Good evening. I'm Joanna Marsh, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and it is my pleasure to welcome you here tonight for the third and final lecture in the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture series for the 2010 calendar year. As always, we'd like to extend our very special thanks to Clarice Smith, whose generous support makes these programs possible. -applause- Before I introduce our speaker tonight, a few housekeeping issues. I'd like to ask all of you to turn off your cell phones and other mobile devices please. Also there will be a question and answer period following the lecture, and we kindly request that all questions be addressed at either of the two microphones which are positioned in the aisles midway up the auditorium. Tonight's program is being webcast live so we want to ensure that all of the questions and answers are heard by our web audience. Now to the main event. We are thrilled to have Sarah Sze with us this evening. The artist joins us from New York City where she lives and works. Sze received a Bachelor's, excuse me a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale university in 1991 and an MFA in 1996 from The School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2003, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Genius Award, and her work can be found in public and private collections worldwide. Most recently, she's had solo exhibitions at Tanya Bonakdor Gallery in New York, Victoria Miro Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Since the late 1990s, Sze has been creating site-specific sculptural installations that penetrate walls, buildings, and even burrow down into the ground. These intricate yet immense works profoundly affect the way we see and experience space whether it's a gallery, a domestic interior, or the corner of a street. Over the years, Sze's labor-intensive practice has become a signature part of her sculptural aesthetic. Each installation is constructed from a myriad of everyday objects from cotton buds and tea bags to water bottles, ladders, and light bulbs. These commonplace items are presented as leftovers or traces of human behavior that have been set free from their utilitarian purpose and are imbued with a new vitality and presence in each of her installations. Sze's careful consideration of the tension between the throw away and the precious, the humble and the monumental, the incidental and the essential, generates an experience of space that both disorients and reorients the viewer at every turn. Now please join me in welcoming Sarah Sze. -applause- Thank you so much. It was a really thoughtful, wonderful introduction. I also want to thank Betsy Broun for having me here and Nona Martin for hosting me and arranging this. And of course Clarice Smith. Lectures like this were so important to me when I was a student, And I think it's wonderful that this series exists, so thank you Clarice Smith. I'm going to start here with some early work. This is one of one of the first pieces that I did in graduate school, and Joanna made a really nice point about this trying to figure out, trying to locate where and when an object is utilitarian and when it's aesthetic, and I'd started as an undergraduate at Yale. I'd started by studying painting and architecture, and I came to sculpture really from those two directions, and the first question that I really posed when I came to sculpture was how do you create value in an object? How do I create it? How do you create it? How does society create it? And I wanted to set this problem for myself where I took a kind of material that was only thought of in practical sense. It was very essential, utilitarian material, but it wasn't thought of aesthetically. So this entire piece is made of toilet paper, and the way that I did it was I sat in one corner of my studio, and I took one sheet, and I crafted in a certain way until I got bored, and I put it down. And I wanted to cover the space in a way that questioned monumentality as well. Something that felt like it was present everywhere, but also you could just blow it away. I was thinking about the idea. I'm going to go back to this one, but of a weather and a space. How the temperature of this room, if it were hot, would totally change our experience of the space, but it's something that we don't realize or think about, lighting or temperature, weather in a space, so actually this piece was originally done in my studio. And I was asked to put in a show of young graduate students in New York. And in my studio it was sort of, as I said, I just put it down as I went and backed out of the space. And they wanted me to put it in the middle of the gallery floor, like a rug. It was very important to me that there's this strange intersection of what was a real life situation and art so that these two things were melded in a way that when you came to it, you should really question where the art began and where it ended. So there was actually a back storage room. It was actually the building of Leo Castelli's gallery space, and this back empty storage room was like this. Also a kind of interesting space because there were these lined with windows and this beautiful light. But you know of course they'd put up a white wall to create a white box. But if one of the things that I also like to play with is to play with natural light and found light and to have a piece that actually does reflect real weather so that this piece looks different at different times of the day. After that piece, I started thinking about really mixing what is a found object and what is a crafted object. Where the space was you know a usable space, and where it became an artwork. So I went back to my studio, and I actually took all the books off of the shelf. I laid them all on the floor, and then I just pulled all the things that I had in my bag out, and I started mixing this. So you'll see there's the toilet paper pieces mixed in here with all the things, my keys, my sneakers. There were toothpicks. I had saltines. They were all sort of things also that I was using in my studio. As a graduate student, I would spend the night there when I was working so I had all these strange things, but I just brought them all out and lay them down and tried to mix these two things together. So things like my desk, just became impossible to use. As you see in the corner, there's the desk chair, and this idea also that the artwork had completely taken over and the studio itself had become an artwork. These are loosely in chronological order, and I chose pieces that I thought brought up interesting questions for me. My husband is a scientist. He always looks at artwork by asking a question. Because as a scientist, that's how you start an experiment. You have to have a question so he's always looking at artwork, like What is the question? So I think it's also an interesting way to talk about work. So you know one of the questions I had here was what can you do in a sculpture that you can't do in a painting or with architecture. So one of the things that I was interested, if you look at the early work, a lot of it is on the floor, a lot of it is really in many ways one-dimensional, it sort of blankets the architecture if you will. But I wanted to think about gravity as the essential formal qualities that you couldn't do in painting. So this is really one of the first sculptures that was actually, to me, fundamentally about gravity. It was in Berlin, at the Berlin Biennial, and it was in Albert Speer's studio. He was the architect for Adolf Hitler. This is a very haunted weighted space, and the whole building had been bombed in World War II, and so the walls were actually falling apart, and there were little measures that they had put in to measure the movement of the walls falling apart. So I decided to do a piece that actually followed, that there's a crack, if you can see it here. That actually followed the crack of one of the cracks in the wall, and escaped out through this hatch in the roof, and the piece is called "Second Means of Egress." And I want to have that and really think about making a piece that felt like it was trying to escape out or actually coming down through an escape route, and also to think about building a piece that felt like it was built beyond its own capacity to support itself that it actually had this kind of ambition that was beyond its own structural support. So the whole piece was made primarily of matchsticks, so this idea of a second means of egress, of like an emergency situation of the potential for danger in any building. So there were things like it really capitalized on the exit signs. There was a fire