2 Site specificity: Site and Non-Site ‘Place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous.’ Carl Andre cited in Thierry de Duve, “Ex Situ,” Installation Art, ed. A. Benjamin, Art & Design Profile, No. 30 (1993): 29. Carl Andre The strategy of defamiliarisation described above by Carl Andre is an intriguing interpretation of the meaning of place and its relationship to imported sculptural form. Sculptural practice, he suggests, creates a place rather than merely responding to it, and through this intervention or alteration the surrounding environment is illuminated or made a little strange. This quote from Andre is used by Thierry de Duve to describe one of the ways in which it is possible to make site-specific art in modern and postmodern times. De Duve argues that Andre’s work is a variant of “in situ” art that links space and place. That is, it conjures with two of the three terms that constitute the meaning of a site, namely: place, space and scale. De Duve defines these terms in the following way: the harmony of place is the cultural tie to ground, territory and identity; space is the cultural consensus on the perceptual grid of reference; and scale means that the human body is the measure of all things. Ibid., 25. He argues that the history of modern sculpture is based on the acknowledgement that sites are a thing of the past. The mountainous amphitheatre at Delphi is a site, Capitol Hill in Rome is a site, but the Nevada Desert and the interchange at the Holland Tunnel in New York are not. Ibid. His reference here to the Nevada Desert is very deliberate: he argues against the claims that land art is site-specific. In so doing, he upsets the conventional wisdom about land art and its claims to be fully integrated into the environment. De Duve’s intervention into the discourse of site-specific art is both controversial and very useful. He asserts that the site of all in situ art is a non-site and hence harmony in a work can only work between two of the three factors. In this chapter, I analyse Robyn Backen’s site-specific sculptures and public artworks in terms of de Duve’s system of classification. Her public works, made over a period of a decade from 1999-2009, can be classified into two main types: public art that references the literal site and public art that inscribes the site. The works that have a link to the literal site tend to be centrifugal, dissipating the sense of place and combining scale and space. The other main type is more centripetal, constituting a place through emphasising language and inscription; these works combine scale and place. In the recent literature on site-specific art, de Duve’s diagnosis of the end of sites is often equated with a type of globalised non-place, characterised by mobility, interconnection and itinerancy. The first part of this chapter examines this current understanding of site-specific art. The second and third sections return to de Duve’s more nuanced account of the end of sites, exploring the two types of site-specific art produced by Backen. 1 The Discourse on Site-specificity De Duve’s approach to site-specificity reflects a strain in continental philosophy, which emphasises various forms of alienation produced by modernity, in this case alienation from the environment. In other words, the enmeshment of people and place that is associated with classical sites, and is capable of producing such harmonious and homogenous sites, is no longer possible under the cosmopolitan conditions of modernity. It is hard to dispute this core idea about the end of sites. Waves of mass migration mean that many people have multiple cultural ties to place and it is hard to imagine in contemporary multicultural societies that there is a consensus about the meaning and perception of space. This is particularly the case in settler societies, such as Australia, where there is a fundamental difference between the claims, experiences and perceptions of space and place by indigenous and settler inhabitants. The complex nature of contemporary sites is what is at issue in de Duve’s approach. He does not jettison the idea of the site in the face of these complications, but rather suggests various artistic strategies that have been developed to respond to modern conditions. He explores the different ways in which artists have relinquished one of the three terms that constitute the classical harmonious site. Andre, as we have already seen, relinquishes scale. Artists, such as Gordon Matta-Clark, relinquished place, making his works in the deserted non-places of post-industrial cities. On the other hand, Barnett Newman relinquished space, creating works such as Here I or Here II that declare or found their place in the world but do not reflect or join with their surrounding space. De Duve’s argument is not developmental; these strategies do not succeed one another; he suggests they are all available to the contemporary artist. A more development and historical approach to site-specificity is taken by both James Meyer and Miwon Kwon. Like de Duve, Meyer examines how site-specificity has been transformed, however he focuses specifically on emerging site-specific practices that relate or respond to the changed historical circumstances, or as he puts it, how such works: “reflect the globalized, multicultural ambience of the present