Review: Installation, Performance, or What?

Reviewed Work(s): From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art by Julie H.
Reiss; Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art by Erika Suderburg; Site-Specific
Art: Performance, Place and Documentation by Nick Kaye
Review by: Peter Osborne
Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2001), pp. 147-154
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600414
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 Reviews

Installation, Performance, or What?

Peter Osborne

Julie H. Reiss: From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (MIT Press:
Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), xxiv + 181 pp., hardback ISBN 0-262-18196-7,
?22.50. 1. See for example Terry Atkinson's reaction to Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American

Erika Suderburg (ed.): Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (University and European Art in the Era of Dissent 1955-1969
of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN, and London, 2000), viii + 370 pp., hardback (Everyman Art Library: London, 1996), Tate
Magazine.
ISBN 0-8166-3158-1, ?43.50, paperback ISBN 0-8166-3159-X, ?17.50.
2. 'Gender as Performance: An Interview with

Nick Kaye: Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, (Routledge: Judith Butler' in Peter Osbore (ed.), A Critical
Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (Routledge:
London and New York, 2000), xviii + 238 pp., hardback ISBN 0-415-18558-0, London and New York, 1996), p. 112. Its
?60.00, paperback ISBN 0-415-18559-0, ?16.99. primary means are described as 'a certain kind
of repetition and recitation'.
The last ten years have seen a resurgence of interest in the art of the 1960s. As
the polemical oppositions of the 1980s ('critical postmodernism' versus 'return
to painting') began to wane and the art of the day, however successful, appeared
increasingly desultory, a series of large international exhibitions set about
reconstructing the artistic trajectories of the 1960s. At the same time, new
editions of writings by major artists from the period, along with widespread
anthologization, provided a more accessible textual basis for reconsideration of
the associated critical tendencies. (The already well-established reputations of
Morris and Smithson, in particular, have benefited in this way.) More broadly, the
1960s started to look sufficiently distant for art historians to consider it a
legitimate object of their professional gaze, while its artistic legacy continued to
engage current critical concerns.
The process has not been without its difficulties and dissenters - not least
amongst artists still active today,1 although some (such as Yoko Ono) have seen
the critical appreciation of their early works soar. Nevertheless, something like a
new critical paradigm has begun to emerge, displacing the historically
obfuscating framework of postmodernism with a deeper sense of the
continuities underlying the latter's own thematizations of urban space and the
performative dimension of meaning.
Performance has been the beneficiary of a dual legacy: on the one hand, the
documentary recovery of the performance base of the so-called 'neo-Dada' art of
the late 1950s and early 1960s; on the other, the development of
deconstructive semiotics away from the epistemological negativism of Derrida's
early writings, towards an emphasis on 'performativity' as 'the discursive mode
by which ontological effects are installed'.2 The notion of performativity places
performance at the centre of cultural experience. At the same time, however, it
threatens to dissolve performance as a distinct artistic category into, first, a
dimension of all art, and second - even more broadly - into the production of
meaning in general. The theoretical focus on space and place, which has
accompanied the new emphasis on the performative, moderates this
liquidationist tendency by drawing attention to the material conditions of
semiotic differentiation, and thereby also to the social bases of its artistic forms.
In the course of these developments, the interlocking problematics of
'objecthood' and 'idea' that provided the self-understanding of the Minimalist
and conceptual art of the 1960s have begun to be replaced by those of
'performance' and 'installation'.
Installation is now the globally dominant form of art. Yet oddly - perhaps
symptomatically - its concept remains untheorized. None of the three books

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Reviews

reviewed here rectify this. However, taken together they do generate a discourse
about installation - part-historical, part-theoretical - which positions it, however
awkwardly, by way of association and negation, within a field of related terms:
environment, happening, site, space, place, situation, and performance.
From Margin to Center: Spaces of Installation Art traces the formation of the
category of installation art, as it emerged in the New York art world during the
1980s, out of the combined heritage of the Environments of the late 1950s and
the situational aesthetics of 1960s' Minimalism. In particular, it focuses on the
cultural and political dynamics of the alternative exhibition spaces in New York
during the 1970s in which installation practices were nurtured and the process
of institutionalization through which they subsequently entered, and rapidly came
to dominate, the mainstream art world. It provides a short, competent, lucid,
engaging, and well-illustrated account (44 black-and-white photographs), which
fills a clearly defined, if rather narrow, gap in the literature. It will no doubt be a
useful teaching resource. Its limitations are those of its approach (empiricist art
history); and these are at their most apparent in the treatment of contemporary
art.

