John Haber wrote: [...] You picked a natural topic, too, for Empyre: in art, “site” and “nonsite” are all about creating cross-disciplinary communities. Besides, I had not thought before of their connection to new media. The terms go back, of course, before digital art. One usually traces nonsites to Robert Smithson, and that has me thinking. How do we get from Smithson and similar practices by another artist, Gordon Matta-Clark, to new media? What do we gain in the process? I propose to explore just that.

New-media artists might like to think they have set the paradigm for nonsites. They could even have the copyright, give or take open source code. One speaks of a Web page as a site, but as traces of elsewhere, distributed across many networks. An elsewhere that leaves cookies on one’s “home” computer makes an even better model for a nonsite. Like Christina in her own videos and digital prints, artists have used also geologic and other data to represent landscape — both online and in the interior of a gallery. In this way, the facticity of real time becomes a potent metaphor for the representation of real space.

Even now, however, there is no escaping another generation entirely. When MOMA reopened in 2004, it displayed the film of Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty.” When the Met added a small gallery for contemporary photography in 2007, it included Matta-Clark. Worse for those who insist on sites as open communities, their Whitney retrospectives came with a sense of closure. A pier that Matta-Clark illegally helped dismantle is giving way to more space for salmon and a park along the Hudson. The “Floating Island” that Smithson planned, a barge of still more rubble, circled Manhattan.

More to the point, their influence is everywhere. I want to start my next post with their visibility today. For now, though, let me leave you with a quote. I shall come back to it in due course, but it has to be the one thing about new media that Smithson would have understood. It is from Sartre, in a late interview with Simone de Beauvoir: “But what’s weird is how I started to think about chance. . . . I had just seen movies that left nothing to chance, and when I went out I had found contingency. It was the necessity of film that made me feel that there is no necessity on the street.”

Nonsite as rupture:

Let me pick up where I left off, with apologies for not understanding that Christina was posting a start for me. Of course, you have to live with my version, because writers are more self-involved than artists, who have to live with nonsite and displacement. Anyhow I said I wanted to begin with a point of rediscovery, with Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, some retrospectives, and some definitions.

Smithson liked deductive logic and formal systems well enough, so long as others took care of them. His spiral of earth, slowly sinking into the Great Salt Lake, could almost parody a Sol LeWitt wall drawing. But had he foreseen a digital universe, would he ever have entered the gallery?

Smithson did enter the gallery, of course, where his work has a notably low-tech and strikingly physical presence — even in the mirror. His “Enantiomorphic Chambers,” like his arrays of mirrors amid salt and rubble, could almost make a mockery of conceptual art. As for fancier algorithms underlying digital art now, better bury them with an old-fashioned steam shovel before they get out of hand.

It takes chance, in the collision of millions upon millions of molecules, to produce his beloved entropy and the arrow of time. It takes a serious rupture of gallery and museum walls to create earthworks, the mark of the creative artist on the landscape. It takes a more subtle breach to invent nonsites, the presence of the landscape within a gallery. It takes a certain permeability between artist, object, nature, and human history to suffer either then to take its course. “Spiral Jetty” now makes its reappearance from time to time after many years underwater, and I hardly know whether to thank happenstance, patterns of water use, or global warming.

For those more attached to round numbers, however, Smithson would have turned seventy with the new year — or, more exactly, January 2. (The law of large numbers means some slippage.) He will have died thirty-five years ago this July. Matta-Clark, another site-specific artist who labored hard to destroy a site, was born and died precisely five years after him. Both also had retrospectives in the last three years, at the very same New York museum, and it might disappoint them both to spot a trend, rather than mere coincidence. Sites and nonsites are where the action is.

Why the sudden revival of two late artists devoted to site and nonsite? Why the interest in a couple of fragmentary careers devoted to leaving fragmentary evidence? In the posts to follow, I plan to explore just that, recognizing but not privileging information technology and new media. I shall focus on what has changed since their time, in order to get at reasonable criticism of site and nonsite for art today. I shall argue that it helps pinpoint additional reasons for the terms’ relevance.

Nonsite as influence:

First off, apologies for the redundancies in my posts yesterday. I simply worked too quickly. That and a bad cold. There I started with Smithson and Matta-Clark as paradigms of site and nonsite. But why worry about them in the first place — other than as a deliberate affront to the artists contributing to Empyre?