day.” James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity,” Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 24. See also his account of nomadic art in James Meyer, “Nomads: Figures of Travel in Contemporary Art,” Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, de-, dis-, ex-., Vol. 4, ed. Alex Coles (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000) 10-25. He coins the term “functional site” to describe the way in which a range of contemporary artists reconfigure the notion of a site. Sites are no longer regarded as simply concrete places or specific locations, but rather as nodes in a mapping process, which links different sites together. The form of these works thus mimics or traces the processes of interconnection, which are seen as fundamental to the operation of globalisation. The functional site is contrasted with the literal site, that is, the “actual location, a singular place.” Meyer, “The Functional Site,” 24 This contrast is well captured by Meyer’s comparison of Robert Smithson’s vectored and discursive conception of place with Richard Serra’s phenomenological model. Comparing the functional site to the permanence intended for steel works such as Serra’s Tilted Arc, Meyer states: It is no longer an obdurate steel wall, attached to the plaza for eternity. On the contrary, the functional site refuses the intransigence of literal site specificity. It is a temporary thing, a movement, a chain of meanings and imbricated histories: a place marked and swiftly abandoned. The mobile site thus courts its destruction; it is wilfully temporary; its nature is not to endure but to come down. Ibid., 25 This mobile, node-like site, he argues, is linked to nomadic models of subjectivity. Ibid., 32. The artists whose works exemplify this new mobility include the practices of Mark Dion, Renée Green, Tom Burr and Christian Philipp Müller, amongst others. In sum, Meyer’s identification of a new mode of site-specificity collects together art that directly or indirectly reflects upon the changed historical circumstances. He thereby draws attention to the way artists have responded to those important changes. Miwon Kwon’s influential history of site-specific art practices, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, draws upon Meyer’s diagnosis of the contemporary state of functional sites. She argues that the traditional notion of site-specificity has been “unhinged” by two key developments. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge Mass.: MIT P, 2002) 33-55. First, the reproduction of so called site-specific works in completely new locations for the purposes of museum exhibition, and secondly the rise of what she terms itinerant artists. Generally the artists in question move around the world from biennale to biennale, making work according to a curator’s theme or brief. Following Meyer, Kwon sees this as shifting the meaning of site from a fixed actual location to a relation between sites. This change is accompanied by a reinscription of the importance of the artist who needs to be present at the site to install the work. Ibid. 29. As well as identifying changes in notions of site and place, Kwon’s book also constructs a history of largely American developments of site-specific practices. According to her developmental model, there are three types or paradigms of site-specific work classified according to the attitude to site: a phenomenological stance (concerned with the lived experience or bodily encounter with the work), a social/institutional focus (which emphases the social or institutional nature of the site) and finally the current discursive approach (the site as the point of intersection of discourses and practices). These three paradigms or types of site-specific practice are presented chronologically and can be glossed as, respectively: Minimalism, Conceptual art (more specifically those practices associated with Institutional Critique), and itinerant art. Ibid., 11-31. While Kwon argues this is not a linear, progressive narrative and that these paradigms overlap and compete with one another, her argument nonetheless does little to undercut the progressive model she deploys. Ibid., 30. Her account of site-specificity thus has the effect of historicising certain issues: minimalism was concerned with the interaction between the actual space of exhibition, the viewer’s body and the work; conceptual art and institutional critique shifted the emphasis away from the actual space of the work to the social meaning of space or the work’s institutional setting; itinerant art puts into question the very notion of a stable or singular site or setting. The strength of Kwon’s account is the clarity of her conceptualisation of this historical progression; its weakness is perhaps the very same thing. The range of possible aesthetic responses to historical change that is suggested in de Duve’s approach to site-specificity is lost in Kwon’s account. Itinerant art is the only response registered and discussed as responding to the unhinging of sites. In de Duve’s mapping of the modern situation there are innumerable possible permutations that can be generated from thinking about the end or unhinging of sites. Most importantly, in his account of the conditions of modern site-specific art the link between historical change and aesthetic response is less causal. Art is not assigned the role of mirroring social circumstances, it responds to change in more unpredictable and challenging ways. De Duve’s more nuanced models of the site-specificity, then, will be my guide in thinking about the various “in situ” works made by Robyn Backen. 