Site-specific art

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Site specific art, also environmental art, is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.

Outdoor site-specific artworks often include landscaping combined with permanently sited sculptural elements. Indoor site-specific artworks may be created in conjunction with (or indeed by) the architects of the building.

More broadly, the term is sometimes used for any work that is (more or less) permanently attached to a particular location. In this sense, a building with interesting architecture could be considered a piece of site specific art. Artists producing site-specific works range from people like Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy and Christo to Richard Serra, Brandon LaBelle and younger artists like Sarah Sze and Simparch.

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Later revisions and problems with the term

only in hope The Exploding Cinema, a UK-based DIY film collective defines site specific in their Dictionary of Video Art as:

"Locations and environments may have some kind of drama or meaning for ordinary people (eg. a dole [welfare] office) but this has no significance for the bourgeoisie until interpreted by the heightened sensibilities of the artist."

This complaint addresses the fact that the idea of site specificity as an iconoclastic choice to reject the commercialism of the gallery system has become one of the mainstays of the established duchampian school of commercial, contemporary international artists.

The re-presentation of sites of trauma, neglect or melancholy can be seen as part of the cultural process of 'regeneration'. The aesthetic sensibilities of the artist make the sites, and the subjects they purport to represent depoliticised and therefore acceptable for cultural scrutiny.

A good recent example of this process is British artist Jeremy Deller's 'The Battle of Orgreave' (2003), a site-specific re-enactment of the clash between picketing miners of the NUM and riot police outside the BSC coking plant at Orgreave, South Yorkshire, on 18 June 1984. Filmed by Mike Figgis and Channel 4, this became a startlingly graphic documentary about the historical events and their social context. Many of the 'actors' had actually participated in the original riots as police or as rioters. Deller's representation is well meant, and by involving the miners who had initially participated in the strike, he does alleviate some of the familiar problems of 'high culture' representations of working-class people and realities. However, the market reality is always in evidence. Press and documentation of the event refers to it as 'Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave', and in Art Angel publicity he is credited as having 'conceived' the idea. Of course this is standard practice in the naming of authored material, and without Deller's idea and cultural caché the film would not have been made. However, the naming of the project as art, the standard assignation of an author, and the contexts in which it is marketed and distributed are problematic. Deller's position as conceptual author and the marketing of the film through art and media channels privileges his position over the participants', despite his objections. In the 'high culture' context of the art gallery this film becomes a commodity from which he gains notoriety and financial reward, whereas the participants were volunteering, so the process inevitably commodifies the experiences, the stories and representations of the ex-miners. This film can be seen as the first stage in the 'heritagization' of the Miner's strike; not that the strike was not a significant event before Deller's film, but this representation of it was engineered by an outside interest, and used to generate and enrich a market that is completely independent of Orgreave and the people whose experiences are represented.

This is the crux of the Exploding Cinema's point about site specific art - it manages to alienate the representation of some part of everyday life, or history from its previous inhabitants, by drawing it into the privileged sphere of art, rather than the other way round as was originally intended.

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Regeneration. 2005

Image:07 August 20050003.jpg

Regeneration is a site specific sculpture which exploits some of the extrinsic historical and political conditions of its location to make a broader cultural comment.

The site contains elements of the sacred and the profane. It has variously been a place of habitation, agriculture, war and peaceful recreation. The ownership or guardianship of the land has changed through processes of annexation, treaty and colonisation.

The sculpture attempts to negotiate these multiple histories without monumentalising any one position. In music, sound sculpture is often site-specific.de:Installation (Kunst)

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