Briony Fer, ‘The
Sommambulist’s story: Installation and the Tableau’, in Oxford Art Journal (special issue, On Installation), Vol.24, Number
2, 2011, pp75-92
Briony Fer: Art historian, critic and curator. Professor at
UCL.
Focused on Abstract art, the infinite line 2004 Yale Press,
Eva Hesse, repetition, seriality to look at work in the 60’s.
The article focuses on the history of
installation art. It mentions that in terms of its historical emergence in the
1960s, installation has generally been seen as a contradiction, as not painting
and as not sculpture, which is fine as far as it goes and certainly corresponds
to what some of the artists were claiming at the time. It stresses the fact
that installation covers artworks that are imaginable and very different from
each other that are not really a painting or a sculpture that are being caught
up in a spatial and temporal encounter
It is asking :
1. What are the connotations of an installation? The idea of something being seen and experienced in
stillness or in motion, she draws on literature as a starting point to create
paradoxes.
2. What is the difference between
viewer/spectator/object/subject in relation to form of address? You can be in or outside of an installation and can be
encompassed within it. Models of viewing have been disrupted, they are
indefinable now.
3. What is the nature of Mise-en-scene ? how are
things/objects framed by
lighting/setting/who are the actors, the participants, spectators, curators, props/staging.
What is the staging of our own practice? The idea of entrapment and enchantment. Viewing at a distance, where
would you stand back from to view the work. it is a space that has been built,
not a natural scene? Anything that exists outside the viewing area is not part
of the Mise-en0scene, it is the framing of an essemblage, the intentional and
separated, the seem that seperates the work from another. It is the installing, placing, hanging,
positioning, event, logistical arrangements.
4. What is the nature of assemblage? It can be Arranged
objects in space, abstract arrangement, an inventory assemblage, a narrative
assemblage, these could also be new meanings for an installation. It could be
and assemblage of concepts and strategies as well as placed objects, by
accident or subconsciously, they could be in order of disordered.
Tableau 1: Proust
essay “bedrooms’. Claus Oldenburg’s bedroom Ensemble 1963 as a cinematic
tableau.
Tableau 2:
Kusama’s ‘Aggression: One Thousand boat show’, installation, where phallic
forms are replicated through other objects in the installation (metonymic
slippage) her photographic images are a tableau that stage her installation
events, and creates a radically redefined idea of a new form of narrative
through serial and series and multiple mutating series.
Tablleau3: Martin Creed’s installation of a list
of minor alterations and series of randomly connected ‘things’ . Rachel Whiteread’s roof top water tower
as an impermanent piece. Sarah Lucas’s
installation at the Freud Museum as a salvage of Mise-en-scenes brought
together as a rough inventory of body parts.
Somnambulist:
someone who walks around in their sleep., slumberer, sleepwalker, noctambulist.
In relation to this essay perhaps she is saying that
‘installation art’ is no longer the conscious centre of experience but simply ‘
being a particle in that sleeping whole’.
That the installation is a dreamlike voluptuous insensibility, (luxurious
fog of instability to the importance of what is being seen) the viewers ware abouts is mislaid in the physical
and mental inactivity of dream state. The viewer temporarily inadvertently
losses part of themselves in an installation, like when one is in a dream. They
are entrapped in the installation, not being able to move things around, as
though one was asleep, yet at the same time perhaps enchanted and bewitched by
their surroundings.
The viewer is placed into a new environment like the object.
Tableau:
Barthes-
pictorial/theatrical/ literary/cinematic it is ‘pure cut out segment’ for which
everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness and remains unframed.
Ouverture: an
introduction (usually to an opera, use
the term to refer to independent, self-existing instrumental, programmatic
works that pre stages the symphonic poem)
Series – a
number of events
Particles of a whole
Serial –
forming part of a repeated behaviour
Repetitive series
Narrative impulses - sudden reflective urge to
account for connected events.