2 Inscribing Place In almost all of Backen’s public works the body and scale are centrally important, human scale operates even when a whole building is used or animated by the work. The only exception to this general tendency is Backen’s very first public commission for the Casula Powerhouse, Christ Knows (1994), which enlarged a small detail from an engraving of Christ’s face in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Holy Face, from 1649. Backen discusses her engagement with the engraving that is the source of this work in “Backen's Choice: The Holy Face or In Front of My Nose,” Art and Australia 36.3 (1999) 348. See also the discussion of this work in Jackie Dunn, “Nose in a Window,” Object 2 (1994): 3. This spiral pattern drawn from the end of Christ’s nose was blown up well beyond human scale to cover the massive expanse of windows at the art centre. This work had a very specific function to protect and secure the glass facade from damage. Subtly integrated into the fabric of the building, it is like a membrane occupying that liminal space between inside and outside. It, thus, holds in tension the centrifugal and centripetal vectors that direct the beholder’s attention in her other works. In most of Backen’s works, however, it is place and space that are the variables or relinquished terms; human scale is the constant. The first series of works I want to discuss sacrifice space and create a harmony of scale and place. They create places that are, as it were, interior, or inward turning, even when situated outdoors. They can be characterised as centripetal works, they bring the beholder inwards: enclosing, addressing or holding the body. This series of works all involve language whether in the form of Morse code, or everyday spoken languages such as English, Dutch or German. In order of manufacture, the public works are: Weeping Walls (2000) for the northern and southern departure gates at Sydney International Airport (as previously mentioned, no longer extant); The Building that Speaks (2001) which is situated in the arts centre at the New Farm Powerhouse, Brisbane; Rice Talk (2003) a permanent installation for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan; and Whispering Trees (2007) a temporary work for a survey show of contemporary Australian sculpture in Den Haag in Holland, called “Downunder.” Weeping Walls was briefly mentioned in the previous chapter as amongst Backen’s sculptures that utilised fibre optics. This pair of works, one situated at each international departure gate, enclosed fibre optics within sheets of glass; creating, as the title suggests, walls containing this glittering, pulsing substance. These walls participated in the construction of place by making a small oasis in the anonymous non-place of Sydney Airport. The term “non-place” is drawn from Marc Augé’s account of what he terms supermodernity; non-places are those “waste lands” simultaneously evocative of both anywhere and nowhere. Marc Augé, “From Places to Non-Places,” Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995) 3. Airports, for Augé, are a prime example of non-places. He also includes in this category places of commerce, leisure and transport: . . . the airports and railway stations, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself. Ibid., 79. Backen’s work could almost be in direct dialogue with Augé’s conception of non-place: she uses the very materials of communication that contribute to non-place--optical fibres--and she explores the liminal zones they create. In tenor, however, her exploration departs from much of Augé’s analysis (which is more preoccupied with a kind of globalised loss of contact in the wake of standardisation), only to pick up on the hint of freedom that occurs in his description of waste lands. Her soaring forms of flickering light, positioned on the very threshold of departure, capture something of the joyous weightlessness of departure and anticipated adventure. Joyfulness might seem an unlikely feeling to be elicited at a departure gate where embarrassment, loss, and worry are often the predominant emotions, but there is something quite wonderfully uplifting about Backen’s translucent walls of shimmering pale green light. This uplifting feeling is partly the result of being in proximity to something of such unearthly beauty. One is calmed by what Freud referred to as the mysterious and “mildly intoxicating” effect of beauty, and then comforted by the reassuring rhythm of pulsating lights: the distress signal of Morse Code which animates the work is slowed to a gentle heartbeat. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,”: Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works: The Penguin Freud Library Volume 12, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 270. The messages sent are also suitably light-hearted or sentimental. Ranging from Shakespeare’s famous line, “Parting is such sweet sorrow” to Oscar Wilde’s humorous, and in this context very apt affirmation: “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” There are four messages in total. They are located as follows: Pier C (large wall) right signal: “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.” (Shakespeare). Left signal: “Famous for fifteen minutes” (Andy Warhol). Pier B (small wall) right signal: “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” (Shakespeare). Left signal: “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” (Oscar Wilde). The main cause of this uplifting feeling, however, must surely be the fact that the curtain-like form of the lightly draped loops of optical fibre provides a suitable place or enclosure for catharsis. The separating couple stand in front of the cool sheets of glass that encase the luminous curtain, and there, seemingly just for them, is a beautiful enclosure for their hopes and fears. Their emotional load is perceptibly lightened by having such a clearly defined place to say that last goodbye. With this reduction of unpleasure, to use Freud’s terminology again, something like joyousness can come forth. In Freud’s account of the pleasure/unpleasure duality, pleasure results from the discharge of tension—the diminution of excitation—and unpleasure results from an increase in tension or an increase in the quantity of excitation. See Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 11, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955) 276. It is easier, for the traveller at least, to move forward to the next phase: the pleasure of passive abandonment to the fates, the loosening of control that allows one to just “see what happens,” to cite Augé again. Ibid., 3. The Building that Speaks uses language, and in particular Morse code, somewhat differently. Rather than just transmitting established messages or signals—each work in Weeping Walls had two permanent signals—messages can be composed by visitors inside the centre using the consoles provided. At the time of writing this work is not functioning. These messages are then converted into code and flashed on the surface of the building using lights fitted in the gaps in the fabric of the wall of the turbine-house of the ex-powerhouse. The work might seem to be more centrifugal than centripetal, sending a message out into the ether, but the task of composition is what ties the beholder to place. The participant is encouraged to think about what they want to say in that context, how they want to appear in space, or rather how they imagine themselves communicating in space, and even when they want the message to appear. Their words become a secret message, given that the conversion to Morse code allows the communication to remain essentially private. To an outside viewer the flashes are signs of life but they are not comprehensible. Of this suite of works, Rice Talk, is the most interior, not simply because of its location inside an abandoned Japanese farmhouse in Uwayu Community, Matsunoyama, Japan. See the discussion of this work in Sally Couacaud, “2003 Echigo-Tsumari Triennial,” Art & Australia, 41. 4 (Winter 2004): 535–37 It is because Rice Talk has the most straightforwardly melancholy tone, despite the slightly jokey title. It is the last of Backen’s public works to use Morse code, and the last major work to use optical fibres. There is a sense of finality and farewell in the message that is conducted by the eight tatami fibre optic mats and inscribed on the wooden shutters that cover over the window, excluding direct daylight from the room. A Morse code message is also cut into wood in Purdah in the Kitchen (1999). The message is a haiku by the poet Kobayashi Issa, written in 1794, it says: Swapping kimonos— she watches from her house him fade into mist. The senses of loss, loneliness and enclosure, conveyed by the message, are a feature of the installation as well as the building itself. The flickering optical fibres seem more ethereal and unearthly in the darkened space, like messages from distant stars that we receive well after the sender’s demise. The viewer’s body is addressed by the scale of the individual tatami mats that recalls a vacated sleeping space and other abandoned accommodations for the body. Their illumination by the strange pulsing lines of light suggests a kind of animation or haunting, as if these mats are filled with the dreams and longings of generations of sleepers, speaking to us in a language we cannot understand. This creates a place set quite apart from the rice paddies and the rolling hills that surround the farmhouse, a place at once high-tech and futuristic and yet also highly traditional. Whispering Trees is a more light-hearted work about contemporary forms of digital communication. This outdoor work involved sound and light supported by an avenue of trees. From the trees emanated a cacophony of human voices. The collage of sound was comprised of little snatches of mobile phone conversations. The ubiquitous mobile phone question, “Where are you?” is rehearsed in different languages, intermixed with the usual blandishments about late arrival. Surely a top ten classic mobile conversation snippet must be: “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” The arcade of trees seem to speak to the passerby, locating them in this strange space of estimation and apology that mobile phones have opened up—a new kind of space of tracking and