In consequence of Artur TAJBER's titling of particular performance/installations of his as Orient-action and Occident-action (1) and 3 Desolaction (2), I propose that formal terminology be corrupted further in the interests of similarly purposeful consolidation. 'lnstallaction' thus becomes a compound term which might translate a synthesis of certain interdisciplinary phenomena which remain in application to the vocabulary of visual art. We, as any of those involved in constituting its form and practice, might also wish to extrapolate further corruptions from a range of accredited spoken and written languages. The intervention of a superscripted 'c' into the term 'installation' in English and French ('installaction'), permits us by further consequence, perhaps, to interfere with the German version via the insertion of a 'k' ('installaktion') and in Spanish via the incorporation of an additional 'c' ('instalacción'). While it remains for French, German and Spanish speaking readers to verify the viability of these corruptions, Italian and Portuguese speaking artists may specifically wish to formulate feasible combinations of 'installazione' and 'instalacao' with the counterpart terms 'azione' and 'acao' respectively. I can only speculate, as one who speaks only English, that either a sense of action is already evident in these words or that attempts at corruption may not be linguistically or artistically pertinent. Artists of other tongues may formulate other purposeful extrapolations in equal measure.

The achievement of linguistic pertinence and/or consistency is, in any case, clearly neither wholly conclusive nor desirable in the identification and dissemination of contemporary interdisciplinary art forms. While it is often proposed, agreed and observed that linguistic matter has epistemtological limits, and especially so in relation to polymorphous art forms, and that Generation of meaning requires an equally pertinent consideration of perceptual matter, it is often the case that this act of secondary consideration simultaneously identifies precisely these epistemtological limits while predicating any remaining room for sensory or experiential manoeuvre. In short, art, any art, is taken as read. There are both selective histories and particular applications throughout twentieth century art and theory to suggest this, none more so revealing than 'the dematerialization of the art object' in conceptual art (and, in particular, certain works of Bruce NAUMANN and Joseph KOSUTH) and the largely post-modern "textualist approach which privileges texts and discourses over experience, the senses and images..." (3) (as is evident in Roland BARTHES' and Michel FOUCAULT's (4) self-reflexive authoring of 'the death of the author'). In this climate of syntactical formalism, I propose that the actuation (5) of installaction, through its precise location of action as the site of both the perception and conception of the aesthetic matrix, provides a necessary undoing of anv preexisting equation whereby language solely equals thought.

Moreover, since we learn from Octavio PAZ that "things hurry away from their names"(6) and from Noam CHOMSKY that 'language develops along an intrinsically determined path, involving specific mechanisms of the language system [...] rather analogous to a physical organ" (7) there can surely be no serious case for undermining the capacity of ontological action to contribute to a much needed reconfiguration of our understanding of the problematic, yet discrete, phenomena of both contemporary art and communication. Only those anxious to retain insufficient economies of tautological signification, which ultimately deprive contemporary art the possibility of an adventurous enough re-orientation required to engage with an epoch where even subjectivity is an unreliable construct, remain advocates of the equation language = thought. The agency of this equation seeks to recuperate, by the affirrnation of obsolete cartographical parameters, those artists' manoeuvres which uncover terra incognita: the unknown territory where it is important to note that it will be "the last possible deed [...] which defines perception itself." (8)

In this context, installaction does not seek exchange (though it is likely to maintain that which Mikhail BAKHTIN characterised as answerability (9)) rather it practices mataxis.(10)- In this way installaction offers a possibility for the theoretical to no longer exist in solely theoretical or aesthetic terms (11) and thus can contribute toward a realisation of Stefan SZCZELKUN's perspektive that "aesthetics follow integrity of action."(12) Installaction, then, in combining installation's axiomatic suspension of linear time and stable matter with performance's discipfined pursuance of spontaneous volition of action, may well find its articulation through an aesthetic matrix oriented around performances contextually anterior to the recognition of art. The dynamic of this recently termed form will only find sustenance if it is realised that performance simultaneously emerges and exists from these multiple matrices meaning, moreover, that performance cannot be considered as nonmatrixed when not being applied to the seemingly "principal paradigm of aesthetics" (13) which we presume to be art.

