Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Site-Specific Art

Response to the reading Introduction: Site Specifics
From the book Site-Specific Art by Nick Kayr

In this reading, the idea of 'site' as 'place' is explored. A preoccupation lies with deconstructing the term 'place' with regards to movement and temporal change. Much effort is spent in defining what 'place' is NOT. Mention of Auge's notion of non-place sums up this philosophical writing - "...as Auge describes it...non-place is defined...in relation to place, even as that relationship is one of displacement." (11)

Things, spaces, and their order are all dependent on relationships and interaction.

"Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed... identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten." Auge (11)

As Kayr is focused on the traveller's movement through space, his traveller's eye can be compared to the art audience eye. The traveller's movement has "also a parallel movement of the landscape which he catches only in partial glimpses...and, literally recomposed in the account he gives them...constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape" as the viewer gazes upon art.

The most valuable ideas I extracted regarding site-specificity is related to Kayr's discussion of de Certeau's idea of "'place' as an ordered and ordering system realised in spatial practices."(4)
SPACE = practised place = place of USE
Example: language space = text
So does art space = the object?
Site-specific art includes location space as part of its USE, thus:
site-specific art space = object + location

Q: Do temporal forces make everything perishable?
Q: What has more bearing on a place - the subjectivity of the traveller or the relationships that define the space?
Q: Does art space = the object, or it's geographical and temporal place?

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