THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 25th MARCH 2021: DAY 361

'Arch.’ situation-specific installation, found materials (planks of wood and space),
Manchester School of Art 2009

'Arch.’ situation-specific installation, found materials (planks of wood and space),
Manchester School of Art 2009
 
Situation-specific installation.

Very soon now work from the Self-Isolation Residency will be going out to form an exhibition about the isolation of the artist, myself. Although a large part of this exhibition will be formed by my new paintings I am also working on a new Situation-specific installation to run alongside them. This piece is also being created to talk about the experience of isolation and ‘enclosure’; the working title for the piece.

Before I go into more detail about the actual new piece, I feel that I should probably begin here by explaining exactly what I mean by situation-specific installation and how it differs from site-specific installation, or at least from what site-specific installation has become. To begin with I am going to quote directly from the website tate.org.uk:

“The term site-specific refers to works of art designed specifically for a particular location and that has an interrelationship with the location.”

So far so good. But here’s where things get interesting:

“As a site-specific work of art is designed for a specific location, if it is removed from that location it loses all or a substantial part of its meaning.”

Now here in lies the problem with a great deal of what is referred to as site-specific installation, when such an installation has been successful in its original incarnation  artists have a tendency to pick it up and exhibit in other locations not really caring that a great deal of the original meaning was left behind. For me this displays sloppy, lazy and usually commercial thinking on the behalf of the “artist” in question. And it was because of this that I formulated the term Situation-specific as an alternative. The basic premise of the Tate definition of the site-specific holds true, “works of art designed specifically for a particular location and that has an interrelationship with the location”, but with a real enthesis on the latter section, “, if it is removed from that location it loses all or a substantial part of its meaning.”

But the word ‘situation’ also speaks about something great than just location in a way that the word ‘site’ never can. It speaks about timing, it speaks about emotion and feeling; this for me is why it is so vital that my situation-specific works are repeated, even if I return to exhibit in a gallery in which I have previously exhibited. Although the space may be the same I am not, I have changed, my ‘situation’ is different.

To be continued...