If You Think of Space

In Celebration Of Theatre: Reclaiming The Sensate Body I like art that involves me on all sensory levels, and I like to play, and explore phenomena. I like art that lets me walk in, walk round, touch, talk, laugh, walk on things, participate. For me installation art and, in particular, film and new media installation offer this; a total immersion, a wrap around world created by someone else, so that when I leave this kind of installation I feel I have experienced something, connected with a new idea or way of looking at the world. Almost as if the viewer is used as, or becomes another artistic medium. There is an element of theatricality both in my work and the artwork of some of the installation artists I admire, and an almost sensation seeking edge, like a mix of performance and fairground show or ride. However there is a small voice saying “is it an inappropriate response to ‘fine art’ if I find it enjoyable, theatrical, sensational, entertaining. Is it art?” Whose is the small voice I hear that suggests ‘fine art’ is of a ‘higher’ nature than a theatrical production or a fairground or theme park ride. My dissertation documents this search starting in chapter one with an analysis of the Minimalist sculptures of Robert Morris specifically his Mirror Cubes 1965 and from Arte Povera, Anselmo Giovanni and his works, Untitled 1968, and Invisible. In particular I start my research by analysing how these works placed importance on the sensate body of the viewer, and in turn how this made art a phenomenological experience. Ironically my key text in celebrating the theatrical in art, has been Michael Fried’s polemic article Art and Objecthood 1967. His almost hysterical accusations of “Degenerate theatricality” non-art, hybrid, and ‘impure’ led me to some of my most important discoveries. This kind of art does have duration as he suggests, it takes time to make itself known. The viewer becomes aware of both being a viewer and then being the viewed. Meaning production in this art, becomes a performance, a process negotiated between object, context and viewer. In classifying Minimalist art as all that was non-art, Fried continued a tradition of demonization and suppression of the ‘other’ that began with the rise of the bourgeois in the 17th century. Using a model developed by Stallybrass and White I explore how these works are a carnivalesque inversion of high and low culture, ‘high art’ and ‘low theatricality’ or non-art. In attempting to police high Modernist boundaries by attacking the return of the sensate body or theatricality, Fried was protecting his own theoretical authority. The high Modernist myth of the disembodied eye, and detached aesthetic judgement. In a process of carnivalesque inversion, I use his polarised arguments against theatricality in art, to support my celebration of the theatrical, and the return of the sensate body. In chapter two I play in Shilpa Gupta’s interactive installation. Like fairs, modern installations travel the western worlds galleries. Gupta’s installation and art in this genre, the carnivalesque transgressive practices discussed in chapter one, Fried’s anathema, have been given licence. A fragment of carnival in a conventional contemporary art gallery, that operates within the dominant capitalist culture of western society. This exploration has been empowering, a celebration of the re-integration of mind and sensate body. I came to understand that my work is theatrical that meaning in all art is a performative process of negotiation, between viewer, object and context, Most importantly for me it has silenced the small voice, I can enjoy the art I celebrate and play to my hearts content. Claude Thibaut: Isn't this radical uncertainty brought about by Virtual Reality likely to challenge man's vision of himself and the world? Jean Baudrillard: Certainly, because it is the system of representation that is at issue. The image that he has of himself is virtualized. One is no longer in front of the mirror; one is in the screen, which is entirely different. Claude Thibaut (1996) Space is an ambiguous field where positions change, where viewpoint becomes scene, seer becomes object, and where depth is the very reversibility of dimensions that unfold with the movements of the body. Allen Weiss (1996) Introduction I like art that involves me on all sensory levels; I like to play, and explore phenomena. I like art that lets me walk in, walk around, touch, talk, laugh, walk on things, participate. For me installation art, and in particular, film and new media installation offer this; a total immersion, a wrap around world created by someone else. A dynamic space between viewer and object, where it seems to me almost as if the viewer is used as, or becomes, another artistic medium. When I leave this kind of installation, I feel I have experienced something, connected with a new idea or way of looking at the world. As an artist myself, I work with this idea of the dynamic space, or interface, using digital film, digital imaging and drawing. My subject matter is space, negotiating space, negative and positive space and the idea that there is no ‘empty space’ the space around objects being a dynamic changeable shape. I imagine ‘sticky space’, a notion I am developing for working with and exploring these spatial properties. It is an idea that we collect the shapes we walk through, that these are then memories, fragments of time that overlay our future paths. I use film as way of working with these ideas. It is a temporal medium. It has a beginning a middle and an end, and usually a linear progression. I imagine my recent films as an animation of a series of drawings, representing a body’s movement through ‘empty’ space. I want to distance the part of my mind that notices and makes judgements about such things as, the colour of the shoes or the make of the jeans. To achieve this I use filters and effects to flatten the perspective of the scene, the illusory depth a film offers, making it easier to see the shape of negative space. In this way I hope to highlight our perception of the connectedness of positive and negative space, and the idea that there is no ‘empty space’. I think of my work as a kind of layering or weaving interaction, a kind of collaging of the concrete and the ephemeral, the external world and the internal psyche, manipulating this interface of object, viewer, and space. There is an element of theatricality both in my work and the artwork of some of the installation artists I admire. By theatricality, I mean the way in which these artists actively seek to include my physicality, my total person, as integral to the experience they are is trying to impart. In other words, the work is created as an experience, contingent upon the relationships of object, viewer, and space. Traditionally, ‘good’ painting or sculpture was, according to Modernist thought, ‘wholly manifest’ to the recipient at first view, whereas installation has a duration in time, which becomes apparent as the awareness of my body/self within the installation unfolds. Also, like theatre, installation art exists for its audience, for the experience. