Installation Art Essay

Out of the many ways in which we can view Installation Art, the term itself is not clearly defined. There are, however, different characteristics of it, and within this essay I will discuss the two most prevalent from my own point of view, and support my thoughts and opinions with examples from information we have encountered throughout this past semester. Although Installation Art has many qualities that it can be associated with, I believe that one which stands true above most is the fact that it Installation Art often casts the spectator as the protagonist. As we have seen throughout the semester, many different artist’s have employed their own ideas of what makes art Installation Art, yet from my own vantage point, it is only Installation Art if we create something for the spectator to walk into and ‘do’ something within the piece itself, as opposed to viewing it from a more museum like way, in order to create a more ‘authentic’ form of art. Lucas Samaras’s creation of ‘Room’, is a direct example of my thoughts on this characteristic of Installation Art. He wished to accommodate the viewer in his work. In this piece, he wished that the space of the piece become â€Å"a wholly immersive environment in which the space existed for the viewer to activate as an engaged and absorbed participant† (Bishop, 27). Installations should be geared toward first hand, real experiences by the viewer, and not illustrate simply a situation. Samaras’ ‘Room’ created this by having the items in the piece ‘fluid’, and not ‘glued-down’. ‘Room’, was a conglomeration of the artist’s own personal belongings reconstructed to mimic his own bedroom, in which the viewer could walk in, sit down on, and actually interact with the items, which, according to Samaras, created the ‘authentic’ quality of the art itself. As we view the characterstic of Installation Art as the spectator casted as the protagonist, we can now realize that, once again looking at Samaras’ ‘Room’, it addressed itself directly to the viewer, whose experience was not that of a detached onlooker, but was indeed the actual focus of the work itself. Samaras created a state of mind more than anything, in which the viewer was essentially in the first-person, and the subject actually will see things through their own ‘daydream’, which is nothing less than escape from a reality that is not completely suspended (in contrast to dreams while we are sleeping, in which we are suspended). According to Freud, a daydream is initially the expression of an unconscious fantasy, as a sort of ‘hallucinatory’ sense and is an escape from reality, which centers the viewer as the protagonist in the piece, because they are the one’s creating the art in which they see.