Taking up the legacy of American site-specific artworks of the late twentieth century, my talk, which is drawn from a forthcoming book of the same title, will address the fundamental question of how to account for such works in the present, as situated in environments that have changed and continue to change at a rapid pace since the time of their completion. The idea that certain objects and structures are tied to 

particular places is not new, but up until the rise of the land art movement in the 

decades after the Second World War, their rootedness tended to arise more from the practical difficulty of moving them, as opposed to a direct requirement by their artist not to do so. The emergence of land art works – such Walter De Maria’s Lightning 

Field (1977) located on a high-desert plain in New Mexico or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976) on the desert flats of northern Utah – introduced a more explicit notion of site-specificity stipulating that all sculptural and architectural elements of these works exist and can only exist in a single place. But when we think of the places in which the monuments of land art were sited, and especially the photographs of them that circulate in books and online, these sites seem to dwell in the past, in stilled images of deserts, lakes, and mesas now nearly fifty years old. The environments themselves, however, have not stood still, having been affected by developments ranging from local urban planning initiates to global climate change. Given that the meaning of site-specific artworks so utterly depends on these environments, my argument meditates on what their volatility and the passing of time might imply for site-specificity itself. 

More precisely, I will do so by thinking about such environments as ecological in their interconnection with the various activities of humans, plants, animals, and even weather. The sites on which land artworks are created, after all, were never “original.” Millennia of geological change and centuries of colonial occupation were already underway before the intervention of any single land artist. What is more, thinking deeply about the durational quality of the work done at these sites places further pressure on such basic art historical tenets as artistic creation and physical conservation. Rather than holding true to the vision of a single individual or allowing for the possibility that an ecosystem might be controlled like the conditions of a traditional gallery, the active lives of these sites are instead formed and re-formed through the ongoing activities of various authors and agents. Taking the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce as a point of departure, I conceptualize this condition as one of “secondness”— a term that encompasses not only the profound implications of temporality for the art historical reception of site-specificity, but also an ethical attentiveness to site that bears on how we understand and treat the vast array of different places on our planet.