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C102 Article
One Place
after Another by
Miwon Kwon
Miwon Kwon's groundbreaking
work on site-specificity was first published as an article
in the journal October. In this article Kwon traced
the origins of site-specific art in public sculpture and the
post-minimalist practices of Robert Smithson and Richard Serra,
and the development of site-specific art practices from the
institutional critique of Hans Haacke to the discourse-specific
practices of Fred Wilson and Renee Green. At a first glance,
this book might appear to repeat much of this original
argument. Yet Kwon's book also contains substantial new discussions
about the histories of public art in the United States and
the meaning of 'community' in community-based art.
Chapter One charts
the emergence of site-specificity in the anti-commercial sculptural
practices of the late 1960s. Citing Robert Barry's 1969 statement
that his installation was "made to suit the place in which
it was installed" and could "not be moved without being destroyed"
(p. 12), Kwon defines site-specific art in terms of the neo-avant-garde's
aesthetic aspiration to "resist the forces of the capitalist
market economy, which circulates art works as transportable
and exchangeable commodity goods" (p. 12).
This aesthetic refusal
of commodification was initially manifested via a phenomenological
paradigm that challenged the innocence of institutional space
and the assumption of a universal viewing subject. However,
as Kwon argues, this practice was later complicated by the
institutional critique of artists including Michael Asher,
Daniel Buren, and Hans Haacke who variously shifted the focus
of site-specificity from the physical condition of the gallery
to a "broader system of socioeconomic relations" (p. 18).
This shift is further illustrated by a discussion of Mierle
Laderman Ukeles's maintenance art, which documented the artist
scrubbing the floors of a museum in order to force "the menial
domestic tasks usually associated with women" to a "level
of aesthetic contemplation" (p. 19). The main limitation of
such a practice is that the art institution remains as the
site and focus of the critique. For this reason, Kwon suggests
that artists including Mark Dion, Group Material, and Jimmie
Durham have prioritised social issues as sites for artistic
engagement. While this may expand the public role of artists,
it also leads to an unhinging of site-specificity: a nomadic
principle that also underwrites the global logic of capitalist
expansion. Kwon asks if the new public service function provided
by artists might be part of a nostalgic move that seeks to
restore authenticity to the site in the face of "the commodification
and serialization of places" (p. 55).
This position is further
developed in Chapter Three through (yet another) discussion
of the debates surrounding Richard Serra's sculpture Titled
Arc, as well as a 'failed' public project by John Ahearn
in the South Bronx. The chapter does not merely rehearse the
Tilted Art controversy however; instead it frames the
debate in terms of Rosalyn Deutsche's powerful analysis of
public art. By doing so, the chapter provides an important
genealogy of the historically shifting meanings of public
art in relation to their sites. Starting with the architectural
determinism of the 1970s, Kwon traces the emergence of community-based
art as a criterion for 'good' public art.
The problem with community-based
art, like public art, is that the term 'community' is regarded
as a fixed and stable referent, when there is no certainty
about who 'the community' actually is, or what the relationship
between the artist and that community will be. Yet as Kwon
points out in Chapter Five through a detailed case study of
the Chicago Culture in Action program (1993), the term 'community-based
art' or 'new genre public art' usually refers to the art world's
engagement with disenfranchised groups or particular social
issues. As Kwon emphasises, it is important to distinguish
between examples of community-based art that actively involve
communities in the long-term production and reception of the
work, and art practices that abuse communities to promote
the interests of either the institution or the artist. Significantly,
the least abusive examples of community-based art in the Culture
in Action program were those that abandoned the "specific
art-oriented contextualisation of the exhibition" (p. 132).
Chapter Six further
complicates the notion of site-specific art through a critique
of Hal Foster's Artist as Ethnographer and Grant Kester's
claim that community-based art serves the interests of neoconservativism
by filling the gap left by the welfare state. Kwon counters
the arguments of Foster and Kester by calling for a collective
artistic praxis, which questions the coherence of a collective
subject, and acknowledges incompletion as an inherent part
of any collective social process.
Such a process seems
to provide a more generative and ethical model for thinking
and practicing site-specific art. But this argument becomes
unhinged as Kwon shifts abruptly to a concluding discussion
of nomadic life styles and art practices. Kwon's final appeal
for local encounters to be transformed into long-term commitments
and unretractable social marks (p. 166) is well taken, but
this could have been substantiated with more detailed discussions
of other, less visible sites, practices and communities.
One Place After
Another offers an exciting survey of the genealogies and
practices that variously constitute site-specificity. Despite
the book's overt failure to examine its own site-specificity
in the US metropolitan art world, there are clearly practices
and paradigms that can be translated to other places, contexts
and communities. Such a crucial practice of translation is,
however, beyond the scope of this book.
Stephen Morton,
Lecturer in English Philology and Visual Culture at the University
of Tampere, completed the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent
Study Program in 2001; his book on Gayatri Spivak will be
appearing in November 2002.
Miwon Kwon: One
Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity,
London and Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
2002; viii + 218 pp., £22.50 in UK; ISBN 0-262-11265-5
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