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272 Installation Media activists to cover the 2002 antiwar demonstra- tions, it was long relatively unknown in the INSTALLATION ART MEDIA Japanese activist community. It finally gained some recognition for G8 protest reporting and Installation art describes artworks that the audi- collaborating with the Japanese G8medianetwork ence physically enters or that take into account in 2008. the physical and conceptual relationships among Challenges faced by IMCs in Asia include lan- objects, the space in which they are arranged, and guage barriers within local collectives (e.g., IMCjp the body of the viewer. This admittedly broad members include Japanese-only and English-only definition suggests the sheer diversity of artworks speakers) and Anglo-centrism within the Indymedia grouped under this category. Installations may network. The latter has manifested itself techno- employ ordinary or “found” objects; industrially logically in software hard to adapt to Asian scripts fabricated materials; traditional visual art forms; (IMC Burma lost momentum before successfully organic material such as soil, blood, or food; addressing this issue on their site), including the screen-based media like film or ; the per- global IMC mailing list server, and organization- forming ; lighting and sound ; and even ally by a process for joining the network that scent. They may be full of sensory stimuli or visu- requires a high level of English skill. A frustrated ally restrained, even nearly invisible. Installations Taiwanese activist wryly signed his postings to the may transform a gallery’s white cube into a seem- New-IMC list (which is responsible for accredita- ingly autonomous world or employ the social, tion), “Don’t hate the English, be English,” a take- physical, and historic characteristics of the place off on the Indymedia slogan “Don’t hate the where they are produced, as site-specific artworks media, be the media.” do. Some installations may invite extended, indi- Another issue in some places (e.g., Korea) was vidual contemplation, whereas others spur the “IMColonialism.” English-speaking activists from audience to group action. the global network often offered help with setting Thus, it is impossible to speak in broad strokes up local IMCs but sometimes went too far in tak- about installation art. The term itself was not even ing the initiative without understanding local settled until the late 1980s, when major museums conditions. East Asian IMC activists tried to con- began to to produce original nect regionally, for example, through Asia-Pacific works, often with very high production costs, for meetings, the IMC-Oceania project, and personal their galleries. Today, installation art often calls to contacts. mind large-scale, museum-based, and highly capi- talized projects that require small armies of techni- Gabriele Hadl cal advisers, production assistants, and professional fabricators. However, installation art has a much See also Alternative Media; Alternative Media (Malaysia); Anarchist Media; Indymedia (The Independent Media longer history, beginning with some of the politi- Center); Indymedia and Gender; Internet Social cized cultural movements of the early 20th century, Movement Media (Hong Kong) continuing through the unmarketable, ephemeral “environments” of experimental artists of the 1950s and 1960s, and coming into its own in the Further Readings 1970s and 1980s alongside artistic engagement in Downing, J. D. H. (2003). The IMC movement beyond feminist, gay rights, and antiwar movements. “the West.” In A. Opel & D. Pompper (Eds.), While canonical art histories tend to downplay Representing resistance: Media, civil disobedience, and the ways that some installation art has furthered the global justice movement (pp. 241–258). Westport, political goals, tensions between art’s symbolic and CT: Praeger. sensory roles and the more goal-directed needs of Hadl, G., & Huang, S. (2007). IMC Taiwan (2003–5): social movements have often complicated attempts Archeology and memory. Interlocals. http://interlocals for artists to work within groups dedicated to .net/?q=node/144 achieving political change. Particularly in the Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Installation Art Media 273

Euro-American tradition, which has traditionally senses—all of which would prove highly influen- prized artwork for its alleged universalism and tial in installation art. Other groups were transcendence of time, place, and politics, artists active in Europe and the United States and devel- are often ambivalent about “instrumentalizing” oped techniques that would revolutionize graphic their work in pursuit of specific social aims. Some design, literature, dance, and . of the most successful examples of art installations However, the movement is better characterized in social movements have involved the politics of as cultural rather than political. Although politi- representation: Marginalized groups have often cal issues were fiercely debated in the pages of successfully used , and installation art various Dada publications, relatively few artists in particular, to demand cultural and political vis- outside