Write 7 pages with APA style on The Site of Art. Yet, to fully appreciate the impact of art, the viewer needs to be able to hear the environment speak through the piece. To do that we must stop, look

Write 7 pages with APA style on The Site of Art. Yet, to fully appreciate the impact of art, the viewer needs to be able to hear the environment speak through the piece. To do that we must stop, look and listen to what the work is trying to say. Art practices in the modern age have been strongly influenced by what is termed the “politics of representation.” This term distinguishes between the content of an image and the form of the image, or the sublime versus the visual, both of which are affected by the environment in which the art exists. The reason for this is that art is not static, but is instead interactive with its audience, the political and social ideas they hold, the symbols inherent in the forms used and the environment in which the work is placed. These are all elements of the postmodern movement. “The political and the aesthetic are inseparable, simultaneously present, faces of the postmodern problematic” (Burgin, 1982). It is because of this postmodern problematic that artists such as Tom Otterness and Jenny Holzer consider the site of their work to be an important element of the work itself.

The 1960s was a time of turbulent change for America, the naturally rebellious attitude of sculptors served to establish this as the art form of the people. “Sculptors have preferred inscrutability to compliance with the values of a world increasingly influenced by marketing and entertainment. The sheer variety of materials and forms that have been presented as sculpture … makes it clear that sculpture has not been regarded as a stable concept with fixed boundaries” (Causey, 1998: 7). With grand public works such as the land art or earth art movement of the 60s and 70s, sculpture emerged as “an attempt to connect art to the world around them” (Peter Murray, founding Executive Director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park quoted by Kaufman, 1999) and established the importance of environment, or the site of the art, to the meaning of the art itself.