Relational Specifity

Relational specificity is an approach to art that considers the object not as an isolated statement, but as part of a system comprising the artwork and its environment. The term draws attention to the spaces between things, and of our need to pay attention to issues of adjacency and distance. Following T.J. Demos’s analysis of Miwon Kwon’s work, relational specificity “rethink[s] identity and difference between places as ‘dialectical,’ in other words not as oppositional but as ‘sustaining relations,’” rejecting both a relativized discursive approach to site and essentialist identitarian approaches based on geography or unified social formations (the “right place”) in favor of the political efficacy of recognizing both shared characteristics and fine-grained, intimate differences between sites, allowing us to “live determinedly in the wrong place." [1]

[1] T. J. Demos, Review: Rethinking Site-Specificity, in: Art Journal 62, Heft 2 (Sommer 2003), S.99–100.