Installation and Sculpture

Alex Potts

The term installation as used in present-day discussion of three-dimensional

work can imply two rather different things. On the one hand, it calls to mind a set
of radical practices associated with the 1960s and early 1970s. These were
interventions in art world and other public spaces carried out with a view to
disrupting the fetishizing of the autonomous art object and provoking a new,
more critical awareness of the material and ideological contexts in which work
occurred. On the other hand, installation has become a term that now refers to a
largely mainstream form of art operating within settings provided by

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contemporary museums and galleries. Installation in this sense designates
those recently established kinds of practice in which a work is conceived as a
staged scenario rather than as a traditional art object. My purpose here is to
interrogate the extent to which three-dimensional art or sculpture has changed in
character as a result of this shift that has taken place over the past three
decades or so from object-like to installation-orientated work.1
That the genre of art practice emerging from this shift should be called
installation art is a moot point, given that any free-standing three-dimensional
work, whether a classicizing statue or an autonomous-seeming modernist object,
has to be installed in some way (Fig. 4). The idea of a non-installation art would
be something of an oxymoron. Insomuch as a structural change has occurred, it
has been most clear-cut at the level of critical and theoretical paradigms. The
move to installation certainly has not resulted in a complete dissolution of the
sculptural object, nor of the distinctive structures of response elicited by a
traditional sculpture. Rather it has entailed a progressive abandonment of the
assumption prevalent in much nineteenth- and twentieth-century sculptural
aesthetics that the authentic art object has to be completely self-sufficient, its
significance unaffected by the circumstances of its display. This view is
succinctly summed up in a comment by the theorist of cubism, Daniel-Henri
Kahnweiler, in an essay called 'The Essence of Sculpture', published in 1919, to
the effect that a sculpture must exist as 'the object pure and simple, detached
from everything surrounding it'. 2
My discussion of installation then has a twofold thrust. Firstly I want to show
how certain supposedly distinctive features of installation work were already
implicit in previous conceptions of sculpture. The underlying processes common
to both object- and installation-orientated work have to do with the nature of the
encounter being staged between viewer and work and the resulting interplay
operating at a phenomenological level between focused and dispersed
apprehension. At the same time, such processes also play out a larger socio-
cultural dynamic of dispersal and binding, or dissolution and reification, that is
the common condition of the object as commodity or quasi-commodity in modern
culture. At issue in all this is less the constitution of the art work as such, than
its staging and how it manifests itself to the viewer. By insisting on these larger
continuities, I am not denying the reality of the shift that took place between
modernist and what are commonly called post-modernist understandings of art,
and the at times convulsive changes in the operations of modem capitalism in
which this was grounded - the Baudrillardian abolition of use value and of any
substantive reality to the object certainly married well with the rampant

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Alex Potts

consumerism of the last few decades of the twentieth century.3 Rather, I am

simply reaffirming the now quite prevalent retrospective view that these changes
did not mark a breakdown in larger, underlying structurings of artistic
consumption.
At the same time, by insisting on certain affinities between installation work
and earlier sculpture, I hope to be able to clarify the concrete nature of the real
shifts that did occur as a focus on the sculptural object gave way to a
preoccupation with context and mode of display. Clearly installation is not simply
another form of sculpture, particularly if we think of the object-fixated work that
counted as sculpture for much of the twentieth century. Here I wish to address
the question of what precisely did change with the search for alternatives to the
autonomous object, beginning with the self-consciously avant-garde initiatives of
the 1960s and 1970s. I shall be doing so, both in fairly broad terms, and in
relation to specific developments internal to the art world, ones that have to do
with a new, what we might call more cinematic, way of staging work and drawing

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in the viewer.

The Viewing of Sculpture

In what ways, then, could recent installation-orientated art be said to invite
modes of viewing that were already being activated by traditional sculpture?
Aside from obvious affinities between recent installations and earlier theatrical
stagings of sculpture in custom-designed architectural spaces, particularly in the
Baroque period, there is a further point. Even classicizing free-standing figurative
sculpture did not quite present itself to the viewer as a single fixed shape, but
could set in train complex interactions not totally dissimilar to those that come
into play with Installation work. The close viewing of an apparently self-contained
sculptural object can involve quite unstable oscillations between a centring and a
dispersal of looking. Broadly speaking, the modem fetishizing of the autonomy of
the art work that got underway in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, with the finest classical sculpture being considered paradigmatic of
the whole, self-sufficient art object,4 was accompanied by an emerging anxiety
that an actual work of sculpture, far from always offering the expected sense of a
single, firmly graspable plastic whole, could engulf the viewer in a spectacle of
changeable, ever-proliferating aspects. The elaborately refined creations of the
foremost classicizing sculptor of the day, Antonio Canova, disconcerted the more
sternly classicizing critics in this very way. In a monograph on Canova published
in 1806, the German art theorist Carl Ludwig Fernow had this to say about the
statue of Cupid and Psyche (Fig. 1) Canova completed in 1793:

One can never arrive at a satisfying view of the work, from whichever side one looks at the
group. One has to leap around it, looking at It now from above, now from below, getting lost in
the Individual partial views, without ever getting an Impression of the whole. The viewer Is
spared something of this trouble because the group can be turned around on Its base [there are
handles Inserted Into the marble block for this purpose], but still seeks In vain for a view from
which both figures' faces can be seen simultaneously and where the expression of tenderness
will converge. Above all this tower the wings of cupId, spreading out over the loosely arrayed
group that further confuses the eye with the several gaps and openings It offers to the view.5

