The prominent cultural critic Mieke Bal defines the new discipline of 'art writing' as a fresh mode of criticism, which aims to 'put the art first'. Following this definition, "Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism" puts the sites of the critic's engagement with art first. The book puts into shape what happens when discussions concerning situatedness and site-specificity enter the writing of art criticism. The sites explored are the material, emotional, political and conceptual settings of the artwork's construction, exhibition and documentation, as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined. Through five different spatial configurations - both psychic and architectural - "Site-Writing" explores artworks by artists as diverse as Jananne Al-Ani, Elina Brotherus, Nathan Coley, Tracey Emin, Christina Iglesias and Do-Ho Suh, aiming to adapt such psychoanalytic ways of working as free association and conjectural interpretation to art criticism.
List of Images
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Pre-Positions
Configuration 1
Triangular Structures with Variable Thirds
Transitional Space
Undoing Architecture
One + One = Three: Tracey Emin's You Forgot to Kiss my Soul
Confessional Construction
Configuration 2
Back and Forth
Frontier Creatures
Travelling the Distance/Encountering the Other
To Miss the Desert
You Tell Me
An Embellishment: Purdah
Configuration 3
A Rearrangement
Word-Presentations and Thing-Presentations
The Welsh Dresser
Longing for the Lightness of Spring
Les Mots et Les Choses
Configuration 4: That Which Keeps Coming Back
Déjà Vu
'Some Things You See Will Remind You of Others': Déjà Vu in the Work of Cristina Iglesias
La Passante
'She is walking about in a town which she does not know'
Configuration 5: Decentering/Recentering
The Copernican Revolution
Somewhere Else She is Told
Decentering/Recentering Do-Ho Suh
Everywhere Else
Trafalgar Square: Détournements
Epilogue: Alien Positions
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
