I live across the street from an empty lot—two, actually. The first (let’s call it “Lot A”) is directly across the street and faces the front entrance to my apartment building. For twenty years it has been advertised as the site of a new coop building project. The ramshackle and weather-beaten plywood barrier that fronts the property is “secured” by a chained link gate with huge gaps on either side where people can, and do, enter.

The second lot (“Lot B”) is on a side street. From my fourth floor perch I look down on its cement perimeter with the embedded metal fence that marks an intended outdoor parking lot. At the front, a paved drive barely makes it past the padlocked gate before fading to dirt road and grass. In the middle of Lot B there are several mature of trees and scattered weed-bushes. Someone mows the abundant grass regularly.

Languishing between real estate booms and busts, both properties have become social spaces. Lot A is a modest community garden maintained by a few people who live in my building. They’ve created a modest pebble-lined path that meanders past small plots of flowering plants. Occasionally, I see a neighbor or two working on the garden. No authority or owner has bothered to shoo them away, so the garden stays, and changes with the seasons.

Lot B has become the local dog run. Neighbors bring their pets to the property and unleash them to run around and play. How do I know this? I hear the barking of dogs as I work on my computer. Occasionally, I hear what I presume are dog owners’ voices. But mostly I see the leftovers of their activities in the constant rearrangement of several white plastic folding chairs, a wicker chair and a red plastic table that appear to be community property.

On any given day, the chairs may be lined up neatly against a secondary cement wall at the center of the property. Or they may have moved to independent spots about the lot, each having taken up the posture of its last inhabitant, with the red table turned, perhaps, on its side. I experience Lot B as a series of narrative stills in which evidence of the most recent social encounter is suggested by its physical remains. (Sometimes I string the stills together and imagine a film where Lot B’s furnishings gallop and tumble about the property.)

This puts me in mind of artists from the 1990s who presented social encounter “leftovers” as works of art, within the confines of the gallery space—artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija. Now, as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it would seem that the artist and gallery are no longer needed. Neither is the documentary camera. All that is needed is daily life, and someone to recognize the evidence thereof.

Image: “Untitled, 2002 (the raw and the cooked)” ©Kioku Keizo