more on installation...

Wow Emma, thanks for the full report, having had to duck out it was good to get caught up.
I was really interested to read about the conversation about writing as installation that had stemed from Richards comment on the problems with writing about installation art. This is obviously something close to my own heart having tried to give a seminar paper about the installation art expereince. What i was trying to open up room for in that account of installation art was the suggestion that installation art as a medium centralises the expereince of the viewer - ie it is in part this expereince that produces the work- the work is incompete without this element. In contrast to the accounts of representational practice ( ie landscape art /writing what ever) this sort of understanding of the art experience develops the viewer ( and/or reader if we are to consider Ian's suggestion of writing as installation) as always already ( to use that hidously overused phrase (sorry!!)) a part of the work. Thus there is never one complete interpretation/expereince, in fact the work does not exist until it is experienced. Given these medium conditions - which are so integral to installation art - there is no sense in which anyone who was writing about installation art ( and any art object or art history since Duchamp) would really desire to produce anything other than a partial account of installation practice, the problem obviously comes when there is an expection of somehow a complete account, or when the writing is such that it develops the rhetroic of a complete and authoriatian account. The ethics of this move mean that the expereince of the work is one in which responsiblity for its interpretation lies as much with the viewer (or reader ) as with the artist ( or the writer ) ( lets get rid of that intentionalist fallacy ! ). Anyway- sorry for the blurb but i was really annoyed to have missed this bit of the discussion as this intersection of ethnogprahy and art is prescily where my interests lie and i had been thinking quite a bit about the way in which this conception of installation practice works with so many of these problems of representation (which is really obviously really given the history of the medium) and actually without the content of the work risks becoming just another rant on the mis-understandings of certain 'ideas' of practices other/ in addition to representation...

Anyway- sorry to be so all over the place and random, if anyone wants to talk about this more please let me know, i have found nothing as yet ( apart from my own witterings) on writing installation expereinces, but more generally on writing the art expereince with a particual post structualist bent see James Elkins book 'Our beautiful dry and distant texts'. Thanks for reading hatti