Anxious Spaces: Instillation as Catalyst
Anxious Spaces: Instillation as Catalyst presented six artists working in what Rosalind Krauss called “the expanding field” of sculpture, forging new modes and styles of sculpture. More precisely in the exhibition’s case instillation art, although some of the work is not essentially one or the other, which further marks the “expanded field” that it inhabits.
The work is something like post-unmonumental, less engaged with assemblage in a formal or Rauschenbergian way. However like the unmonumental it works in a multiplicity of forms and his heavily referential and builds something that is semi grandiose. Working in a Post-Historical way the art seems concerned with a fractured, non-directive narrative, while working through a performative lens that acts formally are regardless of their intention as a site for performance.
While some installations act like autonomous objects installed in space and do not require interaction to be ‘activated,’ others “expand” on instillation art, in the way that installation expanded on sculpture, being multifaceted. Serving both as instillations in of themselves and platforms for performance. Desi Santiago’s Head Float is a float cart that has been sculpted into a monolithic, ominous yet spectacular decapitated head acts as both a sculpture on its own and an interactive, performance tool.
The exhibition is a survey in as much as it looks at commonalities in the work of young contemporary artists but operates more as a kind of ‘forecast’ of something that is or could be emerging than a standard cataloging exhibition of an artistic tendency.
Anxious Spaces: Instillation as Catalyst ran from June 15 – July 06, 2014 at The Knockdown Center in New York City, was curated by Alana Heiss and Joe Ahearn as a part of Clock Tower, the innovative New York non profit run by Heiss who founded P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, now MoMA PS1, in 1971 and directed it until 2008.
by Robin Newman
in Focus on the American East
Jul 29, 2014