ThoughtGallery.org > Site Specificity Without Borders: A Research Symposium

Site Specificity Without Borders: A Research Symposium

Since the land art movement of the late ’60s, site-specific practices have been central to the arts. Scholars, too, have embraced the language of “site.” We use it to explain new forms, such as the GPS-enabled geo-novel, and also to interpret artworks in place, asking not what a poem or photo means generally, but what it means here, for these people, in this site. Site specificity is a strange kind of phenomenon, which travels because it is fixed.

Participants in this symposium will discuss how site-specific discourse and practices have moved across media, space, and time. They will ask whether it’s contradictory to demand a general theory of site-specificity. And they will question whether the localizing language of site is adequate to social or environmental challenges that emerge at a planetary scale, or that embrace technologies unimagined by the pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, speakers will try to identify what is living and what is dead in site specificity. Is site worn out? Is this once-insurgent practice anything more, these days, than a generalized idiom for attaching social values to artistic objects?











When: Fri., Nov. 11, 2016 at 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Where: Columbia University
116th St. & Broadway
212-854-1754
Price: Free
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Since the land art movement of the late ’60s, site-specific practices have been central to the arts. Scholars, too, have embraced the language of “site.” We use it to explain new forms, such as the GPS-enabled geo-novel, and also to interpret artworks in place, asking not what a poem or photo means generally, but what it means here, for these people, in this site. Site specificity is a strange kind of phenomenon, which travels because it is fixed.

Participants in this symposium will discuss how site-specific discourse and practices have moved across media, space, and time. They will ask whether it’s contradictory to demand a general theory of site-specificity. And they will question whether the localizing language of site is adequate to social or environmental challenges that emerge at a planetary scale, or that embrace technologies unimagined by the pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, speakers will try to identify what is living and what is dead in site specificity. Is site worn out? Is this once-insurgent practice anything more, these days, than a generalized idiom for attaching social values to artistic objects?

Buy tickets/get more info now