Rendezvous in the Streets; Déjà vu in the Gallery: The Art of Interaction.

From cooking meals to creating a holiday for a suburban community, artists’ interaction with the public both in and outside of the gallery has challenged the parameters of fine art practice. This paper explores two seemingly divergent interpretations of the artist’s contact with communities and their audiences. In his essay, Artist as Ethnographer, Hal Foster chastises artists for posturing as anthropologists or sociologists.  Unlike these professionals, Foster suggests that the artists’ objective is self-promotion rather than social awareness or change. Rather than condemn the movement toward a collaborative community based art, Nicholas Bourriaud surmises that “the relational aesthetic” produces art that is interactive and convivial in its in engagement.  Unlike Foster, Bourriaud sees this type of creative investigation as liberated from the emphasis on consumption typically associated with object based arts. Through an examination of site-specific works by a variety of artists including Gordon Matta Clark, Pierre Huyghe, Sophie Calle, Rirkit Tiravanija, Marina Abramovic and Vito Acconci, this paper will also explore the possibility that the onus of examining human behaviour shifted from the artists to the viewer through these personal and occasionally confrontational encounters.

Paula Bollers was born in Hackensack, New Jersey of Guyanese parentage. She obtained her Bachelors of Art in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University in 1994. Returning to the tri-state area, she went on to study fine arts at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts receiving her Bachelors of Fine Art from the latter. During her time in New York City, she worked for several cultural institutions including Dia Centre for Fine Arts and the Guggenheim Museum. She is currently a PhD candidate and casual lecturer in the Photomedia Department at Sydney College of the Arts.