Project 3: Site Specificity, Installation, Performance and Intervention

Site Specificity, Installation, Performance and Intervention

For this project, you will create a site-specific work, installation, intervention, or performance work. You will be working individually or collaboratively to make an installation, event, or situation that fundamentally alters the viewer’s experience and perception of a space. Below are some ideas and things to consider:

Installation & Site-Specific: Installation art engages the viewer’s entire sensory experience in four-dimensional space. It dissolves the line between art and life (see Kaprow). It moves away from viewing art as discreet objects isolated from the environment in which they are encountered. An installation artist uses almost any material and media to create an experience in a particular environment. Oftentimes, installation art is highly site-specific. It is not confined to gallery spaces but can be material intervention in everyday public or private spaces.

Performance Art & Intervention: Performance art involves the artist and is created in real time. What makes performance art so intermedial in nature is that it is slippery and truly defies most boundaries and definitions that are imposed on it. On one end of the spectrum you can argue that a performance begins and ends in the place and time that the artist says it does. But if you are in a room waiting for a performance to start, isn’t that part of the experience, hence part of the performance too. And approaching the place of the performance: part of the experience. Getting ready to go to the performance: part of the experience. So on the other end of the spectrum, you could argue that we all are involved in a lifelong performance, that every social act is essence a performance, that there is no boundary between performance and life. Should you choose to do a performance, think less of performance art as a sort of “art-theater”, that is, a “detached, closed arrangement in space-time” in Kaprow’s words. Instead, think of the performance as a way to direct and alter the experience of your audience in real-time. There is no limitation on how you choose to do this.