An Overview of Installation Art

Marc Latamie has worked as an artist in New York City since 1975, though his work has been distributed and viewed on an international level. Over the course of his career, Marc Latamie has worked in a variety of creative areas, including installation art.

Installation art is a term applied to a spectrum of creative works that employ 3D objects in addition to more traditional 2D materials. While there is no one theme or motif that defines installation art, it is common for creators to utilize objects from mainstream culture and display or juxtapose them in a way that comments on the values of modern society. 

Installation art is a relatively new addition to the world of contemporary art, though it is being practiced by more and more postmodernists. This way of creating work is also heavily linked to conceptual art and even computer art. The major difference between conceptual and installation art is that the latter is more concerned with the use of physical space in addition to presentation.

Hidden New York City Art Installations

New York City resident Marc Latamie is an artist who's been working and exhibiting in many countries, including Cuba, Spain, Sweden, and Senegal. Marc Latamie is especially interested in installation art.

While most people know that New York City is home to some of the finest art museums in the world, many may be surprised to learn that free art installations exist all over the city. They can be easy to overlook. For example, in a SoHo loft one can find The New York Earth Room behind a door with a small plaque. Commissioned by the Dia Foundation, the Earth Room is simply a room full of dirt that has been there since 1977.

Another often-overlooked piece of installation art is located right near the trendy High Line park in the Chelsea Market passage. Spencer Finch put together a grid of colored glass blocks to represent the Hudson River. He took a photo each minute for 700 minutes and this installation is the result.

Even Times Square has art installations. The 42nd Street-Times Square subway station actually features a mural painted by none other than pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, commissioned in 1994 by the MTA. Don’t forget to look around as you travel to the famous art museums--you may run into art you would have missed otherwise.

Is Perception of Beauty an Evolutionary Trait?

New York-based artist Marc Latamie began his career in 1970s Paris, where he was a student of the Art History and Visual Art departments at Université Paris 8. After graduating, Marc Latamie pursued his own artistic career, one based on the idea of universalism. Today, his works can be seen in numerous exhibitions and publications.

The artistic movement known as universalism is an extension of the idea of aesthetic universalism. A concept studied by various scholars throughout the years, aesthetic universalism attempts to identify elements that human beings find aesthetically pleasing regardless of their cultural background. Extending beyond artistic taste, aesthetic universalism stems largely from evolutionary psychology and anthropology.

According to the works of many scholars of the topic, certain human tendencies such as enjoyment of foods with fats and carbohydrates are part of evolutionary psychology; those who enjoyed these foods had more offspring than those who did not. Similarly, studies have shown that humans from a wide variety of cultures share preferences in the pictorial content of art, including color and types of landscape. For many, this supports the argument that the perception of beauty, like other evolutionary traits, is universal.

The 1999 Harvard Symposium on Duchamp and Poincaré

Artist Marc Latamie has been living and working in New York City since 1985. Over the course of his career, he has been asked to speak at a number of prestigious artistic institutions including the École du Louvre and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, France. In 1999, Marc Latamie attended a symposium on Marcel Duchamp and Henry Poincaré at Harvard. University.

From November 5 to November 7, 1999, Harvard University hosted a symposium entitled “Method of Understanding in Art and Science: The Case of Duchamp and Poincaré” at the Harvard University Science Center. At the event, a gathering of approximately 200 scholars examined the shared and relevant concerns of artist Marcel Duchamp and mathematician/philosopher Henry Poincaré.

Symposium guests and attendees included academic and industry professionals hailing from a wide range of disciplines. Examining the cultural overlap and integrated methodology of art and science, the gathering brought mathematicians and physicists together with art historians and postmodern theorists to spark a truly unique and enlightening dialogue.                            

Marc Latamie - A Look at Marcel Duchamp

Primarily based in New York City, artist Marc Latamie utilizes the theme of universalism in most of his works. One of his strongest influences is Marcel Duchamp; Marc Latamie had lectured on Duchamp works at the Cooper Union School for the Arts and at New York University and contribueted to the online journal dedicated to the research on Duchamp..

Born in 1887 in France, Marcel Duchamp became one of the most influenced artists of the 20th century. Called a “one-man movement” by Willem de Kooning, Duchamp developed a counter-field from his contemporaries by approaching the mental rather than the visual aspects of art. During the first part of his career, he experimented with then-popular styles such as impressionism and cubism. His 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) used the cubist style to present his subject in motion rather than the traditional static image. Arguably his most famous painting, it initially received negative reviews in Paris, where the work was banned from the important Salon d'Automne.

Following this period, Marcel Duchamp introduced the “readymade,” perhaps his most lasting legacy. Abandoning painting in the years before World War I, Duchamp utilized everyday objects as art. He placed mass-produced pieces such as bicycle wheels, shovels, and windows on display to challenge conceptions of art and beauty. Despite being considered a pioneer with the Dada movement, Duchamp became also a master on playing chess. He passed away in 1968.

What Is Golf Design?

Marc Latamie is an artist whose work has been exhibited around the globe. Among his wide range of aesthetic interests, Marc Latamie follows trends and topics in golf design. 

Golf design, or golf architecture, has attracted the talents of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds. Some well-known golf designers, such as Nicklaus and Braid, have golfed professionally, whereas others have come to the work by vastly different paths. George Crump owned a hotel, and Alister MacKenzie was a physician. The love of the game is one thing that golf designers do seem to universally share. 

In golf architecture, the needs of the game, with all its important details and nuances, are applied to a tract of land in order to produce unique and challenging courses. Designers must consider the contours of the environment in relation to players’ eventual strategies and shots. The product of their design is essentially a puzzle in three dimensions. The engineer must take into account that modifying one portion of the land will impact the entire course. As with a puzzle, each course is unique, and there is no one perfect solution. The rules of design are rather free form, and leave ample room for the imagination, but the process, with all its concerns, is incredibly complicated.

Beauty and Universalism in Art

An accomplished artist, Marc Latamie has appeared as a guest lecturer at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Boston, and New York University. In his art, Marc Latamie strives for universalism.

Universalism revolves around the idea that beauty is deeply ingrained in human nature. Prior to his death in 2010, philosophy professor Denis Dutton authored a book called Aesthetic Universal, which examines the definition of universalism in the context of cognitive science and human evolution. The book explores the work of scholars such as Leo Tolstoy, Clive Bell, and Friedrich Schiller, all of whom addressed the universal meaning of art and its significance. Their studies had one specific element in common: the presupposition of a set of universal aesthetic preferences.

A study conducted by NYU tested whether or not beauty is truly “in the eye of the beholder.” Students were shown 109 paintings representing a number of cultures and historical periods. An MRI was used to measure blood flow within the brain of the subjects as they observed the paintings. Each subject was asked to rate the works on a scale of 1 to 4, depending on how greatly they were affected by each piece. The study showed that while the brain of each individual was engaged in the same way, the parts of the brain related to aesthetics differed from person to person. This leads to the conclusion that while aesthetic experiences are unique to individuals, commonalities still exist.