History of Installation Art

 

Emerging during the 1970s, Installation is associated with Conceptual art and can therefore be traced back to artists such as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and his modernist readymades such as his controversial urinal called Fountain (1917). Other influences include the avant-garde Dada exhibitions in Berlin and Cologne; the work of the collage artist and sculptor Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), notably his 'Merzbau' assemblage which filled a whole building; the Proun Room at the Berlin Railway Station in 1923, designed by the Russian artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941), possibly the earliest ever installation; the Spatial Environments of the painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) and his White Manifesto outlining his theories of Spatialism; the "4-33" silent musical composition composed by John Milton Cage Jr (1912–1992). In addition, the assemblages and writings of the American avant-garde artist Allan Kaprow (b.1927) - notably his 1966 book 'Assemblage, Environments and Happenings' - were also highly influential on the development of the Installation genre

Kristina Kubisch

Robert Morris
»The Box with the Sound of its Own Making«

As its title indicates, Morris's "Box with the Sound of Its Own Making" consists of an unadorned wooden cube, accompanied by a recording of the sounds produced during its construction. Lasting for three-and-a-half hours, the audio component of the piece denies the air of romantic mystery surrounding the creation of the art object, presenting it as a time-consuming and perhaps even tedious endeavor. In so doing, the piece also combines the resulting artwork with the process of artmaking, transferring the focus from one to the other. Fittingly, the first person in New York Morris invited to see the piece was John Cage-whose silent 1952 composition 4'33" is famously composed of the sounds heard in the background while it is being performed. Cage was reportedly transfixed by Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, as Morris later recalled: "When Cage came, I turned it on... and he wouldn't listen to me. He sat and listened to it for three hours and that was really impressive to me. He just sat there."

 Nam June Paik
«Random Access Music: Exposition of Music – Electronic Television»

Since the early 1950s, avant-garde composers have been using magnetic tape to obtain a spectrum of sounds far exceeding the canon of conventional instruments. Obviously, musical notation was worthless in such cases, and Cage developed randomly determined, graphical scores allowing various noises to be assembled into complex tape compositions. In this tape installation, Paik went one step further: the visitor can use the sound head, which has been detached from the tape recorder, to interactively run through the tapes glued to the wall, and constantly vary the sound sequence according to location and speed. This random access to the musical raw material enabled visitors to produce compositions of their own.

 Luigi Russolo
«Intonarumori»
After a «long and unending period of research in his laboratory,» futuristic painter Luigi Russolo builds what he calls the «intonarumori,» devices for producing a broad spectrum of modulated, rhythmic sounds similar to those made by machines, but without imitating or reproducing them. These sounds are to be understood rather as «abstract materials» freed of their mechanical origins and now under human control, writes Russolo in his extensive Sound Art Manifesto. By composing pieces for the «intonarumori,» Russolo also develops a new, graphic form of musical score. In 1914, the first concert for 18 «intonarumori,» a work divided into eight different categories of sounds, caused a huge scandal in Milan. In 1914 as well, the twelve concerts staged in London drew more positive reactions. After World War I, concerts for «intonarumori» were staged together with classical symphony orchestras.

Times Square Max Neuhaus

1977 installierte Neuhaus im Lüftungsschacht der U-Bahn auf einer Verkehrsinsel am Times Square in New York einen synthetischen Drone.

„I began making the piece by investigating what the resonant frequencies of the chambers were. The next step was a gradual process of selecting which resonances to use and how to use them.“
(Max Neuhaus: Sound Works Volume I, Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag, S.66)
„The work includes the traffic noises. It's a funny thing. When you mix sound you can mix sound A and sound B
and you don't get sound AB but you get sound C. So, even though the piece itself doesn't by any means cover
the sounds of the traffic, it transforms them into something else while you're standing in it.“
(Max Neuhaus: Sound Works Volume I, Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag, S.67)

“Traditionally, composers have located the elements of a composition in time. One idea which I am interested in is locating them, instead, in space and letting the listener place them in his own time.”

Pendulum Music

(For Microphones, Amplifiers Speakers and Performers) is the name of a work by Steve Reich, involving suspended microphones and speakers, creating phasing feedback tones. The piece was composed in August 1968 and revised in May 1973, and is an example of process music.

Three or more microphones are suspended above the speakers by means of a cable and stand. The microphones are pulled back, switched on, and released over the speaker, and gravity causes them to swing back and forth as pendulums. As the microphone nears the speaker, a feedback tone is created. Different lengths of cable will swing at different speeds, creating an overlapping series of feedback squeals. The music created is thus the result of the process of the swinging microphones.

