Second Site

A meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time transform the meaning of site-specific art.

In the decades after World War II, artists and designers of the land art movement used the natural landscape to create monumental site-specific artworks. Second Site offers a powerful meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time alter and transform the meanings - and sometimes appearances - of works created to inhabit a specific place.

James Nisbet offers fresh approaches to well-known artworks by Ant Farm, Rebecca Belmore, Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson. He also examines the work of less recognised artists such as Agnes Denes, Bonnie Devine, and herman de vries. Nisbet tracks the vicissitudes wrought by climate change and urban development on site-specific artworks, taking readers from the plains of Amarillo, Texas, to a field of volcanic rock in Mexico City, to abandoned quarries in Finland.

Providing vital perspectives on what it means to endure in an ecologically volatile world, Second Site challenges long-held beliefs about the permanency of site-based art, with implications for the understanding and conservation of artistic creation and cultural heritage.

‘Engaging and provocative. Nisbet persuasively argues that we need to think closely about the physical and ecological changes in many works of land art, revisiting them not as originals but as works that inherently embrace change.’ - Mark A. Cheetham, University of Toronto, author of Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ‘60s

'Second Site is a crisply written, knowledgeable, and theoretically sophisticated exploration of temporality in site-specific art.’ - Gary Shapiro, author of Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel