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One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

by Miwon Kwon
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002.
218 pp., illus.
ISBN: 0-262-11265-5

Reviewed by Claire Barliant
CCS/Bard College,
Annandale, NY, 12504, U.S.A.

cbarliant@yahoo.com

What do most people think of when they hear the term "site-specific art?" Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, perhaps, or Claes Oldenberg’s baseball bat in Chicago—both examples of what is now pejoratively referred to as "plunk" art. Or else one might think of temporary installations, such as the twin towers of light dedicated to the collapse of the World Trade Center. Whatever images come to mind, chances are they are out of date; the definition of what is site specific is constantly changing.

In her groundbreaking book, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon charts the development of site-specific art from the mid-sixties to the present. It is not an easy history to document. Beginning in the mid-60s with well-meaning beurocrats who wanted to bring "art to the people," these intentions were complicated in the 70’s as artists began to question the cultural confinement and physical boundaries of the museum. Today artists have moved beyond the critique of the institutional framing of art, largely because art-world concerns are usually deemed too exclusive, and do not belong to a broader social context. Kwon argues that as artists seek out methods of art making that do not focus on the object, but rather the process, many artists who work on site-specific projects are engaging with social and political issues, rather than a physical place.

Obviously the idea of artist as itinerant freelancer poses several problems, and Kwon tackles these problems with convincing examples and clear, accessible prose. Today artists are not hired to produce an object (read: commodity) for a site, but to provide an aesthetic service. The artist becomes a sort of manager, or beaurocrat, while the community gets to, as Kwon provocatively puts it, "enact unalienated collective labor." In other words, the artist provides a surrogate for a labor system in which the worker’s voice is often suppressed.

As Kwon moves into a discussion of the problems surrounding site-specific art that involves the community (this has been termed "new genre public art" by critic Suzanne Lacy), she uses "Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago" as her target. This massive event in 1993 was a crucial moment in the trajectory of public and site-specific art. Conceived by Mary Jane Jacob, "Culture in Action" commissioned artists to work directly with specific communities within Chicago. It was a break from public art that seemed to ignore community concerns — Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc being the most extreme and tricky example, which Kwon also revisits in this book.

However much I enjoy Kwon’s challenging ideas, I have some trouble with her attack on "Culture in Action." There were eight projects in total for Jacob’s event, and it seems obvious that such a huge effort would have some degree of failure. But failure is a relative term, and here, for Kwon, it seems to mean the amount of actual collaboration between the artist and the community, as well as the amount of meddling on the part of the curator and institution. Kwon cites examples in which it appears that the curator was prohibiting actual discourse between the artist and the community.

Yet I find it hard to imagine public art happening without some institutional support, and Kwon doesn’t give any examples of recent developments in public art that have successfully involved community, so one has the sense that we’re not getting the complete picture. But her goal is not to solve problems, just to identify them.

Her hands-off approach is clear from the title of her last chapter: "By Way of a Conclusion: One Place After Another." As the title warns, she doesn’t provide any solutions or conclusive arguments that site-specific art is doomed. Instead, it is a lyrical meditation on the increasing displacement not only of the artist, but the academic as well. "As many cultural critics and urban theorists have warned," Kwon writes, "the intensifying conditions of such spatial undifferentiation and departicularization—fueled by an ongoing globalization of technology and telecommunications to accommodate an ever-expanding capitalist order — exacerbate the effects of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life."

Once she brings herself into the book, she drops the clinical tone and becomes more sympathetic. Longing or nostalgia for a (generally fictitious) stable location, is perhaps a means of survival, Kwon muses, in a world that is (thanks to a global market economy) rapidly changing. This is not to say that globalization is entirely bad for us, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t adjusting to the difference. Kwon uses an unusually literary example, Valparaiso, a play by Don DeLillo, to show that sometimes being constantly on the move can reveal our true character in a way that stasis cannot. Perhaps the next phase of site-specific art will address the nature of this mobility and fragmentation — relational specificity, Kwon calls it. While recent site-specific art is certainly a long way from early "plunk" art, as Kwon and many others have observed, it still has a long way to go.

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Updated 2nd December 2002


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