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, , talk of theatre as historically being seen by the eighteenth century bourgeoisie as suspect, unstable and rowdy. The boundaries between audience and the performer/performance on the stage were regularly breached by the audience, who shouted out comments about the actors and the play and threw things at the stage and at each other. This for the bourgeoisie was a disconcerting ambiguity, i.e. who was the viewer and who was the viewed. I think installation art, can be thought of in this way, that it mixes up viewer and viewed, crosses disciplines, which makes it a hybrid. It can be seen as unruly, out of ‘control’ and consequently difficult to judge. For me there is also a sense that the act of movement within an installation space, is like an un-choreographed dance. Each person negotiates their way around it, and the other people within it, stopping, looking, turning, touching. This in turn becomes a process of both viewing the viewed and being the viewed. This is especially significant when compared to conventional, essentially ‘Modernist’ terms of reference and their insistence on, the detached, disinterested, separate viewer and the autonomous self referential art object. This Modernist position becomes difficult to maintain if you open up the historically closed conventions of object and viewer, to consider the idea of me/the viewer as the performer in the participatory act of interpretation. I, and every other viewer of art, must be viewed as a sum of our life’s experiences; I am not a static fixed identity in an unchanging world. I, the viewer, and the world at large are in flux, so the meaning I derive from a work is a process of negotiation between the art object, the context and the viewer. This process is contingent and fluid, any meaning I get from the artwork is produced in the process of this performative act. I, the viewer give meaning to the art I engage with, by filtering it through my own changing library of experiences of the world at large and my place in it. Joanna Lowry talks of “how such installations operate as metaphysical spaces articulating the relationship between the eye and the gaze. Thereby impelling the spectator to recognise the performativity of the act of looking” In other words, we are aware of ourselves looking, of seeing and being the seen. As a part of this phenomenon, I, as embodied viewer get a sense of belonging, of empowerment, as I realise that, as viewer I am of almost equal importance to the success of the work as are all the other elements that it holds. The installations I enjoy also have an almost sensation seeking edge, like a mix of performance and fairground show or ride. They both hold similar elements. Installations create a space, designed to take the audience away from the everyday into a fantasy world constructed by the artist, or face them with an everyday phenomenon presented in a way that allows a different understanding of it. The artist’s intent is to create an experience. Compare this to the Spiderman ride at Universal Studios, Florida. This ride also presents you with a fantasy space using holograms interspersed with actual phenomena such as water and fire; the designer’s intent is also to give the audience an unforgettable experience. However the similarities I noticed in these experiences, leads to a feeling of disquietude concerning my enjoyment of participatory installation. I have a small voice in the back of my mind saying “is it an inappropriate response to ‘fine art’ to find it enjoyable, theatrical, sensational, entertaining? Is it art?” Whose is the small voice I hear that suggests ‘fine art’ is of a ‘higher’ nature than a theatrical production or a fairground or theme park ride? In my dissertation I will try to find the voice, as I explore the activation of this dynamic interface and the issues I have identified. In chapter one I focus on Robert Morris’s mirror cubes and Giovanni Anelmo’s Untitled 1968 and Invisible in relation to theatricality. In Chapter Two I go on to analyse an experience of Shilpa Gupta’s interactive installation I had the fun of visiting in Liverpool.

Chapter One
During the summer I went to the Tate Modern to see their new displays. In the room holding the Minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, I was struck most forcibly by an awareness of the space around the works. Not just that there was a lot of space. There was. It is a large industrial room. That wasn’t it. Rather it was the relationship of the objects to the space, and consequently my own relationship to both the space and the objects almost as if the space in between us and around us was energised, that stuck to me. I was reminded of Tony Smith, another Minimalist sculptor, who when interviewed about his work, said,
“If you think of space as solid then my work is like a void in that space” 
This concept of energised space and voids electrifies the ‘empty’ space. Consequently I became aware of my own relationship with the space and the objects as the viewer, viewed within it. By proximity I become a part of the whole.
I, as the viewer, began to feel integral, important to the success of the pieces. This is an empowering feeling. I have a part to play. This art requires my embodied presence to exist and to have meaning.
Why did this dynamic space excite and empower me? In order to address this it is necessary to consider the traditional, high Modernist ideas of the ‘correct’ relationship of art object, space, and viewer.  This is a relationship where each member is deemed to be distinctly separate.
The art is construed as self-contained, and autonomous, occupying a higher ‘separate’ realm of wall or plinth, removed from the public’s realm. The gallery is identified as a neutral, invisible space, where “the art is free…as they say, to take up its own life” . It is firmly separated from the world outside. Brian O’Doherty describes the high Modernist white cube gallery in these words,
”The outside world must not come in so windows are sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the only source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly.…”
In this way galleries, and by extension the ‘artworld’ , mark out their area of power and control, their boundary, their line between Art in here, and, non-art out there. In turn Modernist theory requires a neutral detached observer, divorced from personal concerns and the world/body. ‘His’ place is, firmly behind the guardrail. Guards are placed to enforce this boundary and the code of behaviour, one of distanced “silent specular intensity” .
