Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art [Englisch] [Bibliothekseinband]

I have been an artist all my life, and always worked at the scale of smaller, portable art: drawing, a painting, a small sculpture. However, I was always intrigued with the installation art I have seen at museums, even if I did not always understand it...it "felt" intriguing...-wow.. art you could actually walk into and interact with- and wanted to know more...ultimately I wanted to try my hand at it someday. So I bought a couple different books on site-specific and installation art to learn more on how they were done, how artists conceptualized them and came up with their ideas...this was one of those books. So this is really just a step in my self-education as a newbie to such things.

This book is a collection of essays from artists, educators, critics, curators, professors, and other art specialists. The book is pretty much an insider's book writing for other insiders. The tone is quite postmodern, academic and theoretical. Since this book doesn't have the Look-Inside feature, here's a list of the essays:

=Introduction: On Installation and Site Specificity (Erika Suderburg)
1. The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity (James Meyer)
2. One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity (Miwon Kwon)
3. "Illiterate Monuments": The Ruin as Dialect or Broken Classic (Barbara Maria Stafford)
4. Fountains and Grottos: Installation and the Neobaroque (Sean Cubitt)
5. Garden Agon (Susan Stewart)
6. Written on the West: How the Land Gained Site (Erika Suderburg)
7. Hidden Economies in Los Angeles: An Emerging Latino Metropolis (Alessandra Moctezuma and Leda Ramos)
8. Landscape(s) of the Mind: Psychic Space and Narrative Specificity (Notes from a Work in Progress) (John Coleman)
9. Ordinary Gestures of Resistance (Ernest Larsen)
10. Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco (C. Ondine Chavoya)
11. Scream IV (Laurence A. Rickels)
12. Displacements, Furnishings, Houses, and Museums: Six Motifs and Three terms of Connoisseurship (Kevin McMahon)
13. Public Art and the Spectacle of Money: An Assisted Commentary on Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso (John C. Welchman)
14. Video and Film Space (Chrissie Iles)
15. The Machine in the Museum; or, The Seventh Art in Search of Authorization (Bruce Jenkins)
16. "No Guarantees, They're Wolves": Structure, Movement, and the Dystopic in Diana Thater's _China_ (Colin Gardner)
17. The Space of Electronic Time: The Memory Machines of Jim Campbell (Marita Sturken)
18. The Anthropologist's Shadow: The Closet, the Warehouse, the Lesbian as Artifact (Catherine Lord)
19. Imaging Community: Video in the Installation Work of Pepon Osorio (Tiffany Ana Lopez)
20. The 1970s "Situation" and Recent Installation: Joseph Santarromana's Intersubjective Engagements (Amelia Jones)

For the person new to such subjects, I found Suderburg's "Introduction" (1) to be an excellent contextual piece for the history and theory of this genre; without it, I would not have gotten as much out of this book. As a newbie, I also particularly enjoyed reading about Osorio's work (19), the piece on "Illiterate Monuments" (3), and the essays on video (14) and machine in the museum (15).

If you are an artist or other insider, into the theoretical and aesthetic, if you are an art student in college or an art professional, if you are a patron who likes MOMA and SITE Santa Fe, you can get a lot out of this book. I am still making some connections for myself after reading this book. It deserves a review by someone who works with such art; but as an interested reader, I can say there is meat here for both the novice and the specialist.

Publisher Comments:
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.

Lucy R. Lippard (author of The Lure of the Local and On The Beaten Track):
This book is a varied and fascinating labyrinth of sophisticated writing that opens up the notions of site and space to a grand panoply of new ideas. It should be required reading for anyone making or confronting installation art in the 21st century.

This book is filled with writers who are first and foremost trying to prove their own intelligence rather than discuss the topic at hand; installation artists. At times the writing is completely incomprehensible. Filled with big words and tricky grammar, this collection of essays says a whole-lotta nuthin. Don't buy this one unless you're forced to.