Site-Particular

Abstract

Aside from having become yet another fuzzy mainstream genre, another conspicuous tag used quite indiscriminately as an inherent signifier of vanguardism, the term site-specific has become a veritable battlefield, a war site where opposing positions dispute the nature of the site and the “right” relationship of art and artists to it.¹ As a result, a number of alternate vocables have emerged as an attempt to forge and define more complex ways of engaging with site,² as well as to reclaim practices that aim to be considered socially and politically progressive. While some site-specific artists and theorists continue to argue for rootedness and the physical anchoring of a work of art to a specific place, use, or reading in order to defy hegemonic forces, and others champion nomadism and refabricate and relocate previously installed or performed pieces for the exact same reasons, I propose a particular approach to site. Site particularity is not a fixed set of oppositional methods or even resistance to rules based on a priori assumptions. It is open to changing geographies and based on the understanding that all strategies are context-contingent and as prone to co-optation as any dominant theories or practices on the landscape — no matter how “avant-garde” and oppositional they set out to be.