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One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity by Miwon Kwon. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 218 pp.
In One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon takes the reader on a six-chapter journey that reconsiders traditional notions of site and identity. As an associate professor of art history at UCLA, Kwon writes principally for an art criticism audience. However, this work will engage scholars of rhetoric interested in identity politics and visual rhetoric from a cultural studies perspective. Kwon's broad definition of "sites" includes discursive, non-material "places" that are produced socially, economically, and politically. One Place After Another will also be of interest to scholars of public memory who are interested in public art's role in community definition and remembrance.
Kwon's study opens with a genealogy of site-specific art that begins in the 1960s with examples of artists' insistence on rigid site-specificity, such as Richard Serra and Robert Barry's assertions that to remove their artworks from the sites they were explicitly designed for requires their total destruction. She then traces the "dematerialization" of the site highlighting, for example, feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukele's 1973 "maintenance art." Ukele performed a series of domestic tasks, such as scrubbing the museum floor, that brought menial labor "to the level of aesthetic contemplation, and revealed the extent to which the museum's self-presentations [... ] is structurally dependent on the hidden and devalued labor of daily maintenance and upkeep" (19). Such artworks resist the economic structures of the art world producing not a commodity but a process. That process, argues Kwon, is generative, producing nontraditional, non-"placed" sites such as "repressed ethnic history, a political cause, [or] a disenfranchised social group" (30).
In her second chapter, Kwon posits the decontextualization of sitespecific artworks, noting the repurposing of process drawings associated with site-specific art as "new originals" (33). The privileging of process also revises the artist's role from producer of commodities to service...