#site specificity

Summary:

As a fan of site-specificity and location-based projects, this chapter was painful to read at parts. It was certainly well-written, but Kwon takes a real sharp cut at the interests in projects like these, and who and what benefits from them. She talks about authorship, and how the authorization of an artist validates an artwork, even when someone else might have done the labor. And then she mentions that there’s also the instance in which the physical presence of an artist can validate an artwork as well, as well as the scenario in which an artist becomes something of a globetrotter and is invited to replicate similar projects at different sites around the world, which, Kwon argues, drastically neutralizes the impact of an artwork or practice that is intended to be site specific.

She mentions how easily site-specific work can be used as a promotional tool, and how at a time when so many places are homogenized by globalization, these artworks become instruments with which to distinguish one place from another. The chapter ends on a pretty bleak note!

 Notes and Quotes:

Replicating a site-specific work infuses cash value into the work by aestheticizing and de-contextualizing the work from its original context

“...specificity of the site in terms of time and space is rendered irrelevant...” (38)

“...active processes are transformed into inert art objects once again. In this way, site-specific art comes to represent criticality rather than performing it.” (38)

On inviting artists to perform IC and SS at museums

“They can easily become extensions of the museum’s own self-promotional apparatus, while the artist becomes a commodity with a special purchase on ‘criticality.’“ (47)

Kwon cites Isabelle Graw: “the result can be an absurd situation in which the commissioning institution (the museum or gallery) turns to an artist as a person who has the legitimacy to point out the contradictions and irregularities of which they themselves disapprove.” (47) This poses kind of a micro-crisis in the context of my own work, how are museums, artist and curators supposed to deal with this then? Setting the museums on fire and starting from scratch?

Kwon explains that the skill sets for artists have changed from formal, aesthetic skills to what Buchloh calls “the aesthetics of administration” (51). Artists “provide now, rather than produce” objects. (50) More crisis-thinking here. Curatorial work and educational work are now (and have been) in the realm of artists’ skills and practices. Does is still make sense to make distinctions between artists and curators? Like, what value can I even provide? My ambitions are maybe extremely simple and naive. Where to go now? But then again, there is value in pleasant experiences, and moments for reflection and understanding. But...how do you do this correctly?

Kwon talks about Renee Green’s attempt to deploy similar, unified projects at locations throughout the world as part of an experiment to see if working in similar modes at various locations is possible without reducing the work’s impact...but it isn’t, because the public usually only sees one of these projects at a time. (52)

Other interests at stake with SS projects:

“...the siting of art in ‘real’ places can also be a means to extract the social and historical dimensions of these places in order to vicariously serve the thematic drive of an artist, satisfy institutional demographic profiles, or fulfill the fiscal needs of a city.” (53)

SS “...supplies distinction of place and uniqueness of locational identity, highly seductive qualites in the promotion of towns and cities within the competitive restructuring of the global economic hierarchy.” (54)

SS “..can be mobilized to expedite the erasure of differences via the commodification and serialization of places.” (55)

I was already vaguely familiar with Kwon’s work, but it made sense to dive deeper and I will record notes on each chapter. I like this book, although it was written in 2004 and is a bit dated now.

Summary: Kwon identifies the emergence of site specificity and explains that it’s a response to modernist, object-based aesthetics, commercial systems, etc. She identifies some early SS artists, including Smithson and Serra, and how early on, SS was explicitly tied to a specific space and to move a SS piece would be to ruin it. 

She also talks about Institutional Critique as site specificity, and talked about how artists like Haacke, Buren, and Ukeles draw attention to the specific frame of the institution, and issues of value, narrative, seen and unseen labor. Here we’re still working with a physical place, but the narrative is political, it’s not just about a location, it’s about a system of power/economy.

And then she talks about artists like Fred Wilson who work with multiple sites, and multiple disciplines (the sciences, popular culture, etc) who conceptualize the site as not a physical location, but as a discourse, a suite of themes, etc. And then she goes on to mention how these ideas morph in other chapters to become more theoretical and complex.

Key notes/phrases/quotes etc:

Institutional critique:

“The seemingly benign architectural features of a gallery/museum...actively disassociate the space of art from the outside world, furthering the institution’s idealist imperative of rendering itself and its values ‘objective,’ ‘disinterested,’ and ‘true.’“ (13)

Some SS/IC practices are “aggressively antivisual--informational, textual, expositional, didactic...” (24)

Museums are in some ways meta-sites:

“...the site comes to encompass a relay of several interrelated but different spaces and economies, including the studio, gallery, museum...that together constitute a system of practices that is not separate from but open to social, economic and political pressures.” (14)

Moving to a more complex theorization of site:

“...the site is now structured (inter)textually rather than spatially...” (29)

“Splitting” by Gordon Matta-Clark, as discussed today at Tim’s tutorial.

A number of things struck me about this work and out of our discussion of it.

“Oscillating between sound as worldly phenomena to music as cultural work, Cage sets the state for a heightened consideration of listening and the ‘place’ of sound by developing a form of critical practice” (471).

Anna Stevenson, Anna Lensch, and Amelia Forman

Miles, 2015.

Video Projections on wall.