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.