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Monuments and Site-Specific Sculpture in Urban and Rural Space presents a collection of essays discussing works of art whose formal qualities, content and spatial interactions expand our idea of creation and commemoration. By addressing projects that range from war memorials to commemorations of individuals, as well as works that engage real and virtual environments, this book brings to light new aspects concerning twentieth and twenty-first century monuments and site-specific sculpture. The book addresses the work of, among others, Günter Demnig, Michael Heizer, Thomas Hirschhorn, Dani Karavan, Costantino Nivola, Melissa Shiff and John Craig Freeman, Robert Smithson, and Micha Ullman. A lucid, thought-provoking discussion of creative processes and the discourse between site-specific sculpture and its publics is provided in this collection. As such, it is vital and indispensable for historians, art historians and artists, as well as for every reader interested in the interrelations of art, urban and rural spaces, community and the makings of memory.

This collection of essays examines, maps, and worries decomposition and (re)composition in a range of subjects. The nonfiction pieces that follow attempt to let polders, fungi, and sculpture explain something of what it means to construct a life, with dissolution a foregone conclusion, vividly.

This article concerns context-based live electronic music, specifically performances which occur in response to a particular location or space. I outline a set of practices which can be more accurately described as site-responsive, rather than site-specific. I develop a methodological framework for site-responsive live electronic music in three stages. First, I discuss the ambiguity of the term site-specific by drawing on its origins within the visual arts and providing examples of how it has been used within sound art. I then suggest that site-responsive performance might be a more helpful way of describing this type of activity. I argue that it affords an opportunity for music to mediate the social, drawing on Small’s idea of music as sets of third-order relationships, and Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Third, I suggest that with the current renewed trend for performances occurring outside of cultural institutions, it is important to be mindful of the identity of a particular site, and those who have a cultural connection to it. I make reference to a series of works within my own creative practice which have explored these ideas.

Ghana’s capital, Accra, has seen an explosion in contemporary art in the last fifteen years. Many individuals, institutions, and foundations have contributed to this activity, with exhibitions, site-specific installations and interventions, accessible programming, critical inquiry and writing, digital networks, and social engagement. The art world beyond the country’s borders has become increasingly aware of these exciting developments, which have roots in both Accra and Kumasi, home to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Many acclaimed artists active in Ghana and internationally were educated at KNUST, among them Ablade Glover, El Anatsui, Atta Kwami, Godfried Donkor, Dorothy Amenuke, and Ibrahim Mahama. The role of KNUST’s Department of Painting and Sculpture in fueling revolutionary changes in Ghana’s contemporary art scene is of particular interest to Nagy as director of an academic art museum, while artists’ networks in Accra—with connections to Kumasi—relate to Jordan’s work in network theory and digital humanities. The authors, together with Susan Cooksey, curator of African art at the University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art, had witnessed these changes for the first time in August 2016 while visiting Kumasi and Accra to learn about the community of artists, curators, and activists who are changing the dialogue and practice of contemporary art.

Analysis of an experimental educational methodology aimed at professional development in the field of visual arts. For this, it is based on the experimental and expository proposal consisting of the use of site-specific sculpture as a creative and methodological strategy for the exploration of the line of own research of students of plastic arts degree and pre-doctoral postgraduates. The selection of the students/artists was made based on the creative research lines they develop, examples of works that start from considering the sculptural as intrinsically related to the environment, and more specifically with the natural environment from a phenomenological and structural point of view in terms of artistic experience; and also, from a point of view of sculptural linguistic research based on the Kraussian foundations of the expanded sculptural field that formally arise from a Piaget´s group. On the other hand, the exhibition proposal is intended as a framework for deepening production and artistic diffusion oriented to immersion in a professional experience in which all aspects of the creative process can be addressed, from the mere idea to dissemination through from different means of artistic work, so that the training obtained by the artists/students is holistic in terms of the professional field of visual arts.

Robert Smithson’s text “The Monument” (ca. 1967) is an outline for an unrealized film, tracing the production and exhibition of his first Nonsite work. It reveals that archival material was an active element in Smithson’s practice, a material presence traversing archive and oeuvre, mirroring his theory of Site and Nonsite.

After decades as a novelty, lenticular technology has resurfaced in compelling large-scale projects. Without any required energy, the medium offers stereography without glasses and frame animation without electronics. A kinetic artwork installed in a remote river in the French mountains broke from the technology’s previous restrictions of static and flat display, recalculated the print mathematics for a curved surface, and explored narrative structures for a moving image on a moving display. This paper documents how the sculpture used custom steel fabrication, site-specific energy, and revised lens calculation to present a previously unexplored hybrid of animation.

In focusing on the site-specific art of Walter De Maria (1935-2013), three crucial periods of his career can be discerned that mobilized abstract geometry and dimensionality as means of exploring the intersections of global politics and imaging. What ties together this body of site-specific work is an insistent exploration of how the plain forms of line, circle, and sphere propagate into physical and social environments. De Maria's most important work poignantly expresses the temporalities embedded within spatial dimension, repeatedly reflecting on and ultimately casting off the possibility of encapsulating earth-based sites through any single image.

The work of American sculptor Martin Puryear may, at a glance, seem spare. Abstract yet strangely biomorphic figures take shape in smooth and precisely rendered wood sculptures. Spare, of course, does not always mean simple. On the contrary, like the multitude of shades different wood-grains take on, Puryear’s elegant sculptures are laden with complexity, contradictions, history, and metaphor. Indeed, Puryear has himself remarked, “There are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated.” The illusion of simplicity, which is one characteristic of his work, can be seen in an installation like the one he did for Oliver Ranch, one of a list of public art installations that also boasts Bearing Witness at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, Pavilion in the Trees in Philadelphia, and North Cove Pylons in Battery Park City, New York. Located atop a prominent hill in the heart of Sonoma County, amidst seventeen other site-specific installations that make up the Ranch’s one-of-a-kind collection, Puryear’s sculpture has two faces.