Installation Art and the Question of Aesthetic Autonomy: Juliane Rebentisch and the Beholder's Share

Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, constituted a threat not only to the medium specificity of modernism, but also to the artwork as self-contained autonomous object. That this threat was real is evidenced by the ubiquitous presence of installation art. While only named as such toward the end of this period, installation art––a label still rejected by some of its founding artists––is exemplary of such hybrid practices. Its supporters and critics drew a contrast between, on the one hand, modernism's aesthetic engagement with a medium-specific (and self-sufficient) “object,” and, on the other hand, new so-called nonaesthetic “practices” engaging the “literal” spectator within her own space, such that the space of the gallery or situation is drawn into the encounter. So, while in 1967, Michael Fried writes disparagingly of the notion that “someone has merely to enter the room in which a literalist work has been placed to become that beholder, that audience of one” (1998, 193), Claire Bishop echoes such a claim when she suggests that “an insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key characteristic of installation art” (2005, 6). Despite diametrically opposed critical evaluations of such situated art, a curious consensus emerges around a beholder whose “share” is characterized as a “being present.”

It is indicative because it allows us to see an interrelation “between the anti-objectivist impulse of theories of aesthetic experience and the impulses toward the dissolution of the concept of the work in artistic practice”; thus, the opposition toward objectivism in a philosopher like Rüdiger Bubner is at the same time a “reaction to the destruction of the traditional unity of the work in contemporary art,” exemplified, of course, by installation art (Rebentisch 2012, 10).

The object is aesthetic not by virtue of qualities that precede the experience of such an object (that is, guaranteed by production), but only when the encounter with the artwork initiates a specifically aesthetic experience. This is not “a return to subjectivism that would sacrifice the art critical discourse and with it any consideration of questions of productions aesthetics” (130–131), but rather a recognition that art critical discourse necessarily follows aesthetic experience and is, thus, constitutive of such aesthetic objects through processes of reflective transformation.

Through such discursivity, Rebentisch seeks to avoid the pitfalls of an objectivism conceived as self-referential, and a subjectivism that posits the subject's aesthetic experience as its own object. She defines the aesthetic experience of installation art as a relation that does, indeed, involve aesthetic distance, in that it “brackets” the object not just as a self-referential “thing,” but through an event-like experience: a bracketing that highlights the performative role of the subject. But here, minimalism/installation art reveals a structural aspect of all art, namely, “the double and reciprocally referential presence of the aesthetic object as thing and as sign, its ‘stage presence’” (69). This constructs a tension between that which is representing and that which is represented: a tension that Fried rejects by claiming a self-sufficiency of the aesthetic object that, in its “instantaneous” appreciation, overcomes any dependence upon the beholder. For Rebentisch, installation art, therefore, transgresses not so much the “idea of autonomous art” but rather “an objectivist misunderstanding of it” (14).

Rebentisch's position offers a rebuttal to those, such as Osborne (2013), who suggests that critically engaged contemporary art is, by definition, non or even antiaesthetic. Indeed, her wider stated project is “to rehabilitate philosophical aesthetics as a critical project” (Rebentisch 2012, 16). At the same time, she maintains that installation art represents an ideological rejection of context-independent art. Rebentisch recasts aesthetic autonomy not as the self-sufficiency of the object, but as a semblance (an experience bracketed from the spheres of practical and theoretical reason) that forces us to confront the ethical and political situation where we encounter the artwork. The situatedness of installation art is thus constitutive of the work's meaning while subject to acts of negation. And here, as Chytry (2014, 469) notes in his review of Rebentisch's book in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, “the social dimension [enters] the experience of art precisely through her insistence on the public discursivity that necessarily completes aesthetic experience as she has defined it.”

Rebentisch's defense against the charge of subjectivity is thus founded upon the fact that the recipient does not exercise “complete control over the subjective powers at work” (271) but is caught in a process of oscillation that cannot be arrested, as we are confronted with our own historically and socially specific assumptions. Here, meaning and material “exist in the aesthetic experience only in dynamic and antagonistic interrelation” (114).

This is where Rebentisch's account, despite a lack of acknowledgment, is reminiscent of aspects of Wolfgang Iser's aesthetics of reception, developed in relation to literature. Both conceive aesthetic distance not as an escape from a work's social and historic context, but as a potential to open up another perspective on what might otherwise be habitual: to confront dominant modes of thought. Here, the recipient's role is performative. Indeed, for Iser, representation is both an act of performance (a bringing forth in its staging something that is not given) and a semblance (denying its status as a copy of reality): “The aesthetic semblance can only take on its form by way of the recipient's ideational, performative activity, and so representation can only come to fruition in the recipient's imagination; it is the recipient's performance that endows the semblance with its sense of reality” (Iser 1989, 245).

While Rebentisch makes no reference to Iser's use of the blank, she does refer to Heidegger's characterization of the “gap” as an “emptiness” that is not a nothing, but a “bringing-forth with implications for establishing a place or situation” (Heidegger 1997, 123–124). Rebentisch emphasizes the antagonistic tendency of such scenes or situations “to fall apart again and again in these very processes, only to be collected and arranged in potentially new and different ways by a renewed reading” (2012, 245–246). But against Rebentisch, I want to argue that this is not merely a process of interpretation, but one of critical retrieval of the creative processes that constitute the work (Wollheim 1980).

