Art That Knows Its Place

You may think of site-specific as a term the art world had to coin not long ago to describe things like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a vast coil of crushed boulders at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. It’s site-specific not only because Smithson designed it for that spot but also because, really, who’s going to move 6,500 tons of rock to another location? But the 500 or so works in Art & Place: Site-Specific Art of the Americas (Phaidon; 373 pages), a coffee-table book so hefty that it’s practically site-specific itself, are here to remind you that the term applies across the centuries. The massive earth drawings of the ancient Nazca culture, engraved into the high desert plains of Peru, are as integral to their location as the earthworks of Roden Crater, the extinct volcanic cone in Arizona that James Turrell began carving into sky-art observatories just 30 years ago. Dennis Oppenheim’s loopy Bus Home, a sculptural roller coaster he erected in Ventura, Calif., in 2002, is undoubtedly site-specific. But so are the carved temples that the Maya began producing in the 7th century. The first site-specific artist was a cave painter with a burned stick.

So among the sculptures, murals, earthworks and architectural carvings in this enjoyable page-turner of a book, the Easter Island heads coexist with a Picasso, and Donald Judd’s boxes are never far from a Toltec pyramid. What characterizes nearly all art of this kind is the ambition to make work that transcends its objecthood, something interlocked with its surroundings, not just sitting in them.

But being site-specific is no guarantee of immortality. Just eight years after it was installed in 1981, the steel parabola that was Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, 120 ft. long and 12 ft. high, was pried out of a plaza in lower Manhattan after complaints that it made a public space hard for the public to use. Art & Place commemorates it in a chapter dedicated to artworks that didn’t survive. Some have disappeared by plan, like Richard Long’s Walking a Line in Peru, a straight stretch of several miles across a dry riverbed that the British artist hiked in 1972 after having it marked out by local Indians. A literally self-effacing homage to the ancient Nazca, it’s gone now, surviving only in photographs.

Art & Place has its flaws, none of them fatal. It’s not true that the Rothko Chapel in Houston can be visited only on prearranged tours. It’s a stretch to use site-specific to describe some of these works, like Mark di Suvero’s wonderful Joie de Vivre, which touched down at several spots before coming to rest on Wall Street. And how could this book fail to include Mount Rushmore? Problems with securing photo rights? Unlikely. Sheer art-world snobbery? Could be. But no matter. Long after every coffee-table book has crumbled, those boys will still be on-site.