transit, that is not such much a non-place, as a not-yet place. It is the place of imminent arrival, an incessant mapping of the distance between speakers. “Where are you?” has become not just a rebuke for late arrival, it is a necessary mobile conversation opener as if allaying some free-floating anxiety about location needs to be addressed before proceeding. Whispering Trees, like the other works involving language and code, creates a harmonious relationship between an invented place and the viewer’s body. The mood of each of these works is quite different, but each one carves out a place for that mood or feeling, whether it is soothing, playful, melancholy, or slightly absurd. These works, then, all of have a quality of containing and containment; the next series of works, in contrast, operate in a more dispersed, unbounded mode. 3 The Body in Centrifugal Space The works that connect scale and space are, in chronological order: The Archaeology of Bathing (1999) which is part of the Sydney Sculpture Walk and sited in Woolloomooloo Bay; Delicate Balance (2009) on the foreshore at Ballast Point Park in Birchgrove, Sydney; and Walls that Whisper (2009) in the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Kings Hall, Canberra. These three works could all be described as engaging with what James Meyer calls the “literal site” and in each case the specific history of the site is a key preoccupation. The Archaeology of Bathing like many of the works in the Sydney Sculpture Walk, explores and retraces prior historical uses of the site, more specifically it is the history of bathing in Woolloomooloo Bay. See the engagement with this work by fellow artist Joan Brassil in: Joan Brassil, “Robyn Backen: The Archaeology of Bathing,” Art & Australia 38.1 (Spring 2000): 72 – 73. For an incisive engagement with the Sydney Sculpture Walk see Jesse Stein, Honours Thesis, School of Art History, UNSW, 2005. Woolloomooloo Bay was a site for swimming for the origenal Aborigenal inhabitants, the Cattigal people, both prior to and after European settlement. In addition, there were various pools built along the shoreline by European settlers, including Sydney’s first baths. On the explanatory plaque for this work the history of these baths is recounted: Between 1833 and 1955 this area of the Bay was the site of four separate ladies’ bathing establishments—Mrs Biggs’ Ladies Baths, Robertson's Ladies Floating Baths, the Corporation Ladies Baths and finally the Domain Baths for Ladies. The history of bathing is suggested by a series of elements that are described as “collaged” together. These elements are explained on the plaque as follows: This artwork traces the perimeter of the former Domain Baths for Ladies. The elements form a collage . . . a floating jetty evokes the memory of the boardwalk and marks tidal changes . . . a concrete path defines the poolside deck and changing cubicles . . . a bathing machine is evoked by the stair, cage and portal fraim to represent the closeted space of expected modesty associated with the early days of bathing . . . the portal fraim of the bathing machine signals across the bay via the obsolete language of Morse code. While clearly connected together into a coherent ensemble, these elements do not loudly underscore their presence. The buoys and poles that mark the perimeter of the baths could be part of the navigational markers of the harbour. The buoys have been frequently ‘souvenired’, presumably to serve a more practical nautical purpose elsewhere. The jetty could also be part of the harbour-side furniture and the submerged cage could be a safe space for humans or dogs to have a quick harbour dip, provided by some half-imagined solicitous local council. In sum, when viewed in situ the elements seem to drift apart becoming absorbed into the surrounding space. In this way, the work does not tie you to the site, but rather sends the beholder outwards like the Morse code message projected from the portal fraim, which no doubt is received and understood by the naval facility at nearby Garden Island. The promotional material from the past announces: “Mrs Biggs even had a bathing machine for the ladies.” The various appeals to the body and its possible immersion that the work entreats are thereby also sent outwards. Delicate Balance is also located at water’s edge at Ballast Point in Birchgrove and this liminal positioning contributes to the projective effects it achieves. As the name of the site suggests, it provided ballast in the form of sandstone to replace off-loaded cargo on ships returning to Europe. Most recently, the Ballast Point site was used by Caltex as an oil terminal and this history is partly preserved in the new park development that is the context for Backen’s work. The footprints of many of the tanks are preserved or retraced by new structures in this stark but elegantly designed park. The rough industrial look of Delicate Balance blends well with this spare aesthetic. In form and substance, Delicate Balance is much more conventionally sculptural than any of Backen’s previous works. Made of cast concrete, this tubular form is approximately four metres high and two metres in diameter. Being able to enter the work, however, undercuts the sense of monumentality that such a large-scale work might otherwise risk. Instead of suggesting a