Installation Art

Installation Art

Art and design

Thierry De Duve

EX SITU

When a site is defined as being the harmony of place, space and scale it must be recognised that history of modern sculpture, hardly heroic, is based on the distressing acknowledgement there are no more sites.  Sculpture of this century are an attempt to reconstruct the notion of site from the standpoint of having acknowledged its disappearance. In this sense the site of all in situ art is a non site. With harmony of place space and scale doomed to fail as harmony in the work can only be established between two factors while the third is relinquished. What has been sacrificed finds itself redefined and rein scribed, having acknowledged its failure – a true in situ art.

Sacrificing place, Linking Space and Scale

The Athens charter, which gave its ideological coherence to the international style, therefore proposed a modernist doctrine which firmly linked space and scale but at the detriment of place. Everything that tied architecture to local tradition, culture and ground, to a non-universalistic idiom, and vernacular, was repressed. Behind the loss of place was to be found the idealistic hope of getting rid of private land ownership.

Sacrificing Space, Linking Place and Scale

Barnett Newman explains his 1953 synagogue project as his purpose to create a place, not an environment. His ‘here II’ project can be seen successful in beginning able to abstract a site from space. Consisting of 3 vertical planks set into a truncated pyramids which sit on a think jagged edged slab of steel the way the base has been cut already suggesting that it has been torn away from its environment highlighted further as the sculpture is slightly raised above the ground making it independent from every situation. They transport there place with them while autonomy to careful gauging of their scale exceeding human height, glorifies man Therefore sacrificing space while linking place and scale.

Sacrificing scale, linking space and place

Constantin Brancusi often made his sculptures over again occasionally varying their proportions, often varying their proportions, often varying their scale but he was reluctant to let them out of his studio, which he considered the natural place of the production. Brancusi continually photographed his work varying the arrangement lighting and size of prints.  Insisting on his studio becoming a museum so the pieces could be exhibited exactly how they were made and so scale was scarified. The sculptures did not refer any ideal proportions of a particular type but to the bodies of people who were invited and allowed  to walk around the clustered studio existing in the same space the artist. When the pieces were removed from the studio they adapted to a new place, retaining the flexibility they had in the studio, and not refer not to human scale but to the local space.