On August 27, 2005, a large crowd including residents of a psychiatric facility in Mexicali gathered just to the south of a jagged, oceanside metal fence in Playas di Tijuana, Mexico. The crowd counted down and watched, cheering, as David “The Bullet” Smith shot out of a cannon, flew through the air, and landed, bouncing several times, in a net slung in San Diego’s Border Field State Park. This event, staged to critique U.S. immigration policy while exposing “mental and spatial borders,” was also an artwork created by Javier Tèllez to inaugurate inSITE’s “anti-biennial” contemporary art exhibition. One Flew Over the Void (Bala Perdida), whether experienced firsthand and locally or through documentation and globally, exemplifies a genre of creative practices now known variously as site-specific, site-responsive, community-based, place-making, nomadic, locational, relational, contextual, or situational. Tèllez’s spectacle for inSITE is a fitting illustration for the cover of Situation, a new thematic anthology devoted to writings by artists, curators, commissioners, and critics exploring contemporary art’s engagement with concepts of site.

How do artists reveal, reject, resist, displace, or repurpose sites? To what extent do these reactions by artists reshape sites as well as perceptions of space and a sense of belonging? What effects do dislocations have upon identities and communities? How do ephemeral or critical spatial interventions ameliorate feelings of alienation? Readers interested in questions such as these will find Situation edifying as well as antagonizing.

Edited by Bristol-based curator and writer Claire Doherty, Situation constructs an umbrella for considerations of “the specifics of site and location, contemporaneity, engagement and interruption, public space and publicness, and place as an event-in-progress” (13). Doherty’s expansive conceptualization encompasses tensions between disparate fields such as geography, psychology, urban planning, art history, anthropology, sociology, architecture, and fine art, raising the question of how one can know or shape the phenomenon called “situation.” The strength of the collection is this range—juxtaposition, dissonance, and varied voice keep readers alert to unsettled definitions and contested genealogies. The collection’s weakness is the unevenness of the content of the individual texts, especially in the excerpted form that prevails throughout the volume (and larger series in which it appears).

Doherty’s first section, “The Limits of Site,” contains foundational essays by artists like Robert Morris, Michael Asher, Gordon Matta-Clark, Daniel Buren, Robert Smithson, and Robert Irwin. Projects by these artists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s attempted to remap the way galleries, museums, and critics framed art practice and suggested new avenues for understanding art’s public contexts well beyond the studio or “white cube.” Asher’s description of his futile attempt to remove the container-like presence of his exhibition space in Italy circa 1973 is riveting: “My proposal for this exhibition [at Galleria Toselli, Milan] was to have the walls and ceiling sandblasted, so that every trace of the many layers of white paint which had been applied over the years would be removed and the underlying plaster exposed” (30). Less compelling is the excerpt from Irwin’s “Being and Circumstance” (1985) in which the artist places four categories of what he calls “public/site art” into a hierarchical typology privileging his own brand: “site conditioned/determined.” For Irwin, phenomenological experience is essential to aesthetic perception, but his categories create a false trajectory that is especially apparent after a twenty-five-year period in which Irwin’s activity no longer so sharply diverges from his straw men Henry Moore, Mark di Suvero, and Richard Serra. Google-equipped contemporary readers (the book has no illustrations, so Google Images is an almost necessary accompaniment) can easily navigate to a recent video interview with Irwin, conducted as he was installing Light and Space III (2008) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, in which he struggles to mobilize the categories that seem so ready in his essay.

Fortunately, in the book’s opening section Doherty explores the “limits of the site” confronted by today’s emerging artists. For example, she presents Markus Brüderlin’s analysis of recent work that pressures the still-squared corners of art’s traditional spaces of display. His example is Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Dug Down Gallery/Powerless Structures Fig. 45 (1998) in which a white-walled, halogen-spotlit, desk-equipped full-scale gallery was set in a park near the entrance to the Reykjavik Art Museum to exist as part of everyday life. According to Brüderlin, this “banished White Cube” became “an open container that exposed its insides defencelessly under the open sky” (32).