It was Immanuel Kant, writing in 1781, who originally proposed that aesthetic judgements are universal, not merely personal as a judgement of taste would be, but was disinterested, detached from personal desire. He argued that if, when viewing a still life with an apple, the viewer was reminded of how hungry he was when viewing the painting, then either he was not detached from his desires or it was not art. In other words the aesthetic judgement of art involved a mind/body split. Aesthetic detachment involved the separation of mind and body and the suppression of bodily desire and feeling. Aesthetic judgement was equated with the mind, as free of sensate and bodily concerns.  The ideal viewer of art was construed as a ‘disembodied eye, merely responding to quality’. This has had a formative effect on the thinking of writers such as Clive Bell (1881-1964) a writer and art critic, who stressed the purity of this exalted aesthetic emotion of the mind, when encountering the ‘significant form’ of an artwork. In other words a viewer should be ‘uncontaminated’ by thoughts or memories of their own, like a passive empty vessel, disembodied and all desire sublimated.
However Bell also insisted that only persons of ‘sensibility’ can see the “significant form” and discern the quality of a good artwork, leaving those that cannot see reliant on being told that it is there.  In this way Modernism carved out a place of power within the artworld for those of ‘superior’ sensitivities and judgement, namely critics.
As I understand it, high Modernist ‘good’ art as defined by the critics is self referential and autonomous and it lives within the clean clear neutral space of the white cube gallery. It is also pure Clement Greenberg in his forum lectures on Modernist Painting in 1961, developed this idea of purity by saying art is and should be self referential, a critique of each of its own unique disciplines. According to Greenburg, ‘good’ art, “eliminate(s) from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.”  Most importantly, we know it is ‘intuitively’, ‘naturally’ ‘good’ art, if we maintain the appropriate aesthetic detachment as they do, and if we fail to live up to this we are not persons of sensibility!
This High Modernist definition of viewer, doesn’t allow me, the viewer, much of an active role it denies my experiences as a person with a body, as being valid, within the communication of artwork and viewer. I doubt if it ever really worked in this way, I would think it is impossible to leave personal/sensate experiences and cultural frameworks outside of an encounter with art. Nonetheless this had been the ethos behind gallery curating, and the preservation of the High Modernist values the idea of the disembodied neutral viewer.
Ironically one of the most useful texts I have found when trying to understand this dynamic relationship of the object, viewer, space, was a censorious article written by the art historian and critic Michael Fried, for Artforum magazine in1967. In this he slated the Minimalist works as the antithesis of what he considered to be ‘good’ art. He seemed to feel that literalist sculpture (a term he coined for Minimalist art) was not ‘good’ art but a temporal, sensate experience, going on and on. I found myself using his analysis in a positive way as I walked around the Minimalist works. I could see how Minimalism placed the embodied viewer in a central role, but I did not come to the same negative conclusions about this as he did, for me this experience was empowering. Whereas I enjoy the process of an awakening of sensual awareness that is part of this type of artwork/space, he doesn’t because for him ‘good’ art should be “at every moment wholly manifest”, instant, divorced from all that is non-art, as he says, “Presentness is grace”. Although he was derogatory in his contention that Minimalism is not art, I think it is an interesting development. For me, “(the) Objects (‘presentness’) came to be replaced by an experience”
Fried’s argument polarised art and non-art, with Minimalism used as the ‘other’. He defines ‘good’ art by excluding Minimalism as being, all that is the opposite of ‘good’ art, hybrid neither “one nor the other” neither painting nor sculpture. In other words ‘literalist’ art was degenerate, mixing the disparate qualities of sculpture and painting and entering a third domain that of theatre. ‘Good’ art by his definition was not theatrical, did not place importance on temporality, situation or sensate embodied viewing experience. He writes,
“ And this means that there is a war going on between theatre and Modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictorial – a war that despite the literalists’ explicit rejection of Modernist painting and sculpture, is not basically a matter of program and ideology but of experience, conviction, sensibility”
A development in the arts he declared was at war with Modernist art and, by his extension all ‘good art’, which was, in this convention, detached from the sensate world and grasped immediately. Fried’s authority is based on this Cartesian model of oppositional value, the split between mind and body, with mind being of higher order and body of the low. Like Kant, he claims value in art by ascribing to it ‘self evident’ absolute truths. He says these can only be grasped by the sublimation of personal and bodily desire, thus allowing a neutral stance in judgement. For Fried, the return of the body was an anathema.  His judgements and those of all who based their authority to judge on this model of aesthetic detachment would become indefensible. Amelia Jones suggests that Fried was shoring up his fast disappearing authority, as “works that opened up the performative element of meaning production are seen as something that needs controlling, even policing” If people can make their own meaning why would we need critics?
The tenor of Fried’s arguments makes me think of a theory developed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, which says that in the 18th century the bourgeoisie in order to rise in power, associated themselves with high culture ie. ‘classical’. “Classical” through usage became synonymous with neutral/rational thought, the individual, the monumental, the elevated, the well-balanced, represented by the autonomous detached mind of the self-contained white middle class male. This definition of high, was in part constructed by its fierce exclusions of the perceived low or other. The low was defined as ‘grotesque’, its ‘natural’ attributes are those of, openness, change, having orifices, being multiple, the female, the sensuous body, and the ‘despised other’. I think Fried uses Minimalist or Literalist art in his polemic article as his despised other, helping him define what he considers ‘good’ art, by excluding as other, the theatrical and the hybrid. His definitions of what art is not, have helped my own understanding of the elements that make up, what is for me a dynamic and exciting ‘theatrical’ space.
