Despite its large and growing popularity--to say nothing of its near-ubiquity in the world's art scenes and international exhibitions of contemporary art--installation art remains a form whose artistic vocabulary and conceptual basis have rarely been subjected to thorough critical examination.

With this book, Anne Ring Petersen aims to change that. She begins by exploring how installation art developed into an interdisciplinary genre in the 1960s, and how its intertwining of the visual and the performative has acted as a catalyst for the generation of new artistic phenomena. She goes on to address a series of basic questions that get at the heart of what installation art is and how it is defined. Drawing on the work of such well-known artists as Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist, Ilya Kabakov, and many others, Petersen breaks crucial new ground in understanding the conceptual underpinnings of this vibrant form.