Excerpts from an article that I wrote in the current issue of Border Crossings Magazine:

“Hyper-real installations confront the viewer with an illusion of which we are aware. Or are we? The historic, ages old idea that the world as we experience it is an illusion reaches back to a branch of ancient Hindu philosophy called Advaita Vedanta, which teaches that Brahman (consciousness) represents the Infinite Reality, and the world (Maya) is merely an illusion; likewise, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which prisoners, deep inside a cave, face shadows that they perceive to be “reality”. As in Plato’s story, hyper-real installations destabilize the viewers’ perception of truth, by presenting one reality beside another.

A nice illustration of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Image: commons.wikimedia.org

The idea of the world as illusion engaged the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who, in Will and Representation wrote, “It is Maya, the veil of deception, which covers the eyes of mortals, and causes them to see a world of which one cannot say either that it is or that it is not; for it is like a dream.”

Schopenhauer might have appreciated hyper-real installations. He believed art should communicate a certain existential angst to the viewer, and that the successful art object should allow the viewer to be lost in the aesthetic experience.

Hyper-real installations represent a turning point in the viewer’s relationship to the artwork. From Marcel Duchamp, for whom any object could be art, to John Cage’s inclusive view of artistic media, through to contemporary artists who use the workings of urban society as subject, the hyper-real installation’s importance, as exemplified by artists such as Iris Haussler, Gregor Schneider and Christoph Buchel, lies in its ability to move the viewer’s focus away from the art object, toward their own intimate experience.”

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1916-17. Image: westga.edu

Read the full article, which focuses specifically on Iris Haussler’s Toronto installation The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach, in the current issue of Border Crosssings.