Today, installation is the most prominent of the fine arts. Visitors to an exhibition will often be confronted by works which hang from the ceiling, lie strewn on the floor, cut through walls. They will be surrounded, enclosed and entrapped.
Installation can be seen as a form of sculpture: sculpture which we cannot merely walk around, but are often invited to walk into. Installation differs from traditional sculpture in one important way. In sculpture, one kind of material is used to create a model of quite another kind of thing. Marble is chiselled away until it takes on the form of a human body; bronze is cast in the shape of a horse. But drawing on Duchamp's ready-mades, the contemporary maker of installations will often employ real objects (an actual person, a real animal) rather than attempt to recreate the shape of such things in foreign matter. Kitchen utensils, plumbing equipment, logs, and the contents of an abattoir are more likely to be in evidence than the marble or bronze of earlier eras.
Installation is an "object-based" rather than a representational type of art. Why is it prominent today? Why is an unmade bed with soiled sheets, installed in the Tate Gallery by Tracey Emin, seen as a significant artistic achievement? Thirty years ago this probably could not have happened in London. A hundred years ago it would have been a matter for the police and the psychiatrists. Prominent movements in art tend to see themselves as having a deep relation to the spirit of the times and an important place in the evolution of art. This is not surprising. Without such a justification, a preference for installations of the Emin type would be no different from a passion for Regency watercolours or Russian icons. It would simply be a more or less interesting thing, which people attend to in order to satisfy a private taste. The assumption is that installations are somehow true to the times in a way that watercolours or icons (although nice) are not. To assess this claim we need to look at the ideas which have come together to create an intellectual climate particularly favourable to installation and object-based art.
this task has recently been made easier by the publication of The World as Sculpture (Chatto & Windus) by James Hall, a lucid survey of some of the ideas which have conditioned the creation and reception of object-based art. Hall draws attention to several powerful currents of thought which constitute, collectively, the ideology of contemporary art. The first of these is the elevation of touch as a mode of cognition and awareness. Sight has almost always been regarded as the prime way in which we encounter the world, and this has encouraged the assumption that painting-which ministers explicitly and exclusively to our vision-is the art form with most to offer us. For a long time sculpture tried to compete on the same ground, in which it inevitably appeared limited. Sculpture can be used to represent the visible world, but only a very limited portion of it. You can't sculpt a blush-or the starry heavens. But as touch came to be regarded as an increasingly important "aesthetic sense," the cultural stature of three-dimensional objects was enhanced.
A second development was the cult of the worker-artist. The Renaissance saw the gradual accommodation of painters into the ranks of gentlemen. And this required painters to stress the elegance and urbanity of their mode of working-at the expense of sculptors, who were seen as labouring in dismal conditions, exerting themselves in unseemly ways with crude implements. By the 20th century, loyalties had shifted radically. It came to be seen as a good thing to get dirty. Studios have become messier and more factory-like; using raw and unsophisticated material contrasts with the aloof refinement of earlier self-images of the artist. And, of course, in radical thought the "worker" was seen as the key figure of modern history.
A third strand of thinking is concerned with the impact of photography. Because photographs provide an easy way of generating accurate representations of objects, they were thought to undermine the basis of figurative painting and drawing. One result was that painting became more abstract; sculptors, too, increasingly turned away from creating likenesses in favour of more abstract ambitions. This helped to set the scene for the rise of installations.
A fourth aspect of the contemporary ideology of art is the belief that objects which cannot be taken in at a glance, or which deny the spectator a single viewpoint, are to be preferred to those which invite the spectator to contemplate them from a single fixed position. This is seen as a moral and epistemological virtue. Traditional painting falls into the fixed-viewing-position category; so does much traditional sculpture. The multiple viewpoint demanded by installation resists the assumption that there is a unique position (the eye of God, or the white bourgeois male) from which all understanding and authority flows.
Hall's schematic account of the current art scene is not exhaustive. For example, he says little about the widespread view that art should be confrontational or challenging. Nor does he explore the assumption that a work of art should be "of its time" in some special way. Given that all works, even the most reactionary, are as a matter of fact products of their time, the injunction must come to something like this: a work of art should try to capture what is distinctive about its age. It is in the light of this assumption that the Impressionists, for example, are sometimes praised for painting pictures of suburban railways and beach holidays. Negatively, this sponsors the view that it would be retrograde for a sculptor to produce works which are reminiscent of Rodin, let alone of Canova. However, much as modern spectators like such works, they are, as art, incapable of capturing our world.
