Yayoi Kusama, Aftermath of the extinction of eternity2009, wood, metal, glass mirror, plastic, acrylic paint and LED, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. © Yayoi Kusama
It happens every Summer in Houston, with its cicadas, fear of the Astros, and scorching heat. The inevitable wave of social media images documenting trips to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), where friends and family pose next to or even inside the latest exhibit. Climbing up and down complex bamboo structures or lying around glowing plastic balls. Excited faces and exaggerated poses, enough to entice you to head to the museum and experience the same fun yourself. After all, you don’t want to miss this, and you’re supporting an important local art institution. A win-win.
At first glance, this seems like a brilliant social media strategy. And it is: word of mouth is a powerful tool in any marketing department’s arsenal. It would be easy to assume that social media increases public interest in immersive installation art, creating a demand that artists and arts organizations are struggling to meet. But in reality, as MFAH director Gary Tinterow says, “there is no causal connection.”
“Instagram, Twitter, Reels, before that Tumblr, YouTube. These have all been ways to get exposure for immersive exhibitions, whether they’re in art museums or commercial spaces. So social media and people posting are driving awareness of these projects,” he says. “At the same time, it’s the artists who are creating the objects that allow us to exhibit them in the first place. We don’t make exhibitions so they can be posted on social media… But it’s true that people come to experience our immersive exhibitions and they post about them. That’s why more people come.”
He points out that the MFAH usually schedules its family-friendly installation exhibitions in the summer so that grandparents, parents and children can experience them together. The best-attended events in 2014 were Soto: The Houston Penetrablewhich attracted 130,852 people, and the Shadow Monsterwhich brought in 126,221.
Philip Worthington, Shadow Monster2004–present, Java, Processing, BlobDetection, SoNIA and physics software, reproduced with permission of the artist.
The museum recently presented Pipilotti Rist’s Pixel forest and worries will disappear in 2023. Visitors walked through a “forest” made of large, playful, colorful LEDs and lounged on beanbags while videos played around them, a fantasy of nature, bodies, and the sky. MFAH also acquired Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room The consequences of the extinction of eternitywhich feels like the prelude to an encounter with a powerful cosmic force, as an ongoing exhibition.
Tinterow points out that while the MFAH’s installation pieces often seem to be omnipresent on social media, the museum’s most visited exhibition is actually Hockney–Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature in 2021, which consisted of “paintings, drawings, and an immersive space.” The decision to show installation art came not from the number of Houstonians coming through the doors, but rather from what the artists were already doing.
“I would say that (installation art) is a phenomenon that is omnipresent in today’s contemporary art world. We are following this phenomenon,” he says. “We can only exhibit what has been done. It is clear that many artists are working in this experimental dimension.”
Multimedia artist JooYoung Choi, whose lively puppet and video works have earned praise from the likes of legendary director and Muppet player Frank Oz, agrees that while she’s grateful for the buzz social media brings to artists, she primarily makes things she wants to see herself.
Choi had never considered working in the field of installation art until she moved to Houston. She studied painting while earning her bachelor’s degree at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and later her master’s degree at the Art Institute of Boston. She experimented a bit with video and animation while in college, but it’s DiverseWorks curator Rachel Cook who sparked her interest in immersive, interactive artistic experiences.
“Rachel came into my studio and was amazed at how I organized everything. I didn’t have folders back then. I would put things in empty pizza boxes, label them, and stack them in a big pile… I used coat hangers to attach large pieces of art to,” she says. “And she was amazed at how I organized my makeshift space… She said, ‘Let’s just set up your whole art studio in DiverseWorks.'”
Choi was thrilled. The experience of setting up and exhibiting her entire studio and watching visitors interact with it broadened her horizons of what she understood as art.
As her art spread across social media, so did her opportunities. While buying guacamole at the Fiesta, she received an invitation to her first major museum show in Houston from a curator who had seen photos on Facebook.
And while social media does not shape their final creative decisions, the social element that inspires art lovers to post photos of themselves next to immersive works, surely inspires her in the same way. Her piece Faith comes like a bolt from the blue and helps you throughwhich was previously shown at the Moody Center for the Arts and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, asks visitors to write wishes on paper stars using black light-sensitive ink. They can then walk through them with a black light flashlight and find connections and commonalities with the wishes hung previously.
“This child wanted a little brother. This other person wrote about how much they wanted to have a child and have a family,” she says. “It was incredible for me to see people feel like they could own a piece of art and that it took them to a place they needed to go, contrary to what I thought… (There are) really moving moments when people write things I never would have thought of. It’s almost like your art takes on a life of its own.”
Choi compares her forays into immersive installation art to her childhood of marveling at Nintendo games and the Peter Pan ride at Disney theme parks. Although they are overlooked as such, Are artistic endeavours themselves, and terms like “immersive” and “installation” sound deceptively contemporary. Immersive and installation pieces have never not has been a part of art history since art history began.
“Visiting a large church or cathedral in Europe. Hearing the organ playing, hearing the monks chanting, smelling the incense is an immersive experience. Any great architectural experience, like the Pantheon in Rome, is inherently immersive,” Tinterow points out. “Visiting Mayan temples in the Yucatan is immersive. All of your senses are engaged, including your leg muscles. I think there has always been art and environments that engage multiple senses at once, which is really the definition of immersive.”