The narrative Reiss recounts is in many ways a familiar one, but it has not
been told as the history of installation art, as such, before. The questions it
raises are thus primarily categorial ones, about the concept of installation art
itself. For like all histories, this is a story that only makes sense backwards, from
the standpoint of the present intelligibility of its principal notion (installation art),
the antecedents of which it retroactively produces. Reiss, however, has little
time for such niceties. Her theoretical assumptions remain largely implicit and
have to be excavated from beneath the armature of her method. She is, however,
explicit about her goal: From Margin to Center aims to establish the 'autonomy'
of Installation art as a 'genre' (pp. xiii-xiv), and its capitalization of the 'I' of
Installation anticipates its acceptance into the critical canon as a fixed term of
reference. But is the idea of Installation art as a 'genre' a useful, critically
productive or even coherent one? And can it be constructed wholly from within
the history of the New York art world?
Reiss treats the concept of Installation art empirically, as the product of three
'key characteristics' shared by a body of work: namely, 1) that such works are
produced at the site of their exhibition in relation to its specific characteristics; 2)
that the exhibition site is some kind of gallery space; and 3) that 'the artist treats
an entire indoor space (large enough for people to enter) as a single situation'
(pp. xi-xiii). The first is the core of the definition; the second appears designed to
distinguish Installation art from site-specific work more generally, on the
grounds, perhaps, that Smithson's site/non-site distinction disqualifies the
gallery itself as a 'site', strictly speaking (although Reiss does not discuss this
and is, in fact, inconsistent in her application of this criterion); and the third is a
'refinement' introduced to obtain greater specificity and in order to support
Reiss's (in my view dubious) thesis that 'the essence of Installation art is
spectator participation'. This latter claim is a consequence of taking Allen
Kaprow's Environments as both historical starting point and orienting form. This
is a result, in turn, of the restriction of the scope of the history to the New York
art world. (There is no reference to Yves Klein or Arman, for example, to Arte
Povera, or even to Fluxus. The range of theoretical references is equally
inhibited.)

Kaprow considered the only difference between Assemblages and Environ-

ments to be one of size: Environments were big enough to walk into. They thereby
encouraged various forms of participation, or at least interaction, from their
audience. Once the participatory elements became formalized, in terms of a

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 Reviews

temporally defined specification of tasks, Environments became Happenings. At

this point, Reiss points out, there ceased to be an audience, since 'everyone
present was a participant' (p. 18). Retrospectively, Kaprow's personal emphasis
3. Donald Judd, 'On Installation', in James
on the participatory aspect of Environments (which guides Reiss throughout) Meyer, Minimalism (Phaidon: London, 2000),

appears conceptually flawed, since it was not constitutive of the works as pp. 266-8, reprinted from 'Documenta 7',
(Kassel, 1982); Sol LeWitt, 'Paragraphs on
Environments, so much as an extension of the possibilities they offered for Conceptual Art', in Alexander Alberro and
interaction. In this respect, Kaprow's desire for participation was only actually Blake Stimson (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical

fulfilled in his Happenings, which, as Reiss acknowledges, have a Cagean Anthology (MIT: Cambridge, MA, and London,
1999), pp. 12-16, reprinted from Arforum
performance pedigree. In this light, Environments appear as a transitional form
(Summer 1967). Judd's essay first appeared
between Assemblages and Happenings, rather than a new point of departure, some months before 'Documenta 7' in journal:

the intimation of an integral form, or the precursor of a new 'genre' of art that
emerged over two decades later under very different conditions.
The history that follows plots the transformation of the Environment into the
A Contemporary Art Magazine (Spring 1982) under
the title, 'The Importance of Permanence'. It is
one of the earliest pieces of critical writing on
installation, but Reiss makes no reference to it.