of the Berlin group became directly ibility on their own terms. Finally, the existence of involved with antiwar organizing. Dada’s most a distinct genre known as “installation art” may be savage critiques were often leveled at the art coming to a close, as artists today are increasingly world itself. In 1917, famously employing varied strategies in their work, of which entered a urinal (which he purchased at a hard- recognizable art objects and art experiences are ware store and signed with a pseudonym) into a only a small part. New York that had claimed it would exhibit all entries. Whether offended by the or unwilling to accept an industrial A Prehistory of Installation Art object as art, the artists running the exhibition Although the term installation art did not even chose to hide Fountain, as it was satirically titled. exist 50 years ago, art historians have traced it to Duchamp had exposed the exclusivity and conser- early 20th-century European avant-gardes. The vatism of even the self-described avant-garde. term avant-garde originally meant a small, highly After the Dada movement disintegrated in the skilled group of soldiers who would explore the early 1920s, a former member of Berlin Dada, terrain ahead of a larger army. In a cultural sense, , began what some art historians avant-garde refers to people and artworks that are consider the first installation. Between 1923 and challenging, innovative, or ahead of their time. 1937, when he fled the Nazis, Schwitters slowly Traditionally the avant-garde existed in conflict transformed several rooms of his home in with established social norms and dominant aes- Hannover, , into a total sculptural envi- thetics. Although some were committed to “art for ronment he called the Merzbau. Using largely low- art’s sake,” other avant-gardes extended their cri- cost materials such as newspaper, cloth, wire, dead tiques to more political issues. The tension between flowers, and glue, Schwitters obsessively con- the purely aesthetic and more politicized approaches structed and re-constructed a highly personal art- to art continues. work resembling at times a cave or cathedral and The Dada movement, which arose in Europe in featuring intimate grottoes and shrines. Although reaction to World War I’s colossal industrialized a very private viewing experience that did not slaughter, is one avant-garde associated with the address the world beyond the studio, Merzbau prehistory of installation art. Dada artists attacked contrasted with the European system of valuing the basic philosophies of the warring European artworks that was based on mastery, expen- empires, rejecting their official values of beauty, sive materials, and, above all, the ability for collec- art, and rationalism for their inability to direct tors to buy and sell art objects. It would inspire away from war. Radical experiments in music, later artists who became discouraged with art’s poetry, and theater were performed at the Cabaret role as a capitalist commodity. Voltaire, which opened in 1916 in Zurich, Some artists associated with Dada, especially Switzerland, a neutral country. These from the Paris group, went on to work as Surrealists often mined the detritus of an emerging consumer in the 1920s and 1930s. also viewed culture, obscured the boundaries between audience Enlightenment rationalism as a root of violence and performer, and engaged all the spectators’ and oppression, but the Surrealists more often Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

274 Installation Art Media used traditional art media, such as ; the Eiffel Tower. Fabricated of steel and inspired acknowledged a relationship to ; and by what Tatlin described as a “machine aesthetic,” created work that was often beautiful. Surrealists the tower would have symbolized the strength of were fascinated with the power of the unconscious the new Soviet Union’s industrial workers, even as mind and the theories of Sigmund Freud. Several it also provided space for the public meetings and Surrealist manifestos explicitly linked the libera- screenings that the new citizen needed. The uto- tion of the imagination with political revolution, pian project suggested that space could embody and many Surrealists were actively involved in revolutionary values and actually produce new communist, leftist, and anticolonial political move- kinds of social relationships for the viewers who ments. The Surrealists were aware of the tensions entered it—an idea that continues to inspire some between their political sympathies and the presti- installation artists today. gious art venues for their work. They began exhib- The fate of highlights some of iting artwork in ways that they hoped would the tensions that often have complicated artists’ liberate the imagination and at the same time dis- attempts to work with social and political move- rupt market-oriented art spectatorship and collec- ments. The belief that people need to be “shocked” tion. In 1938, the International Surrealist Exhibition comes across as more than a little arrogant. Not in Paris brought together more than 300 individual everyone wanted to be shocked—including many works in a specially designed environment now ranking