Gillian McIver, Art Site Context
‘Site response in art occurs when the artist is engaged in an investigation of the site as part of the process in making the work. The investigation will take into account geography, locality, topography, community (local, historical and global), history (local, private and national). These can be considered to be “open source” – open for anyone’s use and interpretation. This process has a direct relationship to the art works made, in terms of form, materials, concept etc. Of course, artists, like anyone else, respond to these “raw materials” in individual ways.’
‘Along with installation, site-responsive art sometimes incorporates a live art or performative element…..most site-responsive work is temporal.’
‘Anselm Kiefer said that no empty place is really empty: everywhere is filled up, “almost claustrophobically” with all the traces of the past. The past is always there in the present. Artists working site-responsively are working with these traces or “ghosts” as raw material, aware that whatever we put into a place will be mingled with whatever was there before.’
‘Taking on history so directly causes the artist to examine certain questions and imposes certain requirements which other methodologies of art-making do not:
Ownership – When sites are former public spaces of significance (prison, hospital, theatre, factory, church) and then fall into disuse, what is their role in the life of the community? Does the local authority or private company’s ownership of the bricks and mortar of the property supersede the community’s ownership of the site as repository of memory? This becomes a serious issue when areas of the locality are the locus for “gentrification” and such sites are transformed into offices or luxury housing. In Rodinsky’s Room Iain Sinclair is critical of artists as “shock troops of the developers.” In the case of art as part of urban “regeneration projects,” Malcolm Miles cautions that “Since this advocacy [of art as part of the regeneration process] has been unquestioning of the intentions of development and its impact on communities, art has perhaps been complicit in the abjection that increasingly follows development and the extension of privatisation and surveillance.[3] Artists need to think about this relationship when seeking sites for art-response.
Social use – Cities evolve over time, the social use for which a site was built may change and mutate many times before the artist comes to the site. The artist must be careful not to immediately romanticize and prioritise the “original” use as being somehow more “authentic, ” but to consider the social use of the site as a continuing narrative of which s/he is another part.
What “deserves” to be remembered or commemorated - For example, the video installation “Unbekannt” was made in a former Cold War memorial built over a mass grave where the victims are both opponents of the GDR regime and Nazis (“unbekannt” – “unknown” - refers to the fact that nobody actually knows who most of them were).
Transformation of spaces/communities/locales over time – Related to “social use,” this aspect considers not only the site, but the locale and the population in time. Here an investigation into local history and interaction with local people can be invaluable. Here the artist has an opportunity to bring real depth to the project by collecting stories, rumours, legends and other data about the locale in past and present. In other cases, the artist might be responding to disappeared communities, in which case archival and anecdotal information can be useful.
Sensitivity – Again in Rodinsky’s Room, co-author Rachel Lichtenstein, herself an artist, describes her horror at attending an art event in London’s Whitechapel where the participants were, as an art-action, engaged in destroying sacred Jewish texts which they had found in the squatted premises. Lichtenstein reports that they had no idea or interest in what the texts were. I would say that, while the role of the artist is not necessarily that of the guardian of abandoned cultural property, some sensitivity is needed – if only to make the work effective. This does not preclude the artist from making extreme confrontational work – merely that s/he should know what they are getting into.
Who is in control? – Sometimes the intervention of art into a site can make people question how the site has been kept from public use. In the case of sites which have been made “invisible” due to neglect, disuse or misuse and decay, making the site “visible” again can bring up issues of “who controls communities?” Are local governments and landlords responsive to the needs of the people, or not? This can become the basis for local empowerment and initiatives into how space is “regenerated.”’
Art “as art” One very important issue is the question of how we judge site-specific/site-responsive art “as art”. Site-responsive art has certain aspects which do not apply to gallery and museum-based art:
Accessibility – If, as we have said, one of the purposes of working site-responsively is to “open out” the art audience beyond the gallery habitués, is it possible to truly achieve a genuinely mixed audience, given that the whole rationale for bourgeois art institutions is to create and preserve elites? As stated earlier, siteresponsive art as “inclusive” art (as opposed to “community” art), depends on developing a professional art practice, so it is important for artists to be judged by their peers and critics on the basis of their work. In the case of Horn, she was already known as an artist before she began working site-responsively. In the case of other artists, some work in other art forms aside from site-responsive. Others employ aggressive marketing techniques to gain publicity, so that the bourgeois taste-makers are afraid to ignore them.
