ИСТИНА

Installation, being intrinsically a spatial combination of objects, has yet a distinct temporal dimension, which has been brought into focus within the installation art discourse since at least Michael Fried’s milestone essay Art and Objecthood. This ambivalent spatial-temporal quality is part of installation art’s intermediality, a feature attributed to this genre by many scholars. Intermediality does not only refer to employing different materials or even artworks in other media, such as painting or sculpture, but also implies that installation breaks away from the rigid paradigm which was set by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laocoön and supported by modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg (Modernist Painting, Towards a Newer Laocoon, Avantgarde and Kitsch) and Michael Fried. Lessing’s bipolar normative system prescribed that the spatial arts, above all painting, present their objects simultaneously, while the temporal arts, most notably literature, are to present the events they handle with consecutively. Some installation artists employ the other media’s methods particularly apparently: many of Ilya Kabakov’s “total” installations inherently possess a literary plot, a dramaturgical space structure and a painterly composition, resembling Socialist realism paintings. Still, whether the artist’s strive to engage the viewer into an almost totalitarian action is successful, is debatable. The viewers’ actual reactions, associations and trajectories frequently appear rather different from what had been prefigured by the artist himself. Drawing upon the works by installation art researchers, such as Claire Bishop, Anne Ring Petersen, Juliane Rebentisch, theorists such as Gertrude Stein, Clement Greenberg, and Michael Fried, as well as the archive materials that registered the immediate impression of Kabakov’s viewers, I will try to show how the traditional dramatic, painterly and literary structures are unraveling in his three-dimensional installations and how they may eventually be deconstructed.