Self-disclosure and the ‘staging’ of autonomy in installation art

Abstract

ABSTRACT The adoption of theatrical devices in intermedial art is often characterised in terms of the ‘immersiveness’ of contemporary installations or assemblages. These are described as ‘staged’ precisely because they utilise overt scenographic strategies. Claire Bishop, for instance, employs the symbolically charged term ‘dream scene’ to characterise a mode of installation resembling an abandoned theatre set, where psychological absorption is achieved through physical immersion. For Bishop, this characterises the ‘total’ installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. But might we understand ‘staging’ not merely as scenography (even in its expanded sense) but as a ‘bracketing’ of the represented world in such a way as to reveal its fictionality through self-disclosure? Drawing upon (1) Juliane Rebentisch’s critique of the spatial time of theatrical installation, and (2) Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology, I consider the ‘staging’ of autonomy in relation to a work exemplary of Bishop’s ‘dream scene’: Mike Nelson’s Mirror Infill (2006). I will explore how its particular form of self-disclosure counters misconceptions of such ‘immersive’ work as context-independent and reveal how Nelson’s work makes available something absent (undisclosed) through representation conceived not as mimesis, but as a performative act.