Art You Walk Into
The queues at museums now are mostly for this band. It starts in 1965, with Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli's Field. Countless soft protrusions laid out in a mirrored room, and the visitor walks in. Instead of standing in front of the picture, you end up inside the work. Minimalism and Conceptual Art both begin in that same year, 1965. Land Art and Mono-ha follow in 1968. In the second half of the 1960s, art went out from the object toward the place, all at once. It exploded in the 2000s. In 2003, Olafur Eliasson hung an artificial sun in the vast open hall at Tate Modern (The Weather Project). About two million people came during the run, and photographs of visitors lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling travelled around the world. In 2006, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate was formally unveiled in Chicago. Everyone calls it the Bean. In 2010, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Marina Abramovic sat in a chair for 736 and a half hours in total, silently holding the eyes of whoever sat down across from her. teamLab Borderless, which opened in Tokyo in 2018, drew 2.19 million visitors over the year 2019, and was certified by Guinness World Records as the most visited museum in the world devoted to a single artist or group. A word about the name as well. Installation came over from the museum's own working vocabulary, from the business of installing what goes on display. It was not an insult flung by a critic. The first discovery of this map does not hold here.