This is the place: site-specificity in Ernesto Pujol's Awaiting (2010)

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Title This is the place: site-specificity in Ernesto Pujol's Awaiting (2010)
Publication Type thesis
School or College College of Fine Arts
Department Art & Art History
Author Beardsley, Amanda Kay
Date 2011-08
Description The recent performance work of Ernesto Pujol complicates the notion of site-specific art, extending into the tension of what--or who--constitutes a site. This project considers Pujol's April 2010 site-specific performance entitled Awaiting as a case study in the decidedly complicated relationship between the discursive or fluid nature of the body and the constructed notion of place. Awaiting used performance to call attention to what Pujol identified as an unspoken but omnipresent "culture of waiting" in Utah. However, rituals of shared dress, gesture, and extended rhythms punctuated by spatial and temporal gaps simultaneously invoked and transformed the cultural, historical, and social landscape in which Awaiting was situated. Looking to the various uses of gesture and mapping within Awaiting, I argue that Pujol's invocation of "site" prevented him from creating a space that matched his intention to transcend the constructed nature of site. Rather, the embodied representations of Salt Lake's local identity infiltrated and transformed Awaiting. Consequently, I use Pujol's intentionality in Awaiting as a foil to examine the possibilities and limitations of site-specific performance. I conclude that Awaiting's site-specificity originates not only in its allusion to a culture of waiting, but rather in its resemblance to a ritualistic history characteristic of Utah starting with the definitive utterance of "this is the place."
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Awaiting; Ernesto Pujol; Performance art; Place; Site-specificity; Situationism
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Dissertation Name Master of Arts
Language eng
Rights Management Copyright © Amanda Kay Beardsley 2011
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 10,055,391 bytes
Identifier us-etd3,49453
Source original in Marriott Library Special Collections; N27.5 2011 .B43
ARK ark:/87278/s6891mkj
Setname ir_etd
ID 194270
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6891mkj
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