Soviet officials. Constructivism and other widely seen as a precursor to later installation art. avant-garde approaches were often criticized for and were hung tightly together being too difficult for the common people to on walls, doors, and pedestals while found objects understand, too similar to Western “bourgeois” were strewn around the gallery. In one corner, art, and too abstract to succeed as propaganda. Salvador Dalí installed a pond, complete with Constructivism was eventually banned, along with water lilies, moss, and reeds, beside an antique- any other experimental art, when Joseph Stalin style bed with rumpled sheets. Like later installa- declared Socialist the Soviet official artis- tion art, the exhibition engaged all the senses; the tic style in 1932. smell of roasting coffee wafted through the space This conflict is often replayed when artists work while recordings of screaming psychiatric patients with campaigns for social and political change, assaulted spectators’ ears. To top it all off, the which sometimes want artists to spread their mes- exhibition opening was held in complete darkness, sage engagingly and understandably. Politically and visitors were given flashlights to explore the sympathetic artists, especially those trained in space and view the artwork. The exhibition inten- Europe or the United States, are often concerned tionally overloaded the senses and provoked the that nuance and subtlety will be lost in the process. subconscious mind to overcome habitual ways of Often, like the Zurich Dadaists, artists are more thinking, viewing, and feeling. interested in critiquing the underlying structures of Another avant-garde movement, Constructivism, belief that they see as producing the social condi- arose in Russia in support of the Bolshevik tions they abhor than intervening directly to Revolution’s official goals of social and economic change those conditions. This tension has pro- equality. Constructivist artists were dedicated to duced a subtle but important difference between finding a visual and material vocabulary for “activist” and “critical” art. expressing communist values and producing a revolutionary consciousness. They believed that Critique or Activism? the bold, unfamiliar language of abstraction and could shock the viewer into seeing the Western aesthetic theory has evaluated artwork on world in a fresh way, and they produced countless narrow assumptions, usually ignoring the very propaganda posters and advertisements for new, specific cultural origins of these assumptions. state-run enterprises. Most often identified as a Works of art were to be beautiful, without being precursor of installation art is Vladimir Tatlin’s merely pretty, and certainly not cute. Good art was proposed Monument for the Third International, autonomous of context, specific knowledge, or which would have stood 100 meters higher than any special relationship to the audience. The best Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Installation Art Media 275 art was believed to be transcendent and universal: thereby obliterating the distinction between per- A masterpiece would be so judged in any time and former and audience. Although there was rarely place. Clearly, artwork produced within a social topical political content to the work and the degree movement could clash with these assumptions. An of participation remained controlled by the , artwork addressing injustice may very well not be Kaprow sought to physically, intellectually, and beautiful. A play written for an activist organiza- emotionally engage the viewer. He implicitly sug- tion is not autonomous, and a poster addressing a gested that a participatory art was more populist topical or local issue may not aspire to be univer- and democratic than an art object meant to be sal. Although these assumptions have been roundly appreciated from afar, and he traced a connection rejected, most recently by feminism, queer theory, between his projects of the early 1960s and the and postcolonial criticism, they remain so deeply counterculture that arose soon afterward. Like rooted that they continue to influence even their Adorno, however, Kaprow preferred art that enacted critics. a political stance through its form rather than pro- The notion of artistic autonomy has been par- moted a political position through its content. ticularly persistent. Cultural theorist Theodor For some artists, however, the Vietnam War, Adorno provided one of the most influential anticolonial, and Black Power movements, the Marxist defenses of artistic autonomy when he New Left, second-wave feminism, and the hippie criticized political artists for presenting didactic, counterculture were too urgent to be ignored. By propagandistic work that oversimplified political 1969—the year after the assassinations of Martin complexity, debased the intelligence of the audi- Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the same ence, and opted for a tidy dualism of good and year that the Stonewall raid touched off the gay evil. For Adorno, artistic autonomy could be liberation movement—many artists had come to repurposed for liberatory ends, a way to perpetu- see themselves as a political