Photography as Experience: Michael Kirby's 'Embedded Sculptures' between Photography, Theatre, and Sculpture

Well-known for his writing on happening, performance, and theatre, Michael Kirby also produced, in the mid-1960s, a series of highly notable photo-sculptures. Developed in conjunction with the theoretical concept of “situational aesthetics,” these “embedded sculptures” where conceived of as “visual instruments” in order to explore the experience of art within a specific spatial and temporal context. Sharing with the avant-garde movements of the 1960s the rejection of Modernism, they draw their originality from their theoretical and historical position at the crossroad of Conceptual art, Minimalism, Performance art, and experimental theatre.