Installation through its migration from non-art (or at best, temporary art) spaces,
via alternative art spaces and commercial galleries, to contemporary art
museums. The first stage of this account involves an environmental transcoding
of Minimalist sculpture, on the basis of its 'incorporation of the site of display
into the conceptual parameters of art works' (p. 64). Reiss acknowledges that
there is a difference here between the spatial dynamics of Environments and the
sense of negative space characteristic of object-based Minimalism in even its
most architecturally inclusive forms. However, she views this difference from the
perspective of Environments, to the detriment of Minimalism, as if the latter
were a less radical attempt to think 'environment', rather than an independent,
and more complex, spatial project and set of art practices.
This is an effect of the book's rigid teleological structure, within which, given
the selection of the goal (Installation) and origin (Environment), the intervening
forms derive their meaning from their putative roles as progressive stages of
realization. To some extent, this is an inevitable effect of narrative form,
unavoidable in even self-consciously anti-teleological or genealogical variants,
although it can be mitigated in various ways. In this case, however, it is neither
mitigated nor is it convincing, given the founding significance of specifically
Minimalist debates about space for the problematic of installation. Minimalism
explored a four-fold relational dynamic between objects, their surrounding space,
its architectural frame, and the body of the viewer, in which architectural form
was a given parameter of the exercise (even when violated). This seems far more
directly connected to the spatial logic of installation art (on Reiss's own
definition) than the self-enclosed, more unitary space of Environments.
A similar problem arises with Reiss's treatment of the ephemeral character of
'situated' work. Influenced once again by Kaprow, Reiss considers this to be
constitutive of the installation genre. Born of necessity (the temporary character
of environmental forms in marginal spaces), ephemerality is treated as both a
condition and a value, connected to 'participation' and 'interaction' (used by
Reiss as equivalents); a value which could no longer be sustained by Minimalist
works once they became part of the canon of modern art. Installations, it is
implied, developed as a means to maintain this critical function. Yet are things
so straightforward as this, either historically or conceptually?
Minimalist works complicated the temporal dimension of visual art in a
number of ways, not least via the phenomenology of reception (Morris's 'present
tense of space'). But the ephemeral was not so much a value for these works, in
itself, as a parameter and the site of a problem. One solution was to look
towards permanence (Judd's permanent installations); another (LeWitt's) was to
reconceive the ontological character of the work by stressing its basis in ideas,
thereby avoiding the danger of a regressive monumentalization.3 Yet LeWitt's

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ideational model itself involves permanence at another ontological level: the

conceptual. Arguably, it was in response to this change in the ontological
conception of the work (conceptual art) that the problematic of installation
actually developed - as the outcome of an increased preoccupation with the
issue of realization, rather than as an attempt to maintain ephemerality as such.
The 'ephemeral' installation often turns out to be something that can be
repeated.
One can see this in the transformation of the conceptual grammar of the term
'installation', from the designation of a process of installing to the denotation of
its result: 'an' installation. This is a change from the continuing everyday sense
of installation as the fixing into position of some pre-existing thing to the sense of
producing the work as a physical entity in the act of establishing it within some
specific space. Herein lies the distinctively post-conceptual character of
installation art. For if, as conceptual art insisted, a work of art cannot be
considered identical to any particular physical entity, but nonetheless (contra
Kosuth's notion of a 'purely' conceptual art) depends for its existence upon its
relations to the characteristics of some such entities, then the physical reality of
the work may be considered an instantiation or installation of its idea.
Installations are instantiations of art ideas. Reiss fails to register the sense in
which installation is a distinctively post-conceptual, as well as a post-minimalist,
form, because she fails to register the sense in which installation art poses
ontological, rather than merely classificatory, problems for art history and theory.
In this respect, one might do better to speak of 'art as installation' than of
installation art as a 'genre', although the former may frequently be reduced to
the latter (environmental sculpture), when it fails as art. It is, partly, in flight from
the pictorialism associated with such sculptural qualities that so many
installations have situated themselves, at least in part, outside the literal
physical frame of the gallery over the last ten to fifteen years. However, these are
ruled out of bounds by the second of Reiss's 'key characteristics' of installation
art (that the exhibition site be some kind of gallery space), in the quest to
maintain the specificity of the notion empirically, as a 'genre' - although she
frequently breaks her own rule about this. (There is almost no sense of the
conceptual complexity of the notion of art space.) This severely restricts the
scope of the book, leaving it to concentrate on four exhibitions at major New York
museums: from 'Spaces' at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1969-70 to
'From the Inside Out' at the Jewish Museum in 1993, via 'Rooms' at PS1 in
1976 and 'Dislocations' at MOMA in 1991.
One might question the historical centrality of these shows to the construction
of the idea of installation in the international art world. Reiss notes in passing
the change in the relationship between artist and curator that is involved here
(since the works cannot be viewed by curators prior to their installation), and
hence 'the new role of the museum' (p. 100), but she treats it as an external
condition of this kind of work, rather than as one among a series of recent
changes in the social relations of artistic production which affect the constitution
of the concept of art itself. One is tempted to read the hearty democratic refrain
about audience participation as a displacement (and disavowal) of the growing
power of the artist-curator.