force. Organizations ally interrogate society, to ask the questions that like the Art Workers’ Coalition, the Guerilla Art unsettled one’s own political allies—in other Action Group, the Black Emergency Cultural words, an open-ended “criticality” over a topically Coalition, Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam, specific “activism.” Adorno argued that formal and the Women Artists in Revolution were founded, innovations were important because they unsettled and members often began their activism by sin- received beliefs. gling out the part of the power structure that most Meanwhile in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of immediately touched artists’ lives: major art insti- young, largely male, American artists were redis- tutions. Over the next few years, these and other covering the work of earlier European avant- grassroots groups sponsored frequent protests, gardes and beginning to create expanded sculptural targeting museums with defense industry ties, “environments” that blurred the line between exhibitions that excluded women and minorities, viewer and participant. In the late 1950s, Allan and a system of sales that enriched art galleries at Kaprow began to create large, sculptural assem- the expense of artists. For many of these politicized blages composed of , found objects, and artists, the only rational decision was to abandon other low-cost materials. Over time, the assem- traditional forms like painting and that blages required greater physical engagement by the could easily be sold to hang in a million-dollar viewer and are now seen as among the first exam- home or become just another part of an investment ples of installation art. In Penny Arcade (1957), portfolio. viewers had to move and peer around strips of As an art form that seemed to resist commodifi- cloth hung in front of wall-hung pieces; in Words cation, installation art proliferated alongside other (1962), viewers physically entered a two-room developing forms like art, , space and were asked to rearrange words painted process art, and earth art. New, artist-run galleries, on cardboard piece hung on the gallery wall. often operated collectively, opened in former Around the same time, Kaprow began to pro- industrial lofts, church basements, and temporary duce what he called Happenings, or loosely storefronts. Installation art seemed to embody pre- scripted events in which the audience was asked to cisely the revolution in form that Adorno advo- perform particular tasks singly or as a group, cated. Whereas “autonomous” paintings and Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

276 Installation Art Media sculptures existed apart from the viewer as “mas- California Institute of in 1971. Chicago terpieces,” installation art required a physical and Schapiro wanted to create a collaborative, encounter between the viewer and the artwork. mutually nurturing and emotionally responsive This dependence of the art on viewer participation environment in keeping with feminist values, in was associated with a culture of openness and a opposition to the highly competitive, individualis- politics of radical democracy. tic ethos of mainstream art schools. The program Moreover, by the early 1970s, poststructuralist used techniques developed by women’s “con- theory had begun to identify Western culture’s sciousness-raising” groups and encouraged stu- enthronement of vision over the other senses with dents to explore the political aspects of their a drive to impose order through differentiation, personal lives in their artwork. control, and domination. Installation art’s empha- In 1971–1972, the feminist art class took over sis on multisensory, embodied experience implicitly an abandoned Los Angeles mansion slated for challenged this. Finally, the immersive quality of demolition. Under the direction of Chicago and installations meant that there was no single “cor- Schapiro, 21 female students transformed the rect” perspective from which they could be viewed; entire building into a cooperative installation each individual viewer had his or her own unique called Womanhouse. The installation explored the experience of the . This was in keeping gendered nature of domestic space, simultaneously with attacks against the supposed “universality” of challenging patriarchal ideas of “a woman’s place,” Western culture leveled by feminist and anticolo- celebrating women’s bodily experiences, and pro- nial movements. Installation art seemed an almost claiming the creativity of feminine-associated art intrinsically “critical” form in Adorno’s sense. forms such as embroidery, cooking, lacemaking, However, even during the height of the ferment, and quilting. relatively few artists employed explicitly political In Nurturant Kitchen, by Vicki Hodgetts, Susan themes or content in their work or became politi- Frazier, and Robin Weltsch, every surface of the cally involved in other ways. Perhaps Adorno may room was painted pink, even the appliances, to have reinforced many artists’ individualistic symbolize the kitchen as the ultimate feminine impulses by giving them a political rationale to space. fried eggs were fastened to the ceiling make work the art establishment would