At issue for a critic like Fernow was not just the lack of finality in viewing a
complex sculpture such as this in the round, an effect echoed in the sculpture's
intricate representation of Cupid and Psyche simultaneously embracing and
slipping from one another's grasp, their looks directed at each other yet just that
little bit disconnected. He was also troubled because the vivid immediacy of the
physical, sensuous qualities of the sculpture's surfaces distracted him and got

8 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001

 InstaUation and Sculpture

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Fig. L Antonio Canova: Copld and Psyche. 1787-93.matble. 155 x 168 cm. %union des Mus6es
Natiniaux. France.

in the way of maintaining a sense of distance - the distance needed to

apprehend it as a clearly integrated whole:

This magical charm of the perfect finish of the dazzlingly pure material is what above all
enchants all art lovers, and the eye is still glued to the beautiful surfaces when the higher
sense finds itself already disappointed in its expectation of a pure arUstlc enjoyment.'

One way of characterizing Femow's unease would be to say that it was the very
promise of a mythic. stable wholeness suggested by the simplified, purified
forms of classical sculpture. epitomized for writers of the time by the antique
ideal, that led him to become aware of the dispersal to which sculptural viewing
was subject, a dispersal produced in moving around a work, making one feel that
one has 'seen not one but several statues when one leaves off looking at it' as
he put it,' and of being seduced by the surface effects, of being drawn in too
close and losing one's hold on the overall form.
With recent installation work, a sense of closeness that blocks one from
seeing the work as an integrated shape is the first order effect, not the
consequence of viewing closely what at first strikes one as a clearty bounded
object. Installation work literally situates the viewer inside the frame. A
traditional sculpture, by contrast, presents itself as existing in a space set

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001 9

Alex Potts

slightly apart within a virtual frame, an effect that only loses its stabilizing hold as
one looks more intently, multiplying and shifting the framing as one moves
around to see the work from different angles, or opening the framing up as one
comes close and enters the space the work shapes by its physical presence.
Neoclassical sculpture would sometimes be installed in such a way as to
highlight these different modes of viewing. Canova's statue of Hercules and
Lichas, for example, was placed in a custom-designed rotunda in the Palazzo
Torlonia in Rome which opened out into a larger gallery through an arched
opening framed by columns.8 From a distance, the work presented itself as a
single stable plastic image, framed by the entry to the rotunda, but this effect
would be undone were one to enter the rotunda and circulate around the statue,
viewing it close-up in the round.
If with most sculpture one is invited to anchor the ever shifting close views it
offers in a single distanced, ostensibly framed view to be had facing it head on,
with installation work one is always close up. Yet being situated inside the frame

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does not preclude a certain critical distancing. Here, focusing one's viewing and
looking closely often disturbs the initial sense of being completely immersed in
the work and the immediate apprehensions it generates. Moreover, with certain
installations, the first order experience itself produces a sense of displacement.
Often the viewer is positioned in such a way as to feel both inside and outside,
drawn into, while also being a little excluded from, the interior space the work
activates. Video-based works consisting of an empty darkened arena with
images projected on the surrounding walls will often throw into disarray a
viewer's feeling of being enveloped through a slightly discomfiting sense of
exclusion that is both physical and psychological in character. In Bruce
Nauman's Anthro/Socio (Fig. 2), for example, the talking heads looming on the
outer walls of the display area define its empty centre as the most intensely
activated space in the work - yet moving towards the centre, one is impelled to
step back to prevent oneself from blocking the images coming from the video
projectors placed there. Standing on the edge, out of the way, however, is not
entirely satisfactory either, because of the feeling of being pushed to one side
and removed from the centre of things. Where the sense of enclosure activated
by installation work is more architectonic in nature, there is again often a double
take, with interior spaces being defined within a larger gallery area that seem to
invite one to enter them and yet frustrate the impulse to do so. Even if these
interiors are not completely sealed off or framed like old-fashioned museum
dioramas,9 the viewer is often directly barred from getting inside or is made to
feel excluded. With most of Louise Bourgeois's Cells, the exclusions operate at
both levels,10 while Mona Hatoum's Light Sentence (Fig. 3), for example, creates
an effect of being displaced that is largely internalized by the viewer. In theory,
one could step into the semi-enclosed area surrounded on three sides by
stacked wire cages in which a bare electric light bulb dangling from a wire moves
slowly up and down, casting a constantly changing array of shadows onto the
gallery walls. However, this set-up almost compels one to stay on the fringes,
still inside the play of shadow, and often close up against the banks of wire
cages, but kept at one remove from the prison-like interior which is both the
focus of viewing and the source of illumination.

