Performance, Post-Border Art, and Urban Geography

We asked ourselves, do we need another biennial? The answer is no, we don't.

Michael Krichman, Executive Co-director of inSITE 05

Too much art is seduced by the mass media strategy, by thinking about the public as mere consumers of art. We prefer to think about the quality of the relationship between the art and the public.

Osvaldo Sánchez, Artistic Director of inSITE 05

Amulti-venue event at various sites along the U.S.-Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana, with a roster of internationally prominent artists, a sophisticated press packet, and advertisements in major art publications such as Art in America, inSITE appears to be yet another biennial. However, as Michael Krichman points out above, there are enough biennials and art fairs already. In reaction to the proliferation of art tourist events that take place in the southern California region, inSITE has become an anti-biennial.¹ First, inSITE doesn't follow the biennial schedule of taking place every two years (five years elapsed between the most recent inSITE and the previous one). Second, inSITE isn't situated in one place, but instead takes place over four months at numerous sites in Mexico and the United States that are not necessarily places where art is typically exhibited. Third, the notion of site has evolved from site-specific installation art to a geographical location where performative, transient pieces that are commissioned specifically for inSITE take place. Were it not for the helpful inSITE guide that is handed out to visitors, it would be really hard to even identify this work as "art." Though inSITE accommodates, even courts, art tourists, it doesn't make it easy for them when they arrive. The "art" is often hard to find, the sites are often outside of the art tourist comfort zone, and there is absolutely no way to see all of the works, artists panels, and exhibitions in one day, or even one weekend. The people who benefit most from the projects commissioned by inSITE are those groups at whom the art interventions are directed—local communities who live and work on the border. The work in inSITE 05, held August 26–November 13, 2005, Interventions (projects that took place at a physical site) and Scenarios (projects that used the Internet to create a cyber site connected to the physical region of San Diego/Tijuana), provides a model for engaged activist art in a post-global, cyber-culture society.

The first inSITE took place in 1992, mostly on the San Diego side of the border. Aspirations in 1992 were modest; inSITE was organized by several board members of Installation Gallery as an (ultimately) unsuccessful fundraiser for the gallery. After Installation Gallery lost its physical space, Michael Krichman, then a member of the Installation Gallery board, decided to continue Installation as a non-profit arts organization that would commission and facilitate avant-garde art, particularly installations, at various sites in the San Diego/Tijuana region. Thanks to Krichman's work and commitment, inSITE 1994 included participating institutions from both sides of the border, and inSITE 97 became a truly bi-national event when the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes through the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico joined forces with Installation Gallery to jointly sponsor the event. That same year, Carmen Cuenca, who had coordinated the artistic projects in Mexico in 1994, was promoted to executive co-director. Subsequent incarnations of inSITE (2000–01, 2005) have been sponsored by a combination of non-profit institutions in the U.S. and public institutions in Mexico.

By 2005, inSITE had morphed from its modest beginnings as a small art event in San Diego to an international, bi-cultural, and bi-lingual event that included two executive co-directors, more than 30 artists, a team of curators and assistants, and multiple sponsoring institutions and foundations located in both Mexico and the U.S. A behemoth of an event, it needed an artistic director; Cuenca and Krichman tapped Osvaldo Sánchez, part of the curatorial team in 2000–01, for the position. As the first ever artistic...