Place, space and self: Site-responsive art in a globalized world

Site-specific art grows out of a rejection of the enlightenment models of production and exhibition. The degradation of place and memory that accompanies globalization suggests a rationale for the increasing contemporary concern with site-specific and site-responsive artwork which is discussed in the first half of the article. A detailed reading of an installation, Anima/Animus, by artist collective Wilson-Eflerová (WE), which took place with Winchester Cathedral in 2013 follows as an example. The value of this work is seen as lying in its ability to assert connections between self and other that have been imagined in other times. The medieval statutory that seeded WE’s piece was created during the 1220s as part of a movement towards more realist representational styles and serves as a pre-enlightenment model for an embodied and interconnected world. A world that relies on a very different value system to those of a global market, and one that had from the start appealed on many different levels to a range of interpretive communities and which continues to do so in the present.