Introduction
Surface Tension Supplements aim to provide a site for considering the growing contemporary
international culture of artistic practices related to geographies, bodies and the issues
generated by encounters between spaces and subjects. Planned as an on-going series, the
Supplements will engage discourses around notions of site-based practice in art, architecture
and performance through documentation of works, critical and explorative essays, and
projects designed specifi cally for each book. It is our hope that these publications can serve
as a meeting place, where the inherent diversity of contemporary cultural practice can fi nd
residence, with a view toward assessing, stimulating, and representing such diversity at its
most public, social, and geographically-engaged moments.
Surface Tension Supplements are an extension of an earlier anthology,
Surface Tension:
Problematics of Site (2003), which sought to take stock of the legacy of site-specifi c practice,
recognizing the degrees in which it has generated cultural attitudes toward artistic work.
As the notion of site has itself been re-defi ned, shifted and adjusted within contemporary artistic
practice, questions of place and displacement, sites and non-sites, and location-based
and interventionist practices have multiplied and their audience has expanded. Since the
initial publication, we have found ourselves continually interested and re-invested in many of
its themes, works, and ideas. Coupled with our own individual and collaborative artistic work
involving performative acts of research undertaken in various cities over the last few years,
the decision to reactivate the
Surface Tension project seems appropriate and increasingly
relevant. Our intention to continue the work initiated in the original anthology is also based
in part on our ever-growing awareness of practices around the world that, however varied, seem to cultivate an increased awareness of spatial and locational concerns. More and more
cultural practitioners are questioning currents in urban conditions and policy, spatial constructions
and architectural discourses, academic structures and institutional frameworks,
forms of design and media ecologies, and these currents seem both to radically explode the
assumptions around what it means to work site-specifi cally and truly extend this category
into unknown and urgent territory.
Surface Tension Supplement No. 1 was initiated and developed according to the life and
formation of an idiosyncratic network: each member of a newly formed editorial board contributed
an article and in turn invited or selected a further contribution, thereby creating a
series of conversations that appear on and off the page. In this fi rst publication, issues of
spatial practice are explored through critical refl ections by Scott Berzofsky, Nicholas Petr,
and Nicholas Wisniewski on their bus tours through Baltimore; Newton Goto on the history
and culture of interventionist practice taking place in Brazil; and by Claudine Isé, curator of
“Vanishing Point,” an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2005, that questions the
aesthetics of urban non-spaces through recent photography, sculpture, and fi lm. These are
complemented by reports by Robin Wilson on public art projects in Bristol developed by the
working team of
Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosely; and Ken Ehrlich on the infrastructure of
signage in Los Angeles as seen through the work of Brandon Lattu and Erik Göngrich, two artists
working with cities and signs. In addition, documentation of public projects in Tijuana and
Columbus, Ohio by the artist groups Simparch and e-Xplo are presented, which tease out the
specifi city of given projects and their attempts to adopt a critical yet generous relation to community. These are complemented by
Brandon LaBelle's photographic-textual review of
the recent Experiments in Architecture; Jennifer Gabrys' fi rst installment of Refuse Reports,
digging into the issues surrounding waste as read through the geographic implications of
Fresh Kills Landfi ll in New York; Kathy Battista's review of recent light art exhibitions; and
Aoife O'Brien's critical reading of the legacy of the white cube and related criticism.
Site-specific work continues to operate through politicized modes, however subtle or overt,
yet current versions of site-based practices reveal that the “political” is increasingly varied
and complex. This has less to do with legislative issues and the theater of electoral politics—
though we're certainly aware of the impact reactionary, progressive or even downright
oppressive legislation can have on bodies and cities—and more to do with changing notions
of being “public.” The technological displacement of geography, and the shifting nature of
political and economic borders and cultural identities related to notions of place, have all
contributed to both diffusion and specialization around conceptions of site. At a time when
the line between what is public and what is private is increasingly unclear, site-based practices
in art, architecture and performance delineate trajectories of hope and highlight spaces
of tyranny. Perhaps developing a context for discourses around geographies illuminated by
artistic research might initiate subtle reconsiderations of the places we inhabit each day,
and their potential transmutation.
Ken Ehrlich and
Brandon LaBelle