The Staging of Sculpture

I have been concentrating here on the viewer's apprehension of a three-
dimensional work rather than on the staging of the work as such, the point with
which I began my discussion. Again the shift from a traditional display of

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 Instanation and Sculpture

centuries, starting with the first major public museum of antique sculpture, the
Museo PioClementino in the Vatican, created between 1771 and 1784.13 In
these public sculpture galleries, the combination of sculpture and architecture is
clearly designed to create a sense of classicizingrichness and grandeur (Fig. 4).
The ceilings will often carry decorative paintings, and if not that, elaborate
coffering and architectonic motifs. At the same time, the sculptures are
displayed far enough apart against plain backdrops so that when viewed
individually, they can seem to claim the space immediately around them. The
viewer has a double experience, a public one of expansive grandeur and
sumptuousness, and a more intimate, one could almost say private one, to be
had in close communion with individual works. The indoor sculpture gardens
created in the glasshouselike exhibition spaces of the latenineteenth century
operate in an analogous, if unclassicizing way." The overall effect marks
something of a return to the setting out of sculpture in the formal gardens of the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At the same time the viewer is given

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scope to enter into intimate communion with particular works. The latter thus
function both as isolated, autonomous objects and as eyecatchers in a larger
array of white marble or plaster figures and potted palms.
Staging sculpture, though, is not just a matter of placement, or of creating a
particular environment of display. It also has to do with a work's mode of address

Flg. 4. V m of the Gabinatto in the Museo Pilementino in the Vatican. c.1795, angravifg.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001 13

Alex Potts
-
Fig, 5. Statue of a boy horn the Bay of
Marathon, second half of the fourth century
BC. bronze. height 130 cm.Archae6Wil
Museum. Athens (detail).
14 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001
and its interpolating the viewer in a particular way. I have already indicated how
this operates in recent installation work when the viewer is simultaneously drawn
inside and made to feel displaced. With video works, such as Nauman's Anthro/
Socio (Fig. 2), the interpolation can be very explicit. Here the large talking heads
seem to be loudly haranguing someone at the same time as being quite
impervious to any response. Traditional figurative sculpture too often
establishes a mode of address that seems both to open out to and to ignore
or refuse the viewer.
This facingness, to borrow a term from Michael Fried,I5 became particularly
selfconscious and complex with certain neoclassical sculpture made just at the
moment when people were becoming obsessed by what they saw as the
inimitably calm self-sufficient poise of classical Greek and Roman work. Of
course, even the self-sufficiency implied by the casual stance of the standard
freestanding male nude in ancient Greek and classicizing Roman art is not
without its rhetorical dimension. With classical prototypes such as the Bronze
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Boy (Fig. 5) from the Bay of Marathon, for example, whose basic form is echoed
in countless GreceRoman works known to neoclassicaltheorists and artists, the
pose of the body is such that at one level the figure does seem to offer itself up
or present itself to an imagined viewer. At the same time, the turn of the head
and the disembodied gaze suggest a complete disengagement and oblivious-
ness to being viewed. The figure is neither about to address someone, nor is it
deliberately turned away or inward - it just seems to be there. This open,
unstudied untheatricality was seen by lovers of classical antiquity as embodying
a naive and very unmodern unselfconsciousness,16 though now it might seem to
have its own, very distinctive sophistication.
Such a rhetoric is echoed in most of the classicizing freestanding sculptures
of nude figures that proliferated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Normally, the body faces and exposes its form to the viewer, at the same time
that the head is turned to suggest a looking inwards or away from a viewer
standing facing it head on, blocking any suggestion of a reciprocal exchange of
glances, and asserting a self-sufficiency and refusal of the viewer's presence.
W i Rodin, this double sense of opening out to and closing off the viewer is
taken a stage further, incorporated in the very stance and twist of the torso, that
both turns to face one and bends and collapses inwards." The rhetorical
convention lived on in muted form in a lot of modernist figure sculptures, with a
blank, sometimes nonexistent face partly cancelling the effect of the body-
object's being staged as immediately present.''
In certain neoclassical works, the calm self-sufficient pose of the antique
prototypes with which they invited comparison turns into a very different, edgy
and selfconscious rhetoric of self-presentation to, and refusal of, the viewer. In
Canova's Perseus Triumphant holdingup the Gorgon's head (Fig. 6), for example.
the body could hardly be more thrustingly brandished before one. Yet the figure
tums pointedly away, looking intently at the head he holds up, and the blank,
potentially deadly face of the Gorgon is slightly tilted to one side, as if inwardly
absorbed, a little as in standard antique nudes standing at rest. With another
seemingly more straightforward rendering of a male nude by Canova, a statue of
the youthful Paris, this dialectic of self-presentation and turning away becomes a
selfconxious tease entirely alien to the rhetoric of the antique prototypes
*ose classicizing form its nude body so obviously emulates. In this case the
figure's emphatic turning away signals a sharp awareness of being looked at that
is played out at several levels - Paris is about to award the apple to one of the
three goddesses, at whose beautiful forms he has been gazing, but is
momentarily caught short by the awareness that his own, finely shaped, youthful
I Instabtion and Sculpture

body might itself be the object of someone's admiringgaze, with the added tease
that he holds the apple, the prize in the contest, coyly behind his back just above
his beautifully shaped buttocks.1g

The Move t o Installation

To point to the presence of installationorientated concerns in earlier sculpture is
not to deny that something did shift quite radically in the 1960s and 1970s when
artists working in three dimensions became committed to working out
alternatives to the self-sufficient sculptural form or object privileged both in
traditional classicizing sculptural aesthetics and in modernist conceptions of
sculpture. However, a longer historical view makes possible a more dialectical
take on this development than that allowed by post-modern or post-structuralist
theoridngs of structural break. The move to installation needs to be understood

