There's a strain of contemporary art that has been asking since the 1960s--and even before, if you count Duchamp, which you should--about exactly what it is we do when we're in an art gallery. The passive act of standing and looking (and, by extension, accepting without questioning) has been gradually chipped away. The acts of art that mapped this change were, by turns, transgressive and aggressive (I'm thinking of Bruce Nauman's excessively narrow built corridors; his 1968 video Walk with Contrapposto shows him walking through one such construction), and gentle and expansive (as in, beyond the walls of the gallery, such as Yoko Ono's Sky TV, which broadcast images of the sky into the gallery).

Go here, touch this, be inside this: The bossiness of the artist had everything to do with art becoming something other than aesthetic, something philosophical, something performance-oriented (or "performative," in the current, awkward parlance) that is only completed by the participation of the viewer.

John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler have been putting on exactly these kinds of shows for a few years now, gaining a kind of renown around Cornish, where they all studied. Meg Shiffler, who inaugurated Consolidated Works' SOLO Project Room with an installation by the trio (they're still casting around for a clever cooperative name), told me about an event when guests showed up at their studio to find the door locked, party sounds coming from within, and an enormous pile of keys in the hallway, only one of which worked in the studio door. A frenzy of searching for the right key ensued, and ended when the public broke down the door, only to find the artists drinking beer and having a good laugh--at them. The show, as it turns out, was their own frantic search and frustrated solution.

At ConWorks they've built, in a fairly large space, a series of smaller, odd-shaped rooms, pillars, and nooks, a kind of maze that both plays on and against your instincts about which way to turn, about how to negotiate an obstacle, about where you can and can't go. Throughout this maze there are various objects--a giant pencil suspended from the ceiling, a telephone in the wall, a swollen stack of folded newspapers growing out from a wall--that tweak common notions of what is allowable in a gallery. Yes, you can push on the pencil and watch it inscribe faint marks in the floor. Yes, you can pick up the phone and listen to recorded messages. No, you can't pull out one of the newspapers and watch the whole structure tumble down. But for the most part, you have to negotiate these actions yourself, using your own sense of appropriateness to guide you.

At Suyama Space, the artists have built four plywood structures that invoke a small, pre-fab house in negative space. Like the SOLO installation, it's not instinctively easy to penetrate: The insides can only be broached through rather narrow openings on each side. This is less of a Skinneresque experiment than an inside joke--an art space, often praised for its lovely openness, reduced and crowded, but by a structure that is not inappropriate, since the gallery is contained in an architecture studio. The levels of containment (street, studio, gallery, installation) are what make the performance work, the more so when there are people inside.

The installations by Sutton/Beres/Culler are less existentially dampening than Nauman's, earthier than Ono's, suggesting questions not only about claustrophobia and movement, but also free will and knowingly participating in being manipulated. That these questions may have been asked and answered before doesn't make these shows any less satisfying, largely because the immediate experience of being inside a constructed space is so... immediate, and the surprises about what is and isn't intentional (especially at ConWorks) keep coming. (Most everything is intentional.)

At the end of a hallway in the SOLO space, there's a doorway, a video monitor, and a pile of keys. As you hunt through the keys for the one that fits, you watch yourself hunting, misbehaving, performing. But should you find the key, you'll discover... well, I'll let you cross that barrier for yourselves.