For starters, their influence extends well beyond virtual reality, to an increasing range of options subsumed under site and nonsite. In this post, I want to run those down quickly, to see just what beyond those terms amount to today. Is the litany all too familiar? It should already get one asking what has changed in the conditions surrounding the making of art. Consider the scope of big shows from 2007 alone.

Their influence includes art that restages the outdoors indoors — invariably in a state of incompletion, fragmentation, or deterioration. Museum-scale group exhibitions suggest a culture-wide obsession, as with “Undone” at the Whitney at Altria, followed in no time by “Unmonumental” at the New Museum. Their influence also includes semi-fictional recreations of an artist’s private environment in the space of a gallery, such as Pipilotti Rist in a group show at the Guggenheim last summer, Friedrich Kunath at Andrea Rosen, Rirkrit Tiravanija dishing out curry (yes, yet again) at David Zwirner, a cordoned-off memorial there to Jason Rhoades’s living room soon after, and Beth Campbell right now at the Whitney.

It includes any number of artists dedicated to trashing the joint big time. Ironically, any record of the disastrous run-in with Christoph Buchel has vanished from MASS MoCA’s Web site. At the same time, galleries and museums have shown more willingness to sponsor off-site transformations, as when Roxy Paine blends his steel trees into New York City parks.

In all these works, one should not see site and nonsite as an opposition of the human hand and nature’s, because the landscape under deconstruction is a human one, too — just as with Smithson’s “Buried Woodshed” or Matta-Clark’s “Building Cuts.” When Urs Fischer broke right through a gallery floor this fall, he discovered a Manhattan built more on sand and thus probably landfill than on bedrock. When Mike Nelson staged an abandoned Essex Street food market as “A Psychic Vacuum,” he competed with an active market across the street, but he brought his own tools and some of his own dust.

Arthur C. Danto called his essay on Peter Fischli and David Weiss “The Artist as Prime Mover.” He thus pointed to their dual role as omnipotent creators and as absent from the creation. One does not usually think of their fabulous Rube Goldberg contraption on film as a site or nonsite, but their work’s ambiguity underlies every use of the terms.

One reason, then, for a continued influence is how productive it has proved to be. Later today, I shall offer a couple more reasons, even closer to platitudes. One had better get the good news out of the way fast.

Nonsite as recovery:

At the very least, I argued last time, no one is getting rid of surprisingly nostalgic, even trashy conceptions of site and nonsite, not even by going online. It may not have much to do with the under-the-radar approach of Smithson and Matta-Clark, but it bears their obvious traces all the same. Besides, people who buried buildings or blasted through the roof made some pretty bold gestures, too.

What accounts, then, for the resurgent interest in two artists and two entangled ideas? Most obviously, it amounts to the usual generational swings, as yet another age cohort enters the museum. After Neo-Expressionism and irony, it has become safe to return to the past — provided it comes without the old narratives of formalism and theater. In 2007, too, for example, David Reed curated a view of the late 1960s and early 1970s as “High Times, Hard Times.” While it focused on painting, there, too, art spilled over into space. A year earlier, MOMA devoted the atrium to Jennifer Bartlett’s “Rhapsody” as another study in how painting refused to die. Minimalism is fine now, honest, so long as comes with a warm narrative of survival-and reasonably warm, fluid work to match.

Conversely, the themes never really began with Smithson and Matta-Clark, and they never went away. One can see their presence in the litany of recent exhibitions, or one can look back in time instead. Postmodernism has seen disruptions of art as self-contained cultural artifact in everything from Dada to Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project. Even the idealism of Le Corbusier’s buildings surrounded by park, like Olmstead’s Central Park, invites human habits and landscape to fight it out for themselves. Besides, if Modernism sounds too utopian these days, one should not overlook the late-1960s optimism in Smithson and Matta-Clark, both recovering contested sites for artists and others on the economic margins.

For all that, something has changed. One can see it in the almost ridiculous explosion I have noted in 2007. Another purported use of real-time data, by the Brooklyn duo Fame Theory, displays career prospects numerically on LED, like a pretend stock ticker. One can see it, too, from my own attempt at a hitsory. Note how fixed notions of temporal continuity and discontinuity have entered an account of site and nonsite. One recovers nonsites in installations today as if recovering the past. In the process, one recovers conceptual boundaries all over again, even when one thought one had broken through the walls.

I want therefore to consider alternatives to art history as blissfully marching on or in need of recovery. Museums sometimes like it that way, and the scenario has real power. Tomorrow I shall take up challenges to so optimistic a view. Maybe the ruptures that nonsites and earthworks thought they earned have lost some of their ability to disrupt. [via]