site specific art

In "Genealogy of Site Specificity," Miwon Kwon discusses what makes up site specific art. Anything can be considered a site from a studio or gallery to a runway show. In "Unhinging of Site Specificity," Kwon talks about the ways in which authenticity plays a role in site specific art. It is not "site specific" anymore if it can be moved. It looses its meaning when replicated because it is not in the same environment that it was originally in, but Kwon argues that if the artist is present at the reproduction then it is still considered authentic.  Replicating these stories also turns the site into a commodity which makes it loose some of its aesthetic experience. As much as the artist says they are a rebel to the institution, they are still influenced by the culture of the time, making things that they know that people will like. When the art becomes reproduced, it becomes a commodity. Reproducing art seems inauthentic to me because it is not the same site and the artist did not give his blessing, and even if the artist did give his blessing, the meaning the artist had for a painting is altered with the reproduction because no matter how hard one tries, it will always be a little different than the original. Kwon doesn't think that the meaning is lost when transported. 

Can it really be site specific if the replication is never in the same or original spot?

Authenticity is very ambiguous. How does one define it? There are so many definitions and variations. Some consider the nomadic practice authentic while others see it as fraud.  

Site Specific Art

This art is one of my favorite types of art for many reasons. I think art that is created for a certain location and that must be observed within that spot raises a lot of interesting questions about the function and purpose of art. For instance, i think Andy Goldsworthy's art is incredibly interesting for it is environmental art that changes in the environment. He is famous for making eggs in different specific sites and then filmed how the egg would change during the course of the seasons. In some locations, the eggs fell down and became nothing more then rubble, but in others the eggs thrived and eventually algae grew in them allowing them to become a part of the changing environment. The art is interesting because it shows how things change over time but still remain itself, and in order for one to view the art in all its forms they must visit it multiple times. It is art that cannot be seen once and understood.

Site specific art, according to kwon, also raises important questions as to political statements about art. For instance, site specific art raises certain questions about the museum as a specific site and how some art must be in particular museums to have the same effect. A good example of this is Daniel Buren's sheet which he hung in the guggenheim in New York. The Guggenheim is a tall circular building that is open from the bottom to the top int eh center of the museum. tradtionally, all the art is on the ramps that circulate up the building. However, Buren's sheet was hung from the top of the museum to the bottom in the center, in which it could be viewed from any floor on any side, and in order to observe the whole peice one would have to walk from the bottom to the top. First of all, the peice clearly could not fit in a different museum and was thus made specifically to emphasize the artchitecture of the guggenheim. Secondly, the artwork caused a lot fo commotion for certain artists in the same show did not like that their art could only be seen on one floor where as Buren's peice dominated the museum. Some artists claimed that the sheet blocked their art but the fact of the matter was that since it was in the middle of the museum it did not block anything. thus, when thinking of Kwon, one can see how the art within its certain location raises questions as to the importance of space, the museum, and public art.

The second chapter by Kwon illustrates how certain site-specific art is being relocated which changes the value of the art. It is a contradiction to have site specific art and then move it for technically the art would be destroyed. However, i think that moving it is not necessarily bad, even though it does change the meaning of the art. For me, Goldsworthy eggs cannot be moved, but, to put an egg in a museum and to tell the egg's story would bring recognition to the idea of the artowkr constructed. There are many copies of Duchamp's urinal, and in my opinion it is not only a site specific art but a time specific art created for one particular moment. However, when putting the urinal in museums now, it does not represent the actual and original peice, but merely recognizes the sculptures importance as an artwork. With site specific work, to movie ti changes the work and mkaes it a enw peice, but it can highlight why it is work and why it can be re-made in the museum without destroying it.

Rethinking the City

Easy to read, Sadler tells us in his own words what psychogeography is. Situationism according to Sadler, and no I will not quote him, though it comes from his own words so how I cannot quote him I cannot possibly comprehend how to do, is a frequent play of different things, between small and big space, bright and not paying your electric bill, breathing and suffocating. Both Sadler and McDonough talk about that one picture called The Naked City. Both Sadler and McDonough talked about how situationist space is not merely a concept but a flexible reality that is very much having to do with your interactions with others lives. Sadler explained The Naked City better than McDonough because McDonough is a wuss and does not want to use The Naked City as a dramatic and clear visual example of a typical situationist perspective but as a means of furrowing his brow against things he does not like, as in the layout of Paris, clearly because he feeds on his furrowing. However, Sadler was not all that different from McDonough -- you see, they both in fact similarly discoursed on the Derive, of who's e with a accent mark I cannot for the life of me generate visually on this typographical machine in this new day and age where I could easily copy and paste it from elsewhere. Now, blindly, I will inform you that both pieces help you with an understanding of how situationists think about architecture, even though the point Sadler made virtually on the first page was that situationist space had almost nothing to do with the architecture but with the aforementioned differences in space relating to the lives of people. Perhaps situationists would take to Rastafarianism seeing as they want to live a non-restricted lifestyle, as is clearly implied by the language they use in their pieces. Both Sadler and McDonough think that status has nothing to do with people since they are all people and they are in fact the same, regardless of their differences, or of how little it may seem that I understood or even read Sadler's piece.
Question 1: Why don't Sadler and McDonough get hitched (in blatant disregard to their living status)?
Question 2: Why does everything I said sound like everything someone else said?
Question 3 (true or false): this class has a vivid understanding of situationist space.

