Structures

Captioning sponsored by THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

"Following"

"Theme"

"Examine"

"I"

"Of"

"To"

"Am"

"The"

"Welcome"

"We"

"Structure"

"Hi"

What is the meaning of this?

"21"

"Will"

Hot dog.

Hot dog!

Sam Waterston.

"Hi"

"I"

"am"

Sam Waterston.

"Following"

"we will"

"examine"

"the"

"theme"

"of"

"structure."

"Welcome"

"to"

art:

"21"

Hot dog!

Modern art is a gift.

Take it or leave it, you know.

It's like nobody's forcing it down your throat.

All anyone is trying to do is try out some new ideas,

something different, something, you know...

just ringing the changes a little while.

And I think there's something enormously ambitious

about that idea, that we're all trying to advance

or at least question what's going on,

and I just think that's great.

Drawing is very, very central to the way that I work

because it can be blown up, taken apart,

given to another person to execute,

put into a computer,

redrawn as if the computer had thought of your drawing

in the first place,

shrunk back down to a tiny sketch,

turned into a digital game.

You can just keep on pushing it.

It's like this infinite machine,

which is very hard to do with almost anything else.

Like even with a painting--

a painting becomes a very static, fixed thing,

but a drawing, you can make it three-dimensional,

you can make it flat, you can turn it into a sphere.

You can just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it,

because all it is is information.

It's just a bunch of marks.

So once you sort of understand it,

you're really just the arm at that point.

Like the drawing has already been made;

you're just transcribing it.

The idea is really taking this very small, intimate gesture

and making it into something

that retains all of the properties that it had

but allowing it to be really done on any scale.

So you're really sort of freeing it in a way

to live in the world.

It's like a three-way collaboration between me,

a computer program

that doesn't understand what it's doing at all

and then a group of strangers

who will execute it and rebuild it in a way.

And then we've all made this thing together

that has a kind of shared integrity.

The nice thing about the way I'm working is

that the program that I'm using has an infinite resolution.

So, you know, you keep getting bigger.

This is how the quality of the line remains absolutely constant

from very, very small to very large.

So it doesn't really have a lot of the conventional ideas

that, you know... of reproduction,

where you blow it up and it's like

it's going to lose its definition or its resolution.

So, this can be very, very small or very, very big,

and it's really the same thing.

It's exactly the same gesture;

it's not getting corrupted or evolved or degraded

at any point.

Each time the drawing is reproduced,

it gets bigger and bigger and bigger--

it's now 270 feet long-- and it contains more and more detail,

because it always has to include

not only all of the elements that I've made since then

but the previous version of itself.

So it's like a kind of cross between a dictionary and a map,

so it becomes this separate thing,

like a living document of its own history

and the history of all the hands

that have participated in its making.

It's my work,

but at the same time, part of the work is letting people in.

It's like... it's what keeps it alive in some ways.

I guess I'm most interested in, What can one person know?

And how much?

It's a kind of a weakness and a strength in the work

that it's interested in everything.

There's this famous ratio of signal and noise.

If you try to take too much information in,

it turns into noise; you can only process so much.

So to actually understand anything,

you have to keep tuning stuff out;

that's how we all get through the day.

( baby cooing )

RITCHIE: Talk about building a universe.

Eisen, my son--

it's, like, everything for him is on the same level.

Everything he sees at three months old

is just sound, noise, light.

They're all fused into this kind of panoptic sort of synergy

in his mind.

And he has to pick everything out

and start filtering it and make sense of it.

He has to do it every day from scratch.

All he's getting is this just insane, confusing information,

and that process keeps continuing all our lives.

So we filter out, you know, the knowledge

that everything in this space has a meaning and a history

and a story.

We have to sort of bank it all down,

but I'm kind of interested in then, like,

okay, we've banked it all down,

but now, like, can we bring it up a little?

Can we turn the volume up maybe just a little bit more?

Can we listen to everything just a little bit more loudly?

So, that's sort of what I'm interested in--

describing a kind of armature for that.

This piece is called The Universal Cell,

and it's really conceived of as a kind of a module,

like a single part of a much larger installation.

