Notes on One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon 2002.
CHAPTER 1.
In this chapter Kwon develops the concept of site and its transformative response to the conditions induced by phenomenological, institutional, then discursive frameworks. Identifying how site-specific practice worked through the physio-spatial conditions through to their particular cultural frameworks
According to Kwon (2002), site-specificity initially established a physical relationship between a work of art and its site of installation. Referring to the works of Smithson, Barry, and Sera, these practices are identified as grounding the concept of a materiality of physical space as a characteristic of initial site-specific art. Attributing the initial development of contextual reference in site-specific work to Minimalist practice, the understanding of the site was experiential.
Site-specificity responded to a number of conditions that developed out of “idealist space of dominant modernisms”. (Kwon 2002, p. 11). Aiming to bound the work within a spatial site, only completed by the physicality of a viewing subject, site-specific art, according to Kwon, affirmed “The aesthetic aspiration to exceed the limitations of traditional media…and institutional setting; relocate meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of its context; restructure the subject to a lived bodily experience; and resist the market economies desire to circulate art as a transportable and exchangeable commodity” (2002, p.12).
It is here from this original grounding in the physicality of the environment, that the site encompasses not only these conditions, but also the social, economic, and political pressures that are intrinsic and circumstantial to these sites. As Daniel Buren asserts, “Art, whatever else it may be, is exclusively political.” (cited by Kwon 2002, p.14). In other words, these pressures, amongst the other cultural factors defined in part by the institutions of art, transformed the meaning and modeling of a site into an a thing not only spatial or physical, yet also cultural.
In many ways, for artists working through these developments such as Robert Smithson and Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, and Michael Asher were critiquing the site and situations of art, the museum, physical spaces of art, and the “cultural confinement within which artists function” precipitated through this; the cultural condition and institutional frame of the artist (Kwon, p.18).
The site of art was beginning to dematerialise, no longer subordinate to its absolute physicality, but rather becoming fluid and impermanent. Kwon describes a concurrent shift in aestheticisation, or rather a deaestheticisation and withdrawal of the visual, where practices adopted “informational, textual, didactic, or immaterial [strategies] altogether…”. In essence, the work of art was becoming more process-based, replacing the object-based, phenomenological practices proceeding this evolution.
From here the boundaries between art and non-art become further obscured as art moved beyond the physical and institutional boundaries of the traditional/conventional sites of art towards a social phenomena, art and non-art oriented.
(Has art, to some degree, been concerned with the social?)
Kwon describes art as having become reflexive and self-conscious through the development of site-specificity. When the general practice of art focuses on its situation what does this mean? Art as a reflection of human development? Reflexivity, individualism, self-consciousness (Narcissism is a quality Giddens (1994) describes as necessary in today’s cultural conditions.) have precipitated through Modernity. We find our identity through locating other identities. In this way we are discursively inter-subjective.
Identifying how the site is generated by the work as its content and Kwon suggests that it is then subsequently “verified by its convergence with an existing discursive formation” (p.26). Examples of sites within this emergence might include cultural debates, theoretical concepts, social issues, political problems, institutional frameworks (non-art), seasonal event, or historical condition” (p. 28-29).
Evolving from an actual location to a “discursive vector” the definition of site has undergone ontological transformation. However, this transformation is not succinctly staged in a linear trajectory, but rather offers an overlap of competing definitions and formations. Kwon notes “The phenomenon (move away from literal interpretation of site) is embraced by many artists, curators, and critics as offering more effective avenues to resist revised insitutional and market forces that now commodify “critical” art practices. In addition, current forms of site-oriented art, which routinely engage the collaborative praticipation of audience groups for the conceptualization and production of the work, are seen as a means to strengthen art’s capacity to penetrate the sociopolitical organization of contemporary life with greater impact and meaning” (p. 30).
Kwon goes onto state that “art is becoming more and more unhinged from the actuality of the site once again” (p.30). However, we must address this unhinging with new questions, concerning “traditional aesthetic values such as authenticity, originality, and uniqueness… which always begin with the particular, local, unrepeatable preconditions of a site”? Also, how are the viewer/reader and artist roles and relations defined ? “What is the commodity status of anticommodities?” Does this unhinging support or resist the ideological establishment of art and capitalist expansion?