Curatorial Practices – Curating site-responsive art involves procedures and practices outside of those commonly associated with the “art world.” For this reason, in the UK many site-responsive projects are curated by artists, or in a peculiar relationship between a local funding body (e.g. a local council) and the artist, without a “professional” curator.[5] Elsewhere, it is not uncommon for established art institutions to support extramural site-responsive projects, with a professional curator involved in at least part of the project.
Ephemeral – In most cases the works made for a particular site owe their existence only in relation to the site. If they can be moved and replaced at all, they will be changed by this process.[6] In this case we can say that the work is ephemeral. This applies equally to Kapoor’s Marsyas, made for the Tate’s Turbine Hall, as to the House of Detention projects. In many cases the work’s “life” exists only for the duration of the exhibition. This is particularly true of work made with materials directly related to the site (e.g. waste materials found onsite). As Miwon Kwon notes, “the definition of site-specificity [assuming there is one!] is being reconfigured to imply not the permanence or immobility of a work [as in the sculptural and land art projects of earlier practice] but its impermanence and transience.”[7]
Exists as documentation – Much site-responsive work, as with land art, exists after the initial realisation of the project, as photographic, film or video work – it is thus transformed into another art work. How to deal with this outcome is another subject not discussed here. Process-product – The main danger in working site-responsively is the temptation to be caught up in the process, as opposed to working towards an end result. While this is not a situation limited to site-responsive artists, it is one which we are all especially susceptible to. However, if the aim is also to be accessible and inclusive, we also have to take into account that people who come to see the work expect there to be a work to experience. A description of the process alone is going to be seen as self-indulgent and is an example of then kind of obscurantism that made many artists reject the institutions. This does not mean that the art needs to be “dumbed down” in order to be accessible: quite the opposite. Most people, whatever their background, are quite ready to engage with the intellectual content of an art work if the art work presents itself as open for experience. Those who are not, would probably not willingly attend any exhibition, anywhere.
Becoming part of collective memory of the site – working on a site does not bestow ownership upon the artist. The artist and the work becomes part of the collective memory of the site, and the artist has to accept that. Trying to achieve union of social and artistic purposes – While the artist wants the work to be judged as “art”, the social engagement of working on sites is very much part of what is going on and will affect the outcome. By making this a virtue of the work, the artist can avoid conflict in his/her process.
Not commodity based – Because the site-responsive work rarely generates any kind of sales, income for the projects must normally come from sponsorships and grants. In this way, site-responsive art exists slightly outside of the art market. There are exceptions, as it is not impossible to make saleable works in a siteresponsive manner, but it is not common. Photo-video work that comes out of the documentation, of course, can have a commodity life outside of the site work. However it is safe to say that the site-responsive artist is constantly engaged in writing proposals and funding applications for the few grants and sponsorships that exist, and art dealers rarely visit these exhibitions.
It is an “engaged” art form – Above all, site-responsive art is an engaged art form. The artist is interested in what is happening, what has happened, in the place. Working in this way implies questioning, possibly rejecting, the irony and “cool” relativism of certain strains in contemporary art. The artist cannot avoid coming into contact with social, economic and cultural realities during the course of the creative process. Site responsive art is not necessarily making any direct comment or “telling” the audience what to think, but instead invites them to engage with the very real relationship between place and work, and inviting them to draw their own conclusions.
Notes
1 Site-specificity as public art is explored comprehensively in both Suderburg, Erika (Ed). Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, and Kwon, Miwon. One Place after Another : Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Unfortunately both writers focus primarily on American examples and so miss the issue of interaction with histor history, which is a theme much more explored by European artists.
2 Gillian McIver, who had earlier interviewed former Russian dissidents committed to psychiatric sentences, and German-born Julian
Ronnefeldt.
3 Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City, p.1
4 Gillian McIver, Julian Ronnefeldt, Pearl Gluck
5 The major exception to this being of course Artangel, who are more or less unique in this field.
6 An important caveat to this are works made (to use Miwon Kwon’s terminology) in the primary site of intervention, and exhibited in a secondary site of effect. I would argue that to be truly site-responsive, the secondary site should have some direct relationship with the primary site.
7 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, p. 4.
