medium.

The Viewer as Object

Hypothetical scenario:  If you (the audience member), as a component of the piece, are especially considered, then it is probable that the artist has considered your role within the work prior to its completion.  Chances are your reaction is predetermined; individual responses to the piece obviously differ, but the general behavioral pattern remains the same.  In 1967, Michael Fried first discussed this notion of theatricality in his published essay Art and Objecthood, where essentially the presentness of the viewer became an intrinsic part of the viewing process.  In direct relation to installation art, the viewer as an object pertains to the sensory, or narrative, experiences that surround them.  In that instance, the moments in where the viewer is contained within the chasm of the work, a certain degree of their identity is altered through their viewership.

Doesn’t such emphasis on the viewer bring too much attention to the fact that we are experiencing a fabrication? Am I walking into a gallery expecting to be tricked, or manipulated into believing in a reality that perhaps doesn’t even remotely exist outside this space?

Well, no.  The trademark of installation art is the characterization of its viewership; much like theatergoers, they are often curious and eager to explore the fabricated world.  More than merely a modeled replication, or micro-chasm, of our relation to the outside world, installation literally creates an experience.  An artist’s choice to include the audience as a participle of their final piece doesn’t necessarily discard the audience’s choice to participate through the means of mimicking reality, or abusing the authority that large-scale work often garners.  Instead, the installation’s inclusion of a public body allows for an easier, more accessible entry point to the artwork for most; like theater, enthusiasts are prepared to pay for their ticket into another world, and hopefully come out with something they didn’t have before they went in. The question still remains: does installation actually do this, and more importantly, how does it do this without coming off as completely bogus?

The alteration of space/ reality

The alteration of space lends itself to certain possibilities that other art forms have a much harder, or rather impossible, time conveying.  Much of it is tactile consideration; the directness of the approach to immerse someone in a carefully designed interior is much more effectively done when the space is inescapable upon entering the gallery. Michael Rea believes it opens up certain realms to exploration, sort of like putting on a show without a curtain to mask the behind-the-scenes, which makes it all the more compelling for him, “I like to create something that positions itself between reality and fiction,” says Rea, “I like my audience to feel a sense of familiarity while being challenged by an uneasy sense of the alternative universes my work explores.”

The notion of challenging, or rather negotiating with reality is a common trope for the installation genre, and while some artists choose to fall into this challenge and explore it, others choose to challenge-the-challenge, so to speak: “There is nothing outside the real world, there are only moments of pushing into the unknown, of expanding the sphere,” says Freiburg, “My dad always says ‘welcome to the real world’ whenever something shitty happens, and I always reply ‘fuck the real world.’” In relating this to his practice, he states, “the real world is a shitty place, and I my art is a shitty way to perhaps come to terms with and accept reality as a chaotic advance into the turgid wood.”

Although this may seem like a pessimistic stance, this standpoint allows for Freiburg’s experimentation in order to create that moment, which is constantly permeating his pieces; what makes up an experience, and how long it can last before it expires are both things that Freiburg seeks to create in his work.

Unlike certain practices, such as painting, drawing and sculpture, the situation of where these pieces exist is essentially what brings them to life, which is to say: no space, no installation.  Depending on the piece, the temporality usually sets up a framework, between our world and the installation’s, forcing us to coexist, “I hope that I am creating a kind of reduced simulacrum; a structural model of what it is to be a body – a psychological social body – in relation to the world,” says Kaczynski. “They mirror the ‘real’ world. They mirror in terms of the structure of an interaction between a subjective and objective body. While the ‘Olympus Manger’ series creates a depiction of ‘another world’ as you say, it is doing so to position the viewer and implicate them in the subject of the work.”

For Installations, the artist’s awareness of implicating the audience becomes the most important quality of the piece when trying to figure out just where we fit into the constructed environment.  Less a creation of fantasy, it becomes a creation of mythology; the awareness that this world exists within ours, not above ours