light installation art, Berlin - Podsdamer Platz

Installation art is art that the uses of sculptural materials and other media to modify the way we experience a particular space. Installation art is not necessarily confined to gallery spaces and can refer to any material intervention in everyday public or private spaces. Installation art incorporates almost any media to create a visceral and/or conceptual experience in a particular environment. Materials used in contemporary installation art range from everyday and natural materials to new media such as video, sound, performance, computers and the internet. Some installations are site-specific in that they are designed to only exist in the space for which they were created. This genre of contemporary art came to prominence in the 1970s. Many trace the roots of this form of art to earlier artists such as Marcel Duchamp and the use of readymade objects rather than more traditional craft based sculpture, and Kurt Schwitters Merz art. The intention of the artist is paramount in much later installation art whose roots lie in the conceptual art of the 1960s. This again is a departure from traditional sculpture which places its focus on form. Early non-Western installation art includes events staged by the Gutai group in Japan starting in 1954, which influenced American installation pioneers like Allan Kaprow. Installation as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently; its first use as documented by the OED was in 1969. It was coined in this context in reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century. Allan Kaprow used the term "Environment" in 1958 (Kaprow 6) to describe his transformed indoor spaces; this later joined such terms as "project art" and "temporary art." Nobody has managed to come up with a definition of installation art that satisfies everybody, perhaps because it is more representative of a sea change in the practice of art appreciation than of any decisive breakthrough in a specific medium. Essentially, installation/environmental art takes into account the viewer's entire sensory experience, rather than floating framed points of focus on a "neutral" wall or displaying isolated objects (literally) on a pedestal. This leaves space and time as its only dimensional constants, and it promises to engender or at least embrace a comprehensively critical mode of experience. This implies dissolution of the line between art and life; Kaprow noted that "if we bypass 'art' and take nature itself as a model or point of departure, we may be able to devise a different kind of art... out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life" (Kaprow 12). * Gustavo Aguerre * The Chapman Brothers * Judy Chicago * Mark Divo * Shahram Entekhabi * Ingrid Falk * Ann Hamilton * Ilya Kabakov * Jonathon Keats * Barbara Kruger * Richard Long * Lennie Lee * David Mach * James R Ford (artist) * John K. Melvin * Cornelia Parker * Maria Reidelbach * Christian Bernard Singer * Banks Violette * Matej Andraz Vogrincic * Elisabeth Wierzbicka Wela