In Tate Modern’s display of Minimalist sculpture, I was up to my ears in ‘space’, to part quote Brian O’ Doherty who actually said,  “The pedestal melted away, leaving the spectator waste–deep in wall-to–wall space.”   I love this image of us spectators wading through this space interspersed with voids a la Tony Smith, something that has always been there, but that we haven’t been consciously aware of previously. Conventionally ‘high’ art had been about a subject, framed, on a wall or placed on a pedestal. Now art was in my space, on my level. As I walked around the floor based objects I played with this notion. Noticing the phenomenon of negative space becoming as important as the positive, the space the object inhabits, and the space taken up by other bodies. So that it seemed space became a visible tableau of connected shapes as I moved through it.
As Fried argued there is a temporal nature to this experience. There is duration, the time it takes to walk around the work, and in walking becoming aware of myself within the space. Unlike a walk around a sculpture on a plinth, I have no subject reference to become involved with. This object is in my space, on the floor, wanting to engage with me. There is nothing other than an embodied, perceptual period of experience left to us. By removing the plinth and placing the art directly into the public’s space, the realm of the body, these Minimalist sculptures constitute a carnivalesque inversion of Fried’s high art/ non-art polarity. Like a carnival of shapes ‘Art’ came down from the snow covered peaks, to play in the earthly realm of the people. Amelia Jones says, “Bourdieu points out the threat of popular culture to class hierarchies: ‘the object which “insists on being enjoyed” …neutralizes both ethical resistance and aesthetic neutralization; it annihilates the distancing power of representation…”  I, the viewer, am in a way dancing, performing with ‘art’ as in carnival, the king and the peasant change places for the duration of the carnival.
No wonder Fried was upset, Minimalism was breaking out of confines, transgressing the carefully policed boundaries constructed to keep out the ‘despised other’, and although not acknowledged, to bolster a critic’s authority and power. “ In the world of carnival the awareness of the people’s immortality is combined with the realisation that the established authority and truth are relative.”  The theatricality so derided by Fried produced a space where meaning could be ‘negotiated’ between the viewer and the viewed. Meaning production is a process, as Amelia Jones says, a constant rehearsal. I, as the viewer, am required as an active partner, making my participation central to the success of the art.
The notion of the classical/grotesque split gave me a new and interesting insight into Fried’s reaction to this art, and into that small voice of authority that says art is not art if its not on a pedestal, if its fun and I can play with it. Minimalism is like carnival in that it provides a licensed space in which I can play, am encouraged to play as a way of generating meaning. So I accepted the invitation and I played with Robert Morris’s mirror cubes; four, meter high, mirrored cubes placed on the floor in a square, that literally mirror the space back to you whilst robbing you of your comfortable knowledge of self, as a contained classical subject. This reminded me of a hall of mirrors at a fairground, as the mirrored surfaces broke up my image, reflecting other surfaces where I might have expected my legs or the person next to me, to be seen. The placing of the four cubes at intervals, which matched the width of the cubes, meant that reflected space was juxtaposed with real space, flickering my assumptive spatial awareness. The effect was to take away my legs then give them back or replace them with another’s of the wrong size and angle, as in the hall of mirrors distorting the reflection of your body, but in this hall of mirrors my image is fragmented, like the child’s book, ‘whose legs are these?’
In these performative open works I am re-acquainted with aspects of my physicality that I may otherwise suppress, enabling me to see myself performing as the viewer and the viewed. The break in cognition between what my gaze sees, and my understanding of it, allows me space in which to record my own self, seeing.
Claire Bishop says, Merleau – Ponty the French philosopher
“…argued that the subject and the object are not separate entities but are reciprocally intertwined and interdependent. One of the key claims of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is that ‘the thing is inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually in itself because it stands at the other end of our gaze or at the terminus of a sensory exploration which invests it with humanity”
The thing is inseperable from the me! I, as viewer, am an integral part of this sensory exploration. This further suggests the performative qualities of viewing where meaning is created through the negotiation of self, object and context. My experience of ‘seeing’ the work changes, as I move around the void. Consequently spatial relationships change, and I have a heightened awareness of myself within this space. I have a front, and a back. I'm aware of being an indivisible part of this experience, as is everyone who enters the room. Minimalism addressed the issue Merleau-Ponty first observed, “The self is not simply an embodied presence in the present tense, but a psychological entity that exists ‘through confusion, narcissism…a self, therefore, that is caught up in things, that has a front and a back, a past and a future”. 
I stood and watched others experience the mirror cubes. It is, I think, a performance in which the public are the actors, albeit unscripted, each playing and reacting with the object and the space in their own way. It is also literally a hall of mirrors, fun to play with and fun to observe other members of the public appearing and disappearing as they walk around it. Like theatre, the Minimalist sculptures, in particular Robert Morris’ mirror cubes, could be likened to an empty stage, waiting for the actors to perform the play. In this case the actors are the public and the play is the literalisation of our personal awareness of the space we inhabit, creating a new version of the play each time.
However my experience was slightly stuttered by the boundary markers placed around the works by the gallery. This action is understandable, in the sense that these sculptures are now also historical exhibits requiring protection. But it does  change the spatial dynamic the artists originally intended. Could it be the Tate’s unconscious way of “policing” a boundary in an attempt to keep carnival within their defined limits?
