Installation Art in Close-Up - William Malpas

A huge array of contemporary artists are studied and illustrated in this new book on installation and environmental art, including: Andy Goldsworthy, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, David Nash, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Hans Haacke, Wolfgang Laib, Joseph Beuys, Ad Reinhardt, Louise Nevelson, Tony Cragg, Cornelia Parker, Rebecca Horn, Constantin Brancusi, James Turrell, Donald Judd, Christo, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Irwin, Jannis Kounellis, Donna Dennis, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alan Sonfist, Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Nancy Holt, Walter de Maria, Dennis Oppenheim, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Barbara Kruger.

This is a book of rows of steel cubes, lightning fields, galleries of soil and horses, leaf sculptures, entropy, earthworks, floor-to-ceiling slogans, snow circles, floor spreads, mapworks, walks, reshaped volcanoes, birds in space, fluorescent lamps, TV monitors, mirrors, interior lakes, wrapped buildings, spiral jetties, underground labyrinths, stellar observatories, steam pieces, gardens, embankments, holes, concrete poetry, slate stacks, artificial rivers, and stoves.

An installation is the management of a whole space or environment - floor, walls, ceiling, furnishings, lighting and doorways, as in Rebecca Horn’s Ballet of the Woodpecker, a room full of mirrors, or Sylvia Stone’s Crystal Palace. Artists aren’t content anymore to demurely hang paintings on walls, or peacefully place sculptures on pedestals. Art exhibitions now are an art of environments, with TV monitors, computers, scaffolding, video cameras, supports, bones, wire mesh and a zillion other items everywhere (though video screens are the favourite installation media).

The classic type of installation art developed out of the 1960s, out of performance art, Process art, ABC art, Minimal and Postminimal art. Even today one of the most common forms of installation art is a bunch of TV monitors hooked up together (or often a video projector) showing grainy video images of people accompanied by an atmospheric soundtrack.

Art in Close-Up Series. Bibliography, notes. Fully illustrated. 320pp.