Chapter

Specificities of Sitedness

A Speculative Sketch

EXCERPT

A principal problem for the production of and discourses of site-specific art—which we might also name context-specific art, or relational art, or dialogical art, or socially-engaged practice—is that we can consider that ‘art’ per se, and artworks as such, are sites that are specific in and of themselves. The common usage of the term ‘site-specific art’ is therefore egregiously and doubly tautological and inherently misleading, as are all these other new terms in the lexicon of contemporary art. We must begin by asking the seemingly facetious question: If the artwork is a site, how can it be specific to another site outside of itself? Simply put, it can’t!…