It's derived from a series of drawings

that I scan into the computer

and then I refine through various processes

and send to Jim.

Jim takes it to his computer, cleans it up a little bit,

you know, make sure there aren't any loose points on it.

And then he puts it into a machine

that's expressly designed to take the drawing or the line

and reproduce it with absolute perfection

by cutting through metals.

A process that ten years ago would have taken weeks and weeks

and weeks, can now take a couple of days.

And there's something just fantastic

about being totally in control of the whole production.

The whole thing was designed, like most of my work,

to be taken apart.

It's as much about flatness as it is about sculpture,

because I'm really interested in sustaining the drawing.

Oh, that's nice-- the way that fits there.

RITCHIE: So I wanted to build a structure that felt like a cell,

your cell in the whole universe.

If the universe is a prison, this is your cell.

This is where you're standing,

and you drag it with you wherever you go.

RITCHIE: The show in Sao Paulo is really about the prison of life

where you are trapped in a set of circumstances

that are biological, temporal, physical, mental.

You're locked in to a point of view.

As a culture, we've defined evil in one particular way,

by building structures to contain it.

We build prisons.

And basically, no matter what bad thing you've done,

you go to jail and that's it.

Every crime has the same punishment.

And I was thinking about that,

and then I was thinking about, in a larger sense,

how the context of information defines everything.

So, in a way, each of us is in kind of our own prison,

like you bring it with you.

It's the prison of your biology, of your social structure,

of your life,

and how that is both a sort of challenge and an opportunity.

Proposition Player is about the idea of risk.

And it's about the idea of, Is it possible to always win?

The slogan of this show is "You may already be a winner,"

that takes the idea of a fixed set of relationships

and turns it into something

that's completely, you know, shuffle-able, you can mix it up.

There is no story in a pack of cards,

but you can tell any story you want to tell.

So, the cards themselves, you know,

the first and most important cards are the four aces.

And the four aces represent

the four fundamental forces in the universe,

which is the weak force, the strong force, gravity and light.

There's only four forces in the universe,

conveniently enough for me,

and, uh, they underlie everything.

They tie everything together.

And the four aces generate the four units of measurement,

which are time, mass, length and temperature.

To make it into a proper pack of cards,

of course I had to introduce, um, a joker,

which is time-- absolute time rather than linear time,

which is the totality of time,

the kind of non-time that we all live inside.

Like we measure off:

there's the hours and the minutes and the days

and then there's all of time.

In the moment of gambling

between placing your bet and the result of the bet,

there's a kind of moment of infinite freedom,

because all the possibilities are there.

You may already be a winner.

So you've started out as the smallest possible element,

a particle in the gigantic universe,

and gradually you see how essential that particle is

to everything else, how everything is woven together.

We're all part of that same structure as well.

We're all part of the continuum.

So, that's the idea.

It's a very simple thing.

It's like, here you are, this is a...

literally like a little way of representing you

in a giant game.

Come in, put your card on the table and play.

It's really just sort of taking the traditional aspect

of confronting large, complex ideas about the universe,

which is one of awe, and inverting it to one of play.

This kind of boundary between abstraction and figuration

became much more interesting to think about

as a sort of more porous boundary

between us and everything.

How do we define the figure?

How do we limit the figure?

How do we think of ourselves as this bounded state?

And so these figures started appearing

who are really kind of manifestations.

It was almost like all of the universal ideas

that I talked about in the earlier work

decided that they needed to have bodies

that were much more recognizable.

They needed to turn back into people

and walk around and start seeing what that was like.

And these figures started to kind of emerge.

Before that, they had been typically more abstract

in the paintings, more present in the drawings.

They got very present in the drawings, as you can see now.

And they're still...

in the paintings they're a little more abstracted,

but they're very much... they're there.

And there's this sort of ridiculous idea

that's left over from the 20th century

that abstraction and figuration are legitimate poles.

And I, from the very start,

have incorporated the two things together,

been fascinated by the idea that there is really no distinction;

it's just a question of scale.

And you can always analyze the visual art

in terms of content or appearance--

these formal qualities.

