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c102: Winter 2002 - Miwon Kwon: One place after another
C102 Article
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 Article reproduced from CIRCA 102, Winter 2002, pp. 95-96 .
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