Monica E. McTighe - Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art

Across the dark space, two transparent silk chambers float side by side above oily cement floors in the recently vacated spinning mill. Through the silk panels of each chamber, the observer can see the silhouettes of two long tables. On each table, video projectors, mounted on a turning mechanism, cast on the thin silk the image of a line being drawn by a pencil. The space is large, covering a half-acre with a ceiling supported by metal columns arranged in a grid pattern. The projections sweep around this vast space sometimes chasing each other, sometimes crossing each other. An image falls on the silk screens, splits into two, converges with the second projection, and shatters into four. As the viewer stands there, the sound of the pencil hissing on the paper fills the humid Virginia air and the pencils sweep across the viewers body, the forest of metal columns supporting the ceiling, and finally the cinderblock walls of the empty spinning mill.

Later, when the viewer sees photographs of this installation, ghost: a border act (2000), in a retrospective catalog of the artist Ann Hamiltons work, they do not capture the complexity of her experience of the installation. The reproduced photograph, thin, bounded clearly by its edge, and difficult to read because of the dim light in the space, seems to bear little relationship to the installation that the viewer saw and experienced. Photographs, however, are necessary for a historian of site-specific installation art, as her object of research once exhibited often no longer exists, having been disassembled and stored, or dispersed. Fortunately, many installations are photographed, and in the course of their research historians study these photographs carefully.

Although installation art is often assumed to be an art of direct experience, it is often mediated by photography. If installation art requires the presence of a viewer, what does it mean when the majority of viewers see them only in photographs? As scholars have found, the history of ephemeral art objects and events, such as installation art, is filtered through the memories of the people who saw them first hand. These memories are often solidified or distorted by the documentation that is published alongside the work. Photographs mediate memory; history is a representation often constructed from these bits of evidence.

For instance, with Ann Hamiltons ghost: a border act, the viewer went on to write about this installation. A television show titled Art: 21, Art in the Twenty-First Century was broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States and showed videotape of the installation, as well as interviews with the artist. These fragments of the work of art may then end up in a textbook via the circuitous routes of memory, word of mouth, art review, and brief catalog description. The few photographs and videotapes of these events are often embroidered by memory, which transforms the work into myth, distancing it from the history of the event. A student in an art history lecture hall is provided with a distilled and perhaps distorted verbal description with a single photograph of an art installation. In one of the earliest accounts of installation art as a category, Julie Reiss advocates careful consideration of historical sources to counteract the transformation of history into myth. She encourages scholars to critically analyze personal accounts, press reviews, interviews with artists, and archival evidence, such as photographic documentation.

This book examines ways in which installation art, photography, and memory are intertwined with one another. Photography has shaped our understanding of history and memory since the nineteenth century. In the last forty years, a time in which the issue of memory has become of great interest in art practice and society in general, the theory of photography and photographic practice has become even more important in contemporary art. At the same time, installation art has become one of the ubiquitous, often criticized, mtiers in contemporary art practice.

Ephemeral installations that are concerned with the physical limits and material qualities of a site and interested in the viewers perceptions would seem to elude representation through photographs. It is natural to think then that photographs of these works are both lacking and supplementary to the work itself. However, most installations are photographed. Amelia Jones notes