heightened perception

Focusing in more on this 3rd chapter of Claire Bishop's 'Installation Art':

'Space is not there for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it.' (El Lissitzky

Artists such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Carl Andre and critics in the 60s used Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to theorise about the experience of minimalist sculpture: subject and object intertwined, interdependent, the perception by a body in particular conditions.
In minimalist sculpture there is:
1. a heightened awareness of the relationship between sculptures and space
2. a human scale - like encounters with beings
Obviously meant as objects of perception' (Rosalind Krauss) (my underlining)
A public not private experience, multi-perspectival
The interdependence of the work and viewer decentres the viewer
There is an immediate sensorial reaction to the work in its environment; this dominates over any emotional involvement.
'The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them  a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision'  (Morris) i..e. the viewer is as essential as the work and room.

Amongst west coast USA artists - Turrell, Naumann, Asher - there was an emphasis on the ephemerality, dematerialisation of the viewer's experience, 'light and space' works.
Irwin: 'all first hand now experience, feeling the act of seeing, his aim 'just to make you a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is.'

Dan Graham in the 70s: our experience can't be pure presence, it's a continuum spanning past, present and future; it is socially conditioned.  

Bruce Nauman also in 70s created work that generated an experience of perceptual conflict - unease, anxiety, confusion 'so that you're always on the edge of one kind of way ofrelating to the space or another, and yo're never quite allowed to do either.' Never feel centred and in control.  Perception is fragile and contingent.

80s onwards: challenges to supposed neutrality of perception - conditioned by gender, race, culture. . . 

Olafur Eliasson in 90s reconnected with 'light and space' artists.  Allowed for individual intuitive - as opposed to embodied - experience; how do we subjectively locate ourselves in an institution (gallery, museum); what it means to be human in the world.

Cartsten Holler mid 90s created installations leading to altered consciousness, casting in doubt the stability of everyday perception, which is not a detached gaze on the world but a function of the whole body and nervous system; used drugs, disorienting environments in which to play with perception. 

The activated viewer.