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in part in localized historical terms as a reaction against the increasingly
formulaic and restrictive privileging of the autonomous object in mainstream
post-war, highmodemist conceptions of sculptura2' To open up a space for a
viable threedimensional art in these circumstances, it was in a way necessary to

% 6. kRoni Canova: RHseus T-. 1797-1801, ma&. 235 x 190 x 110 cm. Vatican Museun. Rome (detail). Fratelll Alinari

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001 15

Alex Potts

institute a radical departure from this modernist reification of the object, and
from its puritan anathemizing of staging or pictorial seductiveness. Equally,
however, we need to bear in mind how this self-same modernist cult of the
facticity of the object had originally developed in the early years of the twentieth
century as a reaction against a prevailing tendency to an aestheticizing
dissolution of objects and things inherited from the fin-de-siecle.21
These apparent reversals in twentieth century sculptural aesthetics can be
seen as playing out a larger dialectic of modernity characterized by the oscillation
between a cult of objectification and positivistic insistence on firmly defined
entities on the one hand, and a cult of dispersal, a radical undoing and unfixing
of the definable object on the other. At the broadest level, perhaps a level too
broad to get much of a purchase on precisely what is at stake in this dialectic of
the sculptural and anti-sculptural, we might recognize an echo of the double logic
of commodification, of the often disruptive and destabilizing interplay between
reification and a restless unfixing and dematerializing in which, as Marx put it 'all

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that is solid melts into air'.
Insomuch as modem art that lays claim to some integrity of purpose has
sought to buck, or ironize, or render perturbing or strange the processes of
commodity consumption invited by its very constitution as spectacle or object,
this contradictory dynamic of modem capitalism has been played out in what
Adomo aptly described as a 'perennial revolt of art against art':

Just as It Is essential for art works to be things, so It Is equally essential for them to negate
their thlng-IIke nature, and In this way art turns against art. The completely objectified art work
would solidify into mere thing, while one that withheld itself from objectification would relapse
into helpless subjective impulse and sink In the empirical world.22

Installation-orientated work, no more than object-based sculpture, has been able

to escape the logic of this condition. It is a condition that has, as Adorno put it,
'its basis in fact'. It is both the reality of the larger socio-cultural formations in
which a work of art is embedded, and it is also what makes art real for the viewer
encountering it.
To insist on the common underlying conditions within which both sculptural,
object-based work, and more dispersed, environmentally-orientated work, which
encloses rather than faces the viewer, have operated, and to see the shift from
one to the other as a shift of modality rather than a structural break, is not just to
impose the stabilities of a longer view on a change that at one time did seem to
mark a very real and potentially disruptive departure from conventional
understandings of the art work. Neither is it simply some vaguely comforting
perspective one might choose to adopt after waking up with a headache from a
night of post-modem bingeing, engulfed by shifting, unframed spaces generating
endless profusions of images and signs.
Neither the art world, nor the larger socio-economic order - or disorder - in
which it is embedded, can definitively do away with fixed thing-like entities and
thoroughly materialized, inert structures and formations, that resist capitalism's
destabilizing, destructive dynamic of dispersal and dissolution.23 What keeps
the system going, while at moments threatening its operations, is in part the
systemic instability generated by these contradictory imperatives; just as the
instabilities activating a viewer's encounter with a work of art, including even the
most fluid-seeming video work, are constituted by tensions between the ever-
shifting stagings of signs and subjective scenarios playing out at a symbolic level
the effects of rampant capital circulation, and the work's insistent repetitions
and closures and the presence in it of things and spatial articulations that will
not go away, that are just as much there as any sculptural object.

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 Installation and Sculpture

Empty Spaces and Architecture

Perhaps the most striking structural reversal effected by the move to installation
has been the substitution of a centring object or quasi-figure by an empty space
which the viewer can enter or imagine doing so. Most video work, for example,
that exploits the three-dimensionality of the arena of display will activate the
empty space it surrounds or faces onto, inviting the viewer to take up a place
within it or project into it an imagined presence. Bourgeois's Cells are, for the
most part, structured around partly enclosed spaces that some absent presence
might occupy - there are empty chairs, empty beds, and where objects do
suggest possible presences, the more highly charged occupancy of space is still
a subjectively projected one, surrounded by these inert quasi-figures.24 The
traditional figure, or the object-like cipher of presence in modernist work25 has
become a space into which the viewer can on impulse project an internalized
sense of being there.

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The empty space replacing the object or figure of traditional sculpture does
however have its own materiality and definition. It is conjured up by a fabric of
enclosure, whether an architectonic wall or divider articulating the gallery space,
or some looming image giving emphasis and directionality to the space onto
which it faces. Such scenarios constrain and give shape to, as much as they
freely animate, the viewer's projections.26 It is almost as if the thingness of the
traditional sculptural object has been tunned inside out, so it resides in the
framing that encloses and focuses the viewer's looking, rather than in an object
isolated within the arena of display.
Serra, like many artists of his generation who deal more in spaces than
objects as such, has been adamant that his work is constituted by a focused
activation of space, in his words 'creating a definite space within the given
space' of the gallery. In his view:

Sculpture, If It has any potential at all, has the potential to create Its own place and space, and
to work In contradiction to the places and spaces where It Is created. I am Interested In work
where the artist Is a maker of an 'anti-environment' which takes Its own place or makes Its own
situation, or divides or declares its own area.27

With Serra's interior work, we might describe the installation effect as setting up
a much more condensed, intensely activated architectonic space than that
defined by the gallery architecture.28 But to call the effect architectural does not
entirely fit. If installation is architecture, it is another kind of architecture from
the one we experience on a day-to-day basis. An intensified sense of a particular
space as significant or striking may momentarily occur as one proceeds through
a building; but a functioning building is not designed so such interior spaces
continually stand out and invite their occupants to reflect on the significance of
the effects they generate. Installation isolates and condenses particular
architectonic shapings of space and then artificially stages these so one
attends to them in a qualitatively different way from the architectural interiors
one normally inhabits,29 just as the staging of a sculptural object induces one to
focus on it in ways one does not on objects that simply turn up in the everyday
environment.

Cinematic Spectacle
If in the end the distinctive effects of closeness and engulfing enclosure in
installation-orientated work are no more purely architectural than they are
sculptural, could they be said to relate to resources being exploited in other
modern art forms? Throughout this discussion I have been drawing attention to

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001 17

Alex Potts

the elements of staging and theatricality integral to almost any three-

dimensional work. An installation, however, sets up rather different interactions
with the viewer than a theatrical performance on a stage. Even in the most
modern theatres, the performance takes place in a space set somewhat apart
from the one where the spectators are positioned. Viewing a film in a cinema, on
the other hand, perhaps comes closer to the experience of being inside an
installation. The disembodied image projected in film seems to loom close,
almost engulfing one even when it is literally quite far away, making the
positioning of other spectators in the auditorium, and of oneself among them,
invisible or irrelevant.30 There is an analogy here, not only with obviously
cinematic installation work that makes use of projected video images. The
experience of moving through or past a work by Serra, for example, would not be
totally different from watching a filmed sequence sweeping through the space
the sculpture defines. Serra insisted that viewing his sculpture involved a
process, not just of looking, but looking and walking, and walking through it and

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not just around it as with more traditional object-orientated work.31
A modern viewer's experience of cinema undoubtedly has had a significant
bearing on the effects exploited by installation, particularly now that video
technology makes it easy to stage moving, cinematic images in a gallery.32
Distinctively cinematic resources can be seen to have shaped alternatives to the
relatively distanced viewing of a stable, self-contained object, the image view
privileged by photography, in several ways - most strikingly by virtue of the
immediate, all-engulfing spectacle cinema offers, and also by way of the effects
it exploits, moving from a distant overview of a scene to a close-up inside view,
literally tracking through or around and inside what is being looked at rather than
Just looking out at it.
But the cinematic analogy only goes so far. With installation work, the actual
boundaries of the space within which the object or images or spatial dividers
comprising it are placed are very much present for the viewer, while with cinema
the viewer is largely oblivious of the architectural surrounds. The experience of
an installation work is not only temporal but also emphatically spatialized. As a
viewer one is made acutely aware of being in a specific kind of space or
enclosure, and is not floating free in a darkened environment, as in the cinema.
Even with video-based installation work, the projected image or images have an
evident architectonic anchoring, and as a viewer, one's immediate sense of
ambient space is affected by the positioning of the projected image in a way it is
not in cinema. Multiple or split screens are often used, creating spatial
articulations that intersect with and throw the flow of filmic images out of kilter.33
Where such work remains cinematic is in the sense that it is experienced as
existing within the viewer's own immediate ambient space, and other viewers are
largely bracketed out. One's viewing fills the space defined by the work, while the
body doing the viewing remains invisible. At the same time though, by contrast
with cinema, one is made to feel the positioning of one's own body in relation to
the space inside which one is planted. This is evident even in some of the earlier,
more sculptural forms of 'place-making' installation work such as Andre's flat
square metal carpets. The subtly insistent impact these works make on one is
largely lost if one sees another person standing on them. The intriguing effect of
attemating presence and absence is generated from one's interiorized sense of
being in close proximity to, while also being a little displaced from, the flat low-
lying expanse of the metal carpet and the empty, slightly charged space above
it.34
The partly cinematic, partly architectonic effect of drawing the viewer inside the
frame in installation work was something already exploited in certain earlier

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 Installation and Sculpture

modernist displays, not so much of sculpture as of painting. When Malevich

created an installation of his recent abstract work at the 'Last Futurist Exhibition
0.10' in Petrograd in 1915, the result was a Malevich world that surrounded the
visitor and disturbed a conventional contemplative mode of viewing in which one
faced, at a discrete distance, a single work one could easily encompass within
one's gaze.35 Closer to the large screen experience that is the norm nowadays in
cinema though, was the display of Abstract Expressionist and colour field
paintings in modern white box gallery spaces. In the Museum of Modem Art, New
York, for example, subtly spot-lit works would sometimes seem to loom out at
one from the visually neutral wall-screens in their dimly lit settings - an effect
that Tate Modem has sought to replicate in the current installation of its series
of paintings by Rothko. It is almost as if at some point in the post-war period,
artists working in three dimensions wanted to get away from pure sculpture so as
to be able to exploit the powerful visual effects of intimate engulfment developed
in cinema and certain painting installations. However, partly as an inevitable

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consequence of the conditions of gallery display, they were also impelled to
make the viewer aware of the thing-like quality and the fixed spatial framings of
the images and visual effects in which they were dealing.