The Dissipation of Site

Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art is a large and mixed bag.
Ostensibly concerned to rectify 'the dearth of serious critical and theoretical
attention that installation as a visual arts practice has garnered' by 'chart[ing]
the terms of discussion and debate that have surrounded installation and site-

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specific practices and . . . provid[ing] new critical frameworks that encourage a

rethinking of their history' (pp. 19, 2), it is actually a far more haphazard affair.
Installation functions here as an editorial thematic for tying together various
discrete, and only marginally overlapping, artistic and theoretical concerns.
Foremost among these are: artistic nomadism and the dissipation of the site;
the anomalous art status of follies, grottos and other architectural oddities; film
and video in art spaces; and the art of the Latino metropolis. More than half of
the twenty contributors are artists and/or academics based in California, and in
this, at least, the book is a useful counter to the myopic East-Coastism of
Reiss's study. It also contains hefty doses of the kind of theoretical language
which is anathema to Reiss, with variable results.
The editor's introduction, 'On Installation and Site Specificity', is a minor
catastrophe. Received ideas, garbled sentences, and a desire for absolute
inclusiveness conspire to reproduce the vagueness and contradictions of the
literature it hopes to surpass in a heightened, almost ecstatic form. In particular,
despite noting on its opening page that 'the work of installation and site
specificity . . . grows out of the collapse of medium specificity', it nonetheless
takes installation and site-specific practices to be themselves 'a medium'
(singular) - a usage it maintains throughout. This vitiates its whole critical project
of establishing a workable theoretical definition. It is perhaps indicative of the
current state of critical discourse in this area that the only theoretically focussed
essays - they are by James Meyer and Miwon Kwon, and kick off the volume
proper - are reprints from the October stable of criticism. Both are about the
transformation of the concept of site specificity from physical location to cultural
space (the 'functional' site) - the central development missed by Reiss - but
neither discusses installation as such. The rethinking of installation required by
the transformation of the concept of site specificity thus goes unremarked, let
alone achieved.
Meyer points to the 'mobile and contingent' character of art spaces and
artistic subjectivities in the 'globalized multicultural ambience' of the present-day
art world - returning a 'circulatory' mobility to art within the specificity of its now
largely 'informational' sites - (pp. 35, 24-5) but he does not consider the pre-
history of this alleged novelty in conceptual art, or its consequences for the
ontology and critical functioning of the work. Rather, he highlights the 'nomadic'
character of the new artist-travellers and the troubled relationship between their
socially established cultural identities and the presumptions about knowledge
and locality that frequently characterize the sites of their commissions. Local
communities reflect back the culturalist assumptions of global multiculturalism
as a critique of the transnational distribution of its practices and products;
alternatively, this transnational distribution undercuts its own culturalist
assumptions, throwing them into an unresolved crisis. This is well-illustrated
in Catherine Lord's essay about looking for lesbians in New Mexico, for her
contribution to a group show in Santa Fe.
Kwon accepts the descriptive side of Meyer's account, but is concerned about
the loss of resistance to commodification that the new mobility involves:
domesticating previously critical practices by legitimating the refabrication of
once site-bound work; commodifying the performative aspect of the artist's
presence as a new type of service (facilitating, educating, coordinating,
administrating) which nonetheless restores 'the centrality of the artist as the
progenitor of meaning.' 'In some cases,' she writes, 'this renewed focus on the
artist leads to a hermetic implosion of (auto)biographical and subjectivist
indulgences, and myopic narcissism is misrepresented as self-reflexivity' (p. 53).
At the same time, she argues, the increasing historical loss of distinctions of

