Site-Specific Installation Art in Historical Perspective

Abstract

The argument in this chapter starts with a discussion of the art historical discourse on site-specific installation art. Artists as well as critics have explored various notions of site specificity, usually in concordance with successive art historical periods: the first “wave” of site-specific installations created during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a second period, from the 1980s and early 1990s until today. The chapter elucidates several art historical perspectives on both periods and the shifts occurring in the relationship between artists and museum institutions, between the artwork and the site. Furthermore, it is important to realize that site-specific installation artworks are highly diverse in form, content, and meaning. For the current purpose of developing a model with an eye to the artworks’ perpetuation, a chronological approach is only partly effective. A further abstraction in categorization is needed, focusing on the network of site-specific functions and their changes over time. To this end, a selection of relevant notions elucidate the extended lives of site-specific installations, which I derive from case studies and observations made by artists and art historians in this respect. The discussion is a prelude to chapter 3, in which I take the vocabulary for site-specific installation artworks one step further by employing a triadic set of spatial functions, which I derive from Henri Lefebvre’s theory on space.