Hall writes primarily as a historian; he sets out to inform us about the intellectual forces behind contemporary art. He doesn't set himself up to judge those ideas. He traces the ways in which ideas have been absorbed by artists and informed their work. Valuable though this is, it responds to only one half of the concern felt by any participant in contemporary culture. There is often an important gap between the efficacy of a belief (its power to drive action and win adherents) and the justification of that belief. Ideas which are open to severe criticism-fascist ideology in the 1930s, for example-may still make a considerable impact on how people view the world and themselves. We can accept that the ideology of contemporary art as sketched above is powerful-in that it moves the hearts and minds of many people involved in the arts-without being convinced that the ideas themselves are all that impressive. This is why, in addition to a synopsis of the relevant ideas, we need an assessment of their merit.
Take the emphasis on multiple viewpoints. There is a formal symmetry between a work of art which cannot be comprehended from a single (physical) position and a tolerant attitude which accepts that there are many equally valid ways of thinking about the world. But this is a superficial similarity. It may be that we have to step around an installation in order to see all its parts, and that its appearance changes as we move (a quality shared with that other well-known icon of tolerance, Hampton Court Palace). But does such movement really make us more sensitive to concerns which differ radically from our own? Or take the issue from the other end: what's so bad about a fixed point of view in relation to a work of art? If a painting has to be seen straight on to be enjoyed, this doesn't insinuate the claim that the way you look at a Rembrandt etching, say, should guide your thinking on race relations-any more than a stricture against mixing drinks implies a rejection of mixing in general. The rejection of the single point of view has no real connection with tolerance-it is a simple metaphor for it. And, obviously, there are plenty of tolerant people who like perspectival pictures or sculpture designed to be shown in a niche.
And what about the cult of the worker-artist? (A worker here means someone who does working-class work, rather than that of a high court judge or an estate agent.) Since the big theories behind the role of the worker are fanciful, it has no more cultural authority than any other pet identification: artist as outsider, artist as entrepreneur or entertainer. It is an interesting affiliation, but hardly one which confers any modern-day authority. No one can reasonably be admired for this self-conception; it is not more interesting, or noble, to be a worker than it is to be a venture capitalist or a psychotherapist.
Or consider the thesis about photography. It, too, doesn't bear up well under scrutiny. Photographs are almost never mistaken for paintings-for obvious reasons. Take a Chardin still-life. It will suppress a certain level of detail; at various points the texture of the paint is apparent; different items will be painted with differing degrees of focus or irresolution; there will be many minor manipulations: the top of a table tilts forward, the curve of a teapot is flattened. All this is done for the sake of composition, and the overall feel of the picture depends on it. The way in which photography is supposed to undermine this is obscure. Photography has its own, but different, resources. Fine painting has never merely recorded the look of things. A similar argument applies to sculpture. Marble and bronze were almost never used merely to produce a three-dimensional likeness of something else. The point was to exploit the medium to give special qualities to the artwork which a corresponding real object would lack. Even Canova's life-like statues of women have a purity and a compositional elegance which no real person attains. The spectator is aware of the medium and there is a continuous and beguiling interchange of qualities between material and subject matter: the movement and delicacy of the person infuse the work; the permanence and solidity of the stone become features of the subject. Although artists may renounce such endeavours if they wish, there is nothing about modernity as such which makes it imperative to do so.
the idea that a work of art can stand in a uniquely revelatory relation to its era has long fascinated art historians. It has even become a touchstone of the value of art. What makes something exciting or impressive or deep, the argument goes, is directly dependent on the degree to which it is true to its time. But to what extent should we accept the dogma that works of art should try to capture the essence of their time? In a recent article on Marilyn Monroe, in the London Review of Books, Andrew O'Hagan mentions that two pairs of jeans she wore in The Misfits were recently purchased for a huge sum by the designer Tommy Hilfiger. "Hilfiger gets... the thing that is truly seen to capture his time. The spirit of the age is a bundle of famous rags." But in what way, exactly, do the trousers "capture" their age? The same day that I read O'Hagan's piece I heard a competition on Classic FM in which listeners were asked to sum up the 20th century in a single word. "For me, it must be globalisation," said one participant. Another felt that "genocide" would best encapsulate the past 100 years. This shows how "the times" make a mockery of the attempt to capture them in a brief statement, a word or a single object.
All objects are implicated in elaborate networks of meaning. Monroe's trousers can be seen as connected with the rise of film as an important cultural phenomenon or they can be seen as linked to the defeated demand for happiness which her life exemplified. As jeans, they are objects which belong to a demotic sartorial language but which, through being worn by her, have a privileged identity. But every item-if regarded with sufficient ingenuity-can be brought into contact with more or less everything else. What about my trousers? They are the way they are by virtue of the way the world is: the importance of leg-covering in colder climates; the dark colour, which depends on a whole psychology of lamentation masquerading as fashion; their provenance from a retail chain showing up the paradox of consumerism-we seek individuality and conformity. Considered from this point of view, my trousers are as much part of their century as Monroe's-or as the collected works of Picasso or Freud.
