Site-writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism

Abstract

Aims: Site-Writing aims to perform – through writing – a new kind of criticism, one which draws out the spatial qualities of the critic’s engagement with a work, and the reader’s interaction with the page. These include the sites – material, emotional, political and conceptual – of the work’s construction, exhibition and documentation, as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined. Contexts: This research configures what happens when discussions concerning situatedness and site-specificity (Kwon 2004; Doherty 2009) enter the practice of writing. Methods: Through five different spatial configurations Site-Writing explores artworks by Jananne Al-Ani, Elina Brotherus, Nathan Coley, Tracey Emin, Cristina Iglesias and Do-Ho Suh. Each one investigates the psychic qualities and architectural dimensions of a particular spatial condition, namely the transitional space of the setting, the frontier between conscious, preconscious and unconscious, the rearrangement of words and things, the folded memory of déjà vu, and the recentering and decentering devices of the Ptolemic and Copernican revolutions. The intention is not to ‘apply’ spatial concepts to psychoanalyze certain artworks, but to adapt certain psychoanalytic ways of working – free association, conjectural interpretation and construction – to the writing of criticism. Dissemination and Impact: Material from this research has been delivered as 14 international keynotes, and over 50 invited international talks in galleries/museums, and university settings, such as Tate Modern, Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel, Hayward and ICA in the UK, and so far in 2011, Museum of Public Art, Denmark, and Temple Art Gallery, Philadelphia. Sections have been translated into Armenian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. Sections on the new concept of ‘site-writing’ have been reprinted in Claire Doherty (ed) Situations, (MIT Press and the Whitechapel Gallery, 2009).

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