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4. See Eduardo Costa, Raul Escari, and Roberto
Jacoby, 'A Media Art (Manifesto)' (1966) and
Clido Miereles, 'Insertions in Ideological
Circuits' (1970) in Alberro and Stimson (eds),
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, pp. 2-3,
232-3, respectively.
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place suggests that the ideological function of site-specific work may now be to
manufacture such distinctions artificially, in order to compensate and cover over
the loss.
These broadly Frankfurtean worries are absent from the essays that follow. Of
these, the four about Latino artists in Los Angeles and New York stand out for
their historical and thematic continuities (which go unmarked within the book's
organization) and their political interest. They are focused on the political
dimension of public art practices in migrant communities. An excellent piece by
C. Ondine Chavoya on the work of the East LA Chicano group Asco in the early
1970s ('Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco')
is complemented by three articles on work from the 1990s: John C. Welchman's
account of Hock-Sisco-Avalos's Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate project from 1993;
Tiffany Ana L6pez's examination of Pep6n Osorio's 1994 piece En la barberia, no
se flora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop); and Alessandra Moctezuma and
Leda Ramos's 'Hidden Economies in Los Angeles: An Emerging Latin
Metropolis', about their collaborative projects on homeworking and street
vendors from 1996-1998. There is also an essay by Amelia Jones on the 1990s
video installations of LA Filipino artist Joseph Santarromana.
Chavoya's essay on Asco is the most striking, for its recovery of the fiercely
politicized, flamboyant Chicano art culture of the 1970s (stung into existence in
reaction to the war in Vietnam, in which Chicano casualties were hugely
disproportionate) and its insistence on the conceptual logic of Asco's 'counter-
spectacles'. There are strong affinities here with the Latin American political
conceptualism of the late 1960s and early 1970s; not only in the dual
performative and documentary character of the pieces, but with regard to specific
forms of intervention. Asco's 1974 media hoax piece Decoy Gang War Victim and
Hock-Sisco-Avalos's 1993 Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate (in which a public art
commission was spent by giving out ten-dollar bills to undocumented workers as
a form of tax rebate, documented as art by photocopies of the bills on written
receipts), for example, echo Argentine artist Roberto Jacoby's 1996 'media art'
piece and the Brazilian Cildo Meireless's Insertion into Ideological Circuits:
Banknote Project (1973), respectively.4 Similarly, Moctezuma's and Ramos's
collaboration with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees
(UNITE) for Between Home and Work (1997-8) stands in a long line of such
collaborations dating back to the mid-1960s in Latin America, Europe, the USA,
and elsewhere. It is a pity that the prevailing culturalism leaves these wider
political-artistic contexts and histories unexamined. It also tends to mitigate
against immanent examinations of artistic form. Each of these five essays are
largely descriptive, despite their theoretical terminologies, which function
primarily as means of redescription. The notion of installation, supposedly at
the centre of the book's project, receives no attention; nor does the relationship
between performance and documentation upon which each depends. These are
the 'givens' of current critical discourse.
It is in the chapters on film and video space by Christie lies, Bruce Jenkins
Colin Gardener and Marita Sturken that the problematic of installation is most
directly addressed - in abstraction from the cultural-political concerns of most of
the other pieces. lies sets out from the proposition that 'the moving image
always transforms the space it occupies' (p. 253). Different technological forms
of film and video projection thus produce different types of installation or art
space within, or rather out of, the broader architectural spaces of their physical
sites. The history of film and video art is the history of the experimental
manipulation of these relations, whereby particular technologies give rise to
distinct phenomenological forms. lies concentrates on the early art uses of
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 Reviews

