Site-Writing

Professor Jane Rendell is Director of Architectural Research at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is author of Art and Architecture (I.B.Tauris, 2006), The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002), and co-editor of Critical Architecture (2007); Spatial Imagination (2005); The Unknown City (2001); Intersections (2000); Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995).

'A timely and highly significant contribution to academic and professional fields of contemporary art, Rendell's Site-Writing offers the first substantial exploration of the situatedness of engagement with art. Here Rendell combines exemplary academic argument with immersive critical analysis of contemporary works. It is this distinctive voice which sets Rendell apart from her contemporaries and makes Site-Writing an essential volume for anyone interested in the specificity of viewing and engaging with, producing and writing about art.' - Claire Doherty, Director, Situations, University of the West of England, Bristol; 'Jane Rendell is a nomadic theorist and a theoretical nomad, whose formidable intellect has produced books on the interstitial relationship between space and feminism, place and psyche, city and citizen, architecture and art. Asking, where does biography end and theory begin?A" Rendell's architectonics of criticism performs a praxis that negotiates the personal and the universal. This discloses the critic in all of us, who, in facing the creative work, is confronted with the other (both distant and near), compelling us to reconstruct our own world and therefore the very space we occupy.' - Professor Dorita Hannah, Spatial Design, Massey University College of Creative Arts

• List of ImagesAcknowledgementsPrologue: Pre-Positions Configuration 1 Triangular Structures with Variable ThirdsTransitional SpaceUndoing ArchitectureOne + One = Three: Tracey Emin’s You Forgot to Kiss my SoulConfessional ConstructionConfiguration 2Back and ForthFrontier Creatures Travelling the Distance/Encountering the OtherTo Miss the DesertYou Tell MeAn Embellishment: PurdahConfiguration 3A RearrangementWord-Presentations and Thing-PresentationsThe Welsh DresserLonging for the Lightness of SpringLes Mots et Les ChosesConfiguration 4: That Which Keeps Coming BackDéjà Vu ‘Some Things You See Will Remind You of Others’: Déjà Vu in the Work of Cristina Iglesias La Passante‘She is walking about in a town which she does not know’Configuration 5: Decentering/RecenteringThe Copernican Revolution Somewhere Else She is ToldDecentering/Recentering Do-Ho Suh Everywhere ElseTrafalgar Square: DétournementsEpilogue: Alien PositionsEndnotesBibliographyIndex