In the matter of engaging the attention of the viewer, the modern artist has gone his Renaissance counterpart one better. Where the Renaissance artist admitted the viewer into the picture by means of one-point perspective, the contemporary artist can, if he wishes to, include his viewer literally—in the form of an installation. With an installation the viewer does not enter a room and walk over to a work of art; rather, the room is the work of art, and he is part of it. The point of an installation is to transform a room into an active, charged art environment embracing all those who enter it.

Jonathan Borofsky, whose retrospective came to the Whitney Museum this winter, is an artist who has worked almost exclusively with installations.¹ The scale and place of this exhibition—it occupies the Whitney’s entire fourth floor—is important. It is one thing to see an installation in a downtown gallery, where the innate informality of the form matches the transience of gallery scheduling and the general bohemian tone of the neighborhood.² It is quite another to see an installation in an uptown museum. To his credit, Borofsky is able to cope with his new surroundings (almost too well: this is the nearest thing to a carnival the Whitney has achieved since its 1975 di Suvero retrospective), but the capacious museum space also draws attention to problems in his work that are not so easily overcome.

Borofsky began his installations in the Seventies