Antony Gormley: Sculpted space, within and without

99,442 views ・ 2012-09-07

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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I'm going to tell you about why I became a sculptor,
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and you may think that sculptors,
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well, they deal with meta, they deal with objects,
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they deal with bodies,
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but I think, really, what I care about most
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is making space, and that's what I've called this talk:
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Making Space.
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Space that exists within us,
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and without us.
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So, when I was a child,
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I don't know how many of you grew up in the '50s,
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but I was sent upstairs for an enforced rest. (Laughter)
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It's a really bad idea. I mean, after lunch, you're, you know,
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you're six, and you want to go and climb a tree.
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But I had to go upstairs, this tiny little room
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that was actually made out of an old balcony,
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so it was incredibly hot, small and light,
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and I had to lie there. It was ridiculous.
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But anyway, for some reason, I promised myself
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that I wasn't going to move,
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that I was going to do this thing that Mummy
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wanted me to do.
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And there I was, lying there in this tiny space,
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hot, dark, claustrophobic, matchbox-sized, behind my eyes,
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but it was really weird, like, after this went on
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for days, weeks, months, that space would get bigger
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and darker and cooler
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until I really looked forward to that half an hour
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of enforced immobility and rest,
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and I really looked forward to going to that place
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of darkness.
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Do you mind if we do something completely different?
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Can we all just close our eyes for a minute?
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Now, this isn't going to be freaky.
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It isn't some cultic thing. (Laughter)
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It's just, it's just, I just would like us all to go there.
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So I'm going to do it too. We'll all be there together.
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So close your eyes for a minute.
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Here we are, in a space,
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the subjective, collective space of the darkness of the body.
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I think of this as the place of imagination,
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of potential,
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but what are its qualities?
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It is objectless. There are no things in it.
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It is dimensionless. It is limitless.
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It is endless.
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Okay, open your eyes.
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That's the space that I think sculpture --
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which is a bit of a paradox, sculpture that is about
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making material propositions --
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but I think that's the space
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that sculpture can connect us with.
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So, imagine we're in the middle of America.
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You're asleep. You wake up,
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and without lifting your head from the earth
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on your sleeping bag, you can see for 70 miles.
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This is a dry lake bed.
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I was young. I'd just finished art school.
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I wanted to do something that was working
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directly with the world, directly with place.
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This was a wonderful place, because it was a place
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where you could imagine that you were the
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first person to be there.
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It was a place where nothing very much had happened.
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Anyway, bear with me.
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I picked up a hand-sized stone,
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threw it as far as I was able,
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it was about 22 meters.
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I then cleared all the stones within that radius
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and made a pile.
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And that was the pile, by the way.
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And then, I stood on the pile,
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and threw all of those rocks out again,
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and here is rearranged desert.
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You could say, well, it doesn't look very different
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from when he started.
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(Laughter)
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What's all the fuss about?
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In fact, Chris was worried and said,
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"Look, don't show them that slide,
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because they're just going to think you're another one of
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those crazy modern artists who doesn't do much.
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(Laughter)
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But the fact is, this is evidence
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of a living body on other bodies,
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rocks that have been the subject of geological formation,
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erosion, the action of time on objects.
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This is a place, in a way, that I just
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would like you to, in a way, look at differently
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because of this event that has happened in it,
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a human event,
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and in general, it just asks us to look again
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at this world, so different from, in a way,
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the world that we have been sharing with each other,
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the technological world,
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to look again at the elemental world.
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The elemental world that we all live in is that space
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that we all visited together, the darkness of the body.
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I wanted to start again with that environment,
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the environment of the intimate, subjective space
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that each of us lives in, but from the other side
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of appearance.
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So here is a daily activity of the studio.
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You can see I don't do much. I'm just standing there,
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again with my eyes closed, and other people
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are molding me, evidential.
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This is an indexical register of a lived moment
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of a body in time.
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Can we map that space, using the language of neutrinos
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or cosmic rays, taking the bounding condition of the body
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as its limit, but in complete reversal of, in a way,
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the most traditional Greek idea of pointing?
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In the old days they used to take a lump of Pentelic marble
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and drill from the surface in order to identify the skin,
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the appearance,
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what Aristotle defined as the distinction
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between substance and appearance,
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the thing that makes things visible,
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but here we're working from the other side.
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Or can we do it as an exclusive membrane?
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This is a lead case made around the space
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that my body occupied, but it's now void.
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This is a work called "Learning To See."
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It's a bit of, well, we could call it night,
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we could call it the 96 percent of gravity
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that we don't know about, dark matter,
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placed in space, anyway, another version of a human space
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in space at large, but I don't know if you can see,
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the eyes are indicated, they're closed.
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It's called "Learning To See" because it's about an object
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that hopefully works reflexively and talks about that
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vision or connection with the darkness of the body
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that I see as a space of potential.
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Can we do it another way, using the language
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of particles around a nucleus, and talk about the body
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as an energy center?
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No longer about statues, no longer having to take that
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duty of standing, the standing of a human body,
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or the standing of a statue, release it,
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allow it to be an energy field, a space in space
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that talks about human life, between becoming an entropy
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as a sort of concentration of attention,
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a human place of possibility in space at large.
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Is there another way?
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Dark matter now placed against a horizon.
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If minds live in bodies, if bodies live in clothes,
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and then in rooms, and then in buildings,
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and then in cities, do they also have a final skin,
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and is that skin perceptual?
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The horizon.
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And is art about
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trying to imagine what lies beyond the horizon?
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Can we use, in a way, a body as an empty catalyst
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for a kind of empathy with the experience
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of space-time as it is lived, as I am standing here
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in front of you trying to feel and make a connection
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in this space-time that we are sharing,
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can we use, at it were, the memory of a body,
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of a human space in space to catalyze
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an experience, again, firsthand experience,
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of elemental time.
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Human time, industrial time, tested against
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the time of the tides, in which these memories
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of a particular body, that could be any body,
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multiplied as in the time of mechanical reproduction,
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many times, placed over three square miles,
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a mile out to sea,
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disappearing, in different conditions of day and night.
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You can see this work. It's on the mouth of the Mersey,
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just outside Liverpool.
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And there you can see what a Liverpool sea looks like
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on a typical afternoon.
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The pieces appear and disappear,
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but maybe more importantly --
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this is just looking north from the center of the installation --
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they create a field, a field that involves
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living and the surrogate bodies in a kind of relation,
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a relation with each other and a relation with that limit,
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the edge, the horizon.
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Just moving on, is it possible,
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taking that idea of mind, body, body-building,
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to supplant the first body,
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the biological body, with the second,
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the body of architecture and the built environment.
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This is a work called "Room for the Great Australian Desert."
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It's in an undefined location
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and I've never published where it is.
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It's an object for the mind.
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I think of it as a 21st-century Buddha.
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Again, the darkness of the body,
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now held within this bunker shape
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of the minimum position that a body needs to occupy,
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a crouching body.
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There's a hole at the anus, penis level.
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There are holes at ears. There are no holes at the eyes.
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There's a slot for the mouth. It's two and a half inches thick,
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concrete with a void interior.
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Again, a site found with a completely flat
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360-degree horizon.
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This is just simply asking, again,
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as if we had arrived for the first time,
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what is the relationship of the human project
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to time and space?
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Taking that idiom of, as it were,
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the darkness of the body transferred to architecture,
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can you use architectural space not for living
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but as a metaphor,
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and use its systolic, diastolic
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smaller and larger spaces to provide a kind of
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firsthand somatic narrative for a journey through space,
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light and darkness?
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This is a work of some proportion and some weight
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that makes the body into a city, an aggregation of cells
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that are all interconnected
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and that allow certain visual access
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at certain places.
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The last work that I just wanted to share with you
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is "Blind Light," which is perhaps
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the most open work,
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and in a conference of radical openness,
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I think maybe this is as radical as I get,
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using light and water vapor as my materials.
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Here is a box
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filled at one and a half atmospheres of atmospheric pressure,
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with a cloud and with very bright light.
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As you walk towards the ever-open threshold,
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you disappear, both to yourselves and to others.
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If you hold your hand out in front of you,
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you can't see it.
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If you look down, you can't see your feet.
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You are now consciousness without an object,
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freed from the dimensionful
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and measured way in which life links us
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to the obligatory.
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But this is a space that is actually filled with people,
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disembodied voices,
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and out of that ambient environment,
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when people come close to your own body zone,
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very close, they appear to you as representations.
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When they appear close to the edge,
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they are representations, representations in which
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the viewers have become the viewed.
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For me, art is not about objects of high monetary exchange.
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It's about reasserting our firsthand experience
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in present time.
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As John Cage said,
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"We are not moving towards some kind of goal.
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We are at the goal, and it is changing with us.
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If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact."
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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