Jason Rhoades’s SLOTO

This chapter is dedicated to Jason Rhoades’s SLOTO. The Secret Life of the Onion (2003), a complex, multilayered, site-specific installation artwork in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum. [Figure 20] It introduces the problem of perpetuating a site-specific installation that includes processes of growth and transformation, not only in content but also in form. Museum professionals are often confronted with profound questions in order to keep processual artworks alive and sometimes need to make radical decisions when reinstalling the work in different contexts than foreseen by the artist. Comparative examples are Dieter Roth’s Garden Sculpture (1968–1996) and Jason Rhoades’s P.I.G. (Piece in Ghent) (1994).

Site-Specific Installation Art in Historical Perspective

The argument in this chapter starts with a discussion of the art historical discourse on site-specific installation art. Artists as well as critics have explored various notions of site specificity, usually in concordance with successive art historical periods: the first “wave” of site-specific installations created during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a second period, from the 1980s and early 1990s until today. The chapter elucidates several art historical perspectives on both periods and the shifts occurring in the relationship between artists and museum institutions, between the artwork and the site. Furthermore, it is important to realize that site-specific installation artworks are highly diverse in form, content, and meaning. For the current purpose of developing a model with an eye to the artworks’ perpetuation, a chronological approach is only partly effective. A further abstraction in categorization is needed, focusing on the network of site-specific functions and their changes over time. To this end, a selection of relevant notions elucidate the extended lives of site-specific installations, which I derive from case studies and observations made by artists and art historians in this respect. The discussion is a prelude to chapter 3, in which I take the vocabulary for site-specific installation artworks one step further by employing a triadic set of spatial functions, which I derive from Henri Lefebvre’s theory on space.

Ernesto Neto’s Célula Nave

Célula Nave. It happens in the body of time, where truth dances (2004) by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto is an interactive installation artwork, commissioned by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The artwork consists of a spacious construction of turquoise fabric – the “nave” – hanging on a series of aluminium poles. Visitors are allowed to enter the nave and touch the fabric with their hands and feet. The spatial design of Célula Nave is intertwined with the museum’s Bodon Gallery, for which the artwork was created. The size of the installation has been adapted to its large-scale dimensions; the colour of the fabric matches the greenish floor of the gallery, and the daylight falling into the room enhances the fabric’s translucency.

A Conceptual Model for the Analysis of Site-Specific Installations

In the previous chapter, I argued for a broader notion of site specificity than the connectivity between the artwork and the physical location of display. The institutional and sociocultural contexts of production and reception were also identified as parameters for a site-specific installation, leading to my suggestion to conceive site specificity as a network of site-specific functions. In the current chapter, I develop a conceptual model for the analysis of site-specific installation artworks to understand how this network is formed and transforms over time. The model consists of two parts, one focusing on a categorization of the various functions of site specificity; the other proposing a methodology to compare successive iterations of the artwork and to analyse which “factors of influence” cause changes at a particular biographical stage.

The Problem of the Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Art

In the summer of 1961, Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) installed dozens of used car tyres in the courtyard of the Martha Jackson Townhouse Gallery in New York City. The artist had collected these tyres from a nearby garage and invited his friends and fellow artists to participate in the Happening called Yard.2 There was no audience except for the participants who jumped over the heaps of tyres and moved them around. Photographs of Yard show Kaprow arranging the tyres within the small space of the courtyard, which was officially the sculpture garden of the gallery. Apart from the photographs, accounts of the event are scarce, and the press hardly paid any attention to it. And yet, Yard became one of Kaprow’s seminal Happenings. The work has been acquired for many museum collections and was re-executed on numerous occasions, both by Kaprow and others, at different places and with other participants.

Conclusion and Further Discussion

The readers of this book have taken note of the history of site-specific installation art and were offered an analytical model for examining the perpetuation of the artworks in a museum context. As the term suggests, site-specific installations are physically tied to the surrounding space and would, strictly speaking, have no afterlives after their initial manifestation. However, as demonstrated with many examples, site-specific installations can have extended lives and are frequently relocated to different contexts and times. Hence, rather than defining site specificity as a “fixed” characteristic, this study took a broader perspective by looking into the biographies of the artworks in relation to the exhibition site, ongoing institutional engagement, the locations of production, and the visitors’ interaction in the here and now.

Drifting Producers

Drifting Producers (2004) is an installation artwork built around three large urban models representing a utopian city. [Figure 27] The installation is created by a group of South Korean artists, designers, and curators who call themselves Flying City. The installation is part of a larger project which the artists carried out in an old neighbourhood in Seoul. The project and the installation of Drifting Producers (they bear the same title) are interconnected, although the project lasted for many years (2003–2009) and took many different forms, such as art-and-community workshops, performances, publications, and yet another installation artwork (no longer existent).