1st Edition
Place-As-Medium and New Grounds for Thinking in Contemporary Art
This book presents a broad scope of global contemporary art projects, establishing a new philosophical framework to understand and evaluate the new art practice known as “place-as‑medium.”
This new category of art practice creates artworks that deepen our belonging to place by asking us to think through them together. This book shows how place‑as‑medium art reshapes the ground of thinking by offering a new reading of the work of Alfredo Jaar through the theories of Jacques Ranciere, Gianni Vattimo, and Martin Heidegger. An in-depth analysis of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s 2012 international art exhibition dOCUMENTA (13) focuses on the temporal and spatial dimensions of thinking through place. This book advocates for shared authorship exemplified in artworks by Theaster Gates and John Preus that use repair and renovation to rebuild communities, and provides a model for ecological thinking in a case study of The Swamp School by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas. Additionally, this book includes a Coda for Place‑As‑Medium as a practical guide for artists to think through place.
This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, and philosophy.
INTRODUCTION: Place-as-Medium: An Introduction 1. Thinking through place: on Alfredo Jaar 2. Boundaries of place in Alfredo Jaar’s public interventions 3. The play of places in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s dOCUMENTA (13) 4. Place-as-medium and the question of hospitality5. Towards a shared authorship of place 6. The Swamp School and the Promise of Place-as-Medium as Ecological Thinking APPENDIX: CODA for Place-as-Medium
Biography
Katherine Paige Farrington is an artist‑philosopher and currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at Montserrat College of Art and Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College. Her artworks include Future Monument to the Trees of the Public Garden (2024), part of a multi‑year public art initiative Un‑Monument sponsored by the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and supported by the Mellon Foundation. Her art collective, Ocean School Collective (OSC), was selected for the 2025 Goetemann Environmental Artist Residency at the Ocean Alliance in Gloucester, Massachusetts by the Rocky Neck Art Colony.
Kate Farrington conceptualizes a new art form that arises in “thinking through place” toward “mutuality, reciprocity, hospitality, and locality.” A striking new way of thinking about everything, not least, the future of the biosphere, Place-as-Medium could not have appeared at a more prescient moment.
George Smith, Founder and President Emeritus, Edgar E. Coons, Jr. Professor of New Philosophy, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA)
Kate Farrington is an artist, art theorist, and philosopher, weaving together the Continental philosophical tradition with some strands of Buddhist practice. The extraordinary range and innovation of her thinking illuminates the artform of place-as medium, which activates “thinking through place.” In her topical and profound meditations, the artistic practice of contemporary artists like the Chilean Alfredo Jaar emerge as poignant and rousing responses to the political and ecological exigencies of our global disorder.
Jason M. Wirth, Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University
