The Site and Non-Site revisited

                                                                          Gabriel Orozco. Asterisms, 2012.

                                    Robert Smithson. Non-Site: Line of Wreckage, Bayonne, New Jersey, 1968.

This week I thought I could share Gabriel Orozco, an American contemporary artist, take on the non-site, in the spirit of this week's readings on Environmental Art and the Dissolution of Boundaries. 

Like Smithson, Orozco attempts to recreate a site, in this case a beach in Baja California, Mexico by exhibiting found objects of different mediums in the gallery space, thus creating a link between the two. Orozco appears to be commenting on the excess of garbage that can be found on beaches, but I believe that he relies on the same standards set by Smithson such as his use of untraditional materials to take formal art into the third-dimension. I'm still not sure if the true art resides in the site or the non-site or possibly in the performance of collecting the materials, but it is interesting to think about how artists are still taking advantage of the non-site to promote their own causes. 

You can learn more about Asterisms by visiting http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/past/exhibit/4775

Response to Etlin's "Beyond" in art

I just finished the readings for next week and I have to admit that they were not easy. I read the Etlin reading last and found it to be a bit confusing, but also the most interesting.Specifically, the section of the reading titled, "Night and the Beyond" pages 11-13, which goes over Etlin's third set of conditions about Existential Space. 

"...the spatial sense of self whereby we have the impression of having a bounded spatial being which extends outside the body but nonetheless is contained within some actual physical boundary within view, beyond which lies a spatial realm that becomes the locus of the unknown or the unfathomable" page 11.

I found the topic of Romanticism and existential space interesting because Romantic art produced seems to transcend the viewer through empathy and visual cues. For example, the meaning and space of a landscape painting changes dramatically once a figure is inserted into the composition. The viewer empathizes with the figure and crosses over to further imagine the "beyond".

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818

The nineteenth century artist Caspar David Friedrich is referred to by Etlin and is the main artist I think of when Romanticism is brought up. 

If Friedrich did not have the figure of the Wanderer in the composition the viewer's feeling of space would completely change. We would not have an empathetic connection to him, but would immediately become him, we would be metaphorically be looking through his eyes at nature. The figure heightens our senses and awareness of the sublime landscape by the use of our imaginations. 

Below are two pictures taken of the falls at Yosemite National Park. Although the pictures are different I would argue that the picture on the top is an example of what Etlin is talking about when he refers to the body and existential space and the "beyond" because it includes a figure.