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Situation: Documents of Contemporary Art

This anthology forms part of the influential Documents of Contemporary Art series published by MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, London, which document major themes and ideas in contemporary art. Situation emerged from Doherty’s research conducted since the publication of her edited volume Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (2004). As Doherty discusses in her Introduction, two key principles guided the selection and formation of the book. First, it sets out to disrupt the chronological genealogy of site-specificity by drawing on theoretical considerations of temporality and mobility. Second, the volume was underpinned by Doherty’s curatorial perspective as an integral part of her work as Director of the Situations programme within the PLaCE Research Centre at UWE. As a whole, Situation is an attempt to consider the genesis of ‘situation’ as a convergence of theorisations of site, non-site, place, non-place, locality, public space, context and time as a means to rethink the ways in which contemporary artists respond to, produce and destabilise place. Situation provides access to a carefully selected and diverse collection of historical and contemporary essays that explore the complexity of this issue and whose scope extends far beyond existing anthologies in this field such as Erika Suderburg (ed.) Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (2000) or art historical surveys, such as Jeffrey Kastner (ed.) Land and Environmental Art (2005).

The book was reviewed in Art Monthly (2010), the College Art Association Reviews (29 July 2010) and Prefix Photo 21 (May 2010).