extinguisher at the end. Matchsticks are the main structure throughout the whole piece, and the piece actually moved, and later on I'll show you some videos. All of these works have a movement to them. I'm interested in the kind of movement that is like the futurists where there's no actual movement, but the gestures imply movement. And also a movement that is the result of a natural phenomena, so I'll have fans in the piece that will blow things. So you have this kind of sporadic movement and lessen this kind of mechanical movement that putting a motor into a piece. But I'll show you some videos a little further on. It's a piece I did in Venice, and I became interested in this idea that the piece itself had a kind of behavior. And my idea for this piece was that as the piece got near light, it actually grew. So I started with these lights in the work, and generally my work tries not to use the light of the space. It tries to have this own internal system of light, air, water, in the work. Because I started thinking about this idea of value, and thinking about how to make the work actually feel as if it had life breathed into it. This is sort of a very old sculptural idea of how do you breathe life into inanimate objects or materials? So I wanted actually the sculptures themselves to feel alive. So the idea was that these pieces would go very quickly to a location where they got light, and then when they got light, they would grow. Also had this kind of relationship to the way urban cities develop. They develop around locations. They have a highway develops around a neighborhood. So the piece came out of this room that was actually I found under the plan that it was totally covered, but it was an old closet. So I opened the closet, and the piece sped across the ceiling, and then there was a window that had also been covered by a white wall at the end, and I opened that window. The piece went out that window into the canal, and then it had a weight in an arm that bobbed down on the canal, and when the boats went by, it actually knocked on the window about coming back in. So I chose this piece because this was the first piece where I was asked to do a very large space. This is the Carte Foundation in Paris, and it's designed by Jean Nouvel. There's a series that a few pieces in here and in my career I've been asked to do site-specific installations in very very iconic architecture, so when I do that, I'm always thinking about what's the conversation with that building? What kind of marriage does it have with that building? This building is a very beautiful building by Jean Nouvel, but it's a very difficult building for artists because this is the show space, so if you're a painter, it's tough. They end up putting up a lot of walls, but for me it's a very interesting space. But for me, I'd been doing a lot of pieces that were very small scale. This idea of the kind of work that was built up out of accumulation of very small things and often in places that were not immediately presented to you, so in a lot of museum spaces, I would do things in sort of hidden corners or trying to excavate spaces where were you didn't expect to see art. I was interested in this idea of art being a discovery instead of framed work saying "I'm important." "Now, I'm in a frame in a museum. So you know I'm important," but to put in places where you actually found them yourself, so this was interesting because they didn't have necessarily have the opportunity. I could have done something that was very very small, but I felt like I needed to pull the scale up in the piece. So what I did was I did this piece that felt like it had grown into the architecture. When you walked in, this is the first thing you saw, and in like many of these buildings, Jean Nouvel had designed everything. He designed all the lamps. He designed all the handles, the toilet paper roll holder. Everything was him. First thing I did was put one of my lamps in and have it kind of invade his when you first walk in. Then when you turn to the left, this is what you saw, and the piece was made up primarily of ladders, and I'd like the conversation of the aluminum with the aluminum of the building so it is actually the same materials as the building, but the ladders made sense to me because they were literally built, they're designed entirely with scale in mind and the scale of the body to architecture. So every rung, every decision in design is about your body in relation to architecture. So there were 39 ladders in this piece, and I cut them up, and rejoined them. One of the questions was how do you, how do you make a sculpture on this scale and still make it feel light, still make it feel fragile, which were ideas that I was interested in, this feeling that it felt live like a live event, like it just happened. But you know that when you build on the scale that there has to be planning, there has to be engineering. One of the things that I started to think about was this very old architectural idea, which is the relationship between structure and ornament, and it's fundamental discussion. The modern architects said an extreme example would be the Pompidou Center where all of the actual workings of the building become the decoration as opposed to like the train station here. It's all about the ornament. You don't really know how the building is set up so the way that I played with that is I took things like this clamp here, and I clamped the sculpture to the side. This is actually his stairway. But those clamps actually do nothing so if you look very closely, You can tell that it's not hanging there. That this is structurally not connected to that. But you know, peripheralIy you imagine that this thing is clamped on, and you wonder about the weight. There's a lot of that going on. Structurally I also played with this idea of a vortex so there's actually a lot of empty space up here. I did this piece almost entirely all on sight. I didn't have as much time, and probably would have been nice to have, but it's one of the things that did to fill this space this kind of vortex quality of rising up was one of the ways that I sort of felt like it could occupy this space. I think we had 20 days to make the piece. All the ladders were made there on site. And this is another thing that helped. I put a lot of ceiling lamps very close to the floor so it actually levitated the piece. So there was this idea which I brought up, this idea of the piece itself being an entire ecosystem that was a life support system for its own survival, so the whole piece has a lot of fake flora in it, if you will. This is plastic, but it has one live plant here, and it has a watering system that started here and dripped down, and these all goes this entire sort of ludicrous system to water this one plant down at the bottom. So this questioning of what is actually a decorative thing in the piece? And what is actually doing something? The whole piece is actually watering this plant. And so this is the real plant. And also again from the Venice pieces thiidea that in certain locations, there was this kind of hyper active growth. This is also it happened. So around these lights, things started to develop and grow in my mind, and there's the light there, right there. This piece had a ceiling fan in it that was on, and this whole piece was hanging. So the entire piece was rocking because of the ceiling fan. The ceiling fan was slightly weighted on one side. It wasn't again this idea that it wasn't a mechanical predictable movement. It had this kind of jerking quality of an unweighted fan. And then I made the piece squeeze out, this idea that was like, squeeze out of the architecture itself out into space so that almost felt like this was a tail or trail, a beginning or an end to the piece. So this piece I put in because I was thinking about the idea of how to make a piece that's site-specific with a white wall. And I decided to really think about a natural event happening to that. What happens to a white wall if you can neglect it? It starts to peel. It starts to have this potentially this water. Many of us have had this water damage situation where the drywalling, and to make the piece, that was actually the paint itself, and I was actually looking through the slides for this lecture. I'd never thought of this, but actually it's like a painting. This is a sculpture made out of the paint of the wall so this is all dried paint. This is all dried paint here, and I actually made the wall outside of the museum and just installed the wall. So I dried all this paint and cut it and had it peel out so I'm also interested in this idea of time and how you can see the evidence in