McIver, G., 2004, ART/SITE/CONTEXT, [online] Available at: http://www.sitespecificart.org.uk/6.htm [Accessed 10 Oct 2019]
‘Site response in art occurs when the artist is engaged in an investigation of the site as part of the process in making the work. The investigation will take into account geography, locality, topography, community (local, historical and global), history (local, private and national). These can be considered to be “open source” – open for anyone’s use and interpretation. This process has a direct relationship to the art works made, in terms of form, materials, concept etc. Of course, artists, like anyone else, respond to these “raw materials” in individual ways.’
‘Along with installation, site-responsive art sometimes incorporates a live art or performative element…..most site-responsive work is temporal.’
‘Anselm Kiefer said that no empty place is really empty: everywhere is filled up, “almost claustrophobically” with all the traces of the past. The past is always there in the present. Artists working site-responsively are working with these traces or “ghosts” as raw material, aware that whatever we put into a place will be mingled with whatever was there before.’
‘Taking on history so directly causes the artist to examine certain questions and imposes certain requirements which other methodologies of art-making do not:
Ownership – When sites are former public spaces of significance (prison, hospital, theatre, factory, church) and then fall into disuse, what is their role in the life of the community? Does the local authority or private company’s ownership of the bricks and mortar of the property supersede the community’s ownership of the site as repository of memory? This becomes a serious issue when areas of the locality are the locus for “gentrification” and such sites are transformed into offices or luxury housing. In Rodinsky’s Room Iain Sinclair is critical of artists as “shock troops of the developers.” In the case of art as part of urban “regeneration projects,” Malcolm Miles cautions that “Since this advocacy [of art as part of the regeneration process] has been unquestioning of the intentions of development and its impact on communities, art has perhaps been complicit in the abjection that increasingly follows development and the extension of privatisation and surveillance.[3] Artists need to think about this relationship when seeking sites for art-response.
Social use – Cities evolve over time, the social use for which a site was built may change and mutate many times before the artist comes to the site. The artist must be careful not to immediately romanticize and prioritise the “original” use as being somehow more “authentic, ” but to consider the social use of the site as a continuing narrative of which s/he is another part.
What “deserves” to be remembered or commemorated - For example, the video installation “Unbekannt” was made in a former Cold War memorial built over a mass grave where the victims are both opponents of the GDR regime and Nazis (“unbekannt” – “unknown” - refers to the fact that nobody actually knows who most of them were).
Transformation of spaces/communities/locales over time – Related to “social use,” this aspect considers not only the site, but the locale and the population in time. Here an investigation into local history and interaction with local people can be invaluable. Here the artist has an opportunity to bring real depth to the project by collecting stories, rumours, legends and other data about the locale in past and present. In other cases, the artist might be responding to disappeared communities, in which case archival and anecdotal information can be useful.
Sensitivity – Again in Rodinsky’s Room, co-author Rachel Lichtenstein, herself an artist, describes her horror at attending an art event in London’s Whitechapel where the participants were, as an art-action, engaged in destroying sacred Jewish texts which they had found in the squatted premises. Lichtenstein reports that they had no idea or interest in what the texts were. I would say that, while the role of the artist is not necessarily that of the guardian of abandoned cultural property, some sensitivity is needed – if only to make the work effective. This does not preclude the artist from making extreme confrontational work – merely that s/he should know what they are getting into.
Who is in control? – Sometimes the intervention of art into a site can make people question how the site has been kept from public use. In the case of sites which have been made “invisible” due to neglect, disuse or misuse and decay, making the site “visible” again can bring up issues of “who controls communities?” Are local governments and landlords responsive to the needs of the people, or not? This can become the basis for local empowerment and initiatives into how space is “regenerated.”’
Art “as art” One very important issue is the question of how we judge site-specific/site-responsive art “as art”. Site-responsive art has certain aspects which do not apply to gallery and museum-based art:
Accessibility – If, as we have said, one of the purposes of working site-responsively is to “open out” the art audience beyond the gallery habitués, is it possible to truly achieve a genuinely mixed audience, given that the whole rationale for bourgeois art institutions is to create and preserve elites? As stated earlier, siteresponsive art as “inclusive” art (as opposed to “community” art), depends on developing a professional art practice, so it is important for artists to be judged by their peers and critics on the basis of their work. In the case of Horn, she was already known as an artist before she began working site-responsively. In the case of other artists, some work in other art forms aside from site-responsive. Others employ aggressive marketing techniques to gain publicity, so that the bourgeois taste-makers are afraid to ignore them.
