Essay: The Expansion of Space
THE EXPANSION OF SPACE
The central idea that I returned to while reading the three essays for this week is the expansion of category, definition, and interpretation. It is human nature to challenge labels and expectations. As much as we are creatures of habit and as groups tend to resist change in favor of traditional comfort, questioning authority is still instinctual. Such questioning begins on the intellectual “wordy” level. In politics, we see these ideas played out theatrically in speeches and subversively in campaign strategies. In art we play the game of semantics and watch the ideas manifest themselves visually. There is always room for expansion because we can manipulate “wordy” definitions to fit our motivations. The tricky part is convincing others still stuck in the group-think of comfort and tradition.
Site specificity is the main idea being explored and expanded upon in the readings. Taking a historical approach to understanding how and why the term “site specific” exists today, Rosalind Krauss retraces Western sculpture as “commemorative representation” in the form of a monument. For example, Bernini’s Conversion of Constantine at the foot of the Vatican stairway in St. Peter’s Basilica is a monument marking a “particular place for specific meaning/event” (33). Sculpture, painting and drawing all historically found content in narrative form within a particular place and time. Religion was certainly the most influential (and profitable) source of content. By the end of the 19th century, people’s relationship to authority in religion, politics, and science was challenged. This challenge is reflected in the Modern Art movement where artists sought an “idealist space to explore, a domain cut off from the project of temporal and spatial representation” (34). Seeking to create work and explore ideas without the commissioned content of authority, the logical, physical place of “monument” was lost in abstract intellectual space. Physically, the work was homeless. The absence of a specific place highlighted the role of context in understanding meaning. There is a codependent relationship between space and context that influences a viewer’s perception of content.
Artists of the 1960s began to explore the role of context through site specificity. James Meyer delineates two main categories for “site”: literal site and functional site. In a literal site the artist conforms to a given physical space, and so by “reflecting a perception of the site as unique, the work is itself ‘unique.’ It is thus a kind of monument, public work commissioned for the site” (24). In a functional site, the definition of site expands to include non-physical space. A functional site marks a process, a “movement, a chain of meanings and imbricated histories: a place marked and swiftly abandoned” (p 25). The category of “functional site” is infinite because it reaches out to include anything contextual -- not just the physical space but mental space. Context is embedded in every object through the means of history, culture, place, and relationships. Context fundamentally dictates our perception of content (and reality), and embracing this idea philosophically introduces a phenomenological model of meaning in art. Art can no longer be made without consideration of the “space” the art occupies.
Space itself is nothing except that which is defined by a boundary. By marking a boundary (physical, mental, time-based, emotional, mathematical, etc), you have a “space” between. In marking a boundary, you name a place. In naming a place to work, you choose a site to work in. In choosing a site to work in, you are being site specific. Ultimately, if context is always the defining point of meaning in art, and context is a result of “space,” is all art work site specific? No. The term site specific does not need to be expanded, it needs to be narrowed. The expansionist play on the intellectual semantics of site specificity should end with the word “specific.” Terms that can and should be broadened are context and space – because they always exist. Whether an artist wishes to acknowledge the role of space and its subsequent contexts (and subsequent interpretive meanings) in his or her work is inconsequential because the space itself is inescapable. Such work must acknowledge a basic flux in content interpretation that is inherent to physical and temporal mobility, but does not need to box itself into a specific time and place to be appreciated. However, for the artist who wants define the physical and temporal spatial boundaries of his or her work and specify its relationship to the ideas being explored, the work becomes site specific through intention. I doubt that Richard Serra ever really considered his “Tilted Arc” to be site specific until he was challenged with its removal from the Federal Plaza. This shift in Serra’s original intention does not belittle the work’s conceptual significance as contingent upon the space it occupies, but does shine a light on the fine line between the categories of inherent spatial context vs. site specificity.
As an idea born out of the notion of homelessness, site specificity is brilliant. It is the type of idea that makes us reexamine history to inform our contemporary perception of reality. There is no escaping the notion that our interpretation of content is dependent on context which is shaped by space. The intellectual expansion of “space” as a concept is fantastically broad and will continue to inspire new meanings in the future. I am particularly fascinated by Kwon’s thoughts on our current culture’s ideology of “ ‘freedom of choice’ – the choice to forget, the choice to reinvent, the choice to fictionalize, the choice to belong anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere” (57). In our exploration of conceptual space, new spaces are being developed – with few obvious physical boundaries. Internet and cell phone technology are two obvious examples of new spaces dense with sub-layers of virtual, physical and communicative space. Developing these new spaces, our current technologic culture is not only challenging the labels and expectations of technology, but is also playing with throwing out all the rules and creating a new sense of interpretive homelessness in the idea of “freedom.” New art that seeks to find itself within this current content-rich space will be determining a new specific site.