time through physical gestures. So this idea of a decay or accrual, that you can see in physical things. So this idea that this was a very slow natural process that happened over time, but then I wanted to play or this idea that then it was maybe discovered by someone. So when you came to the museum things like this, and this seemed very abrupt and awkward. So you come, and this is a very quick act. It's like the mark of someone coming and saying okay, this is a construction site. This is a work in progress. If you go upstairs to where the Alexis Rahman is, is it the big door? I wanted you to come into the museum and say is this a piece? Is this not a piece, and you walk in and this kind of idea that it was almost like an archaeological site or a site where the human hand had come in and said I'm investigating this lamp. But then these two moments start to meld so it's almost like there's, in my mind, there was a natural event, it was discovered, but then the natural event almost starts to take over, and the two things come together, and again things that are used, they're all these ideas of measuring the natural phenomenon of this event, but then the measuring tools just become aesthetic within the work itself. So this is the San Francisco MOMA, and it's a very rigorously symmetrical building, and I want to play with this idea of a piece that actually seemed very spontaneous. Again this idea of something that happened very quickly in time, and you'll see as we get into the details, and I wanted this idea that something had just fallen, tumbled through space, and then slowly slowly over time had this different kind of accrual of information. So when you first walk in, this is what you see, and one of the things that I'm interested in, I think in most of my work is these two perspectives. A very distant perspective where you get an overall view and then a very intimate view. This is something I grew up around, Chinese scrolls in our house, and you have these large perspectives in many Asian landscapes, and then you have these tiny tiny views into... it'll be like a farmer milking a cow. So you have this overwhelming nature and then you shoot down. There's not a lot of middle range. Turner does it too in his paintings. It's extreme natural environments, and the tiny little ship being overtaken, and so I like this idea too that you come in and it's almost like this abstract gesture. When you get closer to it, you start to maybe understand more what it is. So this is actually a car that I chopped up into five pieces, and I guess more like the ladders. It was this idea of taking an object and then trying to deconstruct it to the point where it barely maintained its own identity as that object. But I was interested in this piece, and this goes back to the idea of what a sculpture can do about, sculpture in the round. The one of things that's really interesting about this, they call it the oculus, was that you move around in the space and to all these, many of you have probably been there, and you have all of these views, different views, on the sculpture. So I wanted to play with this idea of sculpting around so that the piece really evolved and had different experience of these five pieces as you move through them. So these are the same two pieces from many different perspectives. Many of you probably seen the Bernini's in Rome. You see something like Apollo and Daphne, and you move just one foot to the left or right, and it's an entirely different sculpture. I really wanted to play with that idea of your movement, that kind of your actual movement in the space changing the sculpture itself. So those were the first two. This is the third piece. Then again, the architecture allows for these interesting views, and this is the view of that piece from inside. And it had a very intimate feeling. It was almost like looking into that, inside of an easter egg. And they asked this piece to be done for a group show. It was supposed to be up for three months. And this was a very intimate experience because you came up the stairs. There were no guards around, and it's right in a corner, and you walk up, and you have this very intimate one-on-one experience with this section of the piece, but it's totally open to you and to touching, and they actually acquired this piece, and they kept it up for three years. There's a question that comes up a lot, and you'll all have a chance to ask questions, but was not damaged for three years. Nobody touched the work. The only thing that they did, which occasionally people do with my work, is they left things in the work. Which usually they're in the vocabulary of the work so no one who works in the museum even noticed, and then I come, and I think I didn't put that there. And this is a close-up of the last section of the work which was also in the stairway. With a door, just the door, and this idea that the door had fallen there, and then this kind of strange over time growth happens to this piece. Just talking about this idea of how you move through space and how the work changes, I think a lot about the work as almost like a book. The first thing you're going to see when you walk into space, the second thing, the third, and how you can create a first line in a book, and how important that is and then a crescendo, so that the piece will wax and wane as you move through it. This was a piece that I did in Japan, and I wanted it to feel like it's a large as you moved around the stair, it's in a stair, It came together and to this location. So this is what it looks like at the top of the stair, and almost this idea from talking from the San Francisco piece, almost this idea that a larger hand than mine had made this piece. I was really interested in what happened. How does a piece? How do I make a piece that looks like it's made by centrifugal force? That wind has blown or water has blown. Instead of making landscape, sort of mimicking landscape in the way that landscape behaves. This is another picture of it. Then when you actually came all the way around, the idea was that then it fell apart in space. So you have this one location where it seems complete, seems to be just right, and then it disappears as you move it to the end. I put this in just to give you some examples of work that I've done outside. This is a piece at MIT. There's a few versions of it. The original title was "Fire Escape for a Cat," so the idea was that it is a fire escape, and I was interested in this idea of how do you deal with the scale of outdoors? How do you deal the scale of architecture? But I was also interested in this idea of how do you make a work that site-specific wherever it goes? And that you could have a site-specific piece that was actually like a kit. So this piece comes, and conceptually, the ideas you have, you have 12 ladders, which there's three elements here. There's the ladders. There's the balconies. And there's the stair. So you could have an erector set, and a set of these, and in any place, we could make a sculpture here with them. And it would be totally different than a sculpture here. And that it would grow like a virus or like a vine through any space, and any combination could work. This is the site for a piece that I did in in Manhattan for the Public Art Fund, and it was a corner where they actually have an artwork regularly. But one of the problems with Manhattan is it's such a spectacle. The volume is so high on your senses that to get anyone to actually look or stop is a huge, huge challenge. So I was thinking of all these things, how to do it, and I decided that the best thing to do was actually to mirror the, to mirror the space itself, to mirror the buildings, to mirror the scale of the city. So this is where they usually have the artwork set, but I decided to mirror this corner up here. And this is actually the photoshop for the piece that I presented as a proposal, and it's sort of funny because it actually looks very much like the piece. You'll see that the actual images of the piece are really close, and when I was looking through the slides too, I was thinking about how it's interesting that so much architecture we see now actually is affected by these programs like Photoshop because the photoshop determines what the work will look like, but that's a side point. This is the model for it, the low-tech model. So the idea was to totally disorient the viewer and to have, Manhattan's all about rising. It's all about how high can you get in space. But actually to totally disoriented the viewer and pull them down in space and also tilt their sense of gravity. So that's the model. So the piece actually does this. It goes about 12 feet below