[According to John Coleman the specificity of a particular site/location,ed.] is a woven container of associations: a fluid mix of the physical, emotional, personal, social, and political. Installation has the potential to exist within both physical and psychic spaces; to extend the written, spoken and/or implied narrative into the realm of a physically engaged experience. Space is tangible as much like color, texture, form. It can be shaped to mean, to contain, to conjure...
Coleman, 2000, p.158 - 163
[James Meyer distinguishes two notions of site: a literal site and a functional site, ed.] The literal site is, as Joseph Kosuth would say, in situ; it is an actual location, a singular place. Reflecting a perception of the site as unique, the work is itself 'unique' [...] In contrast, the functional site may or may not incorporate a physical place. It certainly does not privilege this place. Instead, it is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between them (the artist's above all). It is an informational site, a locus of overlap of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places and things...It is a temporary thing; a movement; a chain of meanings devoid of a particular focus.
Meyer, 2000, p. 24-25
[M]ore than just the museum, the site comes to encompass a relay of several interrelated but different spaces and economies, including the studio, the gallery, the museum, art criticism, art history, the art market, etc., that together constitute a system of practices that is not separate from but open to social, economic and political pressures. To be "specific" to such a site, in turn is, to decode and/or recode the institutional conventions so as to expose their hidden yet motivated operations - to reveal the ways in which institutions mold art's meaning to modulate its cultural and economic value. [Refering to James Meyer's notion of the functional site, Kwon argues that, ed.] the site is now structured (inter)textually rather than spatially, and its model is not a map but an itinerary, a fragmentary sequence of events and actions through spaces, that is, a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of the artist. Corresponding to the pattern of movement in electronic spaces of the Internet and cyberspace, which are likewise structured to be experienced transitively, one thing after another, and not as synchronic simultaneity, this transformation of the site textualizes spaces and spatializes discourses.
Kwon, 2000, p. 40 - 46
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