Installation Art

Despite its large and growing popularity — to say nothing of its near-ubiquity in the world’s art scenes and international exhibitions of contemporary art — installation art remains a form whose artistic vocabulary and conceptual basis have rarely been subjected to thorough critical examination.

In Installation Art: Between Image and Stage, Anne Ring Petersen aims to change that. She begins by exploring how installation art developed into an interdisciplinary genre in the 1960s, and how its intertwining of the visual and the performative has acted as a catalyst for the generation of new artistic phenomena. She investigates how it became one of today's most widely used art forms, increasingly expanding into consumer, popular and urban cultures, where installation's often spectacular appearance ensures that it meets contemporary demands for sense-provoking and immersive cultural experiences.

The main trajectory of the book is directed by a movement aimed at addressing a series of basic questions that get at the heart of what installation art is and how it is defined: How does installation structure time, space and representation? How does it address and engage its viewers? And how does it draw in the surrounding world to become part of the work? Featuring the work of such well-known artists as Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist, Ilya Kabakov and many others, this book breaks crucial new ground in understanding the conceptual underpinnings of this multifacious art form.

Anne Ring Petersen is associate professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen and the editor of Contemporary Painting in Context.