Miwon Kwon and Steven Wright

ILA (Islands of LA) is an experiment. One of the ideas it experiments with is the place of “cultural theory” in the practical sphere. Along these lines, some posts on this blog will highlight questions, thinkers, challenges, artists, projects, theories that relate to the way ILA is approaching this.

Here are two:

MIWON KWON (from One Place After Another)
“Certainly, site-specific art can lead to the unearthing of repressed histories, help provide greater visibility to marginalized groups and issues, and initiate the re(dis)covery of “minor” places so far ignored by the dominant culture. But inasmuch as the current socioeconomic order thrives on the (artificial) production and (mass) consumption of difference (for difference sake), the siting of art in “real” places can also be a means to extract the social and historical dimensions of these places in order to variously serve the thematic drive of an artist, satisfy institutional demographic profiles, or fulfill the fiscal needs of a city. ”

STEVEN WRIGHT
Beyond contemplative value: operative value

[There exist] art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, raising the possibility of a new status for art ­ in the absence of artworks, authorship or spectatorship. Envisaging art in terms of competence rather than performance, process rather than outcome, poses a distinct challenge for the art world because in losing its visibility as such, art has only its history to fall back on. For practices whose self-understanding stems from the visual arts tradition, not to mention for the normative institutions that govern it, the problem cannot be merely wished away for if it is not visible, art eludes all control, all prescription, in short, all ‘policing’. If ever more artists seem prepared to deliberately impair their work’s coefficient of artistic visibility, is it not in order to give teeth to the sort of consensus-busting power to which art often lays claim?

In contexts often far removed from art-specific spaces and time, the past few years have witnessed the emergence of a broad range of such practices, which, in spite of certain affinities and indeed, in some cases, of undeniable kinship, can only be described as art-related rather than art-specific activities, often laying no particular claim to art status. In many cases, these forms of symbolic production, implicitly questioning and even shattering the borders of art, live up to art’s promises far more effectively than those practices upheld and underwritten by current artistic conventions. Yet the status of these art-related activities, has never been the object of sustained scrutiny (they are usually written off as conceptual leftovers of the seventies). Even contemporary aesthetic philosophy tends to invoke them as evidence only insofar as they are predefined as not art, in a hasty endeavor to again secure the borderlines of what is conventionally known as art.

Art-related practice
There is, of course, a context for this shake-up of the status of art and the artist, bequeathed by the twentieth century: artistic activity itself is developing on a massive scale and in a mind-boggling variety of forms, and the production of meaning, form and knowledge is no longer the exclusive preserve of professionals of expression. One finds artistic skills and competencies at work in a variety of areas far beyond the confines of the symbolic economy of the art world, and the practices which they inform are in many cases never designated and domesticated as art. The fact that this sort of art-related creativity seeks no particular validation from the art world, that it pays scant heed to the values and conventions underpinning it, should by no means inhibit us from charting its genealogy and identifying its inherent rationality. And yet, aesthetic philosophy, persisting as it does in construing art as an enigma to be deciphered, as an object begging interpretation, seems decidedly ill-equipped to theorize art in this expanded sense. Beyond both the well-worn logic of appropriation, which consists of recuperating as art all description of objects and activities not intended as such; and beyond the converse, though symmetrical logic consisting of using artistic practices — those, in other words, initiated and managed by artists — to stake out and claim new territories for art, it seems worth pursuing use-value in this particular direction though on the basis of an extraterritoriality and reciprocity that prefigure an unforeseen future for it.

(Here is an other essay he has wrote: Users and Usership of Art: Challenging Expert Culture.)

At any rate, the notions of site specificity, place are what is really involved in working with mangroves along the intercoastal (in Miami-Dade, Broward, and St. Lucie Counties). I walk. I walk in site specific places that bring me inner joy, inner peace, and yet stir my excitement for the possibilities of an environment that also embraces me with its smells, its light and dark, its textures, its aural play upon my body, its capability of transporting me to another time, its importance to our coastal environment.

WALKING AS KNOWING AS MAKING // A PERIPATETIC INVESTIGATION OF PLACE
SPRING 2005 // UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS @ URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

In early spring of 2004 the New York Times reported on a recent study of aging adults. An inconspicuous three sentence news brief, noticeable only upon the closest of readings, stated in no uncertain terms: WALK MORE, THINK BETTER, “…In a study done by researchers at the University of Illinois, 41 adults ages 58 to 78 began an exercise program that gradually increased to 45-minute walks three times a week. After three months the participants increased brain activity and had an 11 percent improvement on decision-making tests.” That the conclusion seems rather self-evident suggests both a general recognition of the diminished role of walking in our contemporary lives and an intuitive understanding that walking is somehow good for us. It’s as though our bodies possess some vestigial memory of their own evolutionary heritage or as if our minds had indirectly absorbed fragments of the ongoing conversation facilitated by people such as Paul Shepard, Aldo Leopold, Lewis Mumford, and Henry David Thoreau.