Multiple series
– involving several parts in a number of events
One series mutates into
another
Partial objects
Multiples –
involving/effecting/occupying several parts
Serial progression – gradually working towards a number of events
Reel – a
cylinder of which a flexible material can be wound in or out.
Unravels a series of form
Sequence of events that have
emerged from similar root.
Inventory –
A list of stock, components of a work in
progress.
Things
- an object that one does not give a
specific name to.
A Series of randomly
connected things.
List – a
number of connected items written one below the other.
Minor alterations – to change the character or composition in a small but significant
way.
Suite of frames
Piece –
portion of an object, an item forming a set.
Impermanent piece – the item that forms a set is in the nature of a transient/momentary
variation/short lived value.
Collage – a
collection or combination of various things (sound, papers, materials) glued
together, stitched together, layering of sound and materials. Where one thing
adds up to another. (martin Creeds work p88) in Sarah Lucas work a body part.
Series of Mise-en-scenes – a number of events artfully placed on stage.
tableau vivant
: a silent and motionless group of people arranged to represent a scene or
incident or someone who is a
refined lover of motionless scenes.
Carapace:
the hard upper shell of a tortoise, crustacean, or arachnid. The installation
that encases the subject/artwork/viewer.
Suite of frames
Metonymic: change
of name.
Auratic assemblage:
resembling an aura of the original.
Surrogate: something that serves
in place of something loved, something that will be deprived and will be
missing on deal beach.
Slippage:
something appearing, disappearing, the temporal, moving, still and in motion.
Ludic ludere ludique: spontaneous undirected playfulness.
P1
She is suggesting that the 1960’s term ‘installation art’
has become a conventional mode, a term where the work occupies a whole room,
site specific or situated in a gallery or museum. It now describes a vast
number of contemporary practices. And is now redundant as a critical term. Past
connotations of ‘installation’ were radical and now wrongfully identified as an
institutional orthodoxy. Briony wishes
to look (obliquely at a slant, not parallels or right angles or in a straight
line, but at slant) at different forms of resistance in a single moment in
history through a series of tableau (a group of scenes, series of artworks and
text by
Was ‘installation’ for or against the institution, was it a
progressive or regressive model, or did it set free constraints of the
conventional art piece as a thing in itself, did it set free the idea of a
painting?
Tableau one
Being fixed in a series of tableau vivants (someone who is a refined lover of motionless scenes),
opens up a different spatial experience, transfix the viewer
Prousts bedrooms essay. Where he describes being in a series
of bedrooms by describing –mobility and
stillness, inside and outside, entrapment and entrancement.
These perspectives open up a new way of looking at an ‘installation’.
(or possibly even a work of art/eventwork etc, or maybe an
example of how I could look at: the spatialization of the work I do through in and out of place, reuse and highjack, collaborative
and singularisation, the overlooked and numinous.
Briony furs Models of
spatial recollection:
1. an
encrusted body, where the body is the subject that is caught inside multi
layers of the infinite self, where he looses himself. Entirely solitary. Enwrapped, shrouded, maybe entrapped.
Creating a heightened sensory awareness of things, space, body where the
subject is pure sense-instrument.
2. Watching
and entrancement. Subject to a whole series of tableau (motionless scenes),
riveted by and cut off from the scenes before him. Entranced by the tableau, a
separation or loss of connection, wilful elimination from the scene of fantasy
of which one is enmeshed.
These two models play between the history and psychicality
of how we might already understand the term ‘installation’.
Viewing Winch Box at a distance in a gallery does not entrap
the viewer, it separates the object from its original place, the exhibition
space allows the sound and aesthetics to reconnect to what the object
represents that brings out the psychic resonance, without the distraction of
its original surroundings of the beach, boats, people, seagulls etc..
The Cine-Boat, enwraps the viewer for a heightened sensory
experience. Entrapping the audience.
Both the cine-Boat and winch Box will be detached and
dislocated (temporary out of position) from their conventional space to dramatize
and enhance their overall power and new narrative and puts them centre stage,
giving them a new audience.