small-format, black-and-white video, in contrast to the expanded, and generally

multimedia, environmental cinematic projections of the same period (the late
1960s and early 1970s). She is interested, in particular, in the analytical uses of
the time-delay live-feedback feature of closed-circuit video in the work of Peter
Campus, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, and Dan Graham.
This is an introspective body of work which uses techniques of mirroring in closed
spaces to explore the embodied character and fractured nature of perception. It
is especially concerned with the disjunctive character of self-perception and the
element of surveillance inherent in all technologically-based systems of imaging.
This aspect of control is reinforced by a performative dimension in which the
viewer is often put in the position of taking the place of the artist in repeating a
prior (recorded) studio performance. It is the analytical exploration of the social-
pyschological aspects of video technology, lies suggests, that has made these
works so important to artists such as Gary Hill, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon,
and Liisa Roberts. However, the spatial field of this recent work is quite different,
projecting the language of video on the scale of film in a convergence of video
and cinematic aesthetics into a new, sparser and more artistically controlled
environmentalism.
Jenkins provides a brief and straightforward historical account of the diversity
of forms of display of film in gallery spaces under the aegis of 'The Seventh Art in
Search of Authorization'. Gardener offers a detailed Deleuzian analysis of a
single work of multiple large-scale video projection: Diana Thater's China (1995).
Sturken gives an account of Jim Campbell's 'memory machines': video works
concerned with the durational dimension of representations of time.
If, as Meyer and Kwon agree, 'the site' has become dissipated into cultural
space, as 'a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of
institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between them'
(p. 25), this operation nonetheless still requires staged presentations of its
material markers - installations - in order to achieve actuality as art. Such
installations restore the physical constraints of the literal site (place), however
temporarily, within the dissipated site of contemporary art - as the continuing
emphasis on the phenomenological space of the viewer shows. With this
restoration, or rather maintenance (since it never went away), installation
becomes temporalized as performance: performance and installation converge
into a single form.

The Promotion of Performance

Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation positions itself at the
point of this convergence. It is interested in site-specificity not as a spatial
determination of the work, but as an occasion for 'the performance of place'
(since a site's specificity is found in its use), a performance which always points
beyond itself to 'the writing of non-place over place' and 'the troubling of
oppositions between virtual and real spaces' (p. 215). Drawing upon the French
tradition of spatial theory (Lefebvre, de Certeau, Aug6) and the history of
performance (Kaye is a professor of drama), it sets out to articulate a series of
exchanges between visual art, architecture, and theatre. Its formal innovation is
to conclude each chapter (on 'Spaces', 'Sites', 'Materials', and 'Frames') with a
documented presentation of work by a particular artist: Michelangelo Pistoletto's
La Stanze (The Rooms), Brith Gof's Ten Feet and Three Quarters of an Inch of
Theatre, Station Opera House's The Breeze Block Performances, and various of
Meredith Monk's performances, respectively. Meanwhile, each chapter is
organized around readings of four or five major artists from the 1960s and
1970s, along with the artist whose work is presented at its close.

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This makes for a rich reading experience. It also reveals the covert project of
the book to be a contribution to the process of canon formation, in which
particular performance groups from the last fifteen years - Forced Entertainment
(who close the 'Introduction'), Brith Gof and Station Opera House - are pitched in
with Pistoletto and Monk on the one hand, and with a whole host of stars from
Kaprow, Oldenburg, Morris, and Smithson to Haacke and Buren on the other.
This is a cunning, if not wholly convincing, procedure. Nonetheless, it does
impart to the text an engaging integrity, derived less from the formal connections
it seeks, than the strength of investment of its authorial desire. The theoretical
discussions are clear and generally illuminating, if on occasion a little naively
deconstructive. The treatment of a diverse body of different kinds of work within
the same problematic is largely convincing, although the problematic itself is not
interrogated immanently in much theoretical detail. Discussion of installation is
restricted to the pages on Arte Povera, and viewed exclusively through the lens of
the performance of place, subsuming it under performance, categorially, so that
materials and spatial forms are in danger of becoming mere means within a
textual conception of meaning. Overall, though, the book makes a good case for
the enduring significance of the performance-based work of the 1960s.
After all this, installation remains something of a mystery. Almost too familiar
to articulate, it would seem - except in an empirically reductive sense, which
soon reveals itself to be contradictory. Perhaps this is a sign of broader
deficiencies within the structure of a critical discourse for which 'art as culture'
remains obstinately separated from 'art as art'.

154 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001

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