Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

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

Arts & Photography

Kwon, Miwon

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s.
Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Mit Press)

The MIT Press

This text explores the work of vanguard artist Mark Dion who has made site-specific projects all over the world which explore the relationship of Western art, literature and museology with the natural environment. His sculptures and installations often focus on contemporary environmental issues, and have the uncanny quality of film sets or dioramas. His life-size environments have included live and stuffed animals, plants, lab equipment, and museological displays of garbage. They present lyrical and funny investigations into exoticism, colonialism and environmental crisis.

Mark Dion (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Bryson, Norman

Graziose Corrin, Lisa

Phaidon Press

This Gagosian Gallery catalog of James Turrell’s recent exhibition with the London gallery features installations, light works, sculptures, and prints by the artist. For more than forty-five years, Turrell has explored the myriad possibilities of using light as a medium of perception. His formally simple works draw attention to the limits of seeing, while seeking to expand the wordless thought that they provoke. Throughout these permutations, the light that is normally used to illuminate other objects is assigned form and structure, making it the subject of the revelation. He continues to use light as his primary subject and material, with its inherent allusions to painting and sculpture. Scholar Miwon Kwon has contributed an insightful essay to the publication, which features a biography and exhibition history.

James Turrell

Individual Artists

Gagosian / Rizzoli

Working in a variety of media and a range of scales, from humble works on paper to monumental staged performances, Francis Alÿs (born 1959) has established himself as one of the world's leading contemporary artists. Based in Mexico City since 1986, the artist fashions much of his work from the street life he observes during long walks throughout the city. Bringing together a variety of participants, from Mexican sign-painters to British Guardsmen, his collaborations have produced several well-known works, including "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002), in which he enlisted 500 volunteers to attempt to move a sand dune one foot from its original position using shovels, and "The Modern Procession" (2002), a ceremonial procession commemorating MoMA's temporary move to Queens, New York, that included a brass band and uniformed participants carrying reproductions of the Museum's most famous works across the Queensboro bridge. Published to accompany the largest retrospective of Alÿs' work to date, this publication is more a guidebook than a conventional monograph, reflecting the spirit of the artist's wandering practice. It features an introductory essay by Mark Godfrey, a curator at the Tate Modern, an index of quotes from Alÿs' previous writings and interviews compiled by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, and descriptions of works written by Alÿs and Cuauhtémoc Medina, freelance curator and art critic, as well as responses to the artist's work from a wide range of critics and commentators.

Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception

Weizman, Eyal

Groys, Boris

Medina, Cuauhtémoc

McDonough, Tom

BIESENBACH, KLAUS

Godfrey, Mark

Careri, Francesco

Faesler, Carla

dos Santos, Laymert

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe

I Want to Believe accompanies the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the innovative body of work by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang--best known for his spectacular artworks using gunpowder and fireworks. It presents a chronological and thematic survey that charts the artist's creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: drawings made from gunpowder fuses and explosive powders laid on paper and ignited; explosion events, documented by videos, photographs and preparatory drawings; large-scale installations; and social projects, wherein the artist works with local communities to create an art event or exhibition site, documented by photographs. Featuring works from the 1980s to the present, this volume illuminates Cai's significant formal and conceptual contributions to contemporary international art practices and social activism. Generously illustrated more than 368 pages, this volume includes essays by Alexandra Munroe, David Joselit, Miwon Kwon and Wang Hui--along with some 60 documented plate entries. It is the defining scholarly publication on the artist thus far.

Joselit, David

Munroe, Alexandra

Guggenheim Museum

Through her use of color and assemblage, Jessica Stockholder challenges familiar generic boundaries between painting and sculpture, while de-familiarizing the experience of the exhibition space--not to mention giving the impression of a K-Mart store that's been bulldozed by a group of feminist abstract expressionists. In 1988, Stockholder created the self-contained assemblage Kissing the Wall No. 2 an old-fashion projector screen wrapped in newspaper and plaster that stands like a bad child facing a florescent lamp secured to the wall. This seminal work, from which this exhibition and catalogue take their name, uses the gallery wall as a screen kissed by various objects in what the artist calls "an emotionally charged event." This work, in which found objects become actors in the drama of space and color, is exemplary of the many objects gathered together for this retrospective look at Stockholder's self-contained assemblages since 1988. Includes an interview with the artist, scholarly essays, an annotated chronology and a detailed exhibition and publication history.

Jessica Stockholder: Kissing The Wall: Works 1988-2003

Carruthers, Elspeth

Marquand Books, Inc./Blaffer Gallery/Weatherspoon Art Museum

The Swiss artist Christian Philipp Muller, who has been based in New York and Cologne for more than a decade, may be best known for a series of performances timed to his appearance in the 1993 Venice Bienniale: Green Border saw him cross over and back from Austria to adjacent territories repeatedly, each time illegally. Muller, who has also performed as a Dutch royal at ceremonious social occasions and costumed himself as a museum guard, given out mock-historical pamphlets and offered tours of student exhibitions, remains interested in all the questions raised by this sort of work--in context or site-specificity, in historical or cultural codes, in research and investigations of all sorts, and not least in surprising and entertaining the viewer. Christian Philipp Muller offers a concise survey of his oeuvre.

Christian Philipp Muller

Kaiser, Philipp

Buchmann, Sabeth

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Japanese publisher Soichiro Fukutake has transformed the island of Naoshima into an art lover's paradise. Located off the west coast of Japan, the island is home to Ando-designed museums showcasing works by Walter De Maria, James Turrell, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Bruce Nauman and David Hockney, as well as public installations by Cai Guo-Qiang and Yayoi Kusama.

Naoshima: Nature, Art, Architecture

Tokuda, Kayo

Reference

Hatje Cantz

The fascinating and generously illustrated catalogue documents the history of Land art from its emergence during the early 1960s through 1974. A companion volume to the first large-scale exhibition on Land art, this book traces the emergence of the artistic impulses to use the earth as material, land as medium, and to locate works in remote sites, beyond familiar art contexts. Ends of the Earth challenges many myths about Land art-that it was primarily a North American phenomenon, that it was foremost a sculptural practice, and that it exceeds the confines of the art system. Essays by leading young scholars will offer new insights into Land art's emergence, including its intrinsic connection to media, its dreams of an elsewhere, the attraction of wastelands, and the problems inherent in a historical evaluation of site-specific or ephemeral art. The book will also include a series of reflections from the major curators, critics, and dealers who helped to make Land art both as work and discourse in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974

Prestel

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