[-empyre-] in-situ

["Alexie Glass" <aglass@acmi.net.au>]

Hi its Alexie, sorry the intro is a day late... here's something to kick off this weeks forum

Location, Location, Location. These three words could represent a manifesto for the 21st century. Abducted from the spruikers of lifestyle TV and real estate agents, and co-opted into the vernacular of contemporary visual practice, the paradoxical lure, absurdity, and emphatic demands of the phrase don't diminish. In fact, this earnest catch-cry exposes questions about the binary relationship of information de-centralisation to the reality of global urbanisation.  Does place matter? Some might say location in contemporary art is currency, because the right location can ensure access to audiences - that's cultural capital. And history documents a set of responses to this condition. Land art in the 1960's was a snub to the centre, a refute to capital. Installation art and site specific practice in the 1980's and 90's was often implemented as an action to subvert and expose while still engaging the paradigmatics of certain spaces: think museums, galleries, and, in the case of much public art, urban spaces. Over the past decade the colonisation of online space is yet another departure from the vagaries of the flaneur who simply strolls, tantalised by taste, experiencing the multiplicity of the arts as a visual buffet.  In-situ suggests a greater interactivity, whether that equates to pressing buttons or a cognitive awareness for the viewer of their experience of destabilised space. New media and process-based collaborations articulate another view again. So, for artists, perhaps the question is what - if any - are the aesthetic, political and contextual concerns that situated practice is evoking?   




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