M629957.final 6/25/02 8:50 AM Page 1 #629957 04/27/2002 Miwon Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at the “ You are familiar with art history. Welcome to art geography, a new subdiscipline launched ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER University of California, Los Angeles. by Miwon Kwon’s lustrous commentary on thirty-five years of artists’ engagement with Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity physical and political environments.” MIWON KWON — Andrew Ross, Professor and Director, Graduate Program in American Studies, New York KWON University Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art’s “ A compelling theoretical analysis that never loses sight of the ‘here and now’ of artistic ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as practice and aesthetic experience. Miwon Kwon’s exploration of the social and political site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance dimensions of site specificity succeeds in being both original and provocative; it will provide art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, a valuable foundation for all future studies.” community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the — Judith Russi Kirshner, critic, curator, and Dean of the College of Architecture and the Arts, inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, University of Illinois at Chicago however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra’s famous dictum “to remove the “ The concept of site specificity has been used to cover a wide and often ill-defined range of work is to destroy the work” has been challenged by new models art practices. Kwon’s important book clarifies the issues at stake and cogently lays out a of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. number of analytical paths down which others will surely follow. One Place after Another will redefine the way we think about public art.” One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art — Russell Ferguson, Chief Curator, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles MIWON KWON since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism “ One Place after Another discusses how artists from the 1960s to the 1990s have engaged associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, with specific sites and their contexts, whether in art institutions or public places. Here, sites SITE-SPECIFIC ART AND LOCATIONAL IDENTITY postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates bring to the surface what is intrinsic to a locality but often overlooked or not yet visible. concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book This book provides an important and critical overview of discourses about site specificity addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It that will interest artists, commissioners, curators, institutions, critics, and the broader public.” examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable — Uta Meta Bauer, Professor of Theory, Practice, and Mediation of Contemporary Art, relationship between location and identity in the era of late Academy of Fine Arts Vienna capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renée Green, Suzanne Lacy, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Book and jacket design by John Isaacs Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson. Jacket illustration: Christian Philipp Müller, Illegal Border Crossing between Austria and Czechoslovakia, Austrian contribution to the Venice Biennale, 1993. (Photo courtesy the artist.) THE MIT PRESS • MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY • CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 02142 • http://mitpress.mit.edu ,!7IA2G2-bbcgfj!:t;K;k;K;k 0-262-11265-5 ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER MIWON KWON ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER SITE-SPECIFIC ART AND LOCATIONAL IDENTITY THE MIT PRESS • CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS • LONDON, ENGLAND © 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Monotype Grotesque and Rockwell by Graphic Composition, Inc., and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kwon, Miwon. One place after another : site-specific art and locational identity / Miwon Kwon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-11265-5 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Site-specific art. 2. Art, Modern—20th century. I. Title. N6490 .K93 2002 709’.04’07—dc21 2001044753 For Umma and Appa CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii INTRODUCTION 1 Ẅ GENEALOGY OF SITE SPECIFICITY 11 ẅ UNHINGING OF SITE SPECIFICITY 33 Ẇ SITINGS OF PUBLIC ART: INTEGRATION VERSUS INTERVENTION 56 ẇ FROM SITE TO COMMUNITY IN NEW GENRE PUBLIC ART: THE CASE OF “CULTURE IN ACTION” 100 Ẉ THE (UN)SITINGS OF COMMUNITY 138 ẉ BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION: ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER 156 NOTES 168 INDEX 211 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The first incarnation of this book, in the form of a doctoral thesis, was completed in 1998 at the School of Architecture at Princeton University under the guidance of Rosalyn Deutsche, Hal Foster, and Mark Wigley. I am grateful for their encourage- ment, critical commentaries, and practical wisdom, which set me in the right direc- tion and pushed me forward. Many people during that time and since then gave me opportunities to develop different aspects of the project as papers or lectures. My thanks to Julie Ault, Ron Clark, Sylvie Fortin, Christian Höller, Janet Kaplan, Richard Meyer, Ellen McMahon, Christian Philipp Müller, Andrew Perchuk, Mathias Poledna, Georg Schöllhammer, Do-Ho Suh, Sergio Vega, and especially the editors of Octo- ber for their timely invitations and keen critical responses. I am also grateful to many artists, curators, critics, arts administrators, col- leagues, and friends who shared their insights and experiences or otherwise en- couraged me during the period of the book’s preparation. Among them, I am especially indebted to David Deitcher, Mark Dion, Karen Dunbar, Russell Ferguson, Joyce Fernandes, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Chris Hoover, Mary Jane Jacob, Sil- via Kolbowski, Janet Kraynak, Simon Leung, Roy Levin and the faculty, staff, and stu- dents of the MFA Program in Visual Art at Vermont College, Mark Linder, James Marcovitz, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Michael Minelli, Karen Paluzzi-Steele, Diane Shamash, Margaret Sundell, Frazer Ward, Connie Wolf, and Lydia Yee. The final revision of the book was completed at UCLA, where I am fortunate to be surrounded by this most congenial and supportive faculty and staff. I would like to thank in particular Anthony Vidler and Cécile Whiting in the Department of Art History and Mary Kelly and Juli Carson at the School of Art for their nurturing influence. I also extend special thanks to my students at UCLA for their patient and enthusiastic participation in the seminars that helped to reshape this project. Among them, Katie Mondloch and Doris Chon have been diligent research assistants. The College Art Association supported the early phase of research and writing with its Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians, and a Fac- ulty Career Development Grant from UCLA allowed me to devote myself fully to the project in its last months. I thank both institutions for their support. Along with these thanks, I want to register my sense of loss in the premature deaths of Alice Yang, Ernest Pascucci, Jochen Klein, Joe Wood, and Pat Hearn. Al- though they were not close friends, or curiously because so, their work provided a broad sense of orientation for mine—a fact recognized regrettably in their passing. The future that I can imagine for my generation in various cultural fields is dimin- ished because of their absence. Special acknowledgment is due two exceptional people in my life: Helen Molesworth for her inestimable friendship, and Doug Ashford, my most intimate in- terlocutor, for his intellectual challenges as well as his extraordinary capacity for laughter. Finally, I am grateful to my family. In immeasurable ways, Sowon Kwon and Andre Tchelistcheff have sustained me with spirited support throughout the dura- tion of this study. Their son Sune gave me moments of inexplicable joy when I needed it most. And Seong Kwon remains an inspiration, helping me to keep all things in proper perspective. I would like to dedicate this book to my mother and father. As they have grown accustomed to counseling, worrying about, and cheer- ing for their children from so far away over so many years, I have reciprocally tried to learn to endure geographical distance and physical separation as surmountable obstacles to intimacy. Even during the most intense periods of self-doubt, I felt the grounding power of their good will and love. ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER INTRODUCTION Site-determined, site-oriented, site-referenced, site-conscious, site-responsive, site-related. These are some new terms that have emerged in recent years among many artists and critics to account for the various permutations of site-specific art in the present. On the one hand, this phenomenon indicates a return of sorts: an attempt to rehabilitate the criticality associated with the anti-idealist, anticommer- cial site-specific practices