Problems with installation art

Installation art can leave little room for the viewer to develop their own response, because the script has already been written. Some become almost more oppressive experiences than the simpler act of considering a painting on a wall.

Other recent works further illustrate the problems. Visitors appeared delighted. A ceramics workshop had been set up on the ground floor of the gallery as a space to teach people how to make pots and bricks and other useful things. Just as with melodies, visual images stick with us more than just words. Most artists are very aware of this power that art contains, which is why so many use art to express themselves, make a statement, or, like the ones below, illicit movement for a cause.

A few of the artists below have even centered most of their art around a single cause. Some of the causes below involved a group of artists who donated their time to help an organization raise awareness. All involve beautiful art that really makes viewers stop and think about making the world a better place.

And if you feel moved by any of the causes below, be sure to visit the site and find how you can help. The design layout took her only 30 minutes to engineer and 9 hours to create it live at the WORKS San Jose Gallery using non-toxic, water-based body paint. Merry enjoys using humans for her art, simply because a greater connection is made between viewer and a living, breathing human art piece.

This particular piece she designed for Beyond the Four Walls, a social business venture for empowering women in Nepal. The organization sets up Internet cafes the girls can run and, at the same time, also have access to online educations and the ability to launch online businesses. Named after a rescued cat, this public art initiative aims to raise awareness for animal and child abuse and domestic violence.

Boatright explains how research has shown how abuses of children, animals, and spouses are related. When you find one, you will often find another. A portion of every sale goes to Water. Renown, talented artists from all over the world create the designs for these iPhone 4, 4s, 5, and 5s cases, with a few t-shirts available as well. Every five cases gives clean water to one person for life, since Red Dirt proceeds go directly toward building wells in countries including Ethiopia, Uganda, Haiti, and India.

This organization started the campaign for creating awareness of the worldwide water crises. Alongside of the paintings are tours, educational events, and a symposium to inspire fresh views on global water issues.

Rhinoceros are at the edge of extinction due to poaching for sale of the horns. A public artwork in Cape Town aims to bring awareness to the decline of the rhino population by showing people what a poacher sees through a rifle scope before shooting and dehorning a rhino. Public art like these help to get the word out to people who would otherwise never know of existing problems. Canadian visual artist, Sarah Hatton, created different artworks usind dead honeybees from her own colony to raise awareness of the bee colony collapse disorder.

Okereke took these photos of the Festec village in Lagos, Nigeria, a settlement for poorest in the society. Today, we could take that signature as a Duchampian metaphor for the monetising aspect of art rather than the stylistic distinctions that an artist was capable of creating. Duchamp was not wrong either.

In the case of the abandoned pair of spectacles the Duchampian cleverness does not come into play. It is the poetic justice of the audience that makes even the poetry ridiculous.

So who could be blamed for this blind faith of the audience? I would say the whole of the art establishment is still working around the clock to fool the people with such ephemerals. It happened with the Turner Prize in when it was given to Martin Creed for presenting a light bulb going off and on in a gallery corridor. People were offended and they did not know such a work existed.

When the award was declared the gallery going public was demoralized and many of them said that they did not think it was a work of art but in vain. The process had already been on with the Young British Art movement. The Great British art establishment hand in gloves with the Euro-American art establishments had justified pickled animals, sharks, recreation of bed rooms, stitching the names of the sleeping partners on a tent etc, with sheer money power and made the world believe that new art has arrived.

Till the internet revolution India always got watered down versions of the western art both in modernism and post-modernism, without acknowledgement or people knowing the real sources. Today too Indian installation art is much indebted to the western world but the sources are immediately found, as the open sources are available on internet domains.

However, the Indian audience remained by and large skeptical to the installation art practices, especially to the ones that are done for the sake of installations. But our art establishments, both the public and private ones have been fooling the Indian audience with tall claims of installation art.

In India, there was a time when gallerists hated installation art. It was in early s. Vivan Sundaram with his missionary zeal was trying to convert Indian youngsters to his religion of installation art and the new converts were overdoing their new faith. But lo and behold, the things changed by the boom time and after. Journalists in their enthusiasm to celebrate what they did not understand used the word installation to the level of making it so much of a farce that even the local pubs and toddy shops started using the word for anything and everything.

Installation by Sudarshan Shetty. Image courtesy Art India Magazine. I am not against installation art, in fact I am for it to certain extent. My problem here is the way the audience are brainwashed and swayed, and even fooled to make them believe certain art practices are good and ask them give preference to looking at such art.