Sculptural Spectacle
The crucial aspect of this shift to installation with which I want to conclude is the
focusing on staging and display as integral to the very substance of a work. We
could think of installation as sculpture that has now been fully absorbed within
the modern, or post-modem, society of the spectacle. An artist like Damien Hurst
has been exploiting the fact that for a present-day viewer, it is not just the thing
exhibited that matters, but also the mode of its display, its identity as an
accumulation of specimens, say, or its framing in science-museum-like cabinets,
or, to think of his famous shark, The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of
Someone LMng, its staging as a spectacular presence suspended within an
aquarium-like glass container and almost floating into the viewer's space.
Realism, or the sense of the real, in contemporary culture is not just about the
real things or scenes or situations being presented, but also about the projection
or staging of these things and scenes, and about the elusive boundaries
between the objective facticity and the subjectively projected aspects of the
spectacle into which one is drawn. Installation has become part of the general
fabric of things in contemporary culture, and in a way, art feeds on this situation,
both lulling us into a mesmerized fascination with the spectacle into which it
draws us, and at the same time stopping us short, inducing us to reflect on the
enticements and disenchantments involved. Installation-orientated work engulfs
us through its visual and spatial immediacy, at the same time that it can make us
aware of the framings and closures that are also part of the substance of
contemporary, consumerist spectacles.
Certain sculptural objects made by earlier artists may have functioned
similarly, dramatizing, not Just the figure represented, but its staging, and
inducing a potentially pleasurable as well as potentially uneasy awareness of the
kinds of viewing that art elicited. In Canova's Perseus Triumphant (Fig. 6), for
example, the pleasure we might take in viewing the lithe yet powerful male body,
almost flagrantly posed for us to admire, is momentarily stopped short when we
realize that the beautiful Medusa head presented to us would, were we to
connect with its look, turn our warm flesh into cold stone. There is in this
something of the unspoken reality of the marmoreal world of ideal forms that
classical theory would wish to project as an assuredly living reality. By way of

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Alex Potts

sharp contrast, but also strange affinity, we could cite Mona Hatoum's
installation The Light at the End. In this case, engulfed in a world of warm
semi-darkness rather than the cold clarity of marble forms, we feel drawn to
approach the glow emanating from three vertical bars set close to one wall. As
we do so, however, we become aware that these electrically heated bars would
literally burn us were we to come too close. A hot excess of immediacy,
appropriately for our consumerist society, produces a momentary recoil that
interrupts a pleasurable immersion in sensations of warm light emanating from
an enveloping, but also potentially troubling, darkness. By contrast, confronted
with a neoclassical figure's fixing of a living presence as ideal form, the viewer's
experience can threaten to go unpleasantly stone cold.
This brings me back to the contrast and underlying affinities between the two
apparently very different modalities of three-dimensional art work that I have
featured here. The earlier one, the neoclassical sculptural ideal, purports to offer
up a whole and complete body-like object, a flawless presence that is

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immediately there to be apprehended, and yet is also a little displaced, at
times almost alien. Modern installation presents a whole scenario, which one
does not look at so much as view from within, and which purports to be
envelopingly immediate and then induces unexpected sensations of disturbance
and displacement. Crucial for both modalities is a focused looking, made
possible by isolating and staging the viewer's experience within a museum
environment that momentarily frames the object or scenario from the
contingencies of the everyday.
By way of conclusion I want to suggest how both modalities, while being
defined by the ritual spaces of viewing in modern museums, also pertain to a
longer tradition of staging and displaying sculpted and painted images. In the
churches of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and perhaps most
dramatically in post-Reformation Catholic churches, religious figures and
scenes were installed in specially designed interior spaces that were both
isolated from the outside world while being open to public viewing. Such
permanent stagings of sacred figures or scenes rendered in painting or
sculpture, designed to make these seem palpable and real, stand in contrast
to practices in many other religions, where symbolically charged sacred objects
would often be kept out of sight in spaces from which a larger public was usually
excluded, or would only put on public display when incorporated in rituals or
ceremonies that took place, usually outside, on special occasions.36 Elaborately
conceived sculptural spectacles set permanently on public view in specially
designed architectural settings may feature as part of the religious as well as
courtly life of a number of non-Western cultures,37 but they are still a distinctively
pervasive, if intermittently contested, feature of Christian practice.
The ritual spaces of viewing in modem museums may be very different in
function and character from the ritual spaces of the early modem Christian
worship, but the practice of devising visually striking public exhibitions of objects
and images in interior spaces with a view to inducing in the viewer effects of
immediacy and presence, and the ideologically charged sense of unease over
the illusoriness and contrivance such publicly promoted spectacles can at times
induce, are specific to both. They may seem natural only because they have been
a feature of Western culture for so long, reaching almost baroque proportions
now with certain recent installation work.
To return to the uneasy dialectic of viewing induced by the works by Canova
and Hatoum I just cited. The double-take between a projection of the figure or
scenario as fully, immediately present, and as in some respects alien or absent,
plays out pervasive dualities in Western culture already in a way implicit in earlier

