Week 2: Reaction to Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another”
Kwon studies an evolution in site-specific art, from a focus on an immovable physical location, to an attempt to create works that are unique, not just in their relation to place, but in how they relate to their overall context – including time, culture, and other economic and political factors.
While covering much of the same ground as the Meyer piece, Kwon seems both more realistic and more far-reaching in her analysis, presenting the change in works from the 1960’s onward as an attempt to explore the problem of subverting and calling attention, not just to the surrounding “art world” context, but to the political/social/economic context of the world at large. (Technology could be added to the list in today’s art.)
Kwon goes further than Meyer in exploring the implications of moving away from literal site-specificity. Key explorations are of works that turn a critical eye on the art world itself, mobility of the artist and mobility of art. A natural outgrowth of this is a reflection on the nature of intellectual property and author’s rights…
I found particularly interesting the discussion of the 1989 Ace Gallery exhibition, where works by Carl Andre and Donald Judd were re-created for the show, since the originals were too difficult to move. This implies an attachment to the original physical object and location which rather contradicts the idea of working to a functional site. If the key aspects of the work are relational, and not tied to a specific place or object, why shouldn’t there be copies?
This is an interesting parallel to the Open Source movement, which has gone beyond software to include things like beer, electronic circuits and machine tools. The key ideas and intellectual assets are shared freely, and anyone can use them to build for themselves the open-sourced thing.