Reference: Zurbrugg, N. Installation Art – Essence and Existence in What is installation? An anthology of writings of Australian installation art edited by Geczy, A. and Genocchio, B. 25-31. Sydney: Power Publications, 2001.
Zurbrugg’s chapter within What is Installation? … is an academic essay within which he engages the reader in a discussion directed at obtaining a more structured and informed definition of the term “installation” and the subsequent academic and visual consequences arising from such definition. Within the chapter, Zurbrugg argues that
…it seems more helpful to consider the origins of different kinds of contemporary Installation Art in terms of the early twentieth-century avant-garde movements … it seems that post-modern Installation Art derives from modernist experimentation …
Within the first two paragraphs of the text, Zubrugg sets an over-arching, pragmatic definition of installation;
Installation Art might tentatively be defined as that which artists install, inside, outside or around the exhibition space … perhaps the single-most common feature of all installations is their use of three-dimensional space …
By initially utilising a simplified definition of installation; Zurbrugg facilitates an expansive discussion on the topic, comprising of three primary categories; kinetic, performance and environmental installation art. Zurbrugg formulates his own definition of installation via historical comparison; drawing references to schools of thought in art, to art itself, and visual analysis.
Kinetic, or technological installation, referred to early within the essay, encompasses movement in the form of sound, light and heat waves. Zurbrugg argues that the development and initial experiments with this form of installation can be attributed to the Futurists and those involved in the Bauhaus experiments of the 1920s. Within Zurbrugg’s observations of ‘Kinetic Installation’, Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator, is referred to by the author as functioning “both as a kinetic or static sculpture, as a twofold installation piece”. The artist’s work presents to the author only a minor comparative challenge to those exhibited by artists branching into a number installation ‘fields’ simultaneously.
Considered by the author as multi-media artist, John Cage serves as a transition between two of Zubrugg’s Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
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jor explorations; both kinetic and performance installations. Cage, having recorded a number of his performances, presents a larger problem to Zurbrugg in terms of defining installation;
The co-presence of such detail [the recorded documentation of the work and the live occurrence of the work] typifies the recurrent disparity between Installation Art as some sort of real-time process within a specific location … and Installation Art as documentation.
Posing the most significant problem to Zurbrugg, in his efforts to specify installation, however, is environmental art; the final component of the influences he presents as being precursors to the emergence of installation today. It is here that Zurbrugg struggles with the primary challenge associated with Installation Art- the notion of whether or not “any selection of pre-existing materials may function as an installation in any place if the artists considers them to have artistic value”. Schwitters’ Merzbau is used by Zurbrugg to exemplify this very problem; the combined static, and, at times, banal elements of the work ultimately leads to Zurbrugg’s final conclusion;
…when we ask ourselves which installation works or installation performances and installation-actions seem most substantial, it seems arguable that different kinds of kinetic works seem most attuned to present times …the most rewarding installations are perhaps those which imply or enact some sort of movement …
In light of the objective historical data Zurbrugg has gathered, he has seemingly drawn a somewhat frustrated and subjective conclusion based upon what appears “most rewarding” as opposed to what seemed to be his initial intention; to identify the holistic nature of installation in consideration of the entirety, rather than a selection of it’s influences.
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