Scouring the floor for specificity

Site specificity is, thankfully, a more clearly defined and sensible development in art than situationism. Art exists, and it exists in a structure. Galleries, museums, exhibitions, viewers, buyers, taste-makers, money, the elite. And where previous forms of art had called little or no attention to these conditions, site specific art foregrounds them. Not only is there a structure within which art historically exists, there is an implied political content, and site specific art aims to be its antithesis. Daniel Buren wrote that “although it is too early….to blow [the formal and cultural limits] up, the time has come to unveil them” (269). Emphasis is now placed on the location, weather, scale, texture, etc. Art “works” become less and less commodifiable. Aesthetics are largely abandoned in favor of content, making the content itself the ‘site’ of the art.
If Buren’s quote is “militant” as Miwon Kwon claims, it is because site specific art is a self conscious institutional critique. I was most interested to read that as part of their critique of the insularity and politically “suspect” nature of art, the site specific artists brought their works outside of traditional venues, making them more open to non-artists and the non-art world in general.
A parallel between site specific art and situationism seems clear. Both are cultural critiques and critiques of art. Both are antithetical. Both are based among an intellectual community. But where situationism seems to undermine itself with its own solipsism and condemn itself to failure, site specific art seems to have the possibility of success within it. I can’t say if it was “successful” historically, but the stretching or breaking of traditional artistic placement and the inclusion of a wider audience seem a much better approach.