I would argue that it's a game to separate them.

They're indissolubly linked.

Everything in the material world around us has a narrative.

So to sort of classify visual art alone

as the one medium that shouldn't require

any effort on behalf of anybody to ever understand it--

you should just be able to look at it and walk away on a...

as a pure sensation--

that relegates it to the level of like a roller-coaster ride,

like "Just shut your eyes and enjoy the ride."

I'm more in mind of saying,

"Open your eyes and enjoy the ride,"

because it's much more exciting

if you are thinking and questioning

and you don't know what it is,

and it is full of questions and statements

that you can't possibly grasp,

because that is a truer reflection

of just how extraordinary reality is

than something that's sort of neatly tied up in a bow

and it's, like, "There, look at that, be at peace, go home."

I'm more interested in something

that leaves you asking all those questions,

like "What is that?

I don't know what that is."

WILSON: Everything I want to say

is said by putting things together.

In my studio, I was always, like, arranging things.

You know, this is right out of school.

I was, like, I couldn't sort of say that this was my art.

It wasn't art with a capital A.

But it was really who I was.

Um... why don't we switch this back for that...

that figure, the original figure?

MAN: Yeah.

WILSON: And when you start doing

what you really, really believe in,

that's when you do your best work.

I did all these pieces with, uh... these weird tchotchkes,

these so-called "black collectibles."

This one actually was given to me,

so now I'm trying to make one big piece

with as many of them as possible and get them out of my life.

It's just sort of bad juju.

I really don't have any desire to make things with my hands,

particularly directly.

I don't know when I left that behind,

but I get everything that satisfies my soul

from bringing objects that are in the world

and manipulating them,

working with spatial rela... arrangements.

And then having things produced the way I want to see them.

I love making this stuff.

I love doing it.

And it's not easy in that it's simple,

but it's easy in that it just flows out of me.

This is... that's just the worst one.

WILSON: I'm totally inspired by things around me.

I look at things and wonder what they are and why they are.

Everything interests me.

You know, a gum wrapper could interest me

as much as something, you know, at the Met.

As I get older, I realize that your identity

is really tied largely to your experiences

and that time period that you grew up.

I was born in the '50s.

I grew up in the suburbs.

When I was elementary school age,

I was the only black child in the entire school

and I was shunned because I was different.

My world was not... even though it seemed

like everything was nice, I didn't have any friends.

My connection to the black community

was tangential for those formative years.

So a lot of my project is trying to understand

the visual world around me which really affects me.

Hold it-- yeah, that's about right.

WILSON: For me, that's the basis for a lot of what I do,

is really where that pain comes from.

My mother married an African-American man.

Her sister married a man from, um... from the West Indies

and then a man from Belgium.

And when her other sister married a man from India

and her cousin married a man from China,

it's difficult for me to not look at people in the world

and see everyone as a relative.

To me, they're familiar--

familiar in the root of the word: family, familiar.

I feel comfortable with people,

but that comfort is, uh, tempered by the fact

that people may not feel that way about me.

When I watch glassblowing,

it's like the creation of a planet or something.

You get seduced by the material, by the process.

And then you almost don't care what it looks like afterwards.

You know what?

I'm going to stand right here, because this way

I get the same angle as the slide.

WILSON: Glass is always a liquid.

It never completely solidifies.

Even though it looks like it's solid,

it actually is still moving.

( hammer banging )

And so making it into these drip forms

makes inherent sense for the material.

And I wanted to use black glass because it represents ink.

It represents oil; it represents tar.

Some of them have eyes on them.

For me, these, uh, cartoon eyes, because of 1930s cartoons,

which were recycled in my childhood in the '60s,

were representing African Americans

in a very derogatory way.

I sort of view them as black tears.

So that to me is ultimately a sad commentary.

Working with printmaking is very similar to working with glass

in that it's outside of what I do.

In printmaking I realized that if I...

I could just drop acid... ( laughs )

with this stuff called Spitbite,

just pour it onto a plate and it would eat onto the plate

and it would, you know, kind of make a spot or a splash

and filling it with black ink,

it sort of retains this spot quality,

and it also has kind of a three-dimensional quality

which doesn't happen

when you use ink on a piece of paper.

