Following on from my previous post regarding the role of the viewer in relation to land/site-specific artworks, I thought I would relate this to specific artists.
The first artist I want to mention is Lotte Glob, a ceramic artist based in the Highlands of Scotland. Kwon’s suggestion that a viewer is required to validate artwork becomes interesting when considering an artist such as Glob, particularly in reference to her work Floating Stones, and also raises questions in relation to place and documentation. Glob’s work is heavily connected to site selection and involves her giving back to her surrounding landscapes. In Floating Stones, Glob released 333 ceramic stones into 111 Lochans – three stones in each. Each release was documented through photographs and a journal, which has now been made into a book. The introduction of the book states that:
“Lotte has increasingly been drawn not to the mountain tops for their own sake but instead to discover the more private, hidden location that often lie on their flanks[1]”
This demonstrates that the site and landscape are inextricable to the work. But when the specific, and remote, locations of her “stones” are not disclosed, where does this leave the viewer? If the viewer was to try and seek out the Stones, how certain could they be that they found the actual object – the ambiguity of Glob’s Floating Stones are such that it may be hard to tell them apart from a real stone. The only evidence of this project comes in the form of the book ‘Floating Stones’ published in 2008, which showcases a photograph of the “stones” in situ, along with a journal entry regarding the surroundings.
Fourteen years have passed since Glob first started this project, which has no doubt resulted in the altering of her stones through movement in water, weathering and decay. The original object will be forever altering, until it may possibly decay completely. All this is, no doubt, part of the “artworks” process. But this raises an extra issue of viewer validation. If a viewer is required to “complete” the artwork, when the object of the artwork itself is ever changing, at what point should the viewer be validating – when the stone(s) is first released, or when it is decaying. And with 333 stones within the project, would a viewer ever be able to find them all?
Glob’s stones are required to make their own journey, and in that sense are truly connected to the landscape they have been released into. This in turn should allow the viewer to look past the stones and into the landscape that surrounds them – and that in turn is the actual “object”. A viewer can not validate this artwork in terms of viewing the actual object to gain their subjective opinion, and therefore complete it, instead they must use their subjectivity in the first place to validate the object(s) they are unlikely to see in reality, and only likely to see within the publication. In this case the physicality of the object to the viewer is not necessarily the “required” link for the viewer to connect and respond – it is the action, placement and cycle of the “stones” that is key, and depending on the viewer, this may be enhanced by the existence of documentation (ie her book.)
[1] L. Glob, Floating Stones, Aberfeldy: Watermill Books, 2008, p. 1
