What is installation art?
Let's face it: nobody does proper art and calls it art nowadays anymore. If they do proper art it appears as illustration or webcomics or your coursework for the year. Right now the fad is all for INSTALLATION ART, breaking out of boundaries, having fluid perspectives etc. The point of all installation art is to make people think about things like The Transient Nature of Beauty or The Ever-Changing World or Everything Ultimately Ends In Destruction or -inserts one of those utterly deep one-liner themes-.
Let's explore the ways they break out of boundaries.
An apparent way is that of breaking into the realm of video-making, except you don't call it a film because it isn't. It's Art. And because it's Art, you cannot criticize it for the following:
1. Maan, the quality of the filming totally sucks! The camera shakes, the panning is unnatural and too fast and the video is pixellated! Plus did I just see the cameraman's hand at the side of the screen?
2. Uh, what did I just watch? I believe it was some guy filming himself in the mirror and zooming in and out on his mole.
3. Did the guy just plonk the video camera in the middle of the street and go off to have some lunch?
This is because it is all carefully thought out and the artist intended everything that you wanted to criticize about it. The feeling of discomfort is natural. You're supposed to break out of your boundaries and conventions and not judge this film according to conventional filming standards, because it is not meant to be a film. It is just in the format of a video but it's Art.
Another way of breaking out of conventional art boundaries: performance art! Now we're talking about the highest level of art attainable, the kind of art that alters with the performance setting. This means that every time the art is performed, it is different! That makes it totally original and hard-to-think-of because the artist has to improvise at every setting!
And what are you made to see at performance art pieces? Let's see. At the Singapore Art Museum, something we saw was a video of a guy stacking glasses at his performance art piece. We were riveted as it seemed like he was going to do an amazing thing like stack the glasses to the ceiling and we all know that with a high centre of gravity, the thing is extremely precarious. So I observed that "he's getting somewhere!" at his seventh glass. Unfortunately immediately after that the whole stack fell. The camera zoomed in and out on the shards. Later, he stacked his chair on top of four glasses and poured water from a water bottle onto the ground. The camera zoomed in and out on the water flowing. I suppose we were meant to examine the, uh, mix of water and glass and its transcendental and broken beauty. And that is Art.
Another way to have installation art is to Make Use of the Space. If you kope any random thing, say, a phone, and put it in the middle of a white room, and maybe like tie telephone coils all around the room or even not do anything, you're making use of the space. Because of your obstrusive telephone in the middle of the white room people are made to think about say The Vast Emptiness of Communication. Tada, your space is effectively made use of.
Art is sure growing its roots in all of us, because as long as we think of something that will make people Think, we are making installation art. Surely that is not difficult! I'm sure you can go to a performance venue, burst a few balloons and call it Art. Because you totally took it seriously and spent about eighty hundred days thinking of what to do which will communicate the vast well of thought inside you. If you took a video camera and videotaped a piece of book with its pages getting ruffled that'll be Art too. The best ones are the ones which arouse shock and disgust, and you can do that by inserting an animal into an enclosure and invite the audience to press a button which will eletrocute the animal in seconds. How thought provoking to see the beauty of a living thing shattered to a charred substance in seconds.
In conclusion, Art is for Everyone.
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far and wee
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Saturday, March 28
10:34 PM