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.