( acid dripping )

The directness of that really thrilled me,

and the fact that that's what I'm interested in--

these drips and drops-- uh, really worked for me.

Yeah, that's doing fine.

WILSON: Even before I did the drips, uh, in glass,

I'd been thinking about spots

and just this, uh, reduction of blackness

to this kind of ridiculous degree.

You know, I think it's interesting, I think it's funny,

I think it's ultimately really sad.

All these representations that I grew up with

are telling me who I am whether I realize it or not.

And so by pulling them all out and have them talk to each other

is my sort of taking control of who I am

through these voices.

And also trying to understand who I am,

what is me and what is something

that the rest of the world has said I am.

You know, it comes from this deep sadness that I, you know...

that, uh... that's kind of the baseline.

I'm not a sad person, but, you know, it...

it bubbles up inside of me.

PRINTER: That's starting to look better.

WILSON: Yeah.

Ooh, nice.

WILSON: There are these, like, in cartoons, thought bubbles

where the spots drop, talk to each other

and various conversations emerge

from the relationship between these spots.

To me it made sense

that the representations of Africans in books

would be the voices for these representations

of blackness or of black people in these spots.

And so they all talk to each other

and these different characters, they're kind of...

the voices and personalities come out in...

from these little blurbs.

I was thrilled to be chosen to represent the United States

for the Venice Biennale.

The work in Venice had many different parts.

And the part that is the most abstract

was this room that I created of black and white tile.

There was this huge black urn on its side

and in it was a small bed,

uh, cappuccino cup, some newspapers, magazines,

um, CD player.

I did those pieces right after September 11,

wanting the world to go back to the way it was before.

It's called Safe Haven.

Right around that time,

my mother was getting extremely ill

and was not going to get better.

So this kind of womb shape that came out,

I do think it has a relationship with thinking about my mom.

I'm interested in invisible processes within museums.

I really start museum projects

without knowing what I'm going to do.

I try to just go in, uh, tabula rasa

and try and just sort of be a sponge.

Okay, right there.

WILSON: I work site-specifically.

In Sweden I started the way I'd normally start:

I meet everyone, look at the collection

and talk to people about the collection

and research the collection

and try to understand where I am, the city I'm in

and... and... and make a piece.

WILSON: I need to get a sense

of what this floor is going to look like.

The model is good, but this really helps.

WILSON: I'm creating a metanarrative about museums and display.

WILSON: I would like to put in one of the platforms

so I can see how that looks from different angles.

WILSON: I'm just using the museum as my palette, basically--

manipulating objects, light, color, spatial relationships

and, uh, critiquing as well the notion of museum.

Can you help me to take out?

Yes, yes.

I'll put the gloves here for a minute.

( straining ): Oh, boy, oh, boy-- wow.

Wow, there's certainly stone in here.

WILSON: What happens with a lot of museums

is that galleries are arranged by historians

who are really interested in the history of the object,

the object themselves, and not really so focused

on the environment these are placed in,

the juxtaposition of objects

and what meaning are they creating.

Besides the visual of the object,

what is the visual of the space doing to the object,

doing to your experience?

And sort of try to kind of infuse it into those spaces.

It's not only the visual; it's how this aesthetic experience

affects you emotionally and physically,

and, uh, the power of that.

You know, I'm interested in all that stuff.

Stones, which seem to be

the least movable objects on the earth,

are moving everywhere.

The project really became not only the movement of stones

and archaeological material,

but the movement of people.

The stones I'm choosing because I think they're interesting

and I think they're interesting in how they look together.

It's kind of an archaeological site

that would never be and never would be like this.

But it's just to get this idea across

that these things being everywhere

and that they travel around the world,

people take them from one place to another.

And since I found this one stone from my family's island

and so I saw this connection

between how stone can kind of connect to your identity.

I'm very interested in juxtaposition of objects,

how juxtaposition of very different objects can bring up

a new idea, a new thought.