The transgressive potential of theatricality also finds expression in the works of the Italian Arte Povera artists in the late 60’s. Arte Povera was a grouping of disparate artists who shared a concern with removing the separation between ‘life’ and ‘art’, the separation that was insisted on by ‘conventional’ Modernist attitudes. Arte Povera’s approach to materials was non hierarchical, anything goes, constituting a carnivalesque mixing of precious and non-precious. High and low were allowed to mix on an equal footing. Giovanni Anselmo, in particular for me, wittily illustrated abstract concepts such as gravity, evaporation, and visibility by interweaving the concrete and the ephemeral, concept and performance. ‘Untitled 1968’, sometimes known as the ‘Eating Structure’, comprises a smooth block of granite with a twisted copper wire looped round behind the larger block and then to the front, where another smaller block of granite is positioned. Between the larger and the smaller blocks is squashed a head of lettuce, held in place by the tension of the wire around the blocks.  Should the lettuce be allowed to wilt the tension will be released and the small granite block will fall.  It becomes for me anthropomorphic, a trait castigated, by Fried, as theatrical he said, “…. what is wrong with Literalist work is not that it is anthropomorphic but that the meaning and, equally, the hiddeness of its anthropomorphism are incurably theatrical” The ‘hiddenness’ of its anthropomorphism seems to upset him the most which is unexpected, given that his entire notion of art is built on hidden agendas and the suppression of our humanity.  I think I see in this eating piece the reflection of my own humanity, I recognise in it the fact that I will age, decay and die,  that to be human is to change, and consequently I endow this granite and lettuce with a borrowed life force.
          In, ‘Untitled 1968’, Anselmo also set up a situation that required active participation by another being for the artwork to exist, giving it an element of ritual, of performance, as we can see from the description given here by Victoria Dawson from the Smithsonian Magazine.
“Then there’s Catherine Satterlee, an exhibits technician who walks twice weekly from her Hirshhorn office to Brannan’s concession to pick up the lettuce. And when Satterlee replaces the head of lettuce every day or so, she participates in Anselmo’s art. "Maintain pressure on the small square stone and the lettuce while pulling the copper wire down," the exhibit manual directs. "Place your knee against the small square stone to hold it in place while pulling the copper wire back over the lettuce and the small square stone until taut." That’s Arte Povera at its most intimate.” 
The gallery technician becomes a physical part of a ritual in caring for this sculpture. This regular performance is a part of the work, it reminds me of a regular spectacle like the changing of the guard; we could watch the changing of the lettuce. It is like a small play, it repeated privately every two or three days. But, as this takes place at times not open to the public, these are only imaginary images, conjured for me by Anselmo’s work.
‘Invisible’, (1971) a slide projection by Anselmo, projected the word visible into the space of a room.  In order to find out what the artwork is about, it is necessary to put something in front of the beam, most likely a part of your body, arm, leg torso, , at a distance from the projector, in order to focus the beam of light, and read the word Visible. In the works of Anselmo there is a place outside of the concreteness of the sculpture and outside of the viewer where the art concept is activated. I think that this space, this conceptual interface, is like a switch turning on a light.  The art in this work ignites recognition of the actualisation of the event, firing personal imagination, because the projection of the word ‘visible’ has so many other possible connotations. This illustrates how creating meaning is a performance negotiated between the work, the context and the sensate, individual viewer, a process that creates a separate ‘experience’, that of the ‘art’ experience. It draws attention to the process of meaning production, born in this inclusive, open, creative space that is between the object and the viewer. ‘Invisible’ makes me think that in this age of mass media frenzy, we perhaps only get a sense of ourselves as visible individuals within our modern day western world, by being projected back to ourselves through the channels of TV, film and photography.  Literally, this piece of art does not exist until you become the surface it is focused on, and then it exists for as long as you hold the item there, then it disappears into memory. For me, this can be seen to comment on the invisibility of life outside of the ‘goggle box’ of T.V. I'm seen, I'm not seen, I'm seen, I'm not seen. For me showing the superficiality of an image driven society. Jean Baudrillard says “We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras [figurants interactifs]; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge "reality show."  Life as a reality show, no death the only ‘time’ is now.
Lastly Invisible invites play I'm visible, I'm not, I'm visible, I'm not. Without my embodied presence and willingness to enquire, and play this work would not be completed or even discernable. The viewer is embraced as a finishing part of the work.
Arte Povera was an art that was inherently anti-authoritarian, which once again makes me think of the inversion of carnival. With its non-hierarchical use of materials it is a hybrid art crossing boundaries, mixing the genres, transgressing conventions. It is theatrical, which was defined by Fried, as, “ of a large and seemingly disparate variety of activities..”
So far, my exploration of the individual facets of the ‘artistic interface’, this space between artist, object and viewer that I first became aware of in my work, has led me to consider my experience of Minimalist work, such as Robert Morris. The Minimalists gave importance to the inclusion of the viewers’ physicality in their work, by awakening within the viewer a self-consciousness. Morris puts it like this, “ But the concerns now are for more control….of the entire situation. Control is necessary if the variables of object, light, space, body, are to function, the object has not become less important.  It has merely become less self-important.”  This leaves me, the viewer space to regain my body within the gallery.
Anselmo Giovanni took this further, actively seeking the viewer’s physical participation to complete his work. Both systems of working could be described as being fundamentally performative, which Fried had attacked in Minimalism as being degenerate theatricality. This has led me to analyze what the term theatricality means to me when applied to art. I have responded to the negative argument created by Fried through his polarization and demonization of ‘art’ ‘non-art’/ theatricality from the viewpoint of high culture, with my own process of carnivalesque inversion. I celebrate the theatrical.
 I, like the Minimalists and Arte Povera, have managed to silence the little voice telling me what I should like and in what terms and in so doing have empowered myself.
I think theatricality and the carnivalesque should be celebrated; our humanity must not be left at the door of the gallery. However Stallybrass and White suggest that while carnival had a political dimension, breaking boundaries and taboos of the high order by the low, it was also, paradoxically a mode of societal control, licensing mayhem within clearly defined parameters, like releasing the pressure on fizzy pop by loosening the cap. Could installation be seen as licensed carnival? My next chapter looks at an interactive installation with this question in mind.

