This was a great article by Ann Landi on Installations and storytelling through them printed in ArtNews. It explores the use of narrative by installation artists in their piece to connect with an audience. I have extracted some of the key quotes that sum up their feelings towards using narrative to tell stories, capture ideologies, politics, and social messages.
The article is really inspiring and is a little bit of the missing link in my installation ideas. I want to have a narrative not just cause. It is also liberating to see that some of the artists do not want to make films, do not want to write but use the medium of the installation to communicate their ideas.
Iris Häussler. “If I could, I would probably write, but I can’t. Some people define my works as novels in three dimensions.”
Häussler adds “When I was a student I was interested in portraiture, but I found it absolutely dull and boring to try to put something into two dimensions or to do a sculpture. But if you go in someone’s drawers and fish around, you come across the things that were really meaningful to someone. What we allow in our private sphere tells a lot about the condition of our souls and our personalities.”
Film often presents opportunities for the narrative-driven artist, but those who turn their backs on the movies, or see them as too limiting, cite the reasons installation, in all its flexibility, appeals. “I wanted to tell my own stories in a way that I don’t think is possible in commercial cinema,” says Zoe Beloff.
“What’s great about the art world, as opposed to Hollywood or even most independent cinema, is that we have the freedom not to have to work with a lot of other people,” says George Miller. “We have the freedom of the audience being open to change and difference. We don’t like to stick to making the same things over and over”—as would many a Hollywood director to establish his or her reputation.
Many, if not most, contemporary installation artists turned to the possibilities of using many different mediums after encountering deep dissatisfactions in conventional academic training. “I went to an old-fashioned art school in Edinburgh in the ’70s,” says ZoeBeloff. “I was interested in storytelling there, and I felt that painting was no longer a storytelling medium, and that’s why I got interested in film. Then I ended up in film school, but in the end I didn’t want to make Hollywood or Sundance movies.”
Any work designated “installation” can demand a lot of the viewer. You’re asked to connect the dots, make sense of an array of disparate objects, and perhaps inject your own stories. There is the danger of any agglomeration of stuff tipping over into what Saltz called “clusterfuck esthetics”—“the practice of mounting sprawling, often infinitely organized, jam-packed carnivalesque installations,” which, he wrote in 2005, “is making more and more galleries and museums feel like department stores, junkyards, and disaster films.”
http://www.artnews.com/2015/01/20/installation-art-today/
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