The 'Happening', while in many senses an antecedent of installaction, may have been partly undone because of the fixity inherent in rendering an action which does not constitute 'acting' as being nonmatrixed" (14). This is almost certainly why the 'Happening', caught up in its seemingly utopian ambition to blur performances of art and life, may have ultimately served to unhelpfully problematise the articulation of performance and its contexts for the purposes of indulging an, albeit non-traditional, artistic perspektive While retrospektive evaluation can often be too insensitive, the failure of the 'Happening' to realise that art and life may only be apparent dualities compels a view that this desire to pursue the impossibility of nonmatrixed space was mounted at the cost of acquiring a self-deprecating reflexivity. I am reminded here that as 'only those who attempt the impossible will achieve the absurd"(15), the principal absurdity of the 'Happening' was that it attempted a realisation of nonmatrixed space through the irreconcilable prism of setting certain rules and conditions" (16). The artists who attempted 'Happenings' differ principally from those today who are attempting installaction, however, in that the perceptible, and as such customarily understood, separations inherent in theatre and visual art which were opposed by the former have been magnified in contemporary terms outwith the auditorium and the gallery as constructed subjectivity, estranged participation and contingent universality. The need to contend with this contextual shift compels the practice of installaction to take generative forms which counter our entropying epoch through matrices which remain in liberation.

1. Exhibited June-July 1991 as part of  ' Available Resources ' at Orchard Gallery, Derry, Ireland.
2. Performed October 1997 as part of  ' Rootless ' 97:The Nomad Domain ' at RED Gallery of  Contemporary Arts, Kingston-upon-Hull, England.
3. Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas Postmodern Theory.' Critical lnterrogations (London: MacMillan) 1991, p.149.
4.  see Kristine Stiles"General Introduktion in Stiles, Kristine & Selz, Peter (eds.) Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists ' Writings (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press) 1996, pp. 1-10.
5. Actuation is a term and practice which was coined by Alastair MacLENNAN, see 'Alastair MacLennan Is No 1975-1988', ed. Stephen Snoddy (Bristol, Derry, Glasgow, Belfast: Arnolfini, Orchard Gallery, Third Eye Centre, University of Ulster) 1988.
6. Octavio Paz  ' Objects and Apparitions - for Joseph Cornell ' in Stiles & Selz (1996), p. 509.
7. Achbar, Mark (ed.) Manufacturing Consent.' Noam Chomsky and the Media (Montreal/New York, London: Black Rose Books) 1994 p. 24.
8. Bey, Hakim T.A.Z.- The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorisrn (New York: Autonomedia) 1991, p. 4.
9. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of answerability (otvetstvennost, in the Russian) "emphasized that we are not obligated by theoretical norms or values [... ] but by real people in real historical situations" whereby a "genuine life, and genuine art, can only be realized in concrete responsibility or answerability." (Haynes, Deborah J. Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts:Cambridge University Press) 1995, p. 18)
10. Mataxis' is outlined by Augusto Boal as ' the participation of one world in another ' (Boal, Augusto Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press) 1979, p. 7)
11."...all that which is theoretical must be determined as a constituent moment in the onceoccurrent event of Being, although no longer, of course, in theoretical or aesthetic terms." (Bakhtin, M.M. Toward a Philosophy of the Act (ed. Vadim Liapunov & Michael Holquist, tr Vadim Liapunov, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press)1993, p.2.)
12. Szczelkun, Stefan. Class Myths and Culture (London-. Working Press) 1990.
13. Dixon, Robert The Baumgarten Corruption.' from sense to nonsense in art and Philosoph (London and East Haven, Connecticut: Pluto Press) 1995, p. 152.
14. For evidence of this perspective see Michael Kirby's ' Happenings: An Introduction ' in Sandford, Mariellen R (ed.) Happenings and Other Acts (London and New York: Routledge) 1995, pp. 5-8
15. This is a slogan used previously by the Association of Autonomous Astronauts.
16. See Allan Kaprow ' The Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the Happenings ' in Kaprow, Allan ' Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life ', ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press) 1993, pp. 59-65.

Dartington, England,  February 1999