ground. And this is the finished piece. A really interesting piece to me also that I didn't realize it would do this, but to me, it was an interesting intersection of sculpture, architecture, and painting because the window really became a framed space like a painting or like a Joseph Cornell. It was really like a vista, and then it had a sculptural scale, but also obviously it was imitating architecture. So this one piece I thought I'd give you some images of how it was made. Because it lends to that. So this is my studio in New York. This is a mock-up of what we built, that the actual framework was built and fabricated outside of the studio. But this is actually part of what went down below the structure that went down below. But this was a very important thing to have because the perspective into the space was really limited. So it was really important to have that frame in space. So this is the side of the piece, and this is part of what I built inside, inside when you looked in the window. One of the practical problems of the piece was actually getting it out of my studio because it's too big for my studio. So the piece actually had to break down into five sections just to leave the studio. So these are what the sections look like. That's us going down the hallway. That's it when it arrived on site coming off the truck, and here's the hole. We were slightly delayed because they ran into an Richard Artschwager from the 1960s that was left down there. They said to us that you have one day from morning until evening to install this. So that's also why in the studio, we had to really build the whole thing. So because, just for logistical reasons about being in Manhattan, we had to put the pieces together on site. This is the morning. You'll see by the end it becomes night so here's the corner, and here's the corners as it arrived and came off the truck. There's it going down. There's me looking worried. And so it's evening by the time we get it in the hole, and there's going to the hole, and that's it at night, and actually another thing that was interesting about, I mean I always find that the best parts of work are things that you didn't know would happen or that you discover are going to happen in the process, and I think the night view was really the most interesting because the other thing that was interesting about the work was how the tension between the public and the private and how do you create intimacy in a really public space so all these windows are mirrored in here, and this idea of looking into an interior and seeing that and watching it from the outside was really heightened. It was also interesting because it's right outside the zoo, and I hadn't thought of this either, but to see the window you had to crouch, and they're all these children who came right up to the window. It was their size. And these are some images of the interior. One last point from the outside is I was really interested in this tension between not knowing whether, in your imagination, not knowing whether it was actually coming out of the Earth or whether it['s] like something that's been in the sand and on the beach and that washed up, and then it reveals itself as the sand goes down. Or something that was sinking. So that what it did to actually this surface and drew your attention to this, which is a very beautiful thing around the park, this conversation between this brick and this brick, but I'm interested in that thing, I was talking about it with the Berlin piece of this tension of is it rising, is it falling, trying to find a location where the work is teetering between doing several things at once. So the interior was, I wanted to play with your sense of gravity so you went in, when you looked inside, you couldn't tell what a floor plan really was. There was only one thing in the piece that was actually gravitationally correct. If there's an image of it, I don't think there is. There was a plumb bob that went right down the middle that when you found it, you can tell where obviously it was doing what it's supposed to do. It was telling you where gravity was. So this is a piece I did after that or actually the opposite. This I did before and the idea here also was in a more subtle actually, this idea of taking a basic physical quality of your relationship to space and shifting it, and I was interested in the idea, if your gravity slightly shifted that your whole sense of seeing, the whole way you see becomes heightened because you have to stop and try and reorient yourself in the space. So this idea of reorienting and disorienting the viewer in space as they move through so that you actually look more, and you discover more is what's interesting to me. It's like when you're in a foreign country, and you don't understand the language, and you look at people, and you actually think that you start imagining in a different way or I do. If I'm sitting in France and looking and trying to decipher what people are talking about, you have a heightened awareness of yourself, I think. So this is in the gallery space, and I took out the wall obviously between the two, between the two rooms. When you entered, there's a whole bunch of strings that come out of here. This is something that people, this is at the MSA Chicago, and they always put on the name tag for it. They always talk about this one thing I did talk about which is true that I had just seen "The Last Supper," Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" in Rome, and it's such an incredible thing to see in real life, one because the sighting of it is so bizarre. Those of you have seen this and most of you probably know this, but the doorway cut into it so that you get through, and the way it actually holds the entire wall, It's really an installation in the space and the room how you know the perspective in the when you walk into the room because it really occupies the entire wall is so interesting to me. And I also was interested in how when you looked under the table, the perspective starts with the toes and the toes beneath the table and the pieces of bread beneath the table and all of these little details that shoot you back into space other than actually these lines. But I wanted to play with that in the space. I also wanted to play with this idea, that of entering a piece, but not knowing you'd enter it. So that was actually a really hard thing to do here was when you first came in you walked under, and by the time you realized you're in the piece, you'd already made the decision unconsciously to be in it because one of the things I'm not interested in with installation is this idea that now I'm inside the piece, now I'm outside. Where there's almost a precipice where you go into an artwork and I'm interested in this idea that you find yourself or discover yourself in the work. I put this in because I thought was an interesting example of how to deal with scale. The Carte Foundation, what I did was up the scale on the piece in the work, but this is a consult in Sweden, and it's a massive space, it's like a Kmart. It's huge, and the way to deal with it again, it was how do you deal with this. So my idea was to make sure you make it like a drawing. It's a very beautiful space. Everything is white. The wood is white, but to have the piece so much like a trace or a drawing in the space, and just take the entire floor plan like a piece of paper and draw a line through it. The only thing that existed besides that wasn't white was this mat when you first came in. So a very heavy-handed gesture. I broke this down and made it like a Hansel and Gretel trail into the piece. And then there was this idea of these camp sites or these locations, and that's how I focused people into details that you would see these long lines in these detailed places, so it's almost like taking a trail. So we turn the corner. This is what you see underneath. My husband's family is Indian, and they're obsessed with rugs, and under the beds there are piles of rugs. And I was thinking of doing a portrait of him. So I started this idea of doing a rug, but I started making them out of just small pieces of actual yarn, this very laborious process, then just covering things around it. But I was thinking this was like a tag or a marking in certain locations, and when you're hiking and you go to certain locations, you see the remnants of someone having been there and a trail. So this idea that there's a trail that you follow through here. So these are the lines coming out of that, and it leads to this. There's a hole actually in the floor. So it leads you to this, and this is a tree, if you will, that's made out of all these twigs that I just found