Minimal Art Is Sometimes Said to Have Initiated a Turn Towards Installation Practices. Discuss What Defines Installation Art, and How Minimalism Contributed to Its Emergence.

In the 1950s and late 1960s, Minimal Art shattered traditional notions of art making by redefining the form, material, and production of the object and its relationship to physical and temporal space and the spectator. Because of this, Minimalism was able to draw attention to the space in which the work is shown; this emphasized the direct engagement with the space and environment as a work in itself. Since then, Minimal Art has helped initiate a turn towards installation practices, a practice that has taken fifty years to emerge.

Minimal Art is where artists made no attempt to represent an outside reality. The artists wanted the spectator to respond to what was only in front of them. The reality would be the form of the work and the medium or material that is used to create the work.

Minimal Art surfaced as a backlash against “action painting” , espoused by Abstract Expressionism that focused on emotional intensity and personal readings as Minimalism purely relied on single or repeated geometric form, serial patterns, strong concentration of industrial materials, and along with external factors of the spectator and environment.

Minimal Art also challenged and questioned the theory against 20th century American art critic Clement Greenberg, who also supported Abstract Expressionism that “modest art is an internally focused investigation of the essential features of each separate medium.” He understood that modern art was medium specific and believed that because the history of modernism involved artists exploring the precise nature of their medium, art media should not be mixed.

Both of these disruptions cited turns for the practice of Installation