From "On Collaboration"
by Ken Ehrlich
from Interview with Ken Ehrlich
Q: I wanted to start with a question about site-specificity. Many of your projects are described as “site-specific,” you’ve written about this subject and you edit the Surface Tension book series, which is focused on site-specific practices in art, architecture and performance. This is a loaded term for some readers and might be an unfamiliar term for others. What does site-specific mean in your work and why is it important?
A: Ummm. Ok. You’re right to suggest the ambiguity of this term. Like so many words related to art practices, “site-specificity” is first of all a changing concept. That’s very important. So site-specific practices in the 1960’s or 1970’s have very little in common with most site-based work today. In terms of an art historical take on the term, I like Miwon Kwon’s analysis in which she distinguishes between physical, institutional and discursive site-specificity. In her model, you have someone like Richard Serra who claims that if you move one of his pieces, you’ve destroyed it. So a project for him might be literally bound to a physical site. The institutional sort of site-specificity she describes is attributed to artists like Daniel Buren or Michael Asher, whose work stages a critical dialogue with the “site” of an institution like a museum or a gallery. And then lastly, when referring to discursive site-specificity, Kwon describes the practices of artists like Renee Green and Andrea Fraser, whose work might refer to say African-American history or notions of taste… so that the “site” here becomes a discourse that is interrogated. Now, Miwon Kwon presents her account much more elegantly than that and in much greater detail, but I think she gives us a useful framework for thinking about the term historically.
In terms of my own work, “sited-based practice” is a useful framework that encompasses much of what I do and at the same time I’m not particularly devoted to the concept. I grew up in an environment where if you played the saxophone, built houses, made photographs and wrote poetry that was considered more or less normal. So as an artist who works on a project basis and across many media, I’m interested in site-specificity, sculpture in the expanded field, relational practices, etc… Whatever helps frame a contemporary practice that expands the notion of what art might be… Oh, and the last thing I’ll say about that is that alongside site-specificity a parallel discourse has evolved about the relationship between art and architecture involving all sorts of productive cross-overs and including aspects of geography, urbanism, activism and performance. So without forcing too much onto the term, site-specific work kind of prefigures a lot of contemporary cultural work related to cities and spaces.
[continues in TrenchArt: Tracer, become a member and read more]
Ken Ehrlich is a TrenchArt Tracer series visual artist, in collaboration with Susan Simpson.