Contextsspace no longer view this – as was the case in the 1970s – as a strategic action to
oppose the white cube of the institutionalized visual art museum. Today artists engage
in researching the medial conditions of public space. art historian miwon Kwon was
the first theorist to observe the initial signs of this paradigmatic shift. in her now classic
study One Place after Another, she argues that public art no longer focuses on a physical,
spatial, or institutional relationship, but rather is interested in a discursive bond.
subsequently, Kwon concludes that site- specific art has lost its site and because of this,
it has in fact been dematerialized. in short, the once inseparable connection with the
material surrounding – the surrounding characterized by physical and architectonic
elements taking the viewer into the mode of a ‘phenomenological vector’ as merleau-
ponty puts it – seems to no longer exist. partly inspired by the institutionalized critique
of the 1970s, the practice of today’s public art seems to develop an aesthetics defining
the notion of space anew. in this aesthetics, the notion of space is understood as a
discursive construct: space as a platform for knowledge, intellectual exchange, and
cultural debate. Today, artists engage in societal, social, historical, and political themes
as spaces of artistic research. This development meant that recent site- specific art
resulted in art approaching the site ‘as predominantly an intertextually coordinated,
multiple located, discursive field of operations’ (Kwon 2002: 33).
Thus, no longer is the literal relationship between the work of art and its immediate
surroundings central. at stake is now a reflection on the cultural- political conditions
within which public art is presented and produced. although this artistic strategy also
leads to a form of site- specificity, this manifestation of art is ultimately disconnected
from its concrete topographical space. an indexical relation between the discursive
space and the artistic interventions is no longer relevant. Consequently, a mobile,
multi- faceted space comes into being as an ambulant field where aspects such as
openness, mobility, and ambiguity express the involvement of today’s artistic practice.
in line with this, qualities such as consistency, continuity, and certainty are considered
obsolete resulting in a public art drowning in a ubiquitous visual culture. subsequently,
the danger is lurking that such public art will become an illustration of late- capitalist
levelling out because of its loss of specificity.
Therefore, in A Voyage on the North Sea, Rosalind Krauss (1999) claims that public art
should also be aware of its medium specificity. only the medium has a critical potential
anchored in its inherent aesthetic domain, Krauss argues. This aesthetic domain is
connected with a layer of conventions which, in Krauss’ view, is characteristic of artistic
mediation. The artistic medium as a complex structure of perceptual and conceptual
conventions could not be reduced to a form of communicative one- dimensionality.
according to Krauss, medium- specificity exists thanks to a multi- layeredness which
could never coincide with the physical conditions of the signifier.
That raises the question whether the site as ‘discursive issue’ could also be
understood as medium; for example, in the form of a public art disconnected from
the material parameters of locations, but employing instead the history – photographs,
books, historical objects – of a certain place as building blocks for an archive- type of
documentation based on artistic research.
These issues are starting points for two research projects: Shelter 07, The Freedom
of public art in the Cover of urban space^7 and Translocalmotion, the seventh shanghai
Biennale.^8