around the constella, and then I used these dowels to actually support them, but none of them actually connected. If you look closely, they're all just a bunch of twigs that are supported by this, and I like this idea that the actual scaffolding, and the twig are equal in volume, and there's the plumb from the ceiling that's trying to reach up to. There's this that we're still playing with this theme of actually your floor plane, not being able to hold gravity. So I was also thinking about the floor actually being different kinds of water in different places. So this is just a string but it does this thing to your eye where you really feel like it has the ripples of the water here again. This is like a different kind of water. This is another location where this shows up, and there's the entrance. There's one entrance from outside where that rug was. The other entrance was from the library or the bookstore and the library. They have a very beautiful library there so if you entered from this side, I'm always thinking about so where are people going to start? This is a very architectural idea. How do you enter a building? How does your experience unfold through the entrance to the exit? So if you enter through this way, it's this slow spill of the act. These are actually the books from the library, piled in. This is like a library cart, so it slowly becomes more and more orchestrated as you get further into the piece from that direction. And these are just different locations of feeling this idea of leftovers of an event that happened. I was interested in this idea of the leftovers of an event because again to me, it had this, it harkened back this idea of value of how trying to make the work feel like it was a live event. The value of something like seeing live jazz as opposed to recorded jazz. Or the thrill of seeing athletics where you see in that moment that confluence of luck and skill that come together and the thrill of actually seeing something live rather than seeing it recorded. So to have these pieces feel like...one of the most common questions I get is how long did it take you to make this and what will happen to it afterwards? And it's a very mundane question but I think is actually a very profound question because it immediately, you think about time, and these are just objects, but you think about that the existence of this and how you have this potentially of this anxiety about how is this going to survive, and I wanted to have that be, the volume on that be very high so you had this feeling of value in the experience that it was something that was finite and had a lifespan and a death. So this is a piece I did after the piece in Sweden, and I started in Sweden the work, you actually couldn't, there was no, you actually had to walk over the work to get through it. So those strings, there was no way to see things unless you actually navigated like, stepped over things, and that was actually part of the work. So I like this idea of actually thinking about the work as being like a trap. So for this piece, I started thinking about that the whole space was rigged as a trap so you see these things actually, these strings are the idea of these almost having fuses and the whole thing that is you move through it. If you hit any one of these things, it'll do this domino effect, and the whole piece would fall apart or that you're coming in at a place where it was falling apart. So this is a piece I did in Japan, in a Renzo Piano building. It's the Hermes Building in Tokyo, and it's a really gorgeous, elegant building. The entire building from the outside are these square blocks, and you have none of this. You don't see this from the outside. So you have no sense of scale. It's just like a glass sheet. It's like an iceberg. Because that's how we always, we're always measuring the building because you see the floors through the windows so it's really just one window, and structurally, it's incredible. It's actually a hanging window. This is the structure, and this whole sheet is hanging off of it. The architect who realized the work of Renzo's design said that they could never do it anywhere but Japan because the engineering and the precision of the actual construction was so complex, and in Japan actually they're very good at doing that. But so this is the structure, and this is the hanging curtain so I want to play with that idea. So my piece is right here. This is one of the columns, and all of those objects are actually, they have a hole in them, and they fit over the actual column. But when you're in space, unfortunately I don't have an image the way it hits the ceiling, but it just looks like it's actually jammed up and piled up in the space. And I decided that I wanted to play with this idea. From the outside you have this shooting down the side so I put these mirrors in so that you actually had the same quality from outside that you had in the inside, which is this intense visual fall through space because there's nothing that breaks it up. And then I took out little panels in the floor so that this illusion that if this goes straight down, it's broken. But then it actually has an even scary or fall to it because then it doesn't actually have a floor. One of the things that I was interested in was also taking some of very very elegant space. It's in Japan when the strange thing is a lot of the best show spaces are in commercial spaces. So a lot of the museums, that's where you go, and they're very hidden spaces, and they're very elegant. But I wanted this piece to feel almost like someone reckless had come in, and this event had happened. And that this was this edge of the Earth that the whole piece was falling off of, and it has this view from above actually in the space, and all of these lines were leading up to this column to in real space look like it was supporting the piece. I was also interested in this idea of I love Ukiyo-e prints and Japanese woodblock prints and the use of white in prints in general because you're always using, it's always a decision how much to preserve of the white of the paper or not. That's what you're starting with is white, but in the use of white in traditional Japanese woodblock printing is incredible and so I wanted partially because the way that it absorbs light, and so one of the things that's one of the most celebrated subject matters is are winter landscapes and the use of snow and how negative space can fall...this thing where it falls totally flat, the white, but also because what is around, it actually falls, and you have this perspective, so unlike the other perspective lines that I was thinking about, classically Leonardo. This is an interesting way to try and talk about the flat picture plane space, and how you can shoot it back. I was thinking about a winter landscape with all of this paper, but so then these are, if you look at them, these are actually pieces of cloth and spray paint. Actually they were mimicking the shadows themselves. And there's really bizarrely a very mundane other side to that beautiful front in this gallery space. So it's actually quite ugly actually. If you turned your back, it's like you could only take one picture of the space that looked good but I made the piece go, and this sort of snowscape fall into this and open the back to reveal the innards of the building. So this a piece that I did in England, and I wanted, took this after the Hermes piece, I was thinking about how something trails out or these fundamental building blocks. The beginning to the end of the pieces. I'm going to show you a video of this one because it has, its central piece is this kind of movement, but in this building, it's called "The Blue Coat." It's a museum, designed so that the real element of detail is actually the bricks. I'm sorry I don't have a better image of this. But when they're done, is they take in all the bricks, and instead of having the length of the brick, they have the wall built like this, so the short end of the brick is actually facing forward, so logistically it makes no sense because you don't need the brick to be this way. It just quadruples the numbers of bricks you need, but aesthetically, it was very beautiful. So I decided to play with this idea of bricks, and all these bricks are made out of paper, but again, it's the white.You actually read them as weight when you see them, and when you look down into the space, this is what you saw. The piece, you'll see, I'll show you a little video, but the piece is centered around this little carved out area. And you see there's a fan here, and the string drops down. This is so you can enter from any of these balconies. This is from below. This