‘Placeful’ interventions in spatial incommensurability

The paper discusses 'art and the real' in terms of space—the social and political implications of spatial incommensurability, and the role art plays in this kind of spatial framework. The discussion is intended to throw a different light on those spatially interventionist art practices dismissed as 'innocent' of social and political content by writers such as Miwon Kwon. A context is provided for this framework by sociologist, Anthony Giddens' account of those social institutions of modernity that appeared in Europe around the seventeenth century and are now global in their reach.  These institutions, Giddens argues, are formed in part through processes of time-space distanciation and disembedding that devalue the concrete actuality of place, where space and time are one. In this account, the historic disembedding of space from place produces a spatial framework that devalues place, allowing the relative constancy and past-orientation of the institutions of tradition to give way to the dynamism and future-orientation of those of modernity. Giddens discusses ways to ride the resulting juggernaut to avoid perishing in the apocalypse produced by large-scale warfare or ecological decay.  This paper discusses the ways in which art can function as a disembedding mechanism, but also with the potential to (mal)function as critique of modernity's spatial values. Site specificity may function like this by revaluing place in relation to disembedded space. Miwon Kwon rejects this early form of site specificity in favour of a 'discursive site', site-related practices that emphasise an artist's critique of a site over its literal ‘placefulness’.  However, her analysis suffers from confusion between particular location and occupiable space and, in terms of Giddens' model, favours a position that retreats from critique and supports modernity's devaluation of place, thus demonstrating the need for a reconsideration of the values implied in spatially interventionist art practices.