49 on the audience involved, and so when one works with people not affiliated with art, the action could be one where the public perceives the work as performing some useful task. The question about the action of course depends on many factors, and is indeed problematized by the authorship of the artist, how much he is willing to diffuse the work to his or her collaborators, and how willing they are to work on it. The notion of entry into a work was described by public artists and was expressed in creating shadings and spaces for seating so that it can be used by the audience, That idea of “inviting” audiences is associated with site-‐specific works and it creates a physical and public commitment. (Kaye 2000)84 According to Kwon ‘Space as a social experience, communal scope, individual response, may insure a larger measure of support.” In these critics’ writings of the early 1980s, physical access or entry into an art work is imagined to be equivalent to hermeneutic access for the viewer’ Kwon 2004 )85 . Today we see the usefulness of the piece in which Suzanne Lacy took the idea of engaging with audience, where her work was entirely based on the ideaof meeting the inhabitants of the place. A material documentation of this work shows Lacy shaking their hands. Another project based on engagement was taken upon Nicolás Dumit Estevéz and María Alós to create a museum from pockets of passers by. For his current Let’s Meet at the Bridge, art and life experience, 2011-‐ present, he goes to Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina) to Meet the People . They participated in gatherings and celebrations bringing togetherpeople from both sides of a bridge in a city that was separating the inhabitants. ‘Estévez also acts as a cultural conduit, bridging people he has met with specific places in their town or inviting them to bridge their histories and memories through conversations’ (more information on his work here) Similarly Jennifer Neslon and Dimitris Kotsaras bought products from the supermarket and created a chance map to knock on people's doors and cook for with them while engaging in conversations about [anything including] the changing demographics of their neighborhoods, producing a Limerick Cookbook from the histories of their encounters that included drawings of children, maps of their movement within the city, and their conceptual entanglement with the sites they visited and the relationships they created during their cooking experiments. The relationship becomes a very specific set of recipes ‘actually on behalf of’ 86the ephemerality of conversation, as if the conversation becomes a tension between intelligible matter of choreographed steps to be taken and the unknown route they will take to reach an unknown house according to a chance map that helps them fall through someone’s door. Someone performs the entry into the work by accommodating the [unexpected] artists in his home. The exchange and an assumed relationship is reversed: the artists bring food, the people fill in details on the situational and the sociopolitical context in which the people of the neighborhood live.
Non-‐Site
‘Here, ‘the site is a place where the work should be but isn’t’ [..];the site appears in the promise of its occupation by the Non-‐Site, where a recognition of the site assumes the absence of the work, [..] Indeed, the Non-‐Site’s site-‐specificity is an effect of this
84
Kaye, Nick 2000. Site Specific Art: performance, place and documentation.Routhlege:London and N/Y 85 Kwon, Miwon 2004, One Place After Another: site-‐specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, London. 86 Conversation with Jennifer Nelson