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

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Timothy P. Brown

Miwon Kwon

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002

Since the late 1960S, "site-specific" art has undergone various permutations. While the earlier phases challenged the decontextualized space of the museum, highlighting the experiential and phenomenological nature of the works, more recent developments have attempted to revive the criticality of the practice by calling into question the cooptation of "site-specific" art by market forces and mainstream institutions. In One Place After Another, Miwon Kwon provides us with an overview of these transformations, while working through the ambiguities and contradictions, or the "doubleness," inherent in "site-specificity." She also offers a theory of art and site that is applicable to the larger areas of our social, economic and political life. In order to encourage a complex rather than simple, linear reading of site-specificity, Kwon discourages the acceptance of each periodic development as a series of discrete essences. While each chapter appears to follow a teleological path of currents and countercurrents, the site-specific developments and historical shifts are considered, in a manner similar to Foucault, as a series of disjunctions, highlighting the interweaving and complication of artistic, administrative and market forces. Kwon does however propose three paradigms to frame an otherwise fluid and unstable development: phenomenological/experiential, social/institutional and discursive.

Readers who are unfamiliar with site-specific art, or who tend the view that it is a general term for a rather diffuse cultural practice, will find Kwon's framework helpful. The author provides a thoughtful analysis of the subject, examining the successes and the shortcomings of public art collaborations, including the varying conditions that have contributed to their reception and/or moments of contention. For example, the transition from Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981-1989) to Martha Schwartz's design of Federal Plaza (1997-1998), that is to say from sculpture as "non-utilitarian" and "non-functional" to works integrated both artistically and environmentally, epitomizes site specificity's critical juncture of competing interests and outcomes. While Kwon's genealogy covers a range of site-specific, community-specific projects that function as a terrain of struggle (John Ahearn's "South Bronx Project" and Mary Jane Jacob's "Culture in Action"), her argument becomes circular, if not disorienting, in the fina l chapter. After Kwon's reading of Iris Marion Young's critique of the "ideal community," Jean Luc Nancy's notion of "un-working," Deleuze and Guattari's "rhyzomatic nomadism," Delillo's Valaparaiso, as misrecognition, and the "between spaces" of Bhabha, the reader begins to feel like Valaparaiso's protagonist, Michael Majeski--in the "wrong" place. According to Kwon, this predicament, presented in Valaparaiso as similar to the problems of site-specific art, engenders a reconceptualization of "place" and "identity," "a telling and retelling of the tale."

For those who already have a grasp of postmodern discourse, where the subject encounters splitting or slippage in relation to signifying structures, the rift between conceptual formulations and material outcomes are comprehensible. Overall, Kwon's theoretical formulations offer a complex examination of site-specific art and the corresponding issues of identity and community formations that will be a valuable source for practitioners in the field.