A site-specific installation is inextricably linked to the locale: the parts relate to one another but, more importantly, they relate to the larger space. Indeed, the site-specific artist will have spent considerable time exploring the location of the work, hence, an analysis of the composition of a site-specific installation must include its locale, because it derives its very form and perhaps physical substance, too, as well as its meaning, from the context. Moving is impossible since the work cannot be understood or seen except in relation to the place. The viewer witnesses a dialogue, as it were, between the artist and the space. [Site-specific installtions are either interventions (approaching critically the site), or rapprochement (taking a full account of the space physical dimensions), ed].
Rosenthal, 2003, p. 28
For site-specific installations, where and when may be inseparable, since removal of the material that has been used to make at a particular site may equal the destruction rather than the transfer of the work.
Buskirk, 2003, p. 48
The installations of Robert Irwin [...] are paradigmatic of a dematerialised response to phenomenological perception. They are governed by the idea of response to a site: what he calls site-determined, as opposed to site-dominant (work made in the studio without considering its destination), site-adjusted (work commissioned for a particular situation but relocatable) or site specific (work that responds directly to a specific venue and which cannot be relocated) (q)
Bishop, 2005, p. 57
Collectively the work of installation and site-specificity engages the aural, spatial, visual, and environmental planes of perception and interpretation. This work grows out of the collapse of medium specificity and the boundaries that had defined disciplines within the visual arts beginning in the 1960s [...] Site specific derives from the delineation and examination of the site of the gallery in relation to space unconfined by the gallery and in relation to the spectator [...] The site of installation becomes a primary part of the content of the work itself, but it also posits a critique of the practice of art-making within the institution by examining the ideological and institutional frameworks that support and exhibit the work of art.
Suderburg, 2000, p. 2 - 4
