In part, this reluctance has to do with various coming home challenges — burst pipes, unreliable contractors, relatives using the house in unexpected and unnerving ways. But in part, it’s simply because I don’t know what I did, although I am fairly certain I did not manage to un-orient, and my feeble attempts merely feel like they may be so feeble as to look feeble-minded.

Well, you see where I am. I began last February and March, 2009, living with the desert and Beatty, Nevada, painting small masonite panels, getting to know the territory and its inhabitants. This November sojourn, however, was more limited and almost entirely devoted to the Amargosa, which became more and more fascinating as I spent 6-8 hours a day, alone with the scene, for the full month of November.

So here are photos of the seven panels, plus the full panorama. These were taken as the panels were still on the wall of the Red Barn, under under limited lighting conditions. The exception is the full panorama, which was lit andphotographed by professional photographer, David Lancaster.

I am showing these in part to bolster my own sense of dignity and/or bravado.

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 1, east), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 2, east), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 3, east), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 4, central), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 5, west), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 6, west), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 7,west), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Let me assure you that I’m not looking for compliments. Sympathy maybe, but not false reassurances <snort>

What I will be working out this winter, I believe, is the nature of the horizontal. How much of it can be conveyed, how much of it needs color to work, what scale makes the power and fearful nature of the horizontal apparent? What media can be both intriguing and yet horizontal? How do verticals interrupt the horizontal and are they the only way to convey a sense of space?The problems of scale, color, and vertical interruptions are predominate in my mind as I try sussing out where I need to start.

You see, I’m already to start a new set of propositions, without having the courage to deal with the old. But only out of the old could come the new, so it’s probably OK.

And just for laughs, I’m also including the photo that David Lancaster, the professional photographer on the Goldwell Open Air Museum Board, took of me. It was taken in the waning sun hours, and David had a strobe light that allowed him to photograph me from below, directly in front of the sun. The strobe filled the front space, so I wasn’t just a silhouette. I kept hoping something similar could be done with the mountains, which required an extraordinary amount of vigilance to catch some relief, some sense of form and shape on as they were mostly just silhouettes against the desert sky. It was also David Lancaster who photographed the whole of the panorama,  pictured below:

Unoriented Amargosa Panorama, 28′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009 (photo by David Lancaster)

JOU, December, 2009. Take that, Universe!

A bit of background: when I was working textiles, I regularly engaged in a “discussion” with quilters (some traditional, some contemporary) about whether the stitching work done on my textiles ( specifically in construction and quilting) should strive for perfection. I always maintained that my goal was “competence.” My attention was entirely on the image and impact (on, I maintained, the art).  The craft was there only to hold it together and/or to add to the art. Hence my seams were not necessarily straight and the back of the art was decent but not flawless (I didn’t bury my threads, for example, simply tidied them). I used the quilting stitches as part of the design, which meant that they were generally not even in length and that they were heavy in places and light in others; this can make the quilted art hang wonkily, requiring heroic measures to make it perform well.

This is an example of a old piece of mine that I claim has “competent” craft:

Sophie, Emerging, 84 x 73″, 2002, Materials: hand-painted cotton, canvas, silk, stretch-polyester, felt. Methods: hand- painted-and-dyed, airbrushed and commercial fabrics. Machine stitched.

Sophie Emerging, Detail

I violated all kinds of quilting craft standards here — you can probably see that the center has been lightly stitched while around it the stitching is quite heavy. I mixed materials so wildly that my friends burst into laughter when they heard that I hoped the canvas, silk, light-weight cotton, and stretch fabrics  would hang flat on exhibit. I did exhibit it, with aluminum rods inserted top and bottom, one of which got lost so the piece buckled badly (the uneven stitching, not to mention the range of fabrics, will do that).   At one point I almost took it out of an exhibit because it showed up so badly next to the much finer craft that it hung beside. We replaced the rod, which helped a little, although it always did look like sloppy craft (albeit not “sloppy craft.”)

I didn’t reform much in the following years, although I did throw away the stretch fabrics in my collection. But I continued to have discussions about how “fine”  the craft which gets put into art should be — how much it should conform to finely crafted quilts, for example, that regularly win large awards at national quilt shows. Is competence sufficient in quilted/stitched textile art?

Which brings me to the panel discussion “Sloppy Craft”. “Sloppy craft” is described by craft theorist Glenn Adamson as the “unkempt” product of a “post-disciplinary craft education.” The panel here in Portland featured The Art Institute of Chicago’s  Professor Anne Wilson (Fibers and Materiality), Wilson’s former student Josh Faught (now teaching Fibers at the University of Oregon), Nan Curtis (professor and head of many departments at the Pacific Northwest College of Art), local artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Namita