One might think of Cornelia Parker's 1991 installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, a suspended reconfiguration of charred fragments from a garden shed blown up by the British Army at Parker's behest. Here, the explosion, the recovery of scattered material, and painstaking configuring of the installation are all crucial to the work's meaning. But this is not merely a case of the reconstruction of the artist's decisions of making. The notion of critical retrieval offers the opportunity to expand upon the role of the imagination in mediating between a work's presentation and reception. For Iser, negativity “initiates those processes of imagination which are necessary to bring out the virtuality of those conditions” (1989, 142) through the use of blanks or disconnections placed within the text by the author. Acts of ideation and projection, while indeterminate, are therefore licensed. Nevertheless, Iser states that the “iconic signs of literature constitute an organization of signifiers which do not serve to designate a signified object, but instead designate instructions for the production of the signified” (1978, 65). This demands the reader/beholder's share. In the case of Parker's installation, it requires us to bring to mind the violence of the nonpresent causal event, which is brought into tension with a static display that is only animated by the beholder's movement. The indexical signs of installation art thus problematize the beholder's orientation in its deepest sense, reflecting not only the work's locative function—by bringing our spatial orientation in play—but also our ideological orientation: enticing us into an encounter organized by the kinetic potential of the space while simultaneously repulsing us (reminding us of our externality to the work's virtual realm).

If aesthetic autonomy is recast as a dynamic operating with respect to the ethical and political situation where we encounter the artwork, then what role does framing play? The question is pertinent, given installation art's immersiveness—a being inside rather than outside the work—and if installation art is to avoid degenerating into the kind of spectacle Rosalind Krauss claims, wrongly (I believe), to be its inherent condition.

And yet site specificity, while a feature of some installations, is not a necessary condition, as Parker's Cold Dark Matter—a work subject to multiple iterations—would attest to. Indeed, the double localization of art (that is, a context sensitivity to host space and the social frameworks that influence reception) is a factor of many works that, while site-responsive, are not specific to any one location.² What is relevant is how, in its framing, installation art acknowledges the configurational properties that structure the relation between what we might call (after Kemp 1998), its inner and outer reality (the apparatus of its conditions of access). This requires us to negotiate the relation between the bracketed world of the artwork and that which it has been bracketed from: the actual world from which it has been separated, rather than self-contained. Here, extrinsic factors intrude but are scrutinized. Indeed, for Iser, there is a “continual oscillation between the bracketed world [of the artwork] and that which it has been separated from” (1989, 239). And far from eschewing framing devices, I believe installation art constructs a tension (or “slippage”) between the literalness of the host space and the work's virtual realm, such that the imagination plays a role in negotiating its degrees of virtuality.

Perhaps recognizing something of the above, Rebentisch reflects upon the fact that it is often not clear which concept of site is being employed in any instance, maintaining that “for art that thematizes its double context, the simple reference to the concrete and social context in which the work stands is insufficient to explain its specific context-reflexivity” (2012, 222). Rather, she maintains that it is only through the specifically aesthetic engagement with aesthetic objects that the concept of the work is “internally tied to that of aesthetic experience” (233). This demands aesthetic distance, and hence some notion of framing. Rebentisch cites Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “What is here called figure, Gestalt, is always to be thought in terms of the particular placing (Stellen) and framing or framework (Ge-stell) as which the work occurs when it sets itself up and sets itself forth” (Heidegger 1971, 64; cited in Rebentisch 2012, 233). This is interpreted through a logic that Rebentisch terms “parergonal,” after Derrida's use of parergon in his The Truth in Painting (1987, 15–147), and which pervades all art. Rebentisch echoes Derrida when she states: “It is a characteristic mark all aesthetic experience that the question of what constitutes the work of art and what is ascribed to it as merely external must remain open” (2012, 244).

One might agree but emphasize the role imaginative and cognitive projections play in orienting the beholder to the work's conditions of access (its bracketing, or framing) and the shifting relation between its inner and outer apparatus. This is not dependent on site-specificity, as Cold Dark Matter demonstrates. And to argue, as Rebentisch does, that “no space will ever appear as simply neutral again, least of all the white cube” (250) need not devalue the genuine distinction between installations that merely require a generic kind of framing through such a white cube environment, and those that are, indeed, site-specific, in that they draw upon historical and locational narratives particular to the actual site.

Installation art, thus conceived, constitutes a space that while virtualized—removed from functional imperatives—compels acts of imagination/ideation by problematizing our habitual dispositions. But in the most critically pertinent forms of practice, these processes do not take place in isolation from context, in that external factors impinge upon such processes of negotiating the work's conditions of access. While all installations engage an organizing of the space of the gallery or situation in which we encounter the work, the extent to which the wider conditions of access enter into the work's semantic content varies widely, from works that mimic the self-sufficiency of modernist sculpture (despite our occupying of an immersive position “inside”), to those that draw the spatial and ideological conditions of access into the imaginative and ideational encounter.³