Geography
Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, 38000 Grenoble, France

Like many geographers, I have been marked all through my training by the distinction between site and situation, that one acquires as a methodological reflex when learning to analyze topographical maps. In my research practice, I see that the meaning of these notions fluctuates according to their contexts, including between the English site and the French site, which might sometimes be translated as place [lieu] – terms that imply a kind of “spatial turn” in contemporary artistic practices.

A site is a place, or rather it expresses the qualities of one. Classical geography sets it against the term situation, which considers a place in terms of its interactions with other spaces. Traditionally, the notion conveys a strong reference to a space’s natural characteristics, those that are supposed to provide a dominant interpretive key to the site – in deterministic approaches – or, at least a very,present one – in possibilistic approaches. Artistic practice took hold of the term in the 1960s during the development of conceptual art, adding an active dimension to the place’s anchoring qualities. For my part I question the ways contemporary artistic contributions inform and transform these keywords of geographical analysis.

The interrogation of space in which takes place the aesthetic creation process becomes central when the artist rejects the centrality of object and representation. At a time when the artist dethrones the object and its form. From there, the site becomes performative in and of itself, allowing and bearing forth artistic practices that may or may not be specific to that site. (We often differentiate art as either “site-specific” or “non site-specific”.) This specificity plays out in the unique relationship between the artist’s work and the site in which it is produced. It is, furthermore, multidimensional: the site does not simply inspire the artistic work; it performs its creation and, in return, is transformed by the work’s presence. Artist Denis Oppenheim talks about an “activated surface,” and geographer Anne Volvey has also suggested the term “object-place of art” in order to convey how place constitutes more than a contextual element of creation, but rather how it participates to work out what actually composes the artistic process.

Land art often appears as one of the most manifest expressions of playing with the concept of site, as is attested to by artists whose works transform places in a more or less ephemeral manner. There is Boundary Split, dug in the snow by Denis Oppenheim in 1968, or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, created in 1970 by moving rocks, that remains visible today. The artist R. Smithson nevertheless sought to play with the relationship between site and art by proposing what he called “non-sites,” namely land art pieces presented aboveground and defined, by him, as “indoor earthworks” (1968): installations that, at the same time, represent a site and go beyond it, by introducing a metaphoric dimension that makes it possible to connect the places between them. In this way – and notably in his installation Pine Barrens – Smithson interrogated not only the site itself but the array of relations it inserts itself in, specifically that which is produced in the “journey” between site and non-site. By the same token, he opened art to a vast variety of practices dealing with site, across differing artistic fields. Performance is one of these domains in which relationships with site have taken on a considerable importance; the performer’s body catalyzes the site’s potential in multiple ways. Too often do we forget to consider this, but what is at stake in the site also concerns those on the receiving end of the creation who thus contribute to the work either in the moment at which it becomes public or in their eventual discovery of traces left by the performance, found elsewhere.

In my analytical work on “border art”, i.e. art produced on and or about borders, the notion of “site-specificity” plays an essential role, even if all the works belonging to this category are not linked to a specific place. However, I am not fully satisfied with the notion, and I play on the binomial site-situation to research what would be a “situation specificity” which seems to me more accurate to speak about creating in a bordered space which is solely defined by the relation to the territories it skirts). The works and object-places of “border art” have flourished since the 1990s, but especially 2000s, in reaction to the spectacularization of border security and, surprisingly, they respond to each other through powerful aesthetic and political links worldwide. Inspired by the literary concept of intertextuality, I work on the notion of “intervisuality” in order to highlight the way in which relations to places are constructed in a complex, multi-scalar relationship between the Here and the Elsewhere that the notion of site has the advantage of highlighting, while significantly reducing its scope.

More from this author:

Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, « Borders: the topos of/for a post-politics of images? », Border Images, Border narratives. The political aesthetics of boundaries and crossings, Johan Schimanski, Jopi Nyman dirs., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, pp.151‑67

Cite this item: Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, “Site”, translated by Caroline Schlenker, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2022, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177909