Chapter Two
I want to describe and discuss a piece of work by the artist Shilpa Gupta whose interactive video instillation, made for Liverpool’s 2006 Biennial, was shown at FACT on Wood St in Liverpool. I had heard that it was film coupled with computer-manipulated images and programming, that was reactive to a body’s movement within this space.  Carnival time!
We entered (my daughter, aged 21, and myself) via the blacked out corridor light trap, that is usual in video installation. This signalled a transition from the starkness of a brilliant white gallery, the domain of the ‘disembodied eye’ to a dark intimate cave, sensual, tantalising, suggesting something will happen, creating a sense of anticipation. Isn’t it interesting that the words we choose to describe things reveal subconscious thoughts and associations? A dark intimate cave, suggesting female genitalia and the vagina, the word cave, interchangeable with grotto, the root of ‘grotesque’. All this imagery associated with the despised other, the grotesque body, signalling my subconscious placing of the forthcoming experience in an area of hybrid, transgressive, impurity.
On entering this room we were faced, not with the usual dark room and viewing screen central on the opposite wall, but with a quite light room, with two large white screens, one behind us and one in front of us, and a dotted line with instructions not to cross. As we entered the room we also entered the front white screen as silhouettes. It is always interesting to see yourself in a different way in this case as a silhouette. It is a strange feeling. I am aware of myself present in my body, but although I can see part of my own body, like my arms legs. I can’t actually see my physical entirety unless it is reflected back to me. So in this space, I had this internal body sense of myself, and the perfect silhouette reflection of myself. This image is quite different to a shadow, which is often distorted and importantly, attached to ourselves, which our silhouettes were not. It is as if my embodied self becomes the detached eye, and the silhouette becomes my body so now, it is for the moment, as if the high Modernist split is actualised. But this was only the beginning. We were lucky enough to be the only ones in the installation, which gave us the space to play and experiment freely.
Black silhouettes of waves began slowly rolling across the very bottom of the screen in response to our movements.  This was quite fun and we played with our images in the waves, noticing how they stuck to us like glue. Then a small rectangle appeared to the right of my silhouette on the screen and another appeared next to Ali’s. She touched the rectangle with her silhouette hand, and as she did so it became a window with square panes, which opened with a loud clanging bell sound. More rectangles appeared and we touched them all. There were traffic noises, seagulls squawking, cathedral bells ringing peals, sirens, both loud, like an air raid, and ghostly, almost a singing, wailing sound. There was the sound of breaking things like pots or bricks, and the last sound was a harbour bell.
As this ended a flock of black birds flew up diagonally from left to right with a loud sound of flapping wings. The sound of flapping seemed disproportionately close to me in relation to the size of the birds on the screen. It was as if the birds were taking off next to me, but when they appeared on screen they were flights of birds in the distance. I liked this use of sound; it created for me a feeling of depth and greater movement.  It disrupted my perception of events. The image existing in my mind built partly from the presented image and in main from my life’s experience of birds in flight, seemed to inhabit both the screen, and the space in between. It was as if the birds had flown from my mind as large black crows and across the space to become the visible small flying shapes on the screen. My sense of spatial awareness was disrupted by this, it was definitely not the domain of the ‘disembodied eye’. Then, but for our silhouettes, the screen appeared to be empty, until we noticed a white bird appear and fly across an arm and then disappear. So we spent time moving our bodies to allow the birds to fly up a leg, over our torsos and along an arm.
Just as we were thinking “that was fun and is it finished?” A rectangle appeared around Ali’s upper body so it looked as if she was inside another room or standing at a window.  A little girl’s silhouette appeared next to Ali’s in this window and she said, with an accent that suggested she wasn’t English, “I am your unborn child, of the land you never walked on”.  The atmosphere was instantly transformed from a friendly fun experience to one fraught with emotion and tension for both of us. This child did not exist physically but with her words she had taken us to another level of interaction. The power of words coupled with images, ignite memories of both films, and one’s own life experience.
The window disappeared, as did the girl. We looked at each other “That was freaky” we said.  Then the child ran on from the left followed by another child a boy, I think. They just ran through us and off to the right. I was now totally identified with my silhouette; it had become an extension of me. The little girl re-emerged next to Ali’s silhouette and stood looking at her; she then looked behind her and around her on the ground before reaching out an arm towards Ali. I told Ali to reach out to her and touch her to see what happened, so she did, reluctantly. The girl began dancing round my daughter in a way that felt as if she was interacting with Ali. As when Ali moved she did, if Ali tried to get away from her she followed and continued to dance. It felt as if she was demanding attention from her. But in ‘reality’ (in our physical space), she wasn’t there!  It wasn’t ‘real’, it was an illusion. Just as Ali said she was “about to lose it” as it felt to her “as if the girl would not leave her alone”, the girl came over to me and reached her hand out, so I reached out to her and we danced. Although my daughter and I realised this was an illusion, we were not really interacting with a ‘live person’, there seemed to be a part of us (probably the part that was willing to play and suspend belief) that was transfixed, totally involved with the ‘reality’ of what we were experiencing on the screen. As Chrissie Iles says
“It is this, our ability to invest in the phantasy of projections-somatically, sensorially, conceptually-in conjunction with our commensurate ability to apprehend and partake in them at the same time as spectacle, that forms the contours of a complex prosthetic relation between sense, memory, and technical mediations.”
