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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