One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art And Locational Identity

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. Recent years have seen new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces challenge the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work." This book offers a critical history and theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with these permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates on identity politics and the public sphere, it addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem and examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in late capitalism. The book discusses artists such as John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.