Over the years, a greater diversity of spaces has opened up worldwide for the making and display of art beyond the gallery. This book considers various site-specific artworks internationally located in countries ranging from China to France, to explore the relationships between site-specific art and space set within its globalising contexts.
the image and the architecture materializes and dematerializes the virtual historical presence of women factory workers in the leather industry. In the globalization of labour, their contemporary equivalents in the garment industry are effectively hidden in offshore factories in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Mexico and in other places worldwide where working conditions are difficult to monitor since its strategy is continually to relocate across borders and countries, changing its sources of
pilgrimages to garden centres and National Trust properties, the purchase of ‘bird song’ CDs or other forms of leisure. Its lightness (and frivolity) and easy portability echoed the promises of instant garden transformation as promoted by popular culture in garden ‘makeover’ programmes on television and by other forms of ‘garden consumption’.6 Whilst in eighteenthcentury garden design, the garden strove to be a deception of nature, White Lotus suggested that deception is all, implying that the
eighteenth-century composer, Thomas Arne to passers-by – pedestrians and motorists stuck in traffic or waiting for the lights to change. Vauxhall Cross forms part of the original site of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, an eighteenth-century landscaped park in which Thomas Arne had been composer-in-residence. The songs in Best and Whitty’s work had originally been performed to audiences in the pleasure gardens. In Vauxhall Pleasure the singers sang in relays in different shifts: singly, in duets or
reproductions of residents’ handwritten ‘dream holiday destinations’ such as ‘Hawaii’, ‘Fiji’, ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Tokyo’, ‘Cancun’, ‘Hokitika’, ‘Ecuador’ and ‘Interlaken’ were installed across the town in the windows of houses, on the walls of schools, at the bus and rail stations, in side alleys, in the windows of disused shops and on buildings on the seafront. Neon has been claimed as the vernacular of the seaside town: a kitsch signifier of desire and consumption and part of the promotional culture
Davies. 149 EXPLORING SITE-SPECIFIC ART Located in the proximity of the stock exchange and within the parameters of the Guildhall (the City’s town hall) Underglow provoked a form of topographical disassociation that questioned our faith in perception and the nature of material reality. Emitting light like a computer screen and resonant of a film still, an ultrasound scan or the aerial view of the earth’s surface imaged from scud missiles transmitted via satellite television, Underglow evoked
