The Functional Site

Meyer, James. “The Functional Site: or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000, 23-37.


James Meyer is an Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta. His research interests relate to institutional critique and site-oriented installation. In his essay, “The Functional Site: or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity,” he discusses two notions of site. The ‘literal’ site as described by Joseph Kosuth as ‘insitu; it is an actual location, a singular place.’(1) In contrast the ‘functional’ site that does not privilege place. The ‘functional’ is an informational and allegorical site. Its exploration of the ‘expanded’ site broadens its scope of enquiry. According to Craig Owens, ‘it has a chain of signifiers’ which add meanings or a fabric of illusions.(2) This expanded institutional critique of the ‘functional’ site can be anywhere in culture and can occupy all available space. It is not tied to a particular place. The ‘functional’ site discussed by Meyer makes a connection with Geoff Parks ‘Theatre Country’.(3) Discussion centres on nature as scenery. In art, literature or theatre, the perceptual experience available to the viewer depends upon the preoccupations of the viewer. It relies on construction by the viewer for establishing the way of looking, as discussed by Park, where the landscape becomes art whether framed like a painting or set like a stage. Seeing is not natural, but is a cultural construction from social discourse in the viewer’s memory, imagination and historical experience.

Much contemporary art occupies the ‘functional’ site. Ann Shelton, a New Zealand artist has a series A Kind of Sleep that documents sites of historical significance in the Taranaki region. The Auckland Art Gallery has Sleeper, Lucy’s Gully, Taranaki, 2004 in the current exhibition of Earth Matters. The photographic image and its corresponding title provide a chain of signifiers to events, places and people. The photograph of Lucy’s Gully is a place available only to perception in the viewer. It is set like a colonialist native landscape with a dirt track. Like nineteenth century landscapes it is dark, misty and empty of people so it has a connection to sites elsewhere in art and literature, in the nineteenth century. The title of the work refers not only to a person, Lucy Stevens but also to the Maori land wars in the 1860’s in the region. Lucy Stevens who was born in the area in the 1820’s became known as the ‘Queens Maori’ during the Taranaki Wars as she backed the government against the HauHau.(4) It is now a picnic site where a German tourist was brutally murdered in 2007. Sleeper, Lucy’s Gully, Taranaki, 2004 is an informational and allegorical site that has a chain of signifiers that are dependent on the viewer for construction. Park concludes a scene is never but theatre, making a connection with Meyer and the work of Shelton, that it is about the way we look, and this ‘functional’ site is unique to the viewer and their own historical experience and imagination.

(1) Meyer, James. “The Functional Site: or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000, 24.
(2)Meyer, James. “The Functional Site: or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000, 30.
(3)Park, Geoff. "Theatre Country", in Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua, Wellington: Victoria Press, 20006, 113-127.
(4)http://www.pukerakiki.com/en/stories/tangataWhenua/lucystevens.htm. Updated 6 June 2008

Image versus Text

Mitchell, W.J.T., Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, excerpt from chapter “What is an Image”, pp 7-46

IMAGE IS TEXT AND TEXT IS IMAGE

W.J.T. Mitchell, a professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Enquiry explored images by comparing with words, and by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language. The relationship between word and image is complex and requires mutual translation and interpretation. Mitchell discussed “beneath words, beneath ideas, the ultimate reference in the mind is the image”.1 It is impossible to have words without images and images without words.

Both image and word rely on semiotics to decipher there meaning. Ferdinand de Saussure defined language as a social system of arbitrary signs. The “sign” or word is what bonds a concept to an image and “will always call forth the other”.2 Word calls the image and image calls the word. They go together.

According to Meg Cranston the basic question of conceptual art deals with what constitutes knowledge. How to best represent that knowledge can be pictorial or linguistic. In her own practice when frustrated describing things as a writer, she makes a picture instead.3 She uses the mode of representation that best fits her concept.

Jeff Wall, a photo conceptualist used the text of Ralph Ellison’s The Prologue of Invisible Man (1952)4 to recreate or translate the legendary text as a visualisation in After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999-2000). The hidden meaning lying behind the pictorial surface manifests itself in word, giving the work meaning beyond the image by what is undisclosed. Text is more precise and perspicuous, whereas the image can interpreted differently depending on the experience and conventions of the viewer. Image and text are inextricably linked. Once you have read a novel as in the case of Ralph Ellison and seen the work by Jeff Wall, it is impossible to read the text without the visualisation being apparent in it, and visa versa. It has a dual translation and understanding, despite being different modes of representation.

Artists like Jeff Wall test text and image against their opposite representation. Each informs both sides of the conversation in a relationship of “free exchange along open borders”.5 The relationship has a dialogue between representations. As Mitchell discussed beneath the words, the ultimate reference in the mind is the image. Images and words are both signifiers with which meanings are generated. Both images and words result in a visualisation as the signified, or concept produced by the brain. This makes the two inextricably linked.

Mitchell, W.J.T., Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, excerpt from chapter “What is an Image”, pp 43
Waterman, J.T., “Ferdinand de Saussure – Forerunner of Modern Structuralism”. The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 40, No. 6 (Oct. 1956) pp 307-309.
Daniel, N., “Running on Light Feet”. Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World, Artspace and Clouds, Auckland, 2008, pp 6-21
Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, New York, Random House, 1952. pp.5
Mitchell, W.J.T., Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, excerpt from chapter “What is an Image”, pp 43

The Postmodern Condition

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?'. Trans. Regis Durand. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 71-82.