The Winch Box could be seen as Arte Povera without knowledge
of its context or origins, or perhaps the fishermen could be seen as artists
who work within the realm of Arte Povera ? they are both also absurd magical and
playful cinematic containers. I must
keep reminding myself that the WB is not a real WB it is a fake one, it is in
the spirit of one, represents one, it is an assemblage of salvaged materials
built in the aesthetics as a WB. It is not a repurposed one, it is in the guise
of a repurposed one. Briony uses the term ‘auratic’,
the resembling aura of which a picture represents. WB is a auratic assemblage
that retains the character of a winch box.!
The sound of the engine inside the auratic assemblage
becomes an enactment of the real thing.
What are the
performativity of the objects?
The sound piece in the Winch Box (salvaged readymade bits
and pieces) , creates a performative aspect, where it interrupts the gallery
goers to draw their attention to it. The Cine-Boat is perhaps performative in
the sense of people watching the people enter into and exit the boat.
Both CB and WB critically engage with new forms of
narrative.
Could the WB be positioned on a roof
top somewhere in the UCA?
The WB is a fake, a surrogate,
a substitute. It is put in place of the real winch box, it serves in place
of something loved, something that will be deprived and will be missing on Deal
beach soon. It mimics, it’s a scarecrow,
it simulates the behaviour, artificial yet sinister in in its intention and
origin, its questioning the integrity of the fishing policy? Is it a warning
sign? A surrogate, signifying the collapse of small fishing industries.
displacement of economic cultural production. (SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION Jean
Baudrillard (1929-2007) edited 1994 written in 1981) Could the WB also be a
contingency ? ( a provision in case of the event of the extinction of WB’s
?
What is the week
connection between the film and the object in the Cine-Boat and the Winch Box ?
Three different ways
to reconfigure the subjects in relation to the tableau and a series and New
Connotations of what an installation is. Perhaps these below have
challenged the past meaning of installation, or is an expanded meaning of what
an art installation is:
1.
An inventory of the everyday
2.
The hardly noticed
3.
Too small to be considered a picture or
sculpture or artwork
4.
Fill the room to capacity or more
5.
An addition to the wall
6.
An inventory of ordinary things- refusal to dramatize
7.
Being entrapped and entranced.
8.
Quantity varies.
9.
Work can be hidden ie research or writing.
10. It
can have a carapace – a space where the work is held in.
11. Temporality
measured by the dates of the installation.
12. The
subject/viewer is cought inside.
13. It
can be the actual production, the spatial mapping/ the curating.
14. Anything
that has been re-enstalled out of its natural environment.
15. It
can be anti-narrative, and entirely solitary.
16. Often
in a large scale. But could be small scale.
Other terms for
installation:
‘Benjamin Buchloh: Spatialization of the ready-made”.
Briony: not a painting, not a sculpture.
Clare Bishop (installation art 2005 a critical history):
Environment/ happening/public exhibition sphere/immersive
environments/interactive art/fluxus/ ephemeral site ( a single situation that
can be dismantled and transported/destroyed art structures/experimental
station/designed art space/specialist space.
This text is asking:
How does my work
disrupt the concept of the tableau? Meaning, at what point is the carapace
of the installation gradually turned inside out, at what point is one the
flipside of the other? At what point does the Cine-Boat and WinchBox
re-orientate the viewer in relation to the boat or WB? The cinematic tableau in
the Cineboat does not banish the surroundings into nothing, it merges into the
carapace of the structure of the boat.
What are my series of
coastal interventions? Are they sculpture or paintings, or installations? are
they a series, a series of impulses, multiples, Is the CineBoat a carapace ? is
the essay an inventory or an Ouverture of coastal interventions that pre stage
the MA show?
I approach my work/world through the lens a female
perspective of Totalitarianism, Wabi Sabi, Altermodernism, aesthetics of the
beach and the situationists.
What would fishermen and fishwives perspective of the winch
box and cine-boat be?
