Theatricality in Installation Artworks: An Overview

Abstract

The article is an investigation into theatricality from various standpoints (among others those of Michael Fried, Claire Bishop, Juliane Rebentisch and Samuel Weber) in order to focus on different views on theatricality considered as partially emancipated from theatre and to verify if and to what extent each of them can apply to installation artworks as environments and intermedial devices. Ultimately the article propounds the idea of a paradoxical anti-theatrical theatricality of installation art, grasped in its very connection to site-specificity, critically engaging Martin Heidegger’s insights regarding the «Gestell» and the «work-being» of the work of art, as a general theoretical basis through which a particular focus of ‘specificity’ of installation is endorsed.