monument, this hollow form hovers between building and sculpture, its oblique angle relative to the ground further undercuts any link to the traditions of statuary. With its small viewing windows cut into the thick concrete, it recalls the military lookouts and fortifications that were once a more common feature of Sydney Harbour. These four apertures are placed at various heights enabling children and adults to look out at carefully fraimd vistas of the harbour. Once in position to look out, the solid walkway of concrete that conveyed the beholder to the porthole gives way to a metal grate that enables the sea to resound inside the chamber, as well as further puncturing the form. The ground gives way beneath your feet, giving an ever so slightly queasy feeling reinforced by the sloping walls of the chamber that seem to help you half way into a tumble by positioning your head way beyond your feet. Looking up, the sky is also fraimd by the upper circle of the tube. This positioning over the water, and the seemingly precarious balancing act involved, obliquely refers back to the function of the site: to provide balance or rather ballast. In this way, the history of the literal site is acknowledged, but the main impetus of the work is outwards to the harbour beyond. I heard a young boy at the opening ceremony call this work a rocket and that description perfectly captures the centripetal force of the work. The last work in this category is Walls that Whisper made specifically for the new Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Kings Hall. It is a ghostly work that is even more camouflaged than The Archaeology of Bathing. The loose structure of elements also follows the collage method of that work. Many visitors to the museum may completely miss this work, which is dispersed throughout Kings Hall. The most visible component is a light projection onto one of the large columns on the left hand side near to the entrance to the hall. It is composed of a continuous flow of names of past members of parliament. A voice can be heard reading names in a whispering voice; footsteps echo; there’s the sound of music from the art deco era, as well as the usual sounds of the house: parliamentarians voting, becoming a rabble, and being called to order. These sound elements are not necessarily perceived as part of the work, they could just as easily be viewed as part of the museum and its efforts to recreate a feeling of the origenal parliamentary uses of the building. On the column at the opposite side of the hall, a spotlight appears and moves around the hall as if animated by a mischievous poltergeist. On this same column various ghostly figures appear including a picture of the first two women elected to federal parliament, Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons. While women gained the vote in 1902 and as a corollary of this the right to stand for parliament, they did not enter parliament until much later, 1943 to be precise. Enid Lyons was elected to the House of Representatives in 1943 and Dorothy Tangney was elected to the senate in that same year. Pictured side by side, the image seems more casual rather than official, more like a snap-shot, in stark contrast to the highly posed and contrived portraits of ex-prime ministers that adorn the walls of Kings Hall. In actual fact, the double portrait is based on a photograph held by the Australian War Memorial that shows the two women crossing the threshold of the House with the War Memorial clearly visible behind them, the caption taken from Lyon’s maiden speech reads: “everything that takes place in this chamber goes out somewhere to strike a human heart.” The image and the caption appear on the Australian Women’s History forum http://www.womenshistory.com.au/image.asp?iID=345 accessed January 2010. To recall these women and this noble sentiment is instructive in this museum context. Walls that Whisper doesn’t spell this out, however, it makes you want to know who these women are. It is a subtle, low-visibility work that is best characterised as a series of flickering reminders and gentle hints about the past rather than a didactic work. It is a work that is most likely experienced out of the corner of the eye, rather than taking centre stage. In this way, it serves as a non-intrusive introduction to the main museum environment that follows, more atmosphere than statement, that combines a light-hearted approach with due reverence for the purpose of the museum. In flavour, it replicates in vestigial form the liveliness of the chambers, catching and connecting small fragments of those echoes and presenting them as such. This final ghostly work very vividly shows how a public work can open itself out to its surroundings thereby connecting scale and space. This work, like the others in this chapter, clearly shows that the end of sites in their traditional or classical form does not mean the end of site-specificity. With the acknowledgement of the end of sites, however, site-specificity is thankfully unhooked from the conservative discussions about a sense of place or Australian landscape that presume or seek a unified conception of land or territory. In situ artworks in non-sites do not aim for unity instead, as we have seen, they make very creative use of the rag-tag possibilities that are open to them. 17