When is a room not a room?

When is a room not a room?
There was a bit of a fuss at Tate Britain the other day. A woman was hurrying through the large room that houses Lights Going On and Off in a Gallery, Rock drillMartin Creed's Turner prize-shortlisted installation in which, yes, lights go on and off in a gallery. Suddenly the woman's necklace broke and the beads spilled over the floor. As we bent down to pick them up, one man said: "Perhaps this is part of the installation." FOAM MACHINEAnother replied: "Surely that would make it performance art rather than an installation." "Or a happening," said a third.
These are confusing times for Britain's growing audience for visual art. Even one of Creed's friends recently contacted a newspaperchina flights discount diarist to say that he had visited three galleries at which Creed's work was on show but had not managed to find the artworks. If he can't find them, what chance have we got?
More and more of London's gallery space is devoted to installations. London is no longer a city, but a vast art puzzle. Next to Creed's flashing room is timberland bootsMike Nelson's installation consisting of an illusionistic labyrinth that seems to lead to a dusty Tate storeroom. It's the security guards I feel sorry for, stuck in a faux back room fielding tricky questions about the aesthetic merits of conceptual art simulacra and helping people with low blood sugar find the way out.
The only problem is that this definition also leaves out some very good installations. Consider Richard Wilson's 20:50. It consists plastic injection mouldsof a lake of sump oil that uncannily reflects the ceiling of the gallery. Spectators penetrate this lake by walking y in west London, depriving it of its context. But the Thames and Hudson definition does not allow that this 20:50 is an installation because it wasn't created for that space. air jordanThis is silly: it would be better to say there were two installations - the one at Matt's and the other at the Saatchi Gallery.
Or think about Damien Hirst's In and Out of Love. In this 1991 installation, butterfly cocoons were attached to large white canvases.magazine print Heat from radiators below the cocoons encouraged them to hatch and flourish briefly. In a separate room, butterflies were embalmed on brightly coloured canvases, their wings weighed down by paint. The spectator needed to move around to appreciate the full impact of the work. Unlike looking at paintings or sculptures, you often need to move through or around installations.
It's nice of Creed to share the burden of significance. But sadly for him, few of the spectators were making much of his show last week. His room was often deserted, but the rooms housing Isaac Julien's boring films and Richard Billingham's dull videos were packed. magazine print Maybe Creed's aim is to drive people away from installation art, or maybe he is just not understood. Whatever. The lights were on, and sometimes off, but nobody was home.