Site Specificity

Miwon Kwon's Genealogy of Site Specificity was pretty clear and concise although the ideas surrounding site specificity are numerous and complex. This article was really interesting because I've never thought about the art in relationship to it's space and the viewer. At first, place is introduced as a concrete space like the environment but then towards the end of the article site becomes more of a subject such as the use of homosexuality or racism to be the basis of an artwork. I find it interesting and very creative how artists express their retaliation against the instituionalized frame of museums subjecting the art to become an "illusion". The art's beauty then becomes stressed by the blank walls and preassumptions viewers have when they enter these institutions. Some examples of this retaliation included Daniel Buten's Within and Beyond the Frame where his artwork actually went out the window to exemplify the constraints of museums and Michael Asher's exhibition of culturally specific situations to impose certain thoughts on viewers that reflected the ways of institutionalized framing. Kwon later explained how site specificity has also changed because of technology and the internet. He called this the functional site and that art has become nomadic and is more "structured textually rather than spatially". To conclude his article he was able to come up with three paradigms for site specificity: phenomenological, social/institutional, and discursive.

In Kwon's second article Unhinging of Site Specificity, he talks about the the importance of originality of the work and commodification. He explains that any art that is reproduced without the artist's "touch" is inauthentic. The site is very important in completing the art piece. Even now the artist may be asked to create a personal art piece for a specific site like a museum. Rather than the artist creating an artwork that that the environments adapts too, it is the environment that creates the art. This sort of art making is something I didn't know people did this and how much work and time was put into something like this. Kwon also mentions that commodification also takes away the "traditional standards of aesthetic distinction based" on the skills of the artist. This reminded me of postmodern art and Andy Warhol's silk screen artworks because that was a problem between modernists and postmodernists.

Questions:
What does unfixed impermanence mean when he says we should focus on that rather that the physical permanence of an artpiece?