The Situationist (Re)thinking

Simon Sadler in “Rethinking the City” reminds the reader of McDonough’s article “Situationist Space” because of the context of Sadler’s discussion. A key difference, however, is Sadler’s clarity and precision in defining psychogeography. While much detail is given, “psychogeography” can be as broad as Debord’s definition – “that which changes our way of seeing the street is more important than that which changes our way of seeing painting” or as basic as “playful, cheap, and populist”.

The difficulty in literally rethinking the city comes in the fact that Situationist had to work off of Debord and Jorn’s journals which might have presented quite a lot of trouble recognizing how “psychogeography” was not a science thus a single truth or definition in theory could not be derived – “psychogeography was a reverie, a state of mind conjured up in Debord and Jorn’s Memoires, which left readers with the task of negotiating Jorn’s inky dribbles through Debord’s collage of text, maps, and illustration […] it represented a drift from the ideal and the rational to the extraordinary and revolutionary.”

Furthermore, as Sadler confesses, “psychogeography attempted to combine subjective and objective modes of study. On the one hand it recognized that the self cannot be divorced from the urban environment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the collective rethinking of the city.”

Consequently, what I make of Sadler’s argument is one that by far is more definitive. Definitive in the sense that no longer is the reader left to contemplate whether this or that is “psychogeography”, we are told in the most clear terms what it is.

Question 1: How can we be sure what “psychogeography” is when there are so many interpretations?

Question 2: What type of map layout would be more useful, in terms of getting from point A to point B, a traditional map or one that is “psychogeographic”?

Dérive vs. Drifter

Concise and easy to follow, Sadler’s article deconstructs the term psychogeography to a substantive yet comprehendible definition for the reader. My immediate response is why didn’t we read this article before McDonough’s? Perhaps our critiques of McDonough would have been harsher and our understanding of situationist art more elusive than technical; nonetheless, there are subtle differences between the two articles which demand careful analysis.

Recalling from McDonough’s narrative last week, I noticed that he draws greater emphasis on the technicality of situationist art rather than engage the reader through a more informal but elementary description of the same much like Sadler achieves. McDonough place greater emphasis on terminology and their influence when portrayed in a situationist painting or installation whereas Sadler focuses on deriving interpretations to individual situationist works then simplifying these analyses for general study by the novice reader. Methods of style and diction are distinct in both articles; McDonough’s jargon-rich writing is directed more towards artistic scholars than Sadler’s, which I find glosses over the technical composition of situationist art and, instead, provides a more generic image of the same.

Yet, Sadler’s commentary is not entirely subordinate to McDonough’s in proficiency of analysis; rather, it is complimentary. Sadler presents a functional recapitulation of situationist art that outlines its general themes which McDonough’s article consolidates. Sadler’s article seeks to digest psychogeography as presented in the following, “the sublime could induce new flights of fancy…reshaped by the Enlightenment’s progeny, modernism. If we felt frustrated at the effort required to put them all together, we had missed the point” (76).

Throughout his article, Sadler stresses that, despite its overwhelming and oftentimes indistinct elemental structures, psychogeography should and can be appreciated without extensive knowledge in the field. He adopts the term “drifter” in order to situate a character behind the situationst work and attempt to foment objective and subjective interpretations by the speculator, and then underlines the interconnectedness between the two approaches to urban exploration. Sadler provides the following claim in order to encompass the purpose behind situationist maps, “[they] attempt to put the spectator at ease with the city of apparent disorder, exposing the strange logic that lies beneath its surface” (82).

Sadler uses the term “drifter” to represent the character in a situationist map while McDonough uses “derive”. What is the difference between the two terms and which is more used today?

Also, Sadler claims “ambiance” as a precursor for artists to envisage of psychogeography. How is ambiance different from emotional attachment or sensory appeal? And, what are its representations, if any?

Rethinking the City

Like McDonough’s article, Saddler talks about the situationists and psychogeographical analysis by examining similar artworks like Guy Debord’s The Naked City and “Map of the land of Feeling, 1656”. He talked about how situationism is not the pursuit of beauty in art, but a “constant play of contrasts, between confined and open spaces, darkness and illumination, circulation and isolation.” (72) Saddler used more examples of architecture, photography and drawings to illustrate his point as compared to McDonough’s more theoretical approach. He discussed more on the unities of ambiance rather than Debord’s derive.
Questions: “Unlimited access to all the prisons. The possibility of making them into tourist stopovers would foreground deviances that society has attempted to suppress…” Is Saddles making a point on tourism as McDonough did in his article?What is meant by the “three orders of facts”? What is an “undifferentiated state of the visible-readable realm”?

Rethinking the City

Comparing the two readings from Simon Sadler and Tom McDonough, I find more differences than there are similarities. Sadler’s vision about the situationist is much more broad than how McDonough viewed the situationist. In both articles, the author relied on analyzing The Naked City by Debord. Both articles touched on how space is seem by the situationist as an object that is something very involved in your social life. However, I think that Sadler’s chapter gave a clearer reasoning to why the situationist started to feel that way. Sadler wrote “psychogeography was playful, cheap, and populist, an artistic activity carried out in the everyday space of the street rather than in the conventional art spaces.” He explains the situationist as a group that is much less rigid and one-sided minded people as I got from the tone of the reading from McDonough. The concentrations between the two articles were also very different. Sadler’s chapter focuses more on talking about what the situationist meant or entailed when they were referring to psychogeography. McDonough wrote more like a situationist himself trying to convince readers about derive and trying to influence the reader’s view more the social environment.
Questions: what is meant when Sadler says that the situationist are responsive to the light changes in the fabric of Paris? What is the Corbusian vision he talks about at the beginning of the acticle?