Branislav Dimitrijević: Site and Non-Site

COUNTER-ARCHITECTURE AND COUNTER-SCULPTURE OF ROBERT SMITHSON

The dialectic of site and non-site is not only a question of the relationship between “gallery” and “non-gallery” spaces, but is also a question of the relation any work of art may open up between any space, any object and any image. The site is not something signified by the non-site as its signifier, but it is their mutual relation, the physical and mental network created by this relation, to which a work of art “belongs”, always going back and forth between its sites and non-sites. The work of art is neither “this here”, nor “that there”, it is becoming a work in the process of co-observation and co-investigation, through which art is fundamentally redefining spatial and conceptual framework generally attributed to disciplines dealing with the conceptualisation of space, with the physical and symbolic relations between objects, images and space, that are sculpture and architecture. Smithson’s work is not only an accumulation of different practices that may be included in the art production, but also one the early examples trans-material and post-disciplinary art. Yet, Smithson’s work is not losing itself in the slow temporality and the self-sufficiency of the process, it is always determined by a specific goal: achieving a “logical picture”, that brings “an entirely new sense of metaphor” free of both constructive and expressive content. His employment of entropy as a working (non-)material of art, and other aspects of his work, will be discussed to broaden a channel for understanding the turn that art has taken since the 1960s.

Branislav Dimitrijević is Professor of History and Theory of Art at the College of Art and Design in Belgrade. He teaches and writes mostly on art, cinema and politics of socialist Yugoslavia; on avant-garde art, contemporary art and exhibition histories. His books include: Consumed Socialism – Culture, Consumerism and Social Imagination in Yugoslavia, 1950-1974 (2016), Dušan Makavejev’ s Sweet Movie (2017), Against Art – Goran Djordjević, 1979-1985 (2014), On Normality: Art in Serbia 1989-2001 (2005), and others. Since the mid-1990s he has curated exhibition projects exploring site-specificity and context-specificity. His curatorial projects include Good Life (Geozavod, Belgrade, 2012, w. M. Hannula) and No Network (2011), the first edition of the Time Machine Biennial in the nuclear bunker in Konjic. He curated projects for the Serbian/Yugoslav pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003 and 2009. His most recent research interest focuses on the contemporary relevance of Robert Smithson’s “earthworks” and his dialectic of the “site” and the “nonsite”. (izk.tugraz.at)