#miwon kwon

[museumsarecomplicated]

Miwon Kwon - One Place After Another - Ch. 1 “Genealogy of Site Specificity”

I was already vaguely familiar with Kwon’s work, but it made sense to dive deeper and I will record notes on each chapter. I like this book, although it was written in 2004 and is a bit dated now.

Summary: Kwon identifies the emergence of site specificity and explains that it’s a response to modernist, object-based aesthetics, commercial systems, etc. She identifies some early SS artists, including Smithson and Serra, and how early on, SS was explicitly tied to a specific space and to move a SS piece would be to ruin it. 

She also talks about Institutional Critique as site specificity, and talked about how artists like Haacke, Buren, and Ukeles draw attention to the specific frame of the institution, and issues of value, narrative, seen and unseen labor. Here we’re still working with a physical place, but the narrative is political, it’s not just about a location, it’s about a system of power/economy.

And then she talks about artists like Fred Wilson who work with multiple sites, and multiple disciplines (the sciences, popular culture, etc) who conceptualize the site as not a physical location, but as a discourse, a suite of themes, etc. And then she goes on to mention how these ideas morph in other chapters to become more theoretical and complex.

Key notes/phrases/quotes etc:

Institutional critique:

“The seemingly benign architectural features of a gallery/museum...actively disassociate the space of art from the outside world, furthering the institution’s idealist imperative of rendering itself and its values ‘objective,’ ‘disinterested,’ and ‘true.’“ (13)

Some SS/IC practices are “aggressively antivisual--informational, textual, expositional, didactic...” (24)

Museums are in some ways meta-sites:

“...the site comes to encompass a relay of several interrelated but different spaces and economies, including the studio, gallery, museum...that together constitute a system of practices that is not separate from but open to social, economic and political pressures.” (14)

Moving to a more complex theorization of site:

“...the site is now structured (inter)textually rather than spatially...” (29)

Paradigms of site-specificity that are not discrete, but rather, often overlapping: “phenomenological, social/institutional, and discursive.” (30)

[nickkahler]

The site is now structured (inter)textually rather than spatially, and its model is not a map but an itinerary, a fragmentary sequence of actions and events through spaces, that is, a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of the artist.

Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, 1997

[grupaok]

Documents 10, Fall 1997 — Find here scans of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, "Maintenance Art Manifesto;" Miwon Kwon, "In Appreciation of Invisible Work;" Helen Molesworth, "Work Stoppages;" and the conversation between Ukeles and Doug Ashford, "Democracy Is Empty."

[worldcat]

The advocacy of the continuous mobilization of self- and place-identities as discursive fictions, as polymorphous "critical" plays on fixed generalities and stereotypes, in the end may be a delusional alibi for short attention spans, reinforcing the ideology of the new-a temporary antidote for the anxiety of boredom. It is perhaps too soon and frightening to acknowledge, but the paradigm of nomadic selves and sites may be a glamorization of the trickster ethos that is in fact a reprisal of the ideology of "freedom of choice"-the choice to forget, the choice to reinvent, the choice to fictionalize, the choice to "belong" anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere. This choice, of course, does not belong to everyone equally. The understanding of identity and difference as being culturally constructed should not obscure the fact that the ability to deploy multiple, fluid identities in and of itself is a privilege of mobilization that has a specific relationship to power.

[butterytoast]

While the accelerated speed, access, and exchange of information, images, commodities, and even bodies is being celebrated in one circle, the concomitant breakdown of traditional temporal-spatial experiences and the accompanying homogenization of places and erasure of cultural differences is being decried in another. The intensifying conditions of spatial indifferentiation and departicularization- that is, the increasing instances of location unspecificity- are seen to exacerbate the sense of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life.

One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity  Miwon Kwon

[resetagain]

The two concurrent exhibitions organized in conjunction with the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, are good examples of the confusing uses of the term 'site specificity' in contemporary art discourse. The exhibitions were 'Rings,' a thematic show structured around the 'five universal emotions symbolically related to the number of the Olympic rings,' and 'Picturing the South: 1860 to the Present,' a photography exhibition with a regional focus on the history and culture of the American South, especially Atlanta. In the press release for the exhibitions, Ned Rifkin, Director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, promoted the former rather than the latter as a site-specific exhibition. In this case, despite the universalizing theme of 'Rings,' its temporal coordination with the Olympic Games would seem to trump the geographical specificity of 'Picturing the South.'

Miwon Kwon, from One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. [first endnote to the introduction, p.168]

[spacehyu]

Sept 19 2014, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum NY In this half-day symposium, scholars present on topics that cover the range of James Turrell’s work including the nature of perception, conditions of site-specificity, and the philosophy of aesthetics. Speakers include Thomas Crow (New York University), Miwon Kwon (University of California, Los Angeles), and Mark Taylor (Columbia University), among others.

[damaliabrams]

In a move one critic has dubbed “postmodern social realism,” new genre public art also insists on a move away from the universalizing tendencies of modernist abstraction, to celebrate instead the particular realities of “ordinary” people and their “everyday” experiences.

One Place After Another by Miwon Kwon