One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity

In Miwon Kwon's essay on site specificity, we realize that there were a multiplicity of ideas within the movement of site specific art in the 1960s and 1970s.

In looking at "Tilted Arc," by the minimal artist, Richard Serra,  we see a structure that was created for the Federal Plaza in New York, a specific site with specific physical elements; (height, length, depth). It was grounded. It held a "presence." The viewer was necessary to complete its experience. The site specific work merged with the site of the installation. Serra deemed the two were inseparable, " to move the work would be to destroy the work." When the public found the work to be too intimidating and feared it could be used as a place of hiding for wrong doers, the sculpture had to come down. But indeed, rather than it being moved to a new site, the 120 foot long structure was destroyed.

The Conceptual artists of the 60's developed a somewhat different model of site specificity. 

The Conceptualists were challenging the politics of the white cube, (ie; gallery space, museum space, etc). They insisted the white cube functioned with a hidden motive of "idealism,"and power of the elitists. One of their intents was to expose this ideology within the gallery space.

The institutions maintained that their white walls were neutral and allowed for the autonomy of the work. Conceptualists took exception to this notion, believing that the ideology of the institutions was what had been whitewashed. As the pedestals of sculpture had been knocked down, the walls were about to be exposed, as well as the power of the elite and their influence over the artists who embodied those spaces.   

In Ilya Kabakov's painting we see people looking into the inside of the white cube. 

Conceptual artist Hans Haacke's "Condensation," calls attention to the gallery space it is in. The gallery site can no longer pretend to be hidden. The content of the art is inseparable from the site and embodies the phenomenology of the culture.

Site-specific again shifted. Robert Barry and the Constructivists pushed it toward the dematerialized and de-esthetic.

The site became a "functional site," a site of information, text, video, photographs...."It is a temporary thing; a movement; a chain of meanings devoid of a particular focus." 

Kwon tells us that the "operative definition of the site has been transformed from a physical location-grounded, fixed, actual- to a discursive vector...." 

We move away from the literal interpretation of site as one specific site, anchored in place, as it embodies political, economical and ecological ideas.  

In Robin Lasser's  "The Ice Queen: Glacial Retreat Dress," she meshes site and ecological and political idea with performance. It takes on a nomadic specificity. She moves from Mount Shasta with her Glacial Queen to the downtown streets of San Jose's Zero 1 festival. The viewer walks beneath her dress tent. The every day becomes a performance. The following day she is gone.

"Site specific" has made multiple shifts, from the idea of permanence, as Serra demanded, to impermanence. Site specific work no longer seeks to be a noun but a verb. The process has become the content. It no longer (necessarily) grounds itself in one place. As it has become "dematerialized," and "de-estheticized," the presence of the artist has become even more significant. "The presence of the artist has become an absolute prerequisite for the execution/presentation of site-oriented projects," one place after another.