What is the foundation of what makes an artist now?

Jean-Francois Lyotard is a French philosopher and literary theorist who has been influential for laying down the philosophical foundation of what makes an artist now. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard discusses why artists needed to move beyond reproducing the real. He discussed how an ‘unprecedented split is taking place’, whereby artists have a choice of communicating by the ‘correct rules’, as in realism, or whether they choose to re-examine the rules, as in postmodernism.(1)

The refusal to conform to the ‘correct rules’ of realism is how postmodernism came about. Postmodernism for Lyotard marked the collapse of the grand narratives, which ignored the heterogeneity or diversity of human existence.(2) It dismissed the chaos and disorder of the universe. Lyotard opposed the grand narratives, as they were inadequate to represent or contain us all.(3) Micro-narratives that characterised postmodernism gave a discursive voice to all. It broke away from art that focused on ‘formal refinements to the neglect of historical determinants and social transformations alike’.(4) It searched for new ways to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable, by putting forward the unpresentable in presentation itself. Lyotard referred to the period as one of ‘slackening’ whereby anything goes. This social moment in art broadened the possibilities of a voice for all presentations of art.

Fredric Jameson, a literary critic and Marxist political theorist believed the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of consumer and multinational capitalism. ‘Postmodernism replicates or reproduces – reinforces – the logic of consumer capitalism’ ,(5) thereby laying the foundation of what makes an artist in culture and capitalism. According to Jameson, the manipulation through mass marketing brought about a ‘waning of effect’.(6) As a result of this, feelings and emotions diminished due to commodification under the pressure of capitalism. Andy Warhol's Marilyn (1962) commodified Marilyn Munroe through the repetitious use of her image causing art to become part of society thereby loosing its critical edge. Thus it had a 'waning of effect'.

Whether defined from a cultural or economic viewpoint, the resulting ‘slackening’ or ‘waning of effect’ became the foundation of what constitutes postmodernism in art. Art took on new territory of practice, one of conceptual determination that desired to communicate beyond the real and influenced by a rising capitalist culture. Postmodernist art became about 'art itself in a new kind of way'.(7) It became more about revelation rather than interpretation and required a consciousness on the part of the spectator to generate meaning. Postmodernism and the rise of capitalism occurred at the same time and art at this time had a loss of criticality due to the proliferation of imagery. As a result postmodern art took on a new practice that critiqued the socially dissolving contemporary society in a capitalist society of mass consumerism.

(1)Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?'. Trans. Regis Durand. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 75
(2)Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 11 April 2008. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 11 April 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative
(3) Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 11 April 2008. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 11 April 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Jean-Francois_Lyotard
(4) Foster, Hal. 'The Return of the Real : The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century'. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1996. 205.
(5) Foster, Hal. 'The Anti-Aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern Culture'. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”. Fredric Jameson. Washington : Bay Press, 1983. 125.
(6) Jameson, Fredric. 'Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'. London : Verso, 1990. 18.
(7) Foster, Hal. 'The Anti-Aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern Culture'. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”. Fredric Jameson. Washington : Bay Press, 1983. 116.

Sculpture in the Expanded Field

Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44.



Why is Rosalind Krauss’s seminal work in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” relevant in contemporary art practice today?

Rosalind Krauss, an influential art critic and theorist and founding member of October, provides discussion of ‘the expanded field’ for the post-modernist artist. Krauss discusses a ‘logic of space’ to include a larger cultural field beyond the pure medium thereby opening up the definition of sculpture. In the ‘expanded field’ the hybrid state opens up infinite possibilities within a field of practice beyond High Modernism to the disintegration of the formal to the 'formless'. It does this through oppositions. It is the oppositions that in my opinion make it relevant today. The logic of the ‘expanded field’ begins with oppositions, such as ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’.1 Introducing the inverse of these oppositions, ‘not cultural’ and ‘not natural’ doubles the expansion. These two parts mirror the original opposition and open it up to its negative space. It becomes a map of possibilities through the universe of terms that are in opposition with the cultural situation.2 This provides a language of oppositional thinking, questions or tensions. Oppositions enable conversations outside of art world into other disciplines such as science, technology and philosophy. It frees the art of its pure medium. This interdisciplinary approach enable artists to deal with concerns from other media, simultaneously exploring and occupying different positions in the expanded field. The expanded field is relevant beyond sculpture and into my area of interest, photography. George Baker, Photography in the Expanded Field (1979) discussed how artists such as Jeff Wall reconcile photography with other media like painting, cinema and advertising by inventively drawing on cultural concerns outside of photography.3 The expanded field of photography oppositions of stasis and narrativity and their pure negatives broaden the discourse beyond the pure medium to include cinematic and moving image across a myriad of disciplines. This expanded field opens up new questions that constitute contemporary practice across all disciplines broadening the scope for artists in the postmodern. Artists like Wall questioned what had gone before in painting by the use of photography to question autheniticity and aura of painting. He did this by using large formats and presentations that expanded the field of photography into other media of cinema and advertising to subvert content and provoke discussion around contemporary art practice that has conceptual determinations. Wall used what Krauss called a logic of space that extended out of the pure medium of photography into an expanded field.


1.Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 37.
2. Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 43.
3.Baker, George. “Photography’s Expanded Field.” October, Vol.114, (Fall, 2005) Issue 114, pp 123.