Can the City Speak? Site-Specific Art After Poststructuralism

Abstract

When site-specific artists talk about their work, the physical site comes alive in radical and unexpected ways. To explain the richly interactive experiences enabled by this medium, they speak of entering into a dialogue with the site, of engaging in a complex process of reciprocal animation. The artists featured in my opening epigraphs articulate a surprising form of self–world encounter, attributing speech to the inanimate architectural site. In Houston’s description of the historic Weyburn Mental Hospital, the location of a site-specific performance in 2002, this speech is interpreted as a fully discursive form of communication. The host site becomes intelligible through the twinned rhetorics of medical reform and institutional progress. Yet Houston goes beyond a traditional semiotic decoding of site by according the hospital a certain independence from its viewer. The site speaks ‘for itself’, its dilapidated form throwing the imposed discourse of modernity into relief. Here the live presence of the thing in itself, in its self-givenness, pushes up against and resists its representation. In the words of phenomenologist Bert States, ‘the medium becomes the message: the form winks at the content’ (32). Director Landau echoes this idea of an architecture that ‘talks back’, a speech that is indistinguishable from and communicated through its material form.

In many ways, the material site of the Weyburn Institute speaks for itself. The architecture and monumentality of the building is not mute on notions of utopianism and modernity; it is a graphic articulation of an edenic social project driven by paternalistic systems of governance. The building’s deterioration and decay frame the discourse differently.

(Houston Weyburn Project)

In working architecture as a Viewpoint, we learn to dance with the space, to be in dialogue with a room, to let movement (especially shape and gesture) evolve out of our surroundings.

(Landau: 22)