title: Situation (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)
author: Claire Doherty
description: "Claire Doherty's<br /><br />"This excellent and stimulating book revisits the notions of site and space to underline the increasing importance of situations, opening and thinking about new ways of making and curating art."--Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London<br /><br />"Claire Doherty's "Situation" offers a scholarly yet accessible cross-disciplinary mapping out of the complex discursive interpenetrations of notions of site, public sphere, social space, location-driven research processes and related issues, from the perspectives of artists, curators, art historians, critics, theorists and other cultural producers. The five sections comprising the book propose useful ideational constellations, generating a trans-historical (i.e. non-linear/anti-chronological) interplay of excerpted artist writings, critical texts, curatorial frameworks and theoretical discourses from the start of the 1960s to the present, enlivening the conversation about what it means to be "situational.""--Joshua Decter, Critic and Curator, Director of the Master of Public Art Studies Program (Art in the Public Sphere), USC Roski School of Fine Arts, Los Angeles
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  ### 1
  
  # About the Author
  
  Claire Handscombe is a British writer who moved to Washington, DC in 2012,
  ostensibly to study for an MFA, but actually, let’s be honest, because of an
  obsession with _The West Wing_. She was recently longlisted for the Bath Novel
  Award, and her journalism, poetry, and essays have appeared in a wide variety
  of publications, including _Bustle_ , _Book Riot_ , _Writers’ Forum_ , and the
  _Washington Post_. She is the host of the Brit Lit Podcast, a fortnightly show
  about news and views from British books and publishing.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # Unscripted
  
  
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  ### Claire Handscombe
  
  
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  #### Unbound Digital
  
  
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  This edition first published in 2019
  
  Unbound
  
  6th Floor Mutual House, 70 Conduit Street, London W1S 2GF
  
  
  [www.unbound.com](http://www.unbound.com)
  
  
  All rights reserved
  
  © Claire Handscombe, 2019
  
  The right of Claire Handscombe to be identified as the author of this work has
  been ass