Miwon Kwon Site-ing

I will be talking through ‘One Place After Another’ by Miwon Kwon. It’s really a survey/history of the site specific movement, and is a long and winding road. I’ll attempt to reduce the article to it’s most important points.

Site specificity emerged in the late 60’s and initially took ‘site’ to mean an actual physical location where the art was situated, whether it be in the landscape or in architectural space. She says “site-specific art, whether interruptive or assimilative, gave itself up to it’s environmental context, being formally determined by it”. She refers to Michael Fried’s concept of ‘theatricallity’ that we discussed at length in class-“the art or event was to be singularly experienced in the here-and-now through the bodily presence of each viewing subject in a sensorial immediacy of spatial extension and temporal duration”. The idea was to relocate meaning from within the art object to “the contingencies of it’s context”.

She discusses the saga of Richard Serra and the Tilted Arc project, with its complex implications for the concept of site specificity and perhaps more importantly, of how public art is commissioned and installed. He stated “It is a site specific work and as such not to be relocated. To remove the work is to destroy the work”. It proved to be a lightning rod for controversy and was instantly polarizing, with the art world defending the project, and a large segment of the local population despising it. After years of in the courts, Tilted Arc wound up disassembled and stored in 3 pieces by the government.

Propelled by artists like Micheal Asher, site specificity morphed into a new phase. ‘Site’ became more than a physical location, it became a cultural framework defined by the institutions of art. Asher’s pieces commented on the mechanics of the art business- his piece might consist of a deconstructed gallery, where the interior walls were removed to show only the office space, ‘framing the institutional frame’. Asher also worked with the idea that site was ‘inclusive of historical and conceptual dimensions’. In 1979 in Chicago he moved a statue of George Washington from outside to inside a small gallery of 18^th century painting to show it in relation to it’s historical context as opposed to the exterior of the building.

Kwon then describes another phase where ‘site’ becomes more about process- “the “work” no longer seeks to be a noun/object, but a verb/process provoking the viewer’s critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological conditions of that viewing. The insertion of social concerns (AIDS, racism, sexism) create a merging with the idea of ‘community art’, and a growing sense that the public should be involved in the process, as the process becomes paramount. Aesthetic and art-historical concerns have become secondary issues. “Different cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a social issue, a political problem are now deemed to function as sites”.

Kwon discusses the ‘unhinging’ of works created in the 60’s and 70’s, and how the art market has essentially figured out how to market these older works, leading to recreations of the work. This of course raises lots of interesting questions about the ethics of refabrication and placing the ‘site specific’ work in new physical contexts, and what rights the artists have to be involved. I thought this was one of the most interesting passages in the article. Kwon quotes Susan Hapgood- “the once popular tem ‘site-specific”, has come to mean ‘movable under the right circumstances’, shattering the dictum “to remove the work is to destroy the work”. Brilliant.

Kwon discusses the rise of ‘Itinerant Artists”, a new class who are paid to travel the world doing site specific work for institutions, and civic entities, and how these artists are actually used for local commercial purposes. “ The artist as an overspecialized aesthetic object maker has been anachronistic for a long time. What they provide now, rather that produce, are aesthetic, often “critical-artistic” services”. She uses the example of a site specific exhibition in Charleston, South Carolina, that was actually about promoting the city more than any of the art created there “what is prized the most is the ways the presence of the artists endows places with a ‘unique’ distinction”.

There are some of the highlights of the article, I really enjoyed it and certainly now have a more nuanced understanding of the movement.

Rick English