Site Specific Art

Week 9 Day 1: Response to "One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity" by Miwon Kwon


Here in school whenever I have created a drawing, sculpture or painting I always imagine it being placed in the classic gallery or museum. White walls, no windows, controlled lights, hard floors a place that is quiet so that viewers will carefully observe the art, contemplate it and not be distracted by anything outside the room. After reading the section my 4-D studio teacher instructed us to read, I read that the room I just described is considered a "blank slate" a room that

"actively disassociate the space of art from the outer world, furthering the institution's idealist imperative of rendering itself and it's values "objective," "disinterested," and "true." (page 13)

Although under the surface planned my art for the context of the blank slate, I never actually thought about it. Not until this class started teaching about installation art, site specific art. Where one goes to a location, indoors, or outdoors and creates art in or around it. When creating site specific art, often times the artist immerses the viewer into the art, for instance the reading gave the example of Mierle Laderman Ukeles's 1973 "maintenance art" performance where she was on her hands and knees and washed the entry plaza and steps, and then the exhibition galleries for a total of eight hours held at the Wadsworth Atheneum. She displayed the cliche domestic act of "woman's work" and made people notice the museum's perfect neutral, immaculate and pristine white spaces. Drawing attention towards the hidden daily maintenance in keeping the desired context. One could go on about the representation and meaning behind this performance, but I wanted to make the point that she choose that location and context and needed it to aid in her message. While others would have just used the exhibition galleries like myself to hand or set up works of art. She created art around and in the location, and it could never be recreated exactly the same way.

Another form of site specific art location is not the physical location, but an issue location. While art has often time reflected on the cultural and social and political issues, artist have now taken that issue to be a form of a location and created art based on that"site". The reading discusses how site specific art is becoming more and more popular and taking context to a whole new level.

"Nonetheless, this move away from a literal interpretation of the site, and the multiple expansions of the site in locational and conceptual terms, seem more accelerated today than in the past. The phenomenon is embraced by many artists, curators, and critics as offering more effective avenues to resist revised institutional and market forces that now commodify "critical" art practices." (page 30)

Instead of painting a painting and hanging it anywhere or creating a sculpture and placing it in the middle of a room, artist now are thinking of location, meaning, context, and "site" now more then ever. Be it a physical indoor outdoor blank slate or busy section, be it relational or topic issue and so many possibilities therein -site specific art could be said that an artist takes "The Space of Art" and converts it into "The Art of Space"