James Meyer, ‘The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificty.’

James Meyer offers a useful description of two kinds of site and their art-historical contexts. The literal site is exactly that – an actual physical space outside the gallery that provides a critique of the institution by establishing new conditions for viewing that are intended to be more open, whilst revealing the conditional experience the exists within the gallery. The literal site is phenomenological – knowledge is gained from the conscious experience of what is there before you. The functional site, on the other hand, is a process or operation that exists between two or more sites. Which is to say, it does not privilege one specific space; it is a mobile investigation of inter-subjectivity. Here the art world is an institution within a network of institutions.
Meyer uses the ideas of Robert Smithson to illustrate the discursive nature of the functional site. Of particular interest to me is Smithson’s use of the concept of entropy, which Meyer quotes when talking about the mobile site as a “non-place, a ruin.” (Meyer, p31) Entropy is a scientific concept relating to the law of thermodynamics. It is a statistical measurement used to describe the amount of chaos that exists within a closed system; it may also be thought of as the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work. In his famous article, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, Smithson describes a state of being that is beyond the world of ‘values’; a flat empty desert that is “devoid of all classical ideals of space and process.” (Smithson, p14) Here, time exists without space and without movement. This is what Smithson observed existing in certain physical and psychological environments and he expanded the concept of entropy to draw attention to these socio-political situations of inactivity. Yet Smithson did not take a negative position here. In fact, he finds a kind of inspiring balance within these inert sites, something that might be approaching a “new consciousness of the vapid and dull.” (Smithson, p13) Smithson saw this consciousness represented in the ‘new monuments’, minimalist sculptures that, in their typically large, flat surfaces, distilled the infinitesimal complexity of these sites into “monumental artifices of idea.” (Smithson, p14)

Referrences

Meyer, James, ‘The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificty’ in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Erika Suderberg ed., Minnesota, 2000.

Smithson, Robert, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, in Robert Smithson, the collected writings, Jack Flam ed., California, 1996.

‘Running On Light Feet’ / Meg Cranston interviewed by Nico Israel.

Nico Israel’s conversation with Meg Cranston makes for easy yet insightful reading. Trained in conceptual techniques as she was, Cranston has the ability to speak academically about her process. Yet the interview also contains some curious anecdotes about life as an artist, such as the time she was punched at her own opening. However, it is the seemingly casual comments that point to more complex issues that I find to be the most interesting parts of the interview. The following three quotes are of particular interest:

“I liked the gesture – you know the idea that you could do whatever you want” (Cranston and Israel, p11)

“I analyse things to life” (Cranston and Israel, p14)

“It sounds quaint now, but that was the thinking – to destroy the difference between philosophy and art” (Cranston and Israel, p19)

These three quotes highlight a development in art that has its origins in the multifaceted shifts and demarcating that occurred in the transition from Modernism to Post-Modernism.

Hal Foster has identified how art discourse became intertwined with philosophical discourse after this development. At the same time, art practices became more open, more pragmatic and more multicultural. Instead of residing in a grand castle atop a big hill overlooking the field of life, art turned into an amorphous, gaseous blob, able to penetrate any and all aspects of life in the pursuit of whatever might be interesting at the time. However, “this position is also not-so-benignly-liberal, in the sense that its relativism is what the rule of the market requires.” (Foster, p125)

Returning to Cranston, it is clear that she is grounded in the art-as-philosophical-questioning-of-knowledge approach to making. Yet now there is a feeling that maybe this method has become contaminated; hyper-contextualising has reached its peak and the time has come for art to regain some boundaries that are its own. In critiquing Frank Gehry’s post-modern architecture, Foster observes its perverse flamboyancy as being indicative of a disconnection between skin and structure. Whilst this can also be seen as a criticism of the more grossly over-produced elements of the art world, it connects to the call for some kind of unification of medium specificity within art discourse: “formal articulation requires a resistant material, structure or context” (Foster, p40). To save art from completely vanishing into the late-capitalist ether, perhaps requires a re-joining of art’s skin with its structure.


References

Cranston, Meg and Israel, Nico, ‘Running On Light Feet’, in Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World: Works 1987-2007, Auckland, 2008, pp6-21.

Foster, Hal, Design and Crime, London, 2002.