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

Author:

Miwon Kwon

Description:

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.

About the Author
Miwon Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the faculty at UCLA to teach contemporary art history (post-1945) in the same year. Along the way, she helped to curate several exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, was a founding editor and publisher of Documents, a journal of art, culture, and criticism (1992-2004), and defined her area of research and writings to encompass several disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, public art, and urban studies. She is the author of One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002) as well as numerous essays on the practices of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Marclay, Ana Mendieta, Do-Ho Suh, Mark Dion, Gabriel Orozco, Jimmie Durham, Christian Philipp Müller, Josiah McElheny, among others.

Publisher: MIT Press (2004)
ISBN: 0-262-61202-X, 978-0-262-61202-9

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Nazareth Housing Association provides independent living houses for individuals and couples who are 65 and over and on the Sligo County Council housing list.  Nazareth Village is comprised of 48 houses in a garden setting.  The Village was financed as a public-private partnership between Nazareth Housing Association and Sligo County Council with funding from the Department of Environment, Community and Local Government.  

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