Place-As-Medium: Toward a Shared Authorship of Place

This dissertation establishes a new philosophical framework to understand, evaluate,and champion a category of art practice appearing in the world that I call “place-as-medium.”I will argue that place-as-medium reshapes horizons of knowledge by the way it changes the way we think as the activity of “thinking through place.” Chapter one sets up place-as-medium as an art practice that goes beyond metaphysical thinking in the artworks of Alfredo Jaar. Chapter two demonstrates how Jaaruses place-as-medium as an artistic strategy that gathers things together and brings them into appearance spatially through art forms-as-thinking gestures,defining “boundaries of place.” Chapter three considers dOCUMENTA (13), an expansive international exhibition organized by artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2012 as a thinking-artistic-praxis. The central investigation is the exhibition’s play with spatial, temporal, and historical dimensions of art as ways to reconfigure conditions of place. Chapter four looks at the function of hospitality in three art projects that occurred around the Occupy movement in 2012, which use the aesthetic form of the tent. Chapter five looks at the topic of authorship in place-as-medium, leading to the conclusion that place-as-medium presents new opportunities for art to enact shared authorship of place.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1040/thumbnail.jp