It would be impossible to come up with a simple definition that included everything artists are doing with it. But there are junctures where installations come together. One of these is space. In many ways perhaps what is most notable yet overlooked about installation is the way it uses, or addresses space, context and site. Space in installation art is not simply the gallery.
Space is one of the essential elements in the work.
It is the near tangible, almost liquid air of James Turrell's mass-less light rooms and the open, expansive cradle for Walter De Maria's Nestr Mexico Lightning Field. Like sculpture, which can slice or suck up space into invisible volumes, installation asks space to participate in creating a work's meaning. But installation does it not just with assembled objects but by referring to and playing off its environmental space. It is a collection of things. Installations are threaded on the space they use, their site, and the context they create or exist within like beads on a string.