The descriptions of the actions Persona a persona and Pre-evento written by Alfred Wenemoser (b. 1954) are crucial to exploring and interrogating non-object art from Venezuela. Indeed, Wenemoser is an important representative of such art in the country. Written in the third person, this double proposal is featured in the book Acciones frente a la Plaza. Reseñas y documentos de siete eventos para una nueva lógica del arte venezolano, a compilation by María Elena Ramos. Before moving to Caracas in 1980, Wenemoser had made installations and done performances in Vienna. Soon after arriving in the country, the Austrian artist participated in Arte Bípedo, an event organized by Marco Antonio Ettedgui at the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN), with works that—like these two later proposals—questioned the ties between work of art and viewer. It was in 1981, in the framework of Acciones frente a la Plaza, that Wenemoser enacted Pre-evento and Persona a persona.
Pre-evento—an action in which the artist buried himself until only his head was left above ground—was presented in the Parque los Caobos in Caracas on March 15. That experience attempted to change the meaning of “reality” and “perception.” Persona a persona was performed at the dome in Plaza Bolívar in the same city. On March 21 and 22, the public lined up in a five-meter-deep tent in order to be interviewed by the artist in an “attempt” to establish a sincere dialogue that would give rise to an “alliance” and, hence, erase the boundaries between “emitter and receptor.” The action was an attempt, then, to undermine the discourse of “body language” developed in the late seventies in which the artist dominated the action and incited powerful and aggressive emotions. That discourse established a vast distance between the artist and the audience, which is precisely what Persona a persona attempted to do away with. In the performance, Wenemoser neither dominated nor ordered, but rather invented and recreated situations in conjunction with his guest. In the words of Calzadilla, in that “non-performance” Wenemoser acted as a “demystifier of the creative act.”