James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art

James Meyer is a Professor of Art History. Meyer’s research interests involve American and European art since 1945, in particular Minimalism, Post-minimalism, and site-orientated installation.

Within the essay “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity”, James Meyer discusses the exploration of ‘site’ in art in the 1960s and 70s, and how the transformation of site specificity in turn critiqued institutional frameworks and commodities of the art gallery and museum. Meyer makes two distinctions of site; a literal site and a functional site. A literal site is a singular area in a precise location; it 'is thus a kind of monument, a public work commissioned for the site’.(24) On the contrary, a functional site ‘may not incorporate a physical place…it is a process, an operation occurring between sites’.(25)
Meyer uses Richard Serra’s artwork Tilted Arc as an example of the monumental literal site. What is interesting about this example of Tilted Arc as a literal site (a permanent work for a specific place), it undergoes a change and gains rather similar characteristics I would think to that of the functional site. In 1981, Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza. Its sheer gigantic size caused much controversy which eventually to lead the sculptures abolishment. Through this process of its destruction, it becomes a temporary artwork, and an exchange between two sites. This is reminiscent of atttributes to the functional site. Unlike the functional site however, the sites destruction and absence pursued Serra to ask for money as compensation, becoming a commodity in itself. This undermines the main aim of site specific works suggested by Meyer, which by being site specific, was to critique and criticise the commodity of galleries ‘homeless’(25) artworks.

Another two examples of artworks that evoke neither literal site or functional, is Auguste Rodin’s Gates of Hell and his statue Balzac. Rodin was also commissioned to make site specific works which also became temporary and mobile. Rosalind Krauss suggests that the 'failure of these two works as monuments is signalled not only by the fact that multiple versions can be found in a variety of museums in various countries, while no version exists on the original sites'.(Krauss, 34) These examples suggest that maybe artworks can fluctuate between both the literal and functional site.


References:

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

Krauss, Rosalind, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October, Vol.8 (Spring, 1979), pp.34.