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 Installation and Sculpture

religious work. Such a duality is enacted almost literally in Rachel Whiteread's

Ghost, for example, where the cast surfaces of the inside of an empty room are
reconstituted to form the outside of what has become a block of interior space.
This effect could in some self-enclosed, negative way, be said to echo the double
thrust of presence and absence played out in a rather different, religiously
charged register with Christian sculpture in which a divine figure is projected as
vividly immediate to the viewer yet not actually fully present. Where we are
dealing with a specifically contemporary, if still possibly very Western, double-
take, however, is in the sense of repulsion, as in Hatoum The Light at the End, or
alienation, as in Whiteread's Ghost, produced by an immersion in the excessive
immediacy of the work itself as physical phenomenon.
Such a tease, or curiously self-indulgent masochism, that is rather different
from earlier Christian meditations on the illusory enticements of the material
world, is probably unimaginable outside the context of modern consumerism. I
would suggest that it is already to an extent implicit in the double-take of

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attraction and repulsion, of vivid immediacy and deadly emptiness, being staged
for the viewer by Canova's Perseus Triumphant. This is a work created at a
moment when the public museum was beginning to replace the church and the
palace as the main arena of the public spectacle of art,38 and when the
fascinations and repulsions, the alienating availability of things in modern
consumer society, were emerging as significant features of the everyday life of
the wealthy in modem Europe.

1. The discussion here Is based on an analysis of the shifts that have taken place in modern
conceptions of sculpture developed In my book, Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative,
Modernist, Minimalist (Yale University Press: London and New Haven, 2000).
2. Daniel Henri Kahnweller, 'L'Essence de la Sculpture', In Confesstons EstMtlques (Paris, 1963),
pp. 93-4.
3. Though Baudrlllard began to develop his anti-realist conception of the object in publications
dating from the late 1960s such as Le Systeme des Objets, his Ideas enjoyed their real vogue In the
moment of the 'triumph' of free market capitalism In the 1980s. This Baudrillard moment in the
English-speaking critical and cultural analysis culminated In the publication of a number of
anthologies of his writings, Including Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object
and Its Destiny 1968-1983 (Pluto: London, 1990).
4. For further discussion, see Potts, Sculptural Imagination, pp. 24-59 (Chapter I: Classical Figures).
5. Carl L Femow, Ober den Bldhauer. Canova und dessen Werke (Zurich, 1806), pp. 89-90.
6. Femow, Canova, p. 203.
7. Femow, Canova, pp. 201-2. He Is specifically referring here to Canova's Perseus Triumphant
(Fig. 6).
8. This installation is Illustrated In Giuseppe Pavanello, L'Opera Completa del Canova (Rizzoll: Milan,
1976), p. 107.
9. Some earlier Installation-like works preserved this diorama format, such as Claes Oldenburg's
room A Bedroom Ensemble (1963) and Louise Bourgeois's The Destruction of the Father (1974). On
the staging of the latter, see Mlgnon Nixon, 'Eating Words', Oxford Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, 1999,
pp. 55-70.
10. See Potts, Sculptural Imagination, p. 367.
11. Rosalind Krauss, Passages In Modem Sculpture (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, and London,
1981), pp. 86-8, 99.
12. On Newby Hall and other custom designed sculpture galleries built for private residences in
Britain In the eighteenth century, see John Kenworthy-Browne, 'Private Skulpturen-Galerien in England
1730-1830' In K. Viernelsel ad G. Leinz (eds.), Glyptothek MOnchen 1830-1980 (Glyptothek
MOnchen: Munich, 1980), pp. 34O-2.
13. On the Museo Plo-Clementino, see J. Collins, 'The Gods' Abode: Pius VI and the Invention of the
Vatican Museum' in C. Homsby (ed.), The Impact of Italy: the Grand Tour and Beyond (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge and New York, 2001), pp. 172 ff. On the installation of antique

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001 21

Alex Potts

sculpture In sculpture galleries of the period, see Alex Potts, 'The Classical Ideal on Display,
Richerche dl Storia dell'arte, 2001 (forthcoming).
14. See Potts, Sculptural Imagination, pp. 18, 7 1 .
15. Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism or, The Face of Painting (Chicago University Press: Chicago,
IL, and London, 1996), pp. 256 ff.
16. One of the more eloquent articulations of this view of antique sculpture is to be found In
Wlnckelmann's description of a once famous standing male nude In the Vatican, the Belvedere
Antinous. See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. Wlnckelmann and the Origins of Art History (Yale
University Press: New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 146-50.
17. A particularly dramatic instance is the statue by Rodin called Meditation whose pose Rilke
commented on in his classic analysis of the sculptor's work. See Potts, Sculptural Imagination,
pp. 88-9.
18. Henry Moore's work provides a telling passive Instance of this. Giacometti's late figures and
busts, by contrast, accentuate the tensions Inherent In this rhetorical double-take. The Insistently
flattened heads face sharply out and at the same they deny the viewer a face to look at when seen
head on.
19. This statue, the earliest version of which dates from 1807-12 (Pavanello, Canova, p. 118 plate

