A great read


One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. This is a helpful survey of the related issues of site specificity and institutional critique. My students find it accessible, and find that it ties together major themes and artists of the 1970s. Highly recommended for those teaching/studying art since 1970.

ok for starters


One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. I was waiting eagerly for the Kwon to arrive after I purchased it, perhaps this heightened expectation is to blame for the slight sense of deflation as I read it.
The text has a fairly useful historical overview of the history of 'site' as an artistic idea, with a specifically American focus. One of my disappointments was that Kwon appears to be relying on secondary research, drawing from public art examples already extensively discussed in other public art texts, most notably those of Tom Finklepearl and Grant Kester. The book raises some interesting questions about the relationships between comissioning agents and artists in relation to the thorny problem of what constitutes an identifiable 'community.' These questions are however limited to a narrow interpretation of what public art practice is, remaining close to issues found in what has been called New Genre.
All in all useful as an introduction to the subject, a teaching tool for undergraduate students, but perhaps better as a companion text rather than a definitive source. If you have the Finklepearl already you may not need this one.

useful addition to the literature


One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. This book is a useful addition to the literature--a more comprehensive book that also looked at practices outside the USA is what is really needed. That's one of the major drawbacks of this book, it doesn't clearly indicate that it is tracing an American history of the idea of site-specificity.

The first chapter provides a short history of site specificity from an American point of view (minimalism, conceptual art's critique of institutions) and draws heavily on James Meyer's idea of the functional site to think about the present, after that the book is a series of case studies. A better book for considering the range and history of site specific practices (which includes this book's first chapter and Meyer's essay) is Erika Suderburg's Space Site Intervention.

One obscure word after another is more like it


One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Miwon Kwon's writing is extremely wordy and very hard to grasp. You'll inevitably spend more time looking up her obscure vocabulary than actual reading. I found her writing hard to comprehend even after reading chapters multiple times. I'm a college level reader, and have experienced few problems understanding other art related readings. Her sentences are incredibly redundant and very hard to understand. Honestly, I would ONLY recommend this book to College Professors or anyone with a PHD; otherwise save your self the time and pass this one up. You'll be happy you did.

one contention after another


One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. I find Kwon's book informative and insightful, especially as a practitioner working with installation and context-specific project, and with current development of contemporary theories particularly in mind. Kwon's geneological approach towards reading the development of site-specific work is impressive, obviously overlaid with cultural theory in her analysis. Although she has focused mainly on the perplexity of community-charged art projects at the later chapter, her delivery on spatial politics and the many other facets of the production of site-specific art is most valuable, especially with some useful terminology and concepts (in reading the progress of these practice). Reading the text in conjunction with few other similar books on the issue of space, site and art production, one could discern some of the common notions of criticality and urgency in addressing the unscrupulous co-option of mainstream institutional forces. No doubt, the text could post as both informative and also a challenge towards artistic production, itself in turn becomes a site of intervention as it suggest (and aim) for communal praxis in an (politically correct) age of `glocalisation'.