embrace. and morphed into breasts on the walls to symbol- The artists who most fully realized the potential ize the dual sexual and caregiving roles assigned to of installation art to work reciprocally with social women. As in Kaprow’s environments, visitors movements were those for whom the were invited to interact with the objects: The was not a safe bastion. Women, gays and lesbians, breasts were soft and spongy to the touch, and the and people of color faced routine discrimination in kitchen drawers could be opened to reveal collaged the art world in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, imagery of exotic vacation locales. and the work of these artists demonstrates that Another installation was Faith Wilding’s Womb political installation art can be both formally inno- Room, a much more minimal environment, which vative and activist. These artists used installation cocooned the visitor in exquisite crochet work and to liberate their own consciousness from oppres- invited contemplation. ’s own contri- sion and to articulate an identity in opposition to bution, Menstruation Bathroom, confronted the the stereotyping and discrimination of the domi- viewer with a visceral tableau crammed with thou- nant culture. sands of feminine hygiene products, many of which appeared to be used. Chicago’s bathroom was particularly unsettling to many visitors at the Womanhouse and the Feminist Art Program time, and her insistence on locating feminist poli- Recognizing that female art students were often tics in the bodily experiences of womanhood has openly ridiculed and harassed by their male col- been criticized more recently as heavy-handed and leagues and professors, the artist Judy Chicago dangerously simplistic. founded the first feminist art programs in the Nevertheless, Womanhouse was a powerful United States, at California State University–Fresno example of feminist pedagogy that transformed the in 1970 and, with Miriam Schapiro, at the lives of many of the female students. The project, Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Installation Art Media 277 visited by nearly 10,000 people and reviewed in Cultural de la Raza. The group, which included Time magazine, provided a powerful set of images dozens of collaborators over the years, organized and stories that reinforced the work of feminist scores of events on the U.S.–México border between organizers in other sectors. 1984 and 2000 to address issues of migration, binational culture, immigrant rights, and the mili- tarization of the border. BAW/TAF sponsored and Chicano and produced installations, , , the Border Arts Workshop direct actions, and public dialogue that brought The Chicano art movement was another artist together artists, writers, activists, scholars, and effort that grew from a broader social and political ordinary people from both sides of the border. struggle. The term Chicano is used to describe Their “artwork” was as much organizing experi- politicized Mexican Americans. It connotes identi- ences and discussions as it was producing objects. fication with one’s Mexican, Spanish, and The BAW/TAF was less interested in “shocking” Indigenous heritage in opposition to accepting the the viewer than in using accessible images, forms, categories of White America (such as Hispanic) or and experiences to generate dialogue around press- the pressure to assimilate. The movement began in ing social issues. the mid-1960s when activists supporting United Farm Workers’ labor struggles began producing Artists and the AIDS Crisis graphics. The art movement grew quickly as both vernacular and college-trained artists used visual One of the most serious social issues of the 1980s means to express frustration and rage at a deeply was the AIDS pandemic, yet in the early years of the racist society and inspire others to resist. disease there was next to no public dialogue about Like feminist artists, Chicanas/os wanted to it. The disease had claimed 30,000 lives in the celebrate the popular, culturally specific visual United States (and tens of thousands more around expressions that were devalued by mainstream the world) by the time then-president Ronald aesthetics. Chicano art embraced so-called low Reagan publicly uttered the word AIDS in 1986. In culture—the world of advertising imagery, bright 1987, activists, frustrated with previous efforts to colors, plastic knick-knacks, and “folk” art draw attention to and destigmatize the disease, motifs—and created work that was a celebration founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, bet- of life and a nose-thumbing to middle-class White ter known as ACT UP. ACT UP was dedicated to ideas of taste and decorum. While much of the art using direct action to end the AIDS crisis. took the forms of painting, posters, and The New Museum of invited sculpture, many installations were also created by ACT UP to produce an installation about their artists who identified with the Chicana/o art move- work. They created Let the Record Show in the ment, especially Chicana feminists. Artists like museum’s storefront window to frame the disease Amalia Mesa-Baines were inspired by the tradition as a political and human rights issue, not