is also from below. There's the, this is the hanging brick, and then there's this idea that there was a brick factory over here where, if you thought these were real bricks, if you spent a long time, you could see exactly how they were made. I think I'll go to try out a video for this one. So like I said, that almost all the work actually has elements like this in it that move. And I've never done a lecture where I've shown videos, but all these videos I found on YouTube. I wrote them all, and I asked them if I had permission, and they all gave me permission, but I offered them money, but no one took money, so I sent them catalogues, but it's interesting. This is totally edited by a viewer. But you can see that this idea, that this is central moving thing that all of this is surrounded by, and this beautiful motion that a string does when you swing it this way, and then it has a brick, at the irony of having a brick at the bottom, but actually it's just a paper brick that's making it move like that. This fellow shows a lot of smaller details. So it's very small movement. One of the ideas for the brick was I actually had been in a car accident, and it was this intense spiraling of movement, and then the car stopped, I was thrown against the side of the highway. But there was one thing that kept moving, and there's this daze of this one thing. So it was like this idea. It was this calm moving thing in the midst of this very chaotic installation. But you'll see they're all these fluttering things. So this is the brick factory. So obviously at the brick factory, it's really clear, especially also because it's moving, that these things are made out of paper. This is the last show I'm going to show you, but it's a series of work. I just did this show at my gallery in New York in September, and what's interesting to me is you've seen all these things in succession, but they're all one work. They were always one work exhibited on their own or in a group show where you saw these other different kinds of work. The last show I did, I was interested in this challenge of how do you have several large installations in one location without what I think is often a problem to insulation, where you try and do that. Where you have a central piece and then you have the drawings. So you have the main dish and you have the appetizers, or you have several large installations. It just feels exhaustive so to really think about how to curate or choreograph a space so that the experience waxes and wanes as you move through it. I talked about that earlier but with your own work in several different pieces. So this is the entrance piece for the show, and I was thinking about this idea of, and actually there's a lot more work that I make that looks more like this, but often when I'm giving a lecture, I give the most photogenic work, which is often the larger installation because I think they're more interesting to look at in slides. But this piece was important because to me it would negotiate the entrance from the street. Manhattan you see all over the place. You see these stripped bikes more and more. So you see these change with just the remnants of the bike left over. And I wanted to have this piece that was something that you're used to seeing on the street in Manhattan. But it's displaced and in the gallery, so this is from outside. I actually stripped the bikes at this piece. I actually made on-site. So I just actually try riding my bike to the gallery to do the insulation, and then I thought this is interesting, an interesting thing to actually do is actually to make my bike into a piece. So I stripped the bike there, and I got another bike and strip that bike, and and to me this idea of the piece blurring into the gallery space was interesting so the first thing you see is these decals from the bike, actually put next to the decals of the gallery so the playful intersection of my hand and the gallery's name, I thought was funny because I saw this idea of a commercial space and their name, but the window being this interesting space to have a piece. And then they also have the next thing that you see is they have this, it's unusual for most guys, but they have a space where they have a library, and you don't usually see work there, but I decided to do a piece that felt like it was like an imposter in the space. These are all recyclables from that making of the work in my studio. So as I made the work, I had about three assistants with me. Every day after we ate our meal, we'd pour plaster into the food containers that we had the next day we'd open them. So it has actually a flux reference to this idea of marking time or marking consumption of your own food. Also this idea of a vessel that becoming a solid, a liquid become a solid. All of them are originals because the mold there is gone, but then I wanted to invade the space, and the rule is that it had to actually be doing something if it was on the shelf so all of these things actually end up being just book holders. If we turn they were on the floor, and they were hidden here and there, so they're like invaders, and they asked me about a title for this piece and for the show which I'd never done, but then I thought this is an interesting exercise. What would I title it? And I think there would have been, for me, the show probably would have been titled "Imposters and Impossibilities." So the larger projects are all impossibilities, and all the smaller projects or the pieces in here are imposters in the space. When you turn from the library, you saw this, and I put this curtain rod in here, and then these pieces of these thin strips of chains of ball bearing came down. So it was almost, this is what I think is a reference, for me was a reference in some ways Tores, and the bikes and this idea of pairs. He did these very beautiful pieces that were couples always. He did this beautiful piece where there are just two clocks that are totally in sinc. And so this idea was something I was thinking about, and he did these curtains, so it's a pretty direct reference to him, but they come down so they start and this line comes off the curtain and leads through the crack of the architecture. So you focus on this because it has this very detailed quality to it, this pretty generic stool that's made mostly out of toothpicks and the lamp also made out of toothpicks, but then when you turn, you look into the gallery, and this is what you see. One of the ideas here was this is a very awkward space, but I wanted to play with this idea of a sculpture being framed. Many of you may have seen the Taj Mahal, but it's so incredible to see in real life because it's actually, you look at pictures and you think it can't be more magnificent, but it's so breathtaking. Someone said to me it'll bring you to your knees, and you actually have that quality and the reason, for me, was very surprising because of the way you enter it. You enter it from very far away, and you go through a series of arches that are quite deep so you see it very far away. It's a tiny tiny building, floating, and your movement through it is through these dark spaces, and then you open up into court, and then you go into a dark space, and it's this aperture that gets closer and closer, and when you come out to the garden, it's just this incredible relief of light, and then theres a river behind it so it's totally framed, and you never see it. So it's just the building against the sky, and it has that incredible light hitting it, and the reflection of the water is also why it has that light. Anyway, not to compare this to that, but I did want to have this idea of a pictorial framing where you came in and you represented with this, and then I had this idea also that you were stopped in your tracks, so the whole piece is actually on a right angle. But the right angle is shifted so you don't really know how to enter it. I was also interested in this idea that at any one point, you have to make a decision about where to go. There's a larger idea about the work, but when you have so much visual information, you have at any one point, seven different directions you can go. Curators have talked about this, and I think it's an interesting idea that this is something that we actually, a way that we think. We're all trained to think, and children are trained to think even more just because so much of our information, so much over time is spent on the web. This idea that at any window you have six directions and that leads you in six directions. But any choice will lead you in this fractal way to a different visual experience. So that's the first entrance. I wanted you to be in the situation where you don't