Reich's 1974 book Writings About Music contains the hand-written (1973 revision) description of how to perform the piece.

 

Fountain (1917) is one of Duchamp’s most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art. The original, which is lost, consisted of a standard urinal, usually presented on its back for exhibition purposes rather than upright, and was signed and dated ‘R. Mutt 1917’. Tate’s work is a 1964 replica and is made from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain. The signature is reproduced in black paint. Fountain has been seen as a quintessential example, along with Duchamp’s Bottle Rack 1914, of what he called a ‘readymade’, an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist as a work of art (and, in Duchamp’s case, interpreted in some way).

Zimoun

La Monte Young
«Dream House»

George Maciunas started to use the term Fluxus in 1961 for a series of lecture-demonstrations and performance in New York, since then a continuos on-going series of exhibitions, performances, concerts and publications have traversed all the world, and much has been written and theorised, more or less accurately, about this art movement. Therefore I believe that the best introduction to this first anthology of Fluxus music an sound events should be to publish a selection of texts written by some flux-people, each one dealing with his own individual view point.
La Monte Young

«Around 1962, La Monte formulated the concept of «Dream House» as a piece that would be played continuously, experienced as a living organism with a life of its own, and exist in time as a tradition to itself. […] Time is so important for experiencing and understanding this piece that the exhibition was specially designed to give visitors the chance to offer themselves for longer stretches of time to the environment, and, perhaps, during the time span to frequently return to their own existence. It follows the principle that musical atmosphere is a function of time. […], and can be essential to experiencing frequencies over longer time periods, in order to adjust one’s nervous system and vibrate with the frequencies of the environment.»

(Source: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, «Kontinuierliche Klang-Licht-Environments», in: Inventionen '92, eds., Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, Berlin, 1992, p. 45.)

 

 

https://www.melafoundation.org/about.htm

“Music for Pieces of Wood” was written in 1973 and is designed for five players. It is written for claves, which are percussion instruments with particular pitches. There are two types used in this piece, the so-called standard and the “African” claves. The clave, which comes from Cuba (the word in Spanish means “key”), is made of two pieces of hardwood that the player beats. Audiences may be most familiar with the instrument in its use in the rhumba and other Latin-American dances. They have been used in orchestral works by Varese, Copland (in Connotations, among other works), and Berio. The Claves in this piece are designed to create a particular pitch differentiation. The composer specifies the physical arrangement of the players. While the notation is precise, the composer asks the players to repeat each bar “approximately” the number of times indicated, perhaps giving the performers a chance to vary not only the character but the duration of each performance.

 

The composer provides the following note:

Music for Pieces of Wood grows out of the same roots as Clapping Music: a desire to make music with the simplest possible instruments. The claves, or cylindrical pieces of hard wood, used here were selected for their particular pitches (A, B, C-sharp, D-sharp, and D-sharp an octave above), and for their resonant timbre. This piece is one of the loudest I have ever composed, but uses no amplification whatsoever. The rhythmic structure is based entirely on the process of rhythmic "build-ups" or the substitution of beats for rests, and is in three sections of decreasing pattern length: 6/4, 4/4, 3/4.

Storm Room:

A 2.5 minute excerpt from 10 minute art installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. A computer controls the flow of water, the lights, the strobes, and the fans, etc. An ambisonic sound track plays through 8 hidden speakers and 2 hidden subwoofers. The piece begins as the storm approaches, with no water hitting the windows, then proceeds to the incredibly loud, floor shaking climax (sorry you can't hear this on Youtube). As the storm dissipates the sound of someone moving and coughing in the next room is heard and then the piece starts again. This work was created in a deserted dentist's office in a traditional Japanese house near the city of Tokamachi, Japan as part the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial 2009.

Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project, 2003
Tate Modern, London, 2003

 

https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/the-weather-project-2003/

 

In this installation, The Weather Project, representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of the Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. A glance overhead, to see where the mist might escape, reveals that the ceiling of the Turbine Hall has disappeared, replaced by a reflection of the space below. At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The arc repeated in the mirror overhead produces a sphere of dazzling radiance linking the real space with the reflection. Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.

This project is linked to Eliasson’s fascination with the way museums mediate the reception of art. In a museum, visitors are offered an array of information before they even see a work of art – from the marketing poster and press reviews to the interpretation text panel on the walls of the gallery. Eliasson recognises that this information influences the experience and understanding of the work. In this project he decided to direct these less overt aspects of making an exhibition, so that the experience of the work would be left as unscathed as possible for the viewer.