ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

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16 The term is commonly attributed to architect James Wines of SITE. He is also known to have
coined the phrase “turds on the plaza” to describe the ubiquitous abstract modernist sculptures
on urban plazas.
17 Statement taken from the official Art-in-Public-Places grant application guidelines of the
Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, as cited by Mary Jane Jacob in
her essay “Outside the Loop,” in Culture in Action, exh. cat. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 54.
18 A brief history of this transition is recounted in Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain, 21–24. See also
Richard Andrews, “Artists and the Visual Definition of Cities: The Experience of Seattle,” in
Stacy Paleologos Harris, ed., Insights/On Sites: Perspectives on Art in Public Places (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Partners for Livable Places, 1984), 16–23.
19 According to Richard Andrews, who headed Seattle’s Percent for Art program during the
1970s, public art, from an arts agency point of view, can be divided into two distinct types:
those works aligned with the tradition of collecting, which are object-oriented and site-
transferable; and those that fall within the tradition of building, which are involved in the
designing process of public buildings and places. The scale tipped toward site-integrated
and immovable works beginning in the late 1970s. See Andrews, “Artists and the Visual
Definition of Cities,” 19.
20 Janet Kardon, “Street Wise/Street Foolish,” in Urban Encounters, exh. cat., 8. The exhibition,
featuring documentation of projects by artists, architects, and landscape architects, was held
between March 19 and April 30, 1980.
21 Nancy Foote, “Sightings on Siting,” in Urban Encounters, 25–34.
22 Linker sees an intimation of a solution in Robert Morris’s landscape work Grand Rapids
Project (1973–1974) in the way durational bodily experience of a particular spatial situation
defines the work. See her concluding comments in “Public Sculpture,” 70–73. See also
Alloway, “Problems of Iconography and Style.”
23 I am recalling here the distinction made by Rosalyn Deutsche between integrationist and
interventionist approaches to site-specific art. In Deutsche’s view, the former seeks to erase
visible signs of social problems that might contradict the ideology of unity; the latter seeks to
expose them. See her Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), espe-
cially the chapters “Uneven Development” and “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy.”
24 From the official Art-in-Public-Places grant application guidelines of the Visual Arts Program