The term installation as used in present-day discussion of three-dimensional work can imply two rather different things. On the one hand, it calls to mind a set of radical practices associated with the 1960s and early 1970s. These were interventions in art world and other public spaces carried out with a view to disrupting the fetishizing of the autonomous art object and provoking a new, more critical awareness of the material and ideological contexts in which work occurred. On the other hand, installation has become a term that now refers to a largely mainstream form of art operating within settings provided by contemporary museums and galleries. Installation in this sense designates those recently established kinds of practice in which a work is conceived as a staged scenario rather than as a traditional art object. My purpose here is to interrogate the extent to which three-dimensional art or sculpture has changed in character as a result of this shift that has taken place over the past three decades or so from object-like to installation-orientated work.' That the genre of art practice emerging from this shift should be called installation art is a moot point, given that any free-standing three-dimensional work, whether a classicizing statue or an autonomous-seeming modernist object, has to be installed in some way (Fig. 4). The idea of a non-installation art would be something of an oxymoron. Insomuch as a structural change has occurred, it has been most clear-cut at the level of critical and theoretical paradigms. The move to installation certainly has not resulted in a complete dissolution of the sculptural object, nor of the distinctive structures of response elicited by a traditional sculpture. Rather it has entailed a progressive abandonment of the assumption prevalent in much nineteenthand twentieth-century sculptural aesthetics that the authentic art object has to be completely self-sufficient, its significance unaffected by the circumstances of its display. This view is succinctly summed up in a comment by the theorist of cubism, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, in an essay called 'The Essence of Sculpture', published in 1919, to the effect that a sculpture must exist as 'the object pure and simple, detached from everything surrounding it'.2 My discussion of installation then has a twofold thrust. Firstly I want to show how certain supposedly distinctive features of installation work were already implicit in previous conceptions of sculpture. The underlying processes common to both objectand installation-orientated work have to do with the nature of the encounter being staged between viewer and work and the resulting interplay operating at a phenomenological level between focused and dispersed apprehension. At the same time, such processes also play out a larger sociocultural dynamic of dispersal and binding, or dissolution and reification, that is the common condition of the object as commodity or quasi-commodity in modern culture. At issue in all this is less the constitution of the art work as such, than its staging and how it manifests itself to the viewer. By insisting on these larger continuities, I am not denying the reality of the shift that took place between modernist and what are commonly called post-modernist understandings of art, and the at times convulsive changes in the operations of modern capitalism in which this was grounded the Baudrillardian abolition of use value and of any substantive reality to the object certainly married well with the rampant