know. You move left or right. It's immediately a decision. I was also interested in this idea that I learned from Japanese gardens where they're totally non-hierarchical, but where they actually have a step in the garden where you have to look down, and when you look up, it's completely choreographed and everything is composed, but you feel like you're discovering something in nature. So you wander, and then there's a step and you look up, and everything is composed in space. And you wander, totally different than something like Versailles or a Palladian villa where there's this one place you're supposed to go. Your end experience is actually much more like a filmic experience of these, one juxtaposed with the next. So that was another compositional idea for this. So the interesting thing to me about this piece, if you took a left as you moved around, the piece actually splits into two sections, oddly. And you actually have a very direct walkway. So first you slowed down a lot. You don't know where to go, but as you move one direction, you realize it's actually, there's this pathway that you can go through. And as you move into that pathway, you actually end up, you move so quickly to that path you end up, you're inside the piece and then your scale completely shifts down, and you're in the scale of the shelves. And the shelves were this idea of cascading movement. It almost has this falling water or Frank Lloyd Wright quality to the plays with gravity, plays with this lightness that it... The Cantilever is a very beautifully, inherently it makes light but plays with gravity inherently and its structure. So the whole piece is really these cantilevers that fracture down. But they're really just a series of shelves and then when you get in closer, they all, you're in the scale of a shelf, so it's a much more interior experience. This is coming all the way around. Then you can understand it actually is just very very straight on aisles. Should I do these videos? Okay, because are running a little bit late. I'll just do a quick video. So you can see this in space. This one doesn't have any sound but you can see there's some details that have movement in them. Also, this idea that for me, it was interesting when you first walk in, it's this cascade. Then when you come around the corner, it's actually a pathway, and then when you go through, it is actually an arch. So all these very fundamental architectural things, and then when you go all the way through, it's a wall that's falling. So these things in the same way that that Cartier piece. These are not holding up, structurally, this line. They don't hold up the piece at all. The whole piece is that it tilts, but all of these lines, they look like they're holding the work up, but they're not that same idea. But then when you come all the way around, you see all these different perspectives on the work. That's good. I'm going to quickly go through this to the last piece. So the other idea was that these language would show up in different pieces. So this was a detail that you actually don't notice really when you first come in. I don't think it's right here, and most people go like this actually, but there's a room back here, and one of the things that made the show work is that this is how empty or full spaces were, and things like this, like the shadow, implied that there would be this huge piece back there. But when you went back there, it was just this one section to the back. And I don't have a video of this. But there's a reflection of water, and every wall had a reflection of water. It was a very dark space so it had this very cave-like quality to it. I think a lot of this whole show actually had a lot to do with landscape so each of these have this landscape- quality to them. This is a piece that's upstairs. Unusual that it has a skylight. This frame on the floor is the same dimensions of that full skylight. So to me it was almost like they had come down and fallen there. For me, downstairs, the kind of impossible project, was this idea of a visual encyclopedia and impossibility of an encyclopedia. It's outdated the minute you make it. And what to put in, what not to put in? This piece was about the impossibility of how to frame a horizon, to me. So that's a detail, and this is the last piece I'll show you. And I think it's the one that I'm most interested in, for future work right now and the pieces I'm working on, but the idea was very strange to me because I actually had a very specific project in mind that I wanted to make a planetarium, that it was like a planetarium for one person, but have it be this cobbled together, desperate attempt to do that. But to me that was such a literal idea. It came from this idea Arthur Danto, the art historian, said to me your work functions much less like architectural models because they're not things that are built to be upscaled. They're not things that stand in for something to be built, but they function much more like scientific models because they demonstrate behavior that they're actually behaving themselves so like a DNA model for example, they actually telling you about behavior. They're not about something to be built. So I like that idea. So I wanted to try and do something that was actually, really was like a scientific model, and so this is, this is the planetarium. The last thing I'll do, I'll show you a very short video of it, and then we can go to questions. In this sort of low-tech, no-tech way there's an overhead projector with a black piece of paper with holes in the toilet paper harkening back to the first slide that blows in the wind that creates the twinkling of the stars. So that's that's my last slide. Thank you very much. -applause- Yes, question. So I like how often you've been able to get away with creating the apparently impossible. And I wonder have you ever just fallen on your face trying to do that? Has your sculptures ever just crashed to the ground or someone says no you can't excavate New York or -laughter- big obstacles. I think, with all of these, there's a trial and error, and I'm very good with deadlines so I always figure out how much trial and error I can do 'til the point of knowing that there's an opening involved. I think that this idea of a marathon and even the value of labor, isn't it? So all of these, there's a point a week before that, there's this anxiety of will it work? And I think that anxiety is part of, you feel like this good guy is teetering on you know the brink of disaster. Something that is part of the project and this idea of the marathon. They've never fallen down. I think that that's really important that they look much more fragile than they are. They're actually quite sturdy, to the point where if you have a four-year-old pulling on something like my four-year-old does. That's not going to happen. So it's that challenge, but I think there's, I teach also. I think there's, I play with this idea that there's hiders and there's showers and sculpture, and people like when you go to a James Turrell, you don't really know how it's done. And this, it's not a value. It's not necessarily a value judgment. But I think it's decision you make as a sculptor whereas in my work, if you want to know how it's made and you spend the time, you can see it. There's nothing hidden so the actual pyrotechnics are, half of it is you, I'm giving you the gun, but you're using it, so I think that tension is interesting to me. Yes. I was curious where else have you lived besides New York, and have you done this work strictly since you've been in New York, and does any of your other work reflect other environments? I think, I think I'm really attracted to urban environments, and I think that's definitely part of the work. I'm someone who feels safer in a city than out in the woods. I grew up in Boston, and then I lived in New Haven. I lived in Tokyo and then lived in New York. I think those are the places that I've lived. But I'm definitely, I love living in New York. I like that tension of everything being on. I think New York is like that. You think it's a miracle that something's not falling on your head at all points, and that is interesting to me. I liked Berlin. I lived in Berlin a little bit when I did that, and Berlin had this intense quality of the city, the life of the city being just again this idea that it was in the piece of growing almost faster than I could keep up. Yes? You talked a lot about how you wanted your piece, look there's an event that just happened, and you often trick people into interacting with your pieces. So I'm wondering if you consider yourself as someone who causes chaos wherever you go or like an unorthodox