a matter of home altar-making that was an important part of personal failing. They featured an enlarged pho- of Mexican religious expression, often tended by tograph of Nazi officials at the Nuremberg Trials, women. In An Ofrenda for Dolores del Río (1984), with cutouts of U.S. officials placed in the role of Mesa-Baines placed the 1940s Hollywood film defendants. Each figure had a marker at its feet star at the center of an elaborate altar festooned with a quotation reflecting a “do nothing” or with lace and covered in candles and ritual objects, “blame the victim” approach to the crisis. An LED celebrating her as a bilingual, binational heroine, display cycled through statistics about the disease. whose successful career on both sides of the border The installation, visible to the public even without suggests cultural and personal possibilities beyond entering the museum, was so successful that mem- assimilation. bers of ACT UP created their own group in 1988 The Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte and began to produce art about AIDS exclusively. Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) was an outgrowth of the This group, called Gran Fury, primarily produced Chicana/o art movement founded in San Diego in graphic art and leveraged its good relationships 1984 by the artist David Avalos and the Centro with major art institutions to gain access to public Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

278 Installation Art Media spaces, such as billboards, that they never would project addressed the early anthropologists’ prac- have been able to get on their own. tice of kidnapping Indigenous people and forcing Gran Fury was not the first artistic group to them to live in displays, but it also questioned how address the AIDS crisis. The collaborative effort far the museum and its spectators had moved known as Group Material, initiated in 1980, on—especially when legal protection for sacred became known for their installations and public Native American gravesites was not yet estab- actions on many topics, including what they saw lished. Viewers expecting a mannequin were as the interlocking issues of AIDS, the crisis of shocked that Luna’s figure was alive and quite affordable housing, and the future of democracy. unsettled when he reversed the power of their gaze Group Material’s work took the form of visually by looking back at them. Luna’s piece was so spare installations that joined together documents, influential that it was restaged in 2008 by Erica videos, slogans, pictures, art objects, and consumer Lord (Athabaskan/Dena’ina). Her reenactment, products that revealed various aspects of the com- which was presented with Luna’s cooperation at plex issues they addressed. Like the Border Arts the National Museum of the American Indian, Workshop, Group Material transformed cura- brought issues of gender to the forefront while tion—the selection of objects and programming of focusing attention on whether anthropologists’ events—into its own form of art. Although their and museum practices had in fact improved. work was much less visceral than Gran Fury’s, Group Material believed that the process of sort- The End of Installation Art? ing through the information they presented and engaging in discussion, even argument, in the All of these installation artworks underscore the events they put on was itself a of the demo- near impossibility of differentiating installation cratic process that is necessary to address any artwork from other forms of artistic expression. political and social crisis. Were the BAW/TAF and Group Material , organizers, or artists? Were Gran Fury and Heap of Birds’ signs graphic design, intervention, or Indigenous Rights installation? Was Artifact Piece an installation or a By the 1980s, university-trained American Indian performance? As installation art has been main- artists were beginning to receive some recognition streamed by museums interested in introducing from art institutions for work that drew on instal- contemporary art to patrons who want a good lation, performance, and video art and addressed show, it has become harder to find someone who issues of representation and politics. Native artists self-identifies as an “installation artist.” Rather like Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/ than play taxonomic games, more and more artists Arapaho) used the opportunity to openly contest are taking a tactical, even pragmatic, approach to how American history has been told and for their work. whom. Heap of Bird’s 1990 project Building The Argentinean artist group Ala Plástica Minnesota consisted of 40 signs commemorating (Plastic Wing) is exemplary of this approach. From the 40 Dakota warriors executed by Abraham 1991, the artists were active in a small town just Lincoln in 1862 and 1865 for fighting in the south of . It is one of the most pol- Dakota War. The bilingual signs, in English and luted spots in the world. Rather than presenting Dakota, visually mimicked the look of historical alarming images to shock a distant audience into markers and were installed in a historic district of action, critiquing the dualistic man versus nature Minneapolis as a reminder of