One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
Author
Miwon Kwon, professor of art history at UCLA and a founding co-editor of the journal Documents. She writes on post-1960s art, public art and the politics of site.
Publication Details
One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002; paperback 2004. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-61202-9.[1]
Description
Kwon offers a critical history of site-specific art from the late 1960s to the end of the century, and a theoretical account of what "site" came to mean across that period. She identifies three overlapping paradigms.
The first is phenomenological: the site is an actual physical location, and the work is inseparable from it. This is the paradigm of minimalism and of Richard Serra's dictum that "to remove the work is to destroy the work," tested most publicly in the destruction of Tilted Arc. The second is institutional: the site is the museum, the gallery, the funding structure and the discourse that frames art as art. This is the paradigm of institutional critique, of Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson. The third is discursive: the site is a debate, a social issue, a community, a body of knowledge — homelessness, AIDS, ecology, ethnic identity — and the work is a form of intervention in it, as in projects by Mark Dion, Renée Green, Suzanne Lacy, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, John Ahearn and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
Kwon's argument is that as site becomes discursive it also becomes mobile, and that mobility returns the artist to precisely the condition of nomadic professional service that site-specificity was invented to resist. The itinerant, project-based artist flown in to do community work in one city after another begins to resemble the very model of interchangeable, deracinated labour the practice set out to critique — hence the title.
Key Ideas
- The unhinging of site from location. Site specificity survives its own dematerialisation, but at the cost of the resistance to commodification that motivated it.
- Wrong place / right place. Kwon resists both the nostalgia for rooted place and the celebration of placelessness, arguing for a "relational specificity" that holds the two in tension.
- Community as artistic material. Her critique of community-based public art — that "community" is frequently invented by the commissioning process rather than found — remains the sharpest available.
- The artist as service provider. Site work reorganises the artist's labour into consultancy, with the attendant travel, deadlines and client relations.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Kwon's sequence — site as physical, then institutional, then discursive and mobile — describes something that also happened to ordinary experience of place under networked and location-aware technology. When a location can be checked into, geotagged, filtered and left behind, "being somewhere" becomes exactly the relational and unstable category she describes.
Related Reading
- The Poetics of Space
- Geocloaking
- Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access
- Time and Space Compression
External Links
References
- ↑ One Place after Another, MIT Press.