Despite its ubiquity in the everyday walking is an activity obscured by its own practical functionality. It is employed literally and understood metaphorically as a slow, inefficient, and increasingly anachronistic means to a predetermined end. Rarely is walking considered as a distinct mode of acting, knowing, and making. As its necessity diminishes and its applications rarefy, the potential of walking as critical, creative, and subversive tool appears only to grow. Conceived of as a conversation between the body and the world, walking becomes a reciprocal and simultaneous act of both interpretation and manipulation; an embodied and active way of shaping and being shaped that operates on a scale and at a pace embedded in something seemingly more authentic and real.

Based in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois, Walking as Knowing as Making is a multifaceted effort that seeks to nurture both a theoretical and applied approach to knowing and interpreting place as we experience and construct it through walking. Using the walk as a guiding metaphor the format of this symposium has been designed to encourage a sustained, rigorous, and layered yet experimental, diffuse, and meandering consideration of walking and its associated activities, systems, and values. Between February and May 2005 we will bring to campus a diverse group of scholars, activists, and pedestrians to present ideas, engage in conversation, generate questions, tell stories, and, of course, walk. Supplementing and also weaving together this series of convergences will be a new interdisciplinary course about walking, an informal film series about place, a reading group, a series of informational and experimental walks and tours, production of a monthly sound collage for broadcast on local community radio stations, a museum exhibition, and a digital and print archive of all the events and activities.

Set in what was once a vast expanse of tallgrass prairie and what is now a relatively homogeneous landscape dominated by corn and soybean, the apotheosis of modern industrialized agriculture, the University of Illinois provides a unique, if not slightly ironic context in which to consider walking as a distinct way of knowing. Far from any traditional destinations and lacking all but the slightest topographic variation, walking in central Illinois often seems an anomaly – acutely out of sync, both spatially and temporally, with our lives, the land, and our expectations for how the two should interact. Given its history this region does however offer fertile ground for any consideration of the relationship between ways of knowing and ways of making. The prairie, perceived by early European settlers to be nothing more than a stubborn impediment to progress, was eventually tamed by the application of an unwavering grid and the invention of the stainless steel plow and steam engine. It is precisely from the vantage of these signature products of the Englightenment and Industrial Revolution that we can begin to understand the present day configuration and composition of Illinois.

Susan Sontag once said that an artist is someone who is interested in everything. The College of Fine and Applied Arts is, in this way, uniquely positioned within the University. Eschewing reflexive specialization while encouraging critical experimentation, the College is ideally suited to engage an expansive subject that moves casually between and through the gamut of academic disciplines all the while resisting easy classification and appropriation.

It is our challenge to re-learn this place on foot and with imagination. Please join us for what we hope will be a stimulating conversation about walking…

I walk 2-3 times per week as a way to clear my thoughts when I get bogged down. I find it invigorating, refreshing, and healthful. The beauty of my iPhone is using it to take aural or visual notes with ease, with the ability to upload (if desired), save, and/or share while walking. In the urban environment my walking is usually more health motived, while my rural and nature walks are more intellectual and creative. Evidence of that is in the many years of images I maintain of wooded Minnesota near the Canadian border.

On the way to work! (2005)

MN Boundary Waters area Lake Burntside (2006)
(searching an island in the lake for blueberries)

MN Boundary Waters area Low Lake
Raptors spotted: osprey, vulture, harrier hawk. Near the cabin, next to the road a female deer.

Hungry bear on the back deck! (2008)

“The notion of site-specific art is one that has been used extensively within art theory and practice since the late 1960s. However, in the process of its various utilisations and interpretations the concept would seem to have been emptied almost entirely of meaning such that, in the words of Miwon Kwon, it becomes merely a token of criticality or progressivity. Many works throughout history have had a specific relation to a site. What, if anything, distinguishes modern and contemporary works that draw on the concept or to which it is ascribed? By revisiting the philosophical basis of the problem through an analysis of the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dr Christopher Townson addresses the problem of the meaning of site-specificity as a concept, then elaborating this through case studies on James Turrell and Robert Smithson. As a consequence, significant conclusions can be drawn not only with regard to site-specific art past and present but also for art history as a discipline.”

