Undifferentiated Serialization

A critical term invoked in Miwon Kwon’s parlance through the phrase “one place after another”: a relation between sites that flattens difference in favor of invoking equivalences. It is the bad twin to “relational specificity,” as it allows “the sequence of sites that we inhabit in our life’s traversal” to become generalized, making the real into the conceptual or the ideal. In an art context, it has become the standard critique of the biennial system, in which artists create new iterations of the same project (or even simply display the same project) at each new biennial, failing to establish any long-term relationships or intimacies, and engaging site only at the surface level.