This investment was apparent when we experimented with how it felt warm when we reached our hands into the space next to us that we could see she occupied on screen.  This was especially strong when just looking at the screen not at the space.  It was a relief when she left.
Then I was hit on the head by a large falling house about a foot square, which looked like a monopoly house,  because it was such an archetypal house shape. I actually jumped and said “ow” as if it really had hit my physical head. Houses then kept dropping from the sky like snow; if they hit your hand you could stop them and have them settle on you like snowflakes, as they built up on the floor you could kick through them like falling leaves. They continued to fall until the screen was filled, and only fragments of our silhouettes were visible. Then the houses disappeared and so did we “Oh is this the end then?” but no it wasn’t, we realised, as another house fell from the sky into the white screen. Were we not to be part of this then? No silhouettes of us visible. We noticed a fragment of black that was not a house and slowly our shapes emerged in fragments. It was disconcerting to have my body fragmented like this, to move my arm physically and have this sensation of movement, but not to see it move on screen. I could see other parts of myself on the screen and move them both in physical space and in digital space. It induced a strange sense of loss in me, a dislocation of my senses, it was unnerving. In the same way as Anselmo’s ‘Invisible’ actualised what it is to be visible by projecting the word onto a part of the body, this was inverting that, this experience was taking away my ‘visible self’. I had been so identified with my silhouette that when it wasn’t there, neither was my sense of physicality. I was disembodied! This experience was challenging my secure bounded self. The houses continued to fall and we were re-built until once again we were fully formed and then the waves came back………. this was the end of the cycle.
I have since been back on my own to this installation with several questions in mind, I wanted to watch other people experiencing this installation and see how they react. I wanted to look at how Shilpa Gupta gets people to interact with this installation and whether the installation would exist without this participation of the audience. I also wanted to consider where this artwork existed.
I watched a middle aged white man on his own, step into the installation.  The waves lapped around his ankles and he stood there watching without moving. He didn’t move much at all throughout the cycle. There was no physical exploration of the images as my daughter and I had done. He was a passive observer, totally bounded, it would seem, by the civilising processes of the bourgeois, that make the ‘correct’ response to situations deemed as ‘risky’ or unclear, that might seem to be “straddling worlds of fairground culture and the higher world of humanistic ethics”  one of self sublimation, closed down detachment.
Viewing from a distance it was interesting to note that the sound from the waves was minimal, and they stayed fairly still, a mound around his feet. This was the first time I had seen the installation since my experience with my daughter and I began to question my recollections of it. The rectangle appeared to his right but he didn’t touch it, and it disappeared without turning into a window.  Another appeared and again he didn’t move so it just disappeared, no noise, no window. There were no more windows in his time with this installation. A small flock of birds flew up with a quiet distant noise of flapping. The rectangle appeared around him and the little girl appeared and said her thing. He continued watching but didn’t move, other than to turn his head when she ran in from the left, followed by the other child. She tried to get him to interact, he didn’t he just watched and it was as if she shrugged her shoulders and walked off without dancing, as if the work turned its back on the man, rejecting him as a partner in the carnival.
I found it fascinating to watch others experience this work, it gave it another dimension. The viewers were viewed, becoming in a way a performance, like a theatre in the round. Who will play with it, how will pairs of people react, is one dominant, the other self-consciousness, or are they childlike in their play. I found it really surprising who did what. Who was willing to transgress boundaries at the invitation of this artwork, and who took the ‘high culture’ stance of detached observation. Keeping themselves separate not getting swept up in the carnival of multiples, of play, the realm of the vulgar throngs, who retained the position of classical, self-regulated individual.
The next people to enter were a couple of middle aged white women. One of the women played with the programme, interacting with the images as they appeared.  With the windows, she found out that if you placed your silhouette hand onto the rectangles, they opened into windows. So she happily chased them, putting out her hand to touch them, as if they were balloons escaping. Her friend was much more reticent but did self-consciously participate, until the little girl came round to dance with her. The lady did not reach out to the child, just stood and looked, so the girl walked by the lady and tried the next person who did reach out to her and so they danced.  It appears that the programme rewards physical interaction by becoming louder, with more images and actions the more the audience physically participates. The programme will run, it seems, but in a much more basic way, when there is little physical movement by the viewer.
Gupta, in this installation, builds her work around audience participation. I was reminded of computer games where you have to find a key to open things, or gain treasure by clicking on images on the screen. If the player doesn’t work out where the buttons or hotspot programmed triggers are that activate other events, then nothing much happens within the game. This installation uses the same principles and encourages exploration and participation as with each new discovery rewards of louder noises and more events are given.
Without the audience there literally would be no artwork. She uses the bodies of the audience,interacting with computer programmed images, to create the dialogue or the story.  In this installation the viewer becomes the completing partner. The space becomes activated by the invitation to play, and the way this sparks off the imagination of the participants…or not in the case of the middle aged man.  He did participate, in as much as he watched it play out in its basic form, and his body was reflected back as silhouette and he was both viewed and the viewer, but for those of us who did participate and explore, speaking for myself, this installation’s unfolding fantasy made a stimulating dynamic experience.
In Shilpa Gupti’s work the notion of the art object as a self-contained discrete object, viewed by the detached disembodied eye, will not work. Distance and neutrality cannot give an understanding of its impact, or its structure, it requires the totality of my self, in order to ‘work’.   Like riding the waltzers at a fair that visits town once a year. The thrill of the ride cannot be explained to someone who wasn’t there, cannot fully be understood by looking at its constituent parts individually, or at a photograph of revellers having fun. This art has to be played with, which requires my embodied sensate presence.