Christopher Townson (PhD Essex) (a researcher in philosophy and art history with a particular focus on the relationship between technology, art and politics)
Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller (May 6, 2011)
ISBN-10: 3639339711
ISBN-13: 978-3639339710

A few days ago I served as juror for an show that had awards, and prize monies. I do not like to enter my work in such exhibitions for many reasons. However, I was questioned by two artists as to why I selected one work over another work, the one that was not selected asking the question. After giving my answer, they both huffed away, obviously upset that the juror’s eyes were clouded and unable to recognize the superiority of their art. Also, their act was one of intimidation which I will not discuss at the moment.

A couple of times during the evening, while talking to a few non-artists, I insisted the artist must step away from their work to let it stand on its own, without having to believe that artist’s words were the only valid ones available. Obviously, that is one of the most difficult things to do, yet it must be done.

What does that have to do with site specific art? And my practice in particular?

There are times, especially in including my own case, that we artists want to lock in on our vision so laser like that other viewpoints are not sought out, and even rejected. Rejection, and then questioning was what lead me to an important breakthrough back in 1991. Surrealism, remember that term?

Here, all of a sudden, comes Andy Goldsworthy (after viewing a feature movie on him), Richard Long, now Robert Smithson. Long and Smithson I was much more familiar with than Goldsworthy. They all three have some overlap in their practices that include what I have been working on, and what I am pushing more towards. The idea of Site/Non Site has to be looked at a bit closer since that is how I’m working, although the Non Site has been mostly online. That needs to change. That will change.

So, as I move forward in my own practice I must step back and keep my eyes and ears open because others may be seeing something very different than my original intention.

My real interest with looking at these Smithson works, however, is to point to the formal similarities between them and my own work done in the past five years or so. And, those trees look like mangroves with the spreading root system. The mirrors harken back to my practice, again lacking much documentation, of working with mirrors and reflective surfaces in 1970 before I went to study at Calif. College of the Arts in 1971. I’m not even sure I knew who Robert Smithson was in 1970-71. My practice was focused on photography, not sculpture, even though I did, and continue to work with three dimensional objects in three dimensional space.

“Photography squares everything. Every kind of random view is caught in a rectangular format so that the romantic idea of going to the beyond, of the infinite is checked by this so that things become measured. The artist is contorting, distorting his figures instead of just accepting the photograph.”

Robert Smithson – Mirror & Nature I

Robert Smithson – Mirror & Nature II

“I do think an interesting thing would be to check the behavior of Cezanne and the motivation to the site. Instead of thinking in formalist terms – we’ve gotten to such a high degree of abstraction out of that – where the Cubists claimed Cezanne and made his work into a kind of empty, formalism, we now have to reintroduce a kind of physicality; the actual place rather than the tendency to decoration which is a studio thing, because the Cubists brought Cezanne back into the studio.”

Text excerpted from ROBERT SMITHSON: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS, 2nd Edition, edited by Jack Flam, The University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; University of California Press, LTD. London, England; 1996
Originally published: The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy
Holt, New York, New York University Press, 1979 – ISBN # 0-520-20385-2

Biography on Robert Smithson

“The sculptor, essayist, and filmmaker Robert Smithson (1938-1973) is most known for his site-specific environmental earth works.”

“Smithson continued to explore entropy and chaos in his dialectical series entitled Site/NonSite. In these sculptures Smithson expanded the cartographic aspect of his field trips to disrupt the premises of traditional sculpture. The Non-Site, consisting of bins filled with material collected from specific locations, refers back to the Site from which it was gathered. The bins are displayed in geometric structures and matched with maps and photographs, thus forming a continuous dialogue between the artist’s activity, the object that signifies that activity, and the site in nature from which the object was formed. These Site/NonSite works undermined the museum/gallery location even as they made the transformational actions of the artist on raw matter in its original unbounded state even more explicit.”

“For the last two years of his life Smithson sought to use his art as a resource that would mediate between ecology and industry. He contacted many land mining corporations, offering his services as an artist-consultant for land reclamation. He wished to make art out of the decay of discarded land at such sites, thereby restoring art to an everyday function within society.”

The latter citations seems to fit my current concerns to a large extent, although I have not up to this point pursued a direction of mediation between ecology and industry. It would seem to make a lot of sense to look more closely at Smithson’s practice as we have a great deal of similar concerns as well as interests, and processes.