As an inherently heterogeneous practice, installation art presents a challenge to those who would define it and write its history. The task is both to determine its consistent attributes without being too exclusive and to parse the expanding number of works described as “installation art” into categories coherent enough to provide a critical framework. To complicate matters, these generally ephemeral pieces have often been only poorly documented in photographs and first-hand accounts. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that the approaches and potential audiences for the four books under review are so varied: they range from broad surveys to, most recently, a critical history and theory of installation art. Julie Reiss’s book, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, is the most straightforward history of installation under review here. The author limits the scope of her project to work made in New York from the 1950s to the early 1990s. Within this framework, she chronicles what she sees as the co-optation of installation by mainstream established institutions and the seeming exhaustion of what began as an artist-controlled avant-garde practice. Reiss loosely organizes her account according to the changes in the term used to describe work—from “environment” to...