 Conclusion
“Perhaps it is shocking to think of Disneyland in the context of art, but within the narrower practice of installation, it offers an exceedingly apt comparison. There, the visitor is a participant in what Walt Disney, like Kurt Schwitter’s, describes as, a transforming experience: “ Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy”. The themes found at Disneyland offered a new vision of familiar surroundings, while the perambulation of it promoted an interactive and spatial relationship”. 
I think that,as Mark Rosenthal says in his book Understanding Installation Art, it is or has in the past,  been shocking to me to think of Disneyland in the context of ‘art’. Disneyland I used to think is ‘low brow’ entertainment. ‘Art’ with a capital A, is, educational, highbrow, transporting viewers to a higher plane. It talks of the sublime or spiritual, the human condition or comments on the political. It does not have contact with the mundane, impure world outside. The world of the body ‘grotesque’. Without doubt, for me this ‘shock’ resulted in part from the dominance of high Modernist theory, the ‘small voice’ I traced in chapter one, the high Modernist voice, that insists on the sublimation of personal desire, to achieve a disembodied eye and detached aesthetic judgement. This high modernist theory reminds me of Stallybrass and White’s ideas on the split between classical and its ‘despised other’ the body ‘grotesque’ They use Mikhail Bahktin’s writing about the carnival body, being one of protuberances and orifices, of multiples and change, to suggest that this exaggerated symbolism of carnival, came to represent for the bourgeoisie the despised other. They say that the bourgeoisie defined themselves, by the fierce exclusion and demonization, of anything that was considered to be of the ‘body grotesque’ their ‘despised other’.  Dryden a 17th century playwright, used the language of his plays to shame his audience into behaving in a way he deemed appropriate, “Dryden is not so much dividing the audience into two real and opposed kinds, the civilized and the vulgar, as symbolically re-aligning the body and behaviour of each and every one of his listeners into a ‘unified’ and self regulating bourgeois identity…..carried through in a relentless series of exclusions”   This describes a process that was happening in every area of social discourse at this time, and continues  today. The discomfort I have felt at the idea of ‘Art’ being a spectacle and fun to play with can in part be laid at the door of this civilising process.
Michael Fried’s argument against Minimalism utilises the construct of high and low or the classical and the grotesque, placing Minimalism firmly in the low, the arena of the body grotesque, the despised other. The theatricality of Minimalism signified for Fried, the hybridisation of an art form, a mixing of disciplines, impurity, everything that ‘art’ was not supposed to be. Using this construction of high/low head/body split, he was following on a tradition that maintains high culture by the suppression and demonization of low cultural forms, historically the carnival and the fair and more recently Disneyland.
The correspondence between Disneyland, and installation art, and carnival, does not require to large a stretch. Each of them have been considered ‘other’, they all offer certain pleasures suppressed by classical culture, each of them are places of licensed transgression, giving a sense of empowerment, all of them undermine and subvert the traditions of high art.
What is also apparent from my research is that nothing happens in a vacuum. The art gallery, although trying to exclude the outside world, is a part of the world and subject to its influence. The western viewer has become increasingly visually sophisticated, expecting a greater degree of involvement, whether in the art itself, or in the gallery. Technology advances all the time, taking us all to places we have yet to fully understand. The Disney theme park comparison helping to explain, why my generation (born 1962) of gallery goers expect a greater level of interactivity. The development of new technologies and human development studies in the late70’s and early 80’s were a part of the reason museums went interactive. Their displays becoming about experiential learning, rather than the previously cerebral, detached display cases of artefacts, with written information.
Museums and Galleries have become part of the leisure industry as influenced by Disneyland. Art has become entertainment.  Installations, like Shilpa Gupta’s have become subsumed into the mainstream, available to visit for a timed duration and then moving on somewhere else, globetrotting installations, furthering the comparison with the travelling fair. For me the comparison cannot help but be made between this idea of travelling installations, which have performative and theatrical elements and in which the public can play, are encouraged to play, and the carnival. Installation then could be seen as a fragment of carnivalesque practice, a licensed site for transgressing conventions. It is useful to remember that originally Fried saw the breaching of boundaries, by literalist art, challenging his authority, and by extension, that of the dominant culture. Now in this age of travelling exhibitions, interactive installation as a permitted fragment of carnival, I see the dominant culture of capitalism using interactive installation as an attraction, licensing transgression within their bounds.
What became evident, from my reading, was there is not one definitive history of installation, or for that matter one definitive description of installation, but many. Art history is no longer thought of as a continuum of artistic movements one informing and arising from another in a progressive line. Rather it seems that art theory recognises that there are a multitude of approaches, with art movements often happening at the same time. As Francis Morris says in the introduction to the new scheme of displays in the Tate Moderns Handbook ” …acknowledges that history is not static: hierarchies and interpretations of which we felt certain can be upset and reconsidered in the wake of subsequent developments “  Which, I felt, had given me permission follow my own line of interest.
This has been a useful exploration for me, clarifying and developing my understanding of the ‘art interface’. This dynamic space I first became aware of in installation art, and subsequently in my own work, an active interface, when we understand interface to mean as Chrissie Iles says, “a surface-physical and or conceptual-where two or more biological and technological) entities meet, …..a relationship of sorts among diverse heterogeneous elements”  I have come to see it as a performance, by definition theatrical, the re-integration mind and the traditionally despised other, my sensate body.  The carnivalesque inversion of Fried’s art/non-art polarity has enabled me to explore and celebrate the kind of ‘art’ I enjoy. Presentness may be grace to paraphrase Michael Fried, but theatricality is fun!