Installation as Story Telling

When a child listens to a bedtime story, it has the most profound power over that child for a variety of reasons. A voice is an interactive force that draws a story out of it's two-dimensionality and inserts it hyperdermicaly into your mind. It's intimate. It's like sex. When things can be experienced by more than one sense, it becomes a game, an erotic foray into the world of the subconscious.

Stories are about coming to conclusions by yourself. Ofcourse you could say, 'Timmy, stop being such a little fucker!', but if timmy comes to that conclusion via his own mental gymnastics, then he owns that truth. That truth that always lived somewhere deep in his psyche has come alive by means of some skilfull manipulation by the story teller.

A picture is beautiful. It can provoke a thought. But for the most part, a picture is only a question. It may paint a thousand words, but it is still only a starting point, a first approximation. Installation art digs deeper. It creates an atmosphere, a set upon which an idea comes to life. It is, in essence, a continuation of the ancient art of story telling. We are separated from the mind of the artist by the canvas. But with installation, we feel the presence of the artist gently prodding our thoughts as a child-like curiosity compels our bodies to engage. If you walk into a gallery, how often do you see people browsing over pictures and paintings? How often do you see people browse past an installation? Not often, I'm sure. There is something magnetic about installation art.

Take one of my personal favorites, Annette Messager for example. May I just note that her work truly is SUBLIME. I was once fortunate enough to visit a gallery containing a large collection of her work. Her work transports you... somewhere. You only realise when you leave that you haven't been on this plane of existence for the better half of the last 3 hours. Of course, her work functions as a whole. Each piece speaks for itself, but the beauty of her work is that it becomes a journey through a world of installation, a series of chapters about life.

She starts out small, enticing you with little morsels of childish curiosity, a room filled with taxidermy animals of all kinds. Their heads are those of stuffed teddy bears and/or other plush toys and dolls. You walk past a wall, and happen to notice that there are peep-holes. You gaze into a deep void where strange looking apparitions float past in unison. The whole time you are aware of a perverse sensation building inside you: a mixture of childlike-joy and sexual gratification. There's something unwholesome about what you're seeing, something sadistic. Though everything is so turgid and colorful, you can't but help being reminded of death and putrefaction wherever you look. And in that frightening awareness comes the beautiful awareness of something else: breath. You walk into a room and you are dwarfed, first by the sheer size of the giant inflatable organs surrounding you, and then by the sound. You are inside the body of a living creature. You sit there, dumbfounded as you watch the organs inflate and deflate: the breath, the idea that animates things. The feeling is much akin to the first time you ever held a kitten. You think of that, and suddenly you realise that this is just art, and this is just a room full of crap, and then you see that the artist was trying to communicate that very same feeling, and that much like a story teller, she has taken you on a journey and you have come you her conclusion, by yourself. The sense of awareness is profound. The sense of vulnerability you feel creates a certain intimacy in your mind towards the artist. You are never the same again.