There's no manipulation of the objects

other than their positioning

and that changes the meaning, or the relationship,

or how you think about them.

And this is everything that I'm about.

I would like to think that objects have memories,

and we have memories about certain objects.

A lot of what I do is soliciting memory from an object.

The other piece that expresses another side

of what I've been doing with museums,

the piece called Picasso/Whose Rules

using a large photo blowup of Demoiselles d'Avignon--

the famous painting by Picasso--

uh, an African mask and a video also covers

a lot of other of my interests about art, uh, modernism,

um... you know, ethnography and African culture.

And when I did that,

I was feeling very strongly about how modernism was a part

of the destruction of traditional African culture.

When Picasso found African things in the shops in France,

he saw something far greater in them,

which, you know, of course we're all thankful to him for.

However, neither the missionaries, the military men

nor Picasso had a clue

as to what these things were really about.

If you look through the eyes of the mask,

there's a video of two African friends and myself

speaking about what makes art great.

And, um, there are a lot of convoluted questions

like "If your modern art is our traditional art,

does that make our contemporary art your cliché?"

TUTTLE: My favorite artist is Jan van Eyck,

who gives you a picture which satisfies

all attentiveness to the smallest of the small

and then all attentiveness to the largest of the large.

I mean, that's one of the things

that a picture is supposed to do for us.

Art is... is life, you know, and that is... you know it...

it in fact has to be, you know, all of life.

You know, the awareness, the beauty,

the, uh... the ability to give to a viewer

something which makes their life more what it is,

more what it could be.

Uh, and it's... it's the essential....

it's like, uh, the clue to... to everything.

It's a very kind of remarkable thing to connect

the kind of mind freedom that's available to us

in this particular landscape.

It's about harmonizing, it's about living in the beauty,

not so much just looking at the beauty.

It's about how it gets into us

and finally, uh, feeds the spirit.

You look out and you literally feel

you're the first person who was ever here, you know?

A lot has happened here in time, but then it's erased so quickly.

Part of that is the wind and the rain,

you know, cleanses the soil.

I mean, footsteps left yesterday are... vanish over the night.

Happily, my earliest beginnings

were with, uh, you know, Betty Parsons and the circle

around the New York school of abstract expressionists,

and Western space was definitely one of the elements

in how that art was composed.

I was doing white paper octagonals on the wall,

and we were at a show in, uh... a museum in Dallas,

and a critic came along and made mock introductions

of "Oh, this is Richard Tuttle--

he's interested in impermanence in the arts," you know.

And... and she didn't... she did that to Betty,

and... and Betty just immediately snapped back

and said, "What's more permanent than the invisible?"

( chuckling )

In any art form,

there has to be an accounting of its opposite condition.

You're going to be a visual artist,

then there has to be something in it

that accounts for the possibility of the invisible,

the opposite of the visual experience.

A painting or a sculpture really exists

uh, somewhere, you know, between itself, what it is

and what it is not.

Recently I refined my sense about where my limitations are.

In some sense, I was happy to think that each piece

would be a kind of conjoining of architecture and calligraphy.

Those then exist as definable poles,

but then look in between, and that is this rich, rich vein

that we don't really know very much about.

As this house was being built

we talked about installing works of mine in the Klein collection.

Yellow is a color of happiness,

but I think it's also a very important color in general.

I was tremendously enthusiastic about this yellow

and these pieces that were yellow.

What's really interesting to me

is that you're weaving two separate groups

in three separate rooms,

and so you get a division and a fluidity

that connects with a place.

In some level, the installation, to use a horrible word,

you know, would be this sort of a weaving

between, uh, my persona and their persona

um, and... and to create a... a kind of world

in which you can invite your guests.

( playing classical piece )

An exhibition might be likened to a city.

You don't even need to go to all the places if you don't care to.

It would be enough for a visitor just to visit one village,

but you have a choice, and I...

I think

that's the kind of exhibition I'm...

I'm really thinking of.

I think this village idea is a way to invite the visitor in.

Each village takes on a personality.

You enter a room and you can scan that in a second,

and wherever you're attracted, you can go in that direction.

