The Perpetuation Of Site Specific Installation Artworks In Museums

Site-specific installations are created for specific locations 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. In this book, Tatja Scholte offers an in-depth account of the artistic production of the last forty years. With a wealth of case studies the author illuminates the diversity of site-specific art in both form and content, as well as in the conservation strategies applied. A conceptual framework is provided for scholars and museum professionals to better understand how site-specific installations gain new meanings during successive stages of their biographies and may become agents for change in professional routines.

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

From Ferdinand Chevel's Palais Ideal (1879-1905) and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers (1921-1954) to Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974) and Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981), installation art has continually crossed boundaries, encompassing sculpture, architecture, performance, and visual art. Although unique in its power to transform both the site in which a work is constructed and the viewer's experience of being in a place, installation art has not received the critical attention accorded other art forms. In Space, Site, Intervention, some of today's most prominent art critics, curators, and artists view installation art as a diverse, multifaceted, and international art form that challenges institutional assumptions and narrow conceptual frameworks. The contributors discuss installation in relation to the genealogy of modern art, community and corporate space, multimedia cyberspace, public and private ritual, the gallery and the museum, public and private patronage, and political action. This ambitious volume focuses on issues of class, sexuality, cultural identity rase, and gender, and highlights a wide range of artists whose work is often marginalized by mainstream art history and criticism. Together, the essays in Space, Site, Intervention investigate how installation resonates within modern culture and society, as well as its ongoing influence on contemporary visual culture.

This open access book investigates whether and how theoretical findings and insights in contemporary art conservation can be translated into the daily work practices of conservators or, vice versa, whether and how the problems and dilemmas encountered in conservation practice can inform broader research questions and projects. For several decades now, the conservation of contemporary art has been a dynamic field of research and reflection. Because of contemporary art’s variable constitution, its care and management calls for a fundamental rethinking of the overall research landscape of museums, heritage institutions, private-sector organizations and universities. At first, this research was primarily pursued by conservation professionals working in or with museums and other heritage organizations, but increasingly academic researchers and universities became involved, for instance through collaborative projects. This book is the result of such collaboration. It sets out to bridge the “gap” between theory and practice by investigating conservation practices as a form of reflection and reflection as a form of practice.

Anything is possible in installation art. The typically short lifespan of the materials and techniques used and the intended experience can be endless, often to the despair of the custodian of the work. The processes involved in preserving this complex form of art, reinstalling it, finding ways to recreate the experience over and again, as well as the decisionmaking that underlies these processes, form the backbone of this book. What did the artist originally intend and how has that concept been realised in the past? How can one preserve and document the installation? What relation exists between the components and the space, and what is the spectator's part in the work? Questions of this kind are examined in connection with a number of case studies. At the same time, it reports on the results of an extensive research project Inside Installations (2004-2007) carried out by an international group of custodians active in the conservation of contemporary art. Tatja Scholte is programme manager at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) and specialised in the theory of contemporary art conservation. Dr. Glenn Wharton serves as Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is also on faculty in the Museum Studies Program at New York University, and was the founding Executive Director of INCCA-NA, the North American group of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art. Publisher's note.

Installationskunsten har gået sin sejrsgang verden over, og er her i det 21. århundrede en både vel- og anerkendt bestanddel af samtidskunsten. Med påvirkning fra og udveksling mellem billedkunst på den ene side og performanceteater på den anden befinder installationskunst sig – som bogens titel viser – netop i feltet mellem billede og scene. I Installation Art: Between Image and Stage undersøger Anne Ring Petersen grundstenene for en af nutidens mest udbredte kunstformer. Installationer er – ligesom skulpturer – tredimensionelle formationer eller billeddannelser, men i modsætning til skulpturen er installationen karakteriseret ved at være formet af rum eller rumlige scenografier, som skaber betydning og sanseoplevelser gennem sit billedsprog. Som resultat af dette er installationer ofte stort anlagte kunstværker, som beskueren kan gå ind i, og de lever dermed til fulde op til nutidens krav om spektakulære, æstetisk iscenesatte events og kulturoplevelser, der taler til sanserne. Gennem grundige analyser af værker af kunstnere som Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Jeppe Hein, Mona Hatoum, Pipilotti Rist og Ilya Kabakov som bagtæppe søges der i denne bog svar på, hvad en installation egentlig er, hvilke virkemidler den bruger, hvordan installationskunstens opståen kan forklares i et kulturhistorisk perspektiv og meget mere. Også installationskunstens rumlige, tidsmæssige og diskursive aspekter såvel som dens receptionsæstetik, der sættes ind i en overordnet kunst- og kulturhistorisk ramme, undersøges. Installation Art: Between Image and Stage er et nyttigt værk for alle, der ønsker at forstå denne mangefacetterede kunstforms konceptuelle fundament. Anne Ring Petersen, dr.phil., er lektor ved Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns Universitet. Har i 2009 udgivetInstallationskunsten mellem billede og scene og er redaktør af Contemporary Painting in Context (2010). Despite its large and growing popularity — to say nothing of its near- ubiquity in the world’s art scenes and international exhibitions of contemporary art — installation art remains a form whose artistic vocabulary and conceptual basis have rarely been subjected to thorough critical examination. In Installation Art: Between Image and Stage, Anne Ring Petersen aims to change that. She begins by exploring how installation art developed into an interdisciplinary genre in the 1960s, and how its intertwining of the visual and the performative has acted as a catalyst for the generation of new artistic phenomena. She investigates how it became one of today's most widely used art forms, increasingly expanding into consumer, popular and urban cultures, where installation's often spectacular appearance ensures that it meets contemporary demands for sense-provoking and immersive cultural experiences. The main trajectory of the book is directed by a movement aimed at addressing a series of basic questions that get at the heart of what installation art is and how it is defined: How does installation structure time, space and representation? How does it address and engage its viewers? And how does it draw in the surrounding world to become part of the work? Featuring the work of such well-known artists as Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist, Ilya Kabakov and many others, this book breaks crucial new ground in understanding the conceptual underpinnings of this multifacious art form. Anne Ring Petersen is associate professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen and the editor of Contemporary Painting in Context.

When we think of installation art we imagine enormous, perhaps bewildering, multi-media environments. In this book, Mark Rosenthal offers an historical interpretation and concise critical analyses that should help deepen readers' appreciation of this often-confusing medium.

Collecting the New is the first book on the questions and challenges that museums face in acquiring and preserving contemporary art. Because such art has not yet withstood the test of time, it defies the traditional understanding of the art museum as an institution that collects and displays works of long-established aesthetic and historical value. By acquiring such art, museums gamble on the future. In addition, new technologies and alternative conceptions of the artwork have created special problems of conservation, while social, political, and aesthetic changes have generated new categories of works to be collected. Following Bruce Altshuler's introduction on the European and American history of museum collecting of art by living artists, the book comprises newly commissioned essays by twelve distinguished curators representing a wide range of museums. First considered are general issues including the acquisition process, and collecting by universal survey museums and museums that focus on modern and contemporary art. Following are groups of essays that address collecting in particular media, including prints and drawings, new (digital) media, and film and video; and national- and ethnic-specific collecting (contemporary art from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and African-American art). The closing essay examines the conservation problems created by contemporary works--for example, what is to be done when deterioration is the artist's intent? The contributors are Christophe Cherix, Vishakha N. Desai, Steve Dietz, Howard N. Fox, Chrissie Iles and Henriette Huldisch, Pamela McClusky, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Lowery Stokes Sims, Robert Storr, Jeffrey Weiss, and Glenn Wharton.