Her insistence strives to make clear that her objects are artifacts not art. In this way installation is akin to performance art. And, as the amazing documentation of the Out of Action exhibition at MOCA recently made clear about performance as a temporal art form, artifacts are documentation but not art. Only when a piece is re-installed does it again come into existence. The rotating nature of gallery or museum exhibitions undoubtedly tends to make all art look temporary, but only installation is completely dependent on the exhibition's duration for its life span.
Much installation also exploits that dependency.
Skylights, the museum site and time of day all mattered in Wilson's artwork. It derived meaning from the visual and social inversion of what was seen as high and low, crude and 'enlightened', polluted or pristine, lasting and evanescent. But as self-conscious of its time as much installation is, it is also keenly aware of the viewer's time within it. Pieces that require the viewer's movement through the space to be completed are based on the experience of time as linear, with one event following another. The actions required by Margaret Honda's installations are elemental to the work's meaning.