Curatorial Practices – Curating site-responsive art involves procedures and practices outside of those commonly associated with the “art world.” For this reason, in the UK many site-responsive projects are curated by artists, or in a peculiar relationship between a local funding body (e.g. a local council) and the artist, without a “professional” curator.[5] Elsewhere, it is not uncommon for established art institutions to support extramural site-responsive projects, with a professional curator involved in at least part of the project.
Ephemeral – In most cases the works made for a particular site owe their existence only in relation to the site. If they can be moved and replaced at all, they will be changed by this process.[6] In this case we can say that the work is ephemeral. This applies equally to Kapoor’s Marsyas, made for the Tate’s Turbine Hall, as to the House of Detention projects. In many cases the work’s “life” exists only for the duration of the exhibition. This is particularly true of work made with materials directly related to the site (e.g. waste materials found onsite). As Miwon Kwon notes, “the definition of site-specificity [assuming there is one!] is being reconfigured to imply not the permanence or immobility of a work [as in the sculptural and land art projects of earlier practice] but its impermanence and transience.”[7]
Exists as documentation – Much site-responsive work, as with land art, exists after the initial realisation of the project, as photographic, film or video work – it is thus transformed into another art work. How to deal with this outcome is another subject not discussed here. Process-product – The main danger in working site-responsively is the temptation to be caught up in the process, as opposed to working towards an end result. While this is not a situation limited to site-responsive artists, it is one which we are all especially susceptible to. However, if the aim is also to be accessible and inclusive, we also have to take into account that people who come to see the work expect there to be a work to experience. A description of the process alone is going to be seen as self-indulgent and is an example of then kind of obscurantism that made many artists reject the institutions. This does not mean that the art needs to be “dumbed down” in order to be accessible: quite the opposite. Most people, whatever their background, are quite ready to engage with the intellectual content of an art work if the art work presents itself as open for experience. Those who are not, would probably not willingly attend any exhibition, anywhere.
Becoming part of collective memory of the site – working on a site does not bestow ownership upon the artist. The artist and the work becomes part of the collective memory of the site, and the artist has to accept that. Trying to achieve union of social and artistic purposes – While the artist wants the work to be judged as “art”, the social engagement of working on sites is very much part of what is going on and will affect the outcome. By making this a virtue of the work, the artist can avoid conflict in his/her process.
Not commodity based – Because the site-responsive work rarely generates any kind of sales, income for the projects must normally come from sponsorships and grants. In this way, site-responsive art exists slightly outside of the art market. There are exceptions, as it is not impossible to make saleable works in a siteresponsive manner, but it is not common. Photo-video work that comes out of the documentation, of course, can have a commodity life outside of the site work. However it is safe to say that the site-responsive artist is constantly engaged in writing proposals and funding applications for the few grants and sponsorships that exist, and art dealers rarely visit these exhibitions.
It is an “engaged” art form – Above all, site-responsive art is an engaged art form. The artist is interested in what is happening, what has happened, in the place. Working in this way implies questioning, possibly rejecting, the irony and “cool” relativism of certain strains in contemporary art. The artist cannot avoid coming into contact with social, economic and cultural realities during the course of the creative process. Site responsive art is not necessarily making any direct comment or “telling” the audience what to think, but instead invites them to engage with the very real relationship between place and work, and inviting them to draw their own conclusions.
Notes
1 Site-specificity as public art is explored comprehensively in both Suderburg, Erika (Ed). Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, and Kwon, Miwon. One Place after Another : Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Unfortunately both writers focus primarily on American examples and so miss the issue of interaction with histor history, which is a theme much more explored by European artists.
2 Gillian McIver, who had earlier interviewed former Russian dissidents committed to psychiatric sentences, and German-born Julian
Ronnefeldt.
3 Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City, p.1
4 Gillian McIver, Julian Ronnefeldt, Pearl Gluck
5 The major exception to this being of course Artangel, who are more or less unique in this field.
6 An important caveat to this are works made (to use Miwon Kwon’s terminology) in the primary site of intervention, and exhibited in a secondary site of effect. I would argue that to be truly site-responsive, the secondary site should have some direct relationship with the primary site.
7 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, p. 4.
McIver, G., 2004, ART/SITE/CONTEXT, [online] Available at: http://www.sitespecificart.org.uk/6.htm [Accessed 10 Oct 2019]