There is no theory, no manifesto, no party, no club. It dismantles the tidy groups of spatial experiences we associate with museums, those neat rows of eye-level art, by forcing us to enter other spaces and take in other information. Installation transforms the four square stable place used by architects into an existential or actualised space produced by a viewer. Installation is the experimental prose poem of the visual arts, an unforeseeable hybrid offspring of all the misalliances that make up contemporary experience. Disjunctive but nonetheless emotionally compelling, installations can be tiny, intimate, discriminating habitats or uncorked environments of violent theatricality.
Installation is art finding new ways to go on despite frightening historical discontinuities.
Women artists have been drawn to the half-charted world of installation in significant numbers. The big blown-up macho space of heroic sculpture is sidestepped, in a countervailing feminist strategy, for an inclusive, immanent space responding to the inhabited environment. While each artist's efforts in this area are as intimate and revealing as handwriting. As every teacher knows, enlightened discussion in the classroom is never misdirected so long as no one forgets that art does not only exist to be argued about, but to be perceived and assimilated. Some works require as much silence as talk.