The Site-Specificity of Everyday Life

Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle, eds. Surface Tension: Problematics of Site. CD selection by Stephen Vitiello. Los Angeles/Copenhagen: Errant Bodies Press with Ground Fault Recordings, 2003. 328 pp., 150 b/w ills. $25 paper.

One of the most innovative books to enter recent discussions surrounding site-specific art, Surface Tension: Problematics of Site brings together a diverse collection of critical and creative essays, historical accounts, project documentations, and sound pieces (by way of an accompanying CD) that address what might be called the site-specificity of everyday life. Surface Tension is concerned with the permeable surfaces that delimit internal life from the external world of public encounter, exploring the imbricated realms of the public and the private, the physical and the phantasmic, the extraordinary and the everyday.

The anthology is edited by Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle, both artists and writers, who have each contributed essays, as well as a collaborative offering entitled "Public Space," which takes the form of several blank pages positioned midway through the book. The designation "public" suggests that the use of such a space is presumably to be determined by the reader, so I decided to make those pages the "site" of my review, scribbling notes as I flipped back and forth between the chapters. Of obviously greater significance than my own handwritten intervention was the blankness that preceded it, which implied that it was precisely the definition of "public" that was in question here. Indeed, the empty place at the center of the book holds in abeyance any fixed or fore-closed notion of what might constitute publicness, a position that remains consistent throughout the anthology, with its heterogeneous contributions and sometimes conflicting ideas. What emerges is a conception of the public, and of place, that is provisional, contingent, and open to contestation.

Acknowledging the varying iterations of "site" in art over the past three decades, the editors want to insist upon its continuing use value as a term and a category of artistic production. They describe site-specificity historically, as an oppositional practice, paying homage to its roots as a mode of production that, by anchoring itself to a particular place, aimed to defy the modernist idealism of the autonomous object as well as the logic of the market. Yet in Surface Tension, "the strictly oppositional gives way to modes of diversity, transforming dialectical formulations into dispersed, contested temporal positions" (19). Many of the projects featured in the book may thus be described as "discursively determined," to borrow Miwon Kwon's terminology for site-based practices that have evolved away from a grounding in physical permanence or institutional critique toward an engagement "with the outside world and everyday life ..." (1) This is not to suggest that in Surface Tension the physical location is always subordinate to its discursive framework. Site is emphasized as the place of artistic production as well as of its reception--the moment in which a work becomes public. But Ehrlich and LaBelle posit an "inherent plurality of site itself" (22) and admit that in selecting projects they favored diversity and disjunction, an approach they describe as "all over the place" (21). Indeed, "site" appears variously as: the city, the body, the built environment, automobiles, autobiography, a vacant lot, bathroom plumbing, "sociopolitical interventions," the history of site-specificity, and the book itself (with its aforementioned blank pages, shifting font sizes, and differently textured pages)--to name just a few. In the service of providing an orientation for this sometimes disorienting collection, the book is organized into three categories: essays, project descriptions, and projects created specifically for the book, including the CD of sound works curated by Stephen Vitiello.

If the editors present site-specificity as a historical form, they see its legacy currently evidenced across disciplines, in contemporary art, architecture, performance, and design, among other spheres of production, noting the extent to which it has been broadly assimilated by contemporary culture, "beyond the overtly artistic framework" (20). Accordingly, many of the book's contributions are informed less by art-historical paradigms or contexts than by theories of radical geography and everyday life. Particularly influential is the work of theorists such as Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, whose poetic sociology and eccentric Marxism (respectively) were concerned to articulate the practices of daily life, including its proscriptions for behavior, its possibilities for mobility and resistance, its architecture and topography. This methodology is stated explicitly in LaBelle's essay, which references a legacy of practices of everyday life from the wanderings of the nineteenth-century flaneur to the aleatory driftings of the Surrealists and Situationists and to de Certeau's and Lefebvre's philosophical analyses--all of this as a backdrop to LaBelle's meditations on the individual uses of space within an ever-expanding, global, institutional framework.