But does this mean that the objects in question "capture" their age? That is quite different from being connected with it. You can see the universe in a grain of sand, but this doesn't mean that the universe is "captured" in the grain. After all, you can't see the streets of London in the grain, or what consenting adults do in private, or the corporate strategy of Microsoft, or the deciphering of the genetic code.
So the thesis about capturing the age is wrong, in a number of ways. First, even great works do not really capture their age. Any era of the world is vastly more complex than any work of art, so there is something incoherent about the ambition. Second, it is much harder to capture something than merely to be implicated in it. Every object is implicated in the era from which it derives. But this is quite different from articulating something serious about that era. The first is inevitable, the second, a rare achievement. Third, capturing an era (or part of it) is, in fact, only one strand of interest in art. Most fine works of art have a great deal to offer people who have little interest in the era from which these works derive. A love of Bach does not rest on curiosity about early 18th-century Germany. A liking for Vermeer may stimulate interest in the Holland of his day, but such interest is not what is rewarded in contemplation of his work.
Thus the ideas which have supported the rise of installation as the most prominent art form of today are far from compelling. The principal claims of the current ideology are, at best, debatable opinions, which we are at liberty to reject without being in any way untrue to the modern world. At worst they are confusions and errors turned into dogma.
It is nothing new to discover that the ideas artists have about their work turn out, on reflection, to be rather unconvincing. In the past this has not mattered much because the merits of the work were only loosely tethered to their surrounding ideology. Much of the greatest church architecture came into being under the aegis of the Counter-Reformation. Without the background belief that the authority of the catholic church was essential to man's salvation, these buildings would never have been built. But someone who has little sympathy with that can still be delighted and moved by the energetic beauty of the buildings themselves. This is because what they express is much larger than the specific concerns which motivated them. The drama of light and stone, the logic of the classical orders, the ?lan of an arch or dome can all be used to advance a particular vision of Christianity. But they remain valid quite apart from those ideas. We need to know about the Council of Trent to understand why they were built, but their attractiveness does not depend upon our adherence to the belief system which inspired them. The baroque style of church architecture has many other roots apart from the ideology it happened to serve. It derives from the introduction of movement and drama into the light and static classicism of the high Renaissance; and that is something which makes sense independently of the context of religious belief in which it occurred.
With some contemporary works we find a different relationship between ideas and object. In the Southampton City Art Gallery there is a cast, in dental plaster, of a mattress. The mattress is untitled but displayed upright on its side. Apart from being composed of an unusual material, the object looks like an ordinary mattress. The point is not to remind us what mattresses look like, but to set a familiar item at a distance; to bring it out of the bedroom and into the realm of ideas. Perhaps it is about comfort and pain; or about displacement and expectation; you don't expect to find a mattress in a gallery, you don't expect mattresses to be made of plaster. Perhaps it points to a social irony: everyone sleeps on a mattress, but only the dispossessed sleep directly on a mattress: civilisation is sheet-thin. It is the ideas, rather than the object, which we are supposed to get excited about. Yet are these ideas exciting? Is any point of substance being made? Clearly not. Since the ideas turn out to be vague, banal and ill thought out, the artwork offers the spectator very little indeed. The avoidance of surface charm has cast increasing weight on the underlying ideas. If the ideas are unimpressive, nothing remains.
The background of ideas which sustain the pre-eminence of installation art have no special cultural authority. They amount to no more than private opinions. They do not represent the deepest understanding of humanity or society today. Hence the artworks which closely align themselves with these ideas have no well-founded cultural authority. They articulate the preferences and preoccupations of some people. And these people have every right to do what they want. But what they and their advocates have no right to do is to assume that they occupy a special position.
There is nothing, of course, to prevent an installation being a wonderful creation; just as there is nothing to prevent a watercolour painted this morning from being profoundly beautiful. Except, of course, that both things would require insight, sensitivity, flair and devotion. The only estimate of the merits of a work of art worth having is one which draws upon a serious and mature conception of life and which can articulate how the work deepens and enriches experience. An overblown ideology distorts our perception of artistic value. It does this by encouraging us to consider artworks not from the standpoint of our own experience, but bathed in the glamourising light of improbable ideas. Sometimes, as with baroque churches, the appeal of the works will survive disenchantment with the ideology under which they were produced. Sometimes, on the other hand, this will not happen, as in the case of Tracey Emin, with whose bed we started.
Hall explains why: "While studying painting in London, Emin decided to reinvent herself. She had just had her second abortion. She took all her paintings into the courtyard of the art school and smashed them up with a hammer. It took a whole day and by the time she was finished her hands were bleeding. 'I downed brushes,' she said. 'I downed the whole notion of these ideas of creativity. After termination, I couldn't tolerate the idea of painting any more.'" A private disaster, in which nothing is achieved or created, is held up to the world, inviting applause. Without the support of an ideology-the ideology whose limitations we have just been considering-such actions would appear not as somehow glamorous and deep, but for what they are: miserable, confused and sterile.