The sculptures sort of function as a way

to help you get into that drawing space,

which is really intimate.

Each village has two groups of drawings.

Each set of drawings seems to concern themselves

with, say, how the piece meets the floor

or how the piece meets the wall--

either concern of the floor,

which is like concrete issues, you know,

or how it meets the wall, which is more like abstract issues.

It's an old division between, you know, realism and idealism.

You know, the ideal says

that the experience happens inside of you, you know,

which then would mean that everything

from the conception of drawing to the color itself

is inside of you,

and the real is that everything is outside of you.

But finally, you know, it's art and art alone

which can actually say what is the truth, you know?

You could say that the wire represents form

and then this overlying is... is... is chaos.

Where in the world do you ever find an absence fill a solid

and a solid fill an absence?

This piece as an artwork can simply be giving us

those two, uh, really disparate, uh, solutions

to, uh, the definition of matter,

uh, in one, uh, created form.

I mean, the wood chips are in some sense a decorative element

that's an elaboration of the underlying wire structure.

You can see the actual grains of this piece of wood here.

You can experience that as really a pure drawing.

Everything in life is drawing, if you want,

and drawing is... is absolutely, uh, quintessential

to... to knowing the self, you know,

and I would even say that the art that survives,

you know, from one generation to the next

is the art that actually carries something...

that tells us, tells society what, uh... about self.

One would say in order to draw, you have to be able to see.

Well, what about making drawings

about an area where you can't see?

And, you know, as obsessed as I am

about, you know, the experience of seeing

and the details and so on,

what I find most interesting is the part which I can't see.

And so that... that's what I want to do

in this Drawing Center show--

I just want to look at these kinds of places.

For example, ask somebody to draw blue,

you know, make a drawing of blue.

You know, you can't do that.

The pieces are self-portraits, uh, I mean, as all artwork is.

Maybe it takes me ten tries to make a drawing.

Sometimes the art is actually in the tenth one,

you know, the final one,

and other times it's in the whole ten.

A couple times in my life

where I...

I really can look at something

and... and say that, you know, "I did not make that,"

but in your heart you know, you know, you know, you know

that you... you did, uh, go beyond yourself

or you enjoyed this, uh... uh, kind of a... a leap.

You get beyond this barrier that normally we live within.

Art, unlike life, needs this heightening of reality.

I realize that culturally

we walk on a different ground than is in fact there,

and that the psychological ground

is a little bit higher than the actual ground.

The emotion, you know, of an art response,

the energy of a... of a... does to me feel like motion.

We use that word, "moved"-- "I am moved," you know--

and yet we know we're standing right there

and we have this experience

of being stationary and moved at the same time.

And I guess what I'm trying to figure out

is how to sustain the polarity

where you can be the paintbrush of society,

but also you can make the society your paintbrush.

HORN: For me there's this very hard balance

between oneself and one's work and the audience.

Some people live in a virtual in-their-head space; I don't.

I like to keep my feet in the moving water.

My ambitions lie very much in dialogue with my surroundings.

I don't know that there's any one thing

that attracts me to water, you know.

And of course, if you start to think about water,

it just explodes, because it's so rich

and... and, uh, it's kind of everything and, uh, nothing.

I almost feel like I rediscover water

again and again and again.

So it isn't me going out after water;

I think water's come in after me.

It's... it's really much more.

I'm much more the... the, uh... the prey

and not the predator in that relationship.

The Thames has an interesting fact attached to it:

that it is the urban river

with the highest appeal to foreign suiciders.

One of the points about shooting the Thames was...

was the fact that its darkness was quite real;

that people were in fact...

It wasn't just a... a visual darkness;

it was a psychological darkness,

and it... it was, uh, an actual darkness,

and people are drawn to it... for that exit option.

Even in its darkness, it has this picturesque element.

It's something about the human condition.

It's not the water itself;

it's humanity's relationship to water,

because that's almost a human need,

that water be a positive force.

Every photograph is wildly different,

uh, even though you could be photographing the same thing.

You know, from one minute to the next,

it's, uh... almost got the complexity

of a... of a portrait.

So, here we are.

