James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 23-37.
James Meyer is Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta. He writes on American and European art since 1945 with a special interest in minimalism, post-minimalism, conceptualism, institutional critique and site-orientated installation. (.1) This text is taken from a book which has been called “The definitive work on the role of installation art within contemporary culture and society.” (.2)
Meyer states that as contemporary (1990’s till now) artists have picked up on the site-specific practices of artists of the 60s and 70s, “these practices, the languages and strategies of now historical activities are hybridized and displaced.”(.3) He points out that these revisitations have varying success, sometimes they have “resulted in something unexpected”(.4) and sometimes seem “uninformed, awkward, or, frankly, dull.”(.5)
The main thing that has been achieved by these revisitations, and what seems to be the main point of the whole text is that the notion of what constitutes a site has been transformed:
“The primary distinction I wish to make concerns two notions of site: a literal site and a functional site. The literal site is, as Joseph Kosuth would say, in situ; it is an actual location, a singular place…The work’s formal outcome is thus determined by a physical place, by an understanding of the place as actual…It is thus a kind of monument, a public work commissioned for the site…In contrast, the functional site may or may not incorporate a physical place. It certainly does not privilege this place. Instead, it is a process, an operation occurring between sites…It is an informational site…an allegorical site…whose vectored and discursive notion of “place” opposes Serra's phenomenological model.”(.6)
These notions are crucial to my zine workshop projects which I have been undertaking this year. In the workshops two important sites are of primary importance. First is the site where the workshop takes place and the group of people at this site. Using this site as a starting point I select a publication to rework with this group. The publication is the second site; I consider the publication as a discursive space. A magazine for example can be seen as a kind of virtual museum or meeting place where certain groups of people congregate to exchange ideas both with each other and the reader. This dialogue is usually one way (although these days there are many ways for readers to become contributors in some senses), through the workshop the people who participate are given absolute control over the content of the magazine and can rework it in any way. This opens up the discursive site of the magazine in unpredictable and possibly subversive ways. The third site is then the place where the work is exhibited but as Meyer is quoted as saying above, in a functional work this site is not privileged.
Miwon Kwon states in her book One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity:
“the distinguishing characteristic of today’s site-orientated art is the way in which the art work’s relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are both subordinate to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange, or cultural debate. Furthermore, unlike the previous models, this site is not defined as a precondition. Rather, it is generated by the work (often as “content”), and then verified by its convergence with an existing discursive formation.”(.7)
(.1) James Meyer in Faculty & Staff of Art History Department, University of Emory website.
http://www.arthistory.emory.edu/faculty/meyer.htm
(.2) Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art on The University of Minnesota Press website.
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/suderburg_space.html
(.3) (.4) (.5) pp.23
(.6) pp.24-25
(.7) Miwon Kwon, One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002, pp26.
(quote at the top of blog) pp.27
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