the genocidal price thinking underlying environmental problems, or of American “progress.” producing experiences to enable people to think Other Native artists produced work blurring differently about ecology, Ala Plástica worked the boundaries between performance and installa- with their neighbors—fishermen and farmers, sci- tion. James Luna (Luiseño) is best known for his entists and teachers—to create programs that work Artifact Piece (1985–1987), a “living installation” simultaneously on the level of policy and meta- in which he donned a loin cloth and lay in a glass phor. For example Junco/Emergent Species (1995) display case in San Diego’s Museum of Man. The was a project that reinvigorated the ability of a Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Internet and the Fall of Dictatorship (Indonesia) 279 particular reed to purify coastal waters. Following Suderburg, E. (Ed.). (2000). Space, site, intervention: extensive research, the native reed species was Situating installation art. Minneapolis: University of replanted, community organizing was undertaken Minnesota Press. to secure continued local government support, and educational programming was undertaken to renew the local people’s connection with the plant, INTERNET AND THE FALL OF which had been a significant part of Indigenous life for hundreds of years. The installation art portion DICTATORSHIP (INDONESIA) of the project involved site-specific, ephemeral constructions of reeds on the site, as well as a gal- In the mid-1990s in Indonesia, the political opposi- lery installation that presented visitors with the tion’s uses of the Internet even managed to help many layers and strategies of the project. topple a strongman (General Suharto) who, until his However, Ala Plástica believed that all of their unanticipated resignation in May 1998, had been work, not merely the portion that can be exhib- Asia’s longest reigning postwar ruler. He had seized ited, is art. They insisted that art constitutes a dis- power in 1965 with U.S. support and then engi- tinctive mode of engaging with human and natural neered a bloodbath of over half a million opponents, realities. Unlike Adorno, they insisted that this real and supposed. His regime was notorious for its change be made manifest in results. Artists like Ala corruption, and his army for savage suppression of Plástica are taking installation art’s promise of dissent, especially during its attempt to annex east- democracy, multisensory experience, and attention ern Timor (now the nation of Timor Leste) after to multiple perspectives and turning it into a Portuguese colonial rule collapsed there in 1974. method for aesthetic engagement, with the physi- In the 1990s, however, Indonesian students, cal installation only one outcome among many, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and jour- and possibly not the most important one. nalists marked a new era by speeding the regime’s It is premature to declare the “end” of installa- downfall. Intense discussions about democracy tion art. However, it is likely more and more art- and human rights were held in cyberspace and ists will find ways to reinvent both art and social then disseminated through photocopying down- movements through their work, perhaps finally loaded materials. Many militant actions were also overcoming the impasses of art and politics that coordinated on the Internet. marked the 20th century. As a result, endeavoring to keep a grasp on the Internet became close to an obsession for the Sarah Kanouse regime. Try as it might, the state apparatus seemed unable to predict or contain its rapid growth. The See also Anarchist Media; Environmental Movement other crucial if paradoxical aspect of the situation Media; Feminist Media: An Overview; Indigenous Media in Latin America; Performance Art and Social was that in Indonesia—even up to 2010—the Movement Media: Augusto Boal Internet was still free of censorship, though cer- tainly not of political surveillance. Thus, although activists belonging to the “illegal” faction of the Further Readings opposition Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) might be living clandestinely and under assumed Ala Plástica: http://www.alaplastica.org.ar Ault, J. (Ed.). (2002). Alternative New York, 1965–1985. names, they were free to convey their propaganda Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. on the web, and even insult the head of the armed Bishop, C. (2005). Installation art: A critical history. forces and the president. New York: Routledge. This meant that notwithstanding the draconic Gaspar de Alba, A. (1998). Chicano art: Inside/outside Anti-Subversion Law, a small desktop or laptop the master’s house. Austin: University of Texas Press. combined with a telephone connection enabled Lippard, L. (1984). Intersections. In Flypunkter/Vanishing them to speak their minds without much fear of point. Stockholm, Sweden: Moderna Museet. official retribution. Their words and ideas could Reiss, J. H. (1999). From margin to center: The spaces of travel throughout the country and even beyond its installation art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. borders. Many came to use a number of simple but