organizer who presents both the commonly seen and commonly unseen in an unusual way? Those are, I think those are both really nice descriptions. I think this idea of locating something that just sits between two things. Even in terms of the reading of the materials, if there's too much to volume on architecture, if there's too much volume of nature, if there's too much volume on tools of measurement or things like that, I try and balance it with something else so that every time you think it's one thing, it moves to the other. So I think both of those ideas are really essential. But that at any one time I wanted to be both, I want to just think that wow, this is obsessively organized, but then it's completely chaotic, and then it goes back and forth. Your decisions about how you move through or see the piece actually are, again, you're deciding. You're actively deciding for yourself, whether those things are happening for you in the work. Thank you. I was going to ask about the notion of collaboration versus intervention, and some idea though whether you have collaborated with architects or with other people in your projects, and also have any architects ever responded to your work that's been placed in their work? It's an interesting question, and so Jean Nouvel really loved that piece. He was really, he said it was his favorite, most favorite thing. You never know. I mean obviously the aesthetic is so different than his, but I think he really liked that it was so obviously connected to the work in a different way. I think it's an interesting question because I've been also asked, I don't know if I showed anything, to do installations in work that hasn't been made yet. And that's a very different experience because then it is like a collaboration. I think actually I'm quite good at being given a situation of having to deal with it. I'm a better cook if there's five things in the refrigerator, and you have to create it. So the limitations I like, I like the limitations. I'd like to have a set frame and make a decision about what that conversation is going to be. I think that actually that in some ways I like that better. I have two less esoteric questions. Number one: how much detail do you plan these pieces ahead of time? Do you work within the space when you get there, or do you have them really planned ahead? So it really depends on the on the location and the piece so if I have five days, you get a five-day piece. If I have three months you get a three-day piece on the site, but then there's also like for San Francisco MOMA, we couldn't build, could only build, and basically more than 20 days is impossible to do in the way I work because often we'll work from 8 in the morning until 10 at night for 20 days, so you cannot really function past 20 things at that level. So you're always working back. So that's the longest install. So for SFMOMA, I decided with the larger gesture through that space would be, and then we found the locations. I measured them out and built them in the space. So I just built the wall and then the car was broken up in my studio, but then a lot of the detailing went in and actually surprisingly that piece one of the most important things is how they connect, even though they're just lines, and that all happened on site, and I think for even for some pieces, they're bought and reinstalled in other locations. I always try and do something that really makes you feel like it happened on that site, and that can mean if it goes to Germany, there are German things in it. In that German space, there are there's a door knob that it's tied off on, so in a very simple detail like that can make you believe the whole piece is just made for that space so it's one thing that's, it's kind of interesting that way. Alright, and my next question is where can we see your work somewhere close by in the near future, or do you have anything now? I just put in a piece in Tokyo. I didn't bring that today. -laughter- It's a different piece than the one there. I just did it. I just came back home from Tokyo. I did a piece there. You could go. Closer to than that, I'm doing several pieces. I'm doing a piece in London. I'm doing a piece in, sorry, they're all far away. There's a piece in New York. And I'm going to do a piece for the high line. The high line is being extended the next ten blocks. I'm doing a piece on that. Do you know when you're going to be doing that? Yeah, it actually opens in May. I'm doing the 92nd street subway station. That's not for a while, so it's either, I'm giving you far away physically or far away in time. We're doing a show at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. That's closer. I wanted to ask you what kind of play materials you used as a child around age 2-5? My father is an architect, and my mother, she's retired, but was a kindergarten teacher. And our house was definitely filled with tons of, my father's office was wherever he went, and it still is. And our house was filled with seven animals on any vacation that my mother would take back from the school and take care of so I played a lot with those things. And I think that does come into the work. Probably the same things that everyone else plays with outside of that, whether it's legos, erector sets. Was never that into dolls, stuffed animals, sports. I think there's a sports component to this idea of the marathon and the work as well, and I think the idea of an interior space that I think children create for themselves, although I think the relationship of the work to children is always an art. It's always a very like, it's always a very fragile territory. Because I think obviously so much of it is the decision making process and the editing process is something that doesn't, that differentiates it so much from that. Should we take one, I don't know about time. Should we just take one more? Does anyone? We'll just take one last one. I'm sorry or should we take the last two? I don't know what to do. Okay last two. So you spoke a lot about the large almost architectural aspects of your work, but not so much about the more intimate spaces and the material from the choices you make. Tell us something about that? Sure. I mean it's really important, and this has to do with value, and I think ultimately the experiences in our lives that are meaningful are these very very intimate experiences. So this idea of a survival space or space of the essentials or this idea of what you bring when there's a fire? Like what do you keep? What has meaning? And how do we invest, what are the five things you would keep if you had a fire? It was something that I don't know if it's still asked in graduate school a lot, but I remember there was, it almost became a cliche. But I think it's a very important question where people would ask if this studio, because graduate students would be all heady, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, and say well if the studio burned down, which of these paintings or which of these would you take? And it would a lot of times not be the one that they were talking about, but to sort of try and touch a kind of intimacy in a location or a work is I think really really primary. It's what I'm trying to do. What can you tell us about the MacArthur Experience, and how did it change you? It's an incredible honor. It's overwhelming. I think one of the things that it does is it gives you a validation outside of the art world. The art world is a very insular space and place, and I think for me that it's how you function when all of you and your different professions, if they're outside, there's a material language to it. That gets very insular and self-referential. But I think with art, it's definitely, there's always a tension. So to have an audience outside of it, and it is I think an incredible, outside of obviously the money, but this gives you a voice and a different level that I think is, it's completely invaluable. And it gives you a conversation with other people, the other fellows. They don't require you to do anything for the MacArthur, which is amazing, this kind of trust in the freedom that position can give you with absolutely no strings attached. But they do offer you if you want to go, to go on retreats, and so you can go on these retreats where people talk about their work, and you meet them. And it's just fascinating to see other people across the board and in their own professions doing amazing things. So that was really I think the greatest honor from it. And it allowed me to make a lot of choices like not make sellable work at certain points because I could pay my rent otherwise, so it really gives you that freedom. Thank you. -applause-
