ABSTRACT
The focus on subject-centred relations in socially engaged art can be seen in relation to art’s negation of the artworks’ object that became especially virulent in the late 1960s and 1970s. The art historian and critic Rosalyn Deutsche terms this the ‘site-specificity’ of an artwork, alluding to ‘an aesthetic strategy in which the context was incorporated into the work itself'. Site-specific works could be seen as a critique of the capitalist and exclusive gallery system by proposing other, less elitist and more inclusive, sites for art. The chapter addresses the particular contributions offered by geographical approaches for understanding processes of meaning-making and for destabilizing places, spaces, and worlds. Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning is an influential book that paved the way for new and richly interesting fields of enquiry in this regard. Jackson marks the emergence of a so-called new cultural geography that links the idea of the social with the cultural.
