ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER:

MIWON KWON

"Whether inside the white cube or out in the Nevada desert, whether architectural or landscape-oriented, site-specific art initally took the "site" as an actual location, a tangible reality, its identity composed of a unique combination of constitutive physical elements: length, depth, height, texture, and shape of walls and rooms; scale and proportion of plazas, buildings, or parks; existing conditions of lighting, ventilation, traffic patterns; distinctive topographical features."(p.85)

"...forced a dramatic reversal of this modernist paradigm."
(p.85)

"THE SPACE OF ART WAS NO LONGER PERCIEVED AS A BLANK STATE, A TABULA RASA, BUT A REAL PLACE"
(p. 86)

"the self-conscious desire to resist the forces of the capitalist market economy, which circulates art works as transportable and exchangeable commodity goods..."

RICHARD SERRA

HANS HAACKE

MARK DION

FOUR SITES

• Site of collection
• Gallery to which they were shipped
• Curatorial intervention of objects
• Realtionship with the site

DISCURSIVE


"...cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a social issue, a political problem, an institutional framework (not necessarily an art institution), a community or seasonal event, a historical condition, even particular formations of desire, are now deemed to function as sites." (p.93)

3 PARADIGMS OF SITE SPECIFICITY (P.95)

• phenomenological
• social/institutional
• discursive

UNHINGING

"art work is becoming more and more "unhinged" from the actuality of the site once again -- unhinged both in a literal sense of a physical seperation of the art work from the location of its installation, and a metaphorical sense as performed in the discursive mobilization of the site in emergent forms of site-oriented art." (p. 96)

"Difficult to collect and impossible to reproduce"

FAITH WILDING

ITINERANT ARTISTS

Untitled Slide

"Generally, ostensibly unsuitable for re-presentation anywhere else without altering its meaning, partly because the commission is defined by a unique set of geographical and temporal circumstances and partly because the project is dependent on unpredictable and unprogrammable on-site relations".
(p. 101)

FRED WILSON

"...The artist as an overspecialized aesthetic object maker has been anachronistic for a long time already. What they provide now, rather than produce, are aesthetic, often 'critical-artistic,' services."
(top of p. 103)

"...this "return of the author" results from thematization of discursive sites, which engenders a misrecognition of them as "natural" extensions of the artist's identity, and the legitimacy of the critique is measured by the proximity of the artist's personal association (converted to experience) with a particular place, history, discourse, identity, etc (converted to thematic content.).... because of the signifying chain of site-oriented art is constructed foremost by the movement and decisions of the artist, the (critical) elaboration of the project inevitably unfolds around the artist."
(mid-paragraph bottom of p.103)

"In such a pre- (or post-) poststructuralist conception, all site-specific gestures would have to be understood as reactive, "cultivating" what is presumed to be there already rather than generative of new identities and histories."
(bottom of p. 108)

"For this collapse of the artist and the site reveals an anxious cultural desire to assuage the sense of loss and vacancy that pervades both sides of the equation."
(p. 55)

THOUGHTS?

KARA WALKER

HANS HAACKE

BANKSY