One Place After Another by: Miwon Kwon

One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity
by: Miwon Kwon

To be "specific" to such a site, in turn, is to decode and/or recode the institutional conventions so as to expose their hidden operations- to reveal the ways in which institutions mold art's meaning to modulate its cultural and economic value; to undercut the fallacy of art's and its institutions' autonomy by making apparent their relationship to the broader socioeconomic and political procecsses of the day. Again, in Buren's somewhat militant words from 1970:

Art, whatever else it may be, is exclusively political. What is called for is the analysis of formal and cultural limits (and not one or the other) within which art exists and struggles. These limits are many and of different intensities. Although the prevailing ideology and the associated artists try in every way to camouflage them, and although it is too early- the conditions are not met- to blow them up, the time has come to unviel them.
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