Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art

1. Expanding the Frame: Installation Art in the 1970s

Installation Art and Modernist Painting Most museums and galleries are designed to show masterpieces; objects made and planned elsewhere for exhibition in relatively neutral spaces. But many artists today do not make self-contained masterpieces; they do not want to and do not try to. Nor are they for the most part interested in neutral spaces. Rather, their work includes the space it’s in; embraces it, uses it. Viewing space becomes not frame but material. And that makes it hard to exhibit. —Alanna Heiss on the exhibition Rooms at PS1 in 1976 In the late 1960s, major art institutions in the United States had only recently and with a great deal of trepidation brought the new practices of installation and site-specific art within their walls. Simultaneously, there was a glut of artists who wanted places to exhibit and who, as Alanna Heiss asserts, were making work that challenged the conventions of the traditional art gallery. With the support of government funds, new exhibition spaces run by artists began to sprout all over New York City and other cities across the United States. These new spaces exhibited time-based, ephemeral art practices such as video, performance, and installation art.1 These new forms of art and types of exhibition practices led artists and critics to question the values of the traditional art gallery devoted to exhibitions of modernist painting and sculpture. This chapter explores three examples of installation art in the 1970s in New York that challenged these traditional art gallery practices. These projects include the exhibition Rooms at PS1 in 1976, Gordon Matta-Clark’s piece ONE expanding the frame INSTALLATION ART IN THE 1970S 24 FRAMED SPACES Splitting from 1973 to 1974, and an exhibition at Artists Space in 1978 of the work of Adrian Piper, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman. Using the idea of the “frame” as a pivot point, this chapter examines the ways these projects broke the conventions of the modernist art gallery. Two different dimensions of framing are examined. Taking the now commonplace notion that the exhibition space is a kind of frame for artwork, the chapter asks how these examples of installation art “broke” the frame and challenged the strictures of modernist art exhibition conventions. Second, because for the most part only the photographs and the texts that describe them survive these pieces, these projects will be examined via exhibition catalogs in an effort to understand how this type of representation conditions the historical understanding of these exhibitions. Because of its ephemeral and motley character, installation, in contrast to painting, has been marginalized in writing on the history of contemporary art. Its marginalization parallels that of the modernist movements of Surrealism and Dada in the history of 1960s Greenbergian modernism, which is based on abstract painting.2 As artists and critics had come to realize by the end of the 1960s, modernist art, painting in particular, required a certain kind of setting in order to achieve the sense of its aesthetic autonomy and visual purity. “The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. . . . Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is devoted to the technology of esthetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. . . . The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, spaceoccupying bodies are not—or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins for further study.”3 This is an oft-quoted paragraph from the trio of articles that artist and critic Brian O’Doherty (aka Patrick Ireland) wrote in the mid-1970s about the conventional modernist art gallery. As an artist who was exhibiting in alternative art spaces in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s and as the director of funding for the visual arts for the National Endowment of the Arts, O’Doherty had an interest in the way art was exhibited. O’Doherty argued that the modernist gallery continued to serve as a kind of frame for the work that contained it and, along with a certain decorum for the viewer, dictated how the art was to be seen. Modernist painting is made for the eyes alone. Installation breaks the traditional frame of art, as exemplified by EXPANDING THE FRAME 25 painting, and often engages more than the visual sense. O’Doherty regarded installation-type practices, therefore, as a rupture within...