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XLVII), was one of Canova's better know later works. It offers the viewer an intricate staging of
posing and viewing that stands In marked contrast to the rhetorical address of work by Canova's
contemporary Thorwaldsen, who was preferred by the more austerely classicizing critics of the time
such as Femow. With Thorwaldsen, the pose and presentation of the figure are such as to project a
studied denial or suspension of active engagement with a prospective viewer, a denial that for many
made his figures all the more deliriously seductive. See Potts, Sculptural Imagination, pp. 56-9.
20. See for example the introduction to Herbert Read's The Art of Sculpture (Princeton University
Press: Princeton, NJ, 1969), first published In 1956.
21. The modernist fetishlzlng of sculptural objectivity involved a reaction against what was seen as
Rodin's palnterilness and lack of true plastic sense (Penelope Curtis, Sculpture 1900-1945 (Oxford
University Press: Oxford, 1999), pp. 216-9). Rodin's work came to be seen as more truly modem
than the staid, vaguely classicizing work of sculptors such as Malllol favoured by the early
modernists once a reaction set in against the cult of the autonomous object in the 1960s. See
Potts, Sculptural Imagination, p. 100.
22. T.W. Adomo, AstnetJsche Tneorie, G. Adomo and R. Tledemann (eds) (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am
Main, 1973; first published 1970), p. 262. See also the English translation by R. Hullot-Kentor,
Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, 1997), p. 175. Adomo's Aesthetic
Theory was partly devised as a pointed critique of recent avant-garde aspirations to escape the
relflcatlon of the art work through a dissolution or abolition of Its object-like character.
23. See for example the recent analysis by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh University
Press: Edinburgh, 2000), particularly p. 57 ff.
24. A particular Instance Is her Cell {Glass Spheres and Hands, 1990-1993, National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne, Australia). See Potts, Sculptural Imagination, p. 368-70.
25. For all his insistence that David Smith had realized a new, truly abstract modernist sculpture,
Clement Greenberg still had to recognize the signiflcance of the figure-like presence of much of his
work. 'It was', as he commented, 'the soar of the human figure that held him' (Collected Essays,
vol. IV (Chicago University Press: Chicago, IL, and London, 1993), pp. 227-8).
26. See for example Bruce Nauman's comment about his corridor pieces: 'I didn't want to present
structures where people would have too much freedom to Invent what they thought was going on . . .
The corridor was specific enough. Whatever ways you could use It were so limited that people were
bound to have more or less the same experiences I had.' (Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman
(Rlzzoli: New York, 1988), p. 18).
27. Richard Serra, Writings /nlervtews (Chicago University Press: Chicago, IL, and London, 1991),
p. 171. A similar point was made by Donald Judd (Donald Judd (Kunstvereln St. Gallen: St Gallen,
1990), p. 55): 'When you make a work of art, you are making space or further architecture . . . We
have space In this room, but It is a weak nondescript, neutral space.'
28. A good example Is the work Snake Richard Serra created for the huge ovoid gallery in Frank
Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
29. Several of Bruce Nauman's works quite literally do this, such as Performance Corridor (1969)
and the Installation he created for the Leo Castelli Gallery In New York, Room with my Soul Left Out,
Room That Does Not Care (1984).
30. Thus Michael Fried was able to claim that his strictures against the theatricality of a viewer's
being made to feel the intrusion of a Minimalist work in his or her space could not apply to cinema
('Art and Objecthcod' (1967) in Art and Objecthood Essays and Revtews (University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, IL, and London, 1998, p. 164).

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 Installation and Sculpture

3 1 . Serra, Writings, pp. 48, 160, 172.

32. I am indebted to Laura Mulvey for this point about how video technology made it much easier
for artists to create work using moving Images than had been possible before with unwieldy film set-
ups.
33. The use of multiple or split effects to undercut or destabilize a standard single screen cinematic
presentation has been exploited to Intriguing effect by a number of artists such as Susan Hiller,
Jane and Louise Wilson and Stan Douglas.
34. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, pp. 313-15. In Installation shots of Minimalist work such as
Andre's and Morris's; no viewers are shown. All one sees are simple blocks and empty spaces Into
which one can Imaginatively project one's own presence.
35. See Kaslmlr Malevich 1878-1935 (Stedelljk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1989), p. 156.
The installation rooms El Ussitzky created In the 1920s were still more painterly than sculptural in
the sense that the work was all In tow relief.
36. This Is true of most African masks and votive figures, for example. See Frank Wllletts, African
Art (Thames and Hudson: London and New York, 1993), pp. 169-80. There are however some
significant exceptions, partJcularty among royal places and cult shrines of West Africa. See Susan
Preston Blier, Royal Arts of Africa (Laurence King: London, 1998), pp. 70, 85, 92, 183. In ancient

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Greece, the most important cult statues were housed Inside the confined spaces of the temple
cells, closed off from the outdoor arenas where public ceremonies took place and where votive
statues and altars were set up. In the Western Christian church too, there are Instances where
particularly sacred statutes or relics would traditionally only be brought out on special ceremonial
occasions.

37. Buddhist shrines are a notable Instance. See for example the elaborate installations of
sculpture in early Japanese shrines detailed In T. Kabayashi, Nara Buddhist Art Today/ (Weathertilll/
Helbonsha: New York and Tokyo, 1975), particularly Fig. 119. I am grateful to Martin Powers for
drawing this to my attention and supplying me with the reference.
38. The first version of Perseus Triumphant was acquired from Canova by the Pope for the Museo
Pio-Clementino In Rome.

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