Doherty’s facility with presenting such a wide range of recent contemporary site-based practice builds on her previous work as editor of Contemporary Art from Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004) and as curator/commissioner for the Situations project. Rather than relying upon art-historical knowledge to explain situational art, Doherty privileges the language of artists themselves, as well as statements by curators and commissioners. This dialogue reveals the importance of collaboration to situational practice.

The book’s next two sections, “Fieldwork” and “Action and Public Space,” are both expansive and erudite in their conception; they present an especially fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. In “Fieldwork,” the reader finds excerpts from key texts like Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari’s “On Nomadology” (1980), Hal Foster’s “The Artist as Ethnographer” (1996), and Miwon Kwon’s “One Place After Another” (1997) juxtaposed with artistic visions like Tacita Dean’s meditation “the remotest island on earth,” Tony Smith’s epiphany on the New Jersey Turnpike, Walid Raad’s urgency to collect The Beirut Al-Hadath Archive, and Gabriel Orozco’s desire to work “in the context but against the context.” This section’s linchpin is an essay by anthropologist George E. Marcus in which he considers the complex relationship between the perspectives of insiders and outsiders and the role of complicity in any subject position. His ideas of “shared imagination” and collaborative production of “third” spaces are taken up later in Situation’s final section’s consideration of the recent uptick in biennial exhibition activity.

In “Action and Public Space,” Doherty emphasizes the intersection between public art practice and what Jane Rendell dubs “critical spatial practices.” Texts by theorists Hannah Arendt, Michel de Certeau, and Guy Debord describe ways to conceptualize, use, and subvert public space. Rosalyn Deutsche, Douglas Crimp, and Simon Sheikh probe contemporary public art’s position as a cipher for the liberal democratic public sphere and ask how it might also catalyze transformation of fragmented urban publics. Allan Kaprow, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Vito Acconci reinforce the promise of creative activity—open-ended, strategic in its forms of address, or unnecessary—as a resource for the public sphere’s critical reshaping.

Doherty’s “Place and Locality” section foregrounds the political effects of location. From Martha Rosler’s “Immigrating” (1975) and Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From (2003) (described in an essay by critic T. J. Demos) to Doreen Massey’s “A Global Sense of Place” (1991) and Lucy R. Lippard’s “Notes from a Recent Arrival” (1995), Doherty here troubles a most basic aspect of the human condition: Where am I? Where can I go? The answer is never obvious in a globalized society marked by economic, racial, and gender divisions. Even concepts like space and time can be mobilized toward political ends, as Arjun Appadurai eloquently argues in “The Production of Locality” (1996). For him, “locality is an inherently fragile social achievement” (171), a condition that becomes a resource for the artists and curators included in this section, many of whom operate in what Geeta Kapur calls modes of “utopian engagement” (176).

Situation’s final chapter, “The Curatorial Imperative,” surveys the proliferation of international biennials and city-wide exhibitions since the 1970s with texts by their curators and critics. The essays span shows like Arnhem’s Sonsbeek, Great Britain’s TWSA Four Cities, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Charleston’s Places with a Past, Tijuana/San Diego’s inSITE, the Istanbul Biennial, and the roving Manifesta. As the final say, Berlin-based critic and Frieze contributing editor Jan Verwoert’s “Forget the National: Perform the International in the Key of the Local” (2007) poses a key question that Situation ultimately leaves open: “Does it make sense at all to consider collective subjects as possible addressees and subjects of an art experience?” (216) Verwoert’s query points to a surprising omission in the anthology: the perspective of performance studies. For example, a sample of Diana Taylor’s theorization of “scenarios,” traced brilliantly in The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) through analysis of Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians (1992), might have been included.

The anthologist’s challenge is to assemble the right mix, and Doherty’s achievement is laudable. In her introduction, she sets out to “consider the genesis of ‘situation,’ as a convergence of theorizations of site, non-site, place, non-place, locality, public space, context and time, and as a means of rethinking the ways in which contemporary artists respond to, produce and destabilize place and locality” (13). She delivers all of this and more, adventurously dipping in and out of a fascinating array of recent art projects that chart a course for exploring and articulating phenomenological experience, disciplinary knowledge, theoretical concerns, and political action.