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.
The arrival of semiotics, psychoanalysis and deconstruction in the early 1970s coincided with the arrival of postmodernism. There was a regrouping of scholars and all the old disciplines began to run at highly eccentric angles to each other. Many found the language clenched, charmless and cerebral. Others formed into discursive tribes blown out by the way this late-modernist analysis set up a series of instabilities of perspective and judgement. Foucault, Lacan, Barthes suggested the precariousness of all language, meaning, knowledge.