It may be difficult to believe that rural places might make fertile ground for contemporary installation art, a medium most well known as an urbanized modern art, but the complex aesthetics of rural places and people make great fodder for contemporary artists and creative thinkers. “The innovation and originality associated with an avant-garde isn’t all that different from the pioneer spirit and rugged individualism attributed to rural dwellers.” (Handwerker, Saxton, 2014) Rural America is a vast and complex landscape that provides inspiration for many contemporary artists working in rural spaces or who may have an interest in rural culture and its uniqueness.(Frink, 2014) Organizations like the M12 Collective are contributing heavily to what is now a “rapidly coalescing international art movement located around a new understanding of and engagement with the rural and agriculture as a challenging new site for contemporary art practice and curatorship.” (Handwerker, Saxton, 2014) The rural sits at the crossing of many contradicting complexities that are constantly pressing up and pushing against each other to create a very interesting cultural dynamic: the familiar and the strange, traditional and contemporary, material and immaterial, and permanent vs. transient. Rural places and people often endure struggle unlike people from anywhere else, endured to hardships tied directly to the environment and the unforgiving elements. Lastly, there is an extremely deep connection to place and community that is driven down through generations. (Fluharty, 2014)
“It is significant that the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city is an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present.” – Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
In “Rethinking the Rural: The Wilder Shores of Contemporary Art,” Ian Hunter suggests that there are five main contributions to why agriculture and rural have come into the spotlight as new zones for contemporary art practice. Several of his points directly relate to installation-specific work as well. He described a re-engagement with the land from the 1960s onward, inspired by the Land Art movement, recognition by leading cultural theorists and thinkers which included reaction to the monumentalism of early earthwork installations, the importance of global environmental issues and policy, and the influence of social art practices. (Handwerker, Saxton, 2014)
Not installation specific, but this video, featuring Brian Frink, the founder of RACA (Rural American Contemporary Arts), gives a good perspective on the what the state of contemporary arts in rural America might be. He challenges old notions of separation between contemporary art and rural life.
Presentation by Matthew Fluharty on Art of the Rural, including relevant information on rural America and arts and culture in rural America today.
Installation art is best suited to engage with the complex dynamics of the rural more than any other art method because of its adaptability, multimedia nature and because of the fact that it is a very complex medium on its own. It has the capacity to engage a complicated subject. Installation art also lives outside of the constraints of conventional language of the visual arts, making it more adaptable and possibly even more accessible as it sits further away from the traditional vision of “high art” from which rural audiences may distance themselves.
The fundamental aspects of installation art align themselves well to rural aesthetics:
- Habitation of a physical site – Considerations of site and associated context are crucial to art installations. Place and context are also essential to rural life as well. The term “rural” is very often associated closely with ideas of place.
- Connection to real conditions – The scale and immense, sometimes very complex capacity of installations provides the ability for the art piece to strongly represent real conditions, sometimes even entire derived environments. These conditions might be visual, historical or social. It is an ideal medium to tell a story of the past and present, of people and of place in a very effective way.
- Bridging of traditional art boundaries – Installation art can bridge boundaries of public and private, individual and communal, high style and vernacular, breaking down barriers of what art can be or do. It can create connections between urban and rural and help to reconcile the many complex cultural dynamics of rural life and what rural life means today. It also blurs the lines between art, architecture, landscape and education, creating deep conversations by utilizing these synchronized elements. (Rosenthal, 2003)
The aesthetic power of installation art lies far outside of the art object. This medium has the capacity to create an experience in which the place and participant become part of the work, whether recognized or not. When the artist or art piece asks viewers to relate to the work in some way other than through visual observation, possibly even by asking them to participate in the completion of the piece, they challenge more than the viewer’s expectations about materials and conventions. Work and space are melded together to create an experience and the bubble of high art or the barrier between art, artist and audience becomes compromised, and even democratized. (Rosenthal) Installations can be responsive to situations, to place and to participants. They are never stagnant but can be whatever they need to be, depending on the conditions in which they need to exist, which allows for a broad range of possibilities, approaches and themes. They can create a more meaningful place or even a new place all together. By immersing participants into a conceived environment, installations can encourage audiences to look at the world differently, either positively or in a more critical way, questioning perceptions of rural life as perceived by those from the outside and the inside. Installation art is also very inclusive and may involve both traditional and nontraditional art mediums that frequently overlap, including but not limited to painting, sculpture, performance and process, video, light and audio, architecture and narrative. This also makes it quite easy for the work to incorporate materials relevant to or re-purposed from rural culture instead of what might only be used in traditional art mediums.
How might art installations provide a method of creating rural cultural vitality and revitalization?
Rural contemporary art installations have the capacity to capture the strange dynamic of the “now and then” that exists in many rural areas, a presence of the past mixed in with contemporary life. This may be through the synthesis of contemporary art and culture mixed with existing traditions, places and materials to convey a multidimensional meaning that transcends past and present, encouraging reflection on rural areas and rural culture. It might also articulate the shared reality of rural and urban life, lessening the gap between the two.
The wealth of possibilities in installation art allows it to take on a more versatile purpose, often taking the form of social art or public art and contributing to cultural work in social, cultural, economic or environmental sectors or in neighborhood and community revitalization strategies. The highly participatory element of this kind of artwork also contributes to this ability. The artwork may even serve a more practical, immediate purpose, providing shelter or space for wildlife or may contribute to awareness and education. Installation art is often used to reclaim spaces or revitalizes degraded spaces or structures. The medium itself has been described as one capable of reinvigorating art…is it possible then, that it is a likely candidate to reinvigorate culture in rural communities?
Analysis
The idea of contemporary art installation in rural areas, specifically rural America, relates closely to many of the themes discussed in class. One of the most prominent is the idea of social purpose and community cultural development as discussed in The Arts and the Public Purpose by The American Assembly. The arts uniquely derive from the pluralism of our society and are an important tool for participation, stewardship and for preserving our national legacy. The rural arts must be in balance with the arts in the rest of our society, and mediums such as installation can serve to create artwork that not only promotes contemporary rural life but serves a social purpose in rural communities. Generating arts participation is crucial in communities that may be lacking cultural stimuli and installation work has the capacity to encourage arts participation, because for much of the work, participation is critical to its success as an art piece.
We also focused on aesthetics throughout the class, which I have touched on in my field guide as well. As we discussed in regards to Becker’s perspective on aesthetics, they are relative to the system which they come from. Rural aesthetics are different than urban aesthetics and rural aesthetics may be different from each rural area in the county. Aesthetics are essentially determined by the audience who is receiving the cultural material. It is important to consider aesthetics of the rural as well as typical aesthetics of installation work to determine whether the two are an appropriate match. The aesthetics of an art medium must lend themselves well to the aesthetics of place and audience.
Resources
Farrell, Anne. (1997). Blurring the Boundaries, Installation Art 1969-1996. Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
Fluharty, M. (2014, Dec. 2) Art of the Rural, Retrieved from: http://artoftherural.org/g/
Frink, B. (2014, Dec. 2) RACA Online, Rural America Contemporary Art. Retrieved from http://www.racart.org/
Handwerker, M., Saxton, R. (2014). A Decade of Country Hits. Jap Sam Books, Heijningen.
M12. (2014, Dec. 2) M12 [website]. Retrieved from http://m12studio.org/
Press Street (2014, Dec. 2) Matthew Fluharty, Art of the Rural . Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvK3VULTeoQ
Rosenthal, M. (2003). Understanding Installation Art, from Duchamp to Holzer. Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York.
Re-installing Rural 