We're in what's actually the second largest town in Iceland,

which is 15,000 people, and it's called Akureyri,

and it has the largest university outside of Reykjavík.

The weather's often quite poor in this area,

so you can stay inside, you can move about--

once you're in there,

it's like a little interior kind of, uh, metropolis.

And the piece is, uh, very large, about 80 photographs.

The idea is to lay it out in a way

that is a flow through the building,

but depending on who you are and how you use the building,

it's a discovery process t could occur over days, months

or even years.

I like very much the idea

that the scale of the work is unknown... but pervasive...

not dominating it but setting kind of a tone for the space.

( man lecturing in Icelandic )

You're bringing the nature inside the university walls,

and, uh, it makes you calm.

You see the students flow down the halls and with the water,

so for me it really changed the atmosphere.

It's like a very fine combination

of people flowing around and the water flowing around.

I think it's really great

to have the water inside the building.

HORN: Of course, I always thought of Iceland

as a kind of studio for me, or a quarry.

Maybe a quarry is a good metaphor,

because I always feel like I'm involved

in a process of if not hunting, at least mining of some sort.

For Iceland, it's not so much about memory;

it's... it's more about that place and my need to be there.

I had traveled in this area a number of times

and I knew the lighthouse,

so I asked the municipality if I could live in it.

They eventually said it was okay,

and, uh, I went up there and sat around

and looked at the weather for a couple months--

a little bit of reading, a little bit of drawing.

It was a psychological clearing,

and then it was also a way to connect with this island.

There was no ambition; it was just to be there.

It's just real simple--

that was the whole agenda for the couple months

was just be there,

and it couldn't have been, in a way, more simple

and more difficult.

You Are the Weather-- the viewer walks in

and you're surrounded by up to a hundred images,

which are one portrait of a person who is a multitude.

WOMAN: The original idea was to do this book

on me, which... which was not to be on me as a person

but using my face as a place.

So the situation was just me going into the water,

and then she started photographing.

And she didn't give me any directions

except for looking into the lens of the camera.

HORN: It was very much of a wordless interaction

for the two months we spent together.

And, uh, water became a very important part of the bond

and the image and, um, the subject.

The viewer relationship to the portrait

is, I think, very erotic,

because there is this eye contact and this ambiguity.

MODEL: We were spending a lot of time together.

That affected the work,

because that created this trust, which is very important.

HORN: In the case of You Are the Weather,

I was curious to see if I could elicit a place from her face,

almost like a landscape-- not... not in a literal sense,

but how close those identities were.

MODEL: And I remember

when I went to the opening, I was shy to enter that room.

But my son, who was only five years old at that time,

he thought it was fantastic

and I would keep thinking of like, you know,

going into a room and only seeing your mom on the wall--

that must be an experience.

And he kept calling me and saying, "Come, come.

"Mom, have you seen this room?

It's all you, it's all you!"

( softly ): Oh...

HORN: There's this swimming pool, actually in Reykjavík,

that I really fell in love with.

The swimming pool itself is quite beautiful,

but then when I went down to the locker room,

the locker room was amazing.

It just struck me as not only a kind of a Mobius,

because there are no edges, there's all surface...

And there's not one interior-exterior edge

among this net of lockers,

it's just an endless tiled surface.

And it's got a collection

of doors that are both open and closed,

and it's got these peepholes.

The peepholes are sort of what really kind of drew me in,

because you just wonder,

"What the hell are those peepholes doing there?"

and nobody seems to know.

It was this incredible

kind of almost voyeuristic delight, this space.

It was designed by a voyeur and a chess player, I decided.

I shot it in a way

to kind of bring out more of that sensual aspect,

to balance against the antiseptic quality

of the architecture.

I shot them as almost like visual kind of, uh, traces.

There is a resemblance in the way you move through the space

versus across a chessboard.

WOMAN: Roni is my aunt, and we have a really good relationship.

For a while we would send each other postcards

with two animals or two people or two objects on them

and we would write, "This is me,"

and point to one, "This is you."

Each of the pictures in the book are taken

about two seconds or three seconds apart,

so if you were to look at one picture...

and then flip to the other side and look at the first picture,

it would be the same image but a few seconds later.

HORN: So I really just recorded her in action.

And it looks like she's performing and all that stuff,

but, you know, there's that period

of a girl becoming a woman

where they're trying on all these identities.

It's very much of a portrait of a girl,

because all of that different dress

and the hair thing and the... all the stuff with the face

was not orchestrated.

NIECE: It does take place over about three years,

and just looking at it,

it's somewhat difficult to tell that it's the same person.

For instance, this one I have really, really short hair.

And then in this one I'm wearing some yellow glasses

and I have longer hair.

HORN: Doubt by Water--

it's the interrelationship between the two-faced image,

the front-back composition.

It's the drawing of the many elements interacting together,

and it's the drawing of the viewer through the space.

And, you know, this was originally a bank building.

It's very beautifully proportioned

and very full of itself.

You can see the paneling and the detailing and everything is...

uh, it's so beautifully designed and of a piece.

It's really almost impossible to occupy this space

without, uh... basically redefining it.

The piece flickers between a three-dimensional experience

and a two-dimensional.

When I was putting this work together,

I knew that I wanted disparate motifs

coming together in close quarter.

It's viewable from every angle.

That may seem like, "Oh, every three-dimensional object is,"

but usually the relationship to the space is somewhat fixed,

and here it isn't.

I mean, as you walk around the grouping,

obviously these images are coming and going,

you're seeing some and others are dropping out.

All of that has to be, in a way, composed,

so this is a work that has that very particular way

of moving the viewer through space

and through image space,

which is very different than architectural space.

The Cabinet Of:

I don't think I would have thought to do that work there

if I hadn't seen this little room which is so claustrophobic,

which was a vault.

It's a cabinet inside a cabinet,

and, uh, I love the idea that it's in the basement.

And it's just functioning

in a completely different way than everything else.

The clown image, even though it's a photographic work,

has an architectural component and a psychological component.

You have the reference to something figurative,

but it's also symbolic.

It's using those photographs in the drawing technique.

I like the idea of taking this very formal institution

and putting a rubber floor in it.

I thought that is probably the right balance.

It would have, you know, kept things from...

from getting so out whack

if we'd had that soft rubber floor in

a few hundred years ago.

My relationship to my work is extremely verbal.

I am probably more language- based than I am visual,

and I move through language to arrive at the visual,

although I think of text as visual as well.

I never really distinguish between symbolic visual language

versus descriptive visual-- photograph.

I don't think of myself as a photographer or a sculptor.

I just think of myself in a more broad way,

so that allows me to draw upon these different forms...

without having to be identified with them.

You use metaphor

to make yourself feel at home in the world.

You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown.

And for me the problem is the unknown is where I want to be--

I don't want it extinguished.

( crickets chirping )

( sighs )

Two sugars, no cream.

MAN: Thank you.

Ah...

I am telling you, Sam,

it is the same dream every night.

Uh, this is it:

I'm me, I'm a cop, and I'm on a late-night shift with you.

I...

I go into the coffee shop

and sitting, uh, two chairs away from the register...

Well, you know how they have

those green stools in there that spin around?

Well, there's this lady sitting there.

Uh, early 50s, drunk.

I can smell it even though she's got her back to me.

DISPATCHER: 232, we just got a...

And I get up to the register,

and suddenly this lady spins around and stares right at me.

( woman chuckles softly )

Well, I've seen her somewhere before but...

Hmm.

So... so I say, "Can I help you, ma'am?"

And meanwhile Joe's putting the lids on our coffee,

so I'm good to go, right?

But this lady, oh...

DISPATCHER: Yeah, you were clear.

Were you clear?

I can feel her breath on my face...

and now she leans in even closer.

She's looking right at me and she says,

"Wake up."

( snaps )

( Sam chuckling )

And then

she just turns away.

So... so I come out of the coffee shop,

and I see you sitting there and...

uh, I pass you the coffee,

and I notice how tired you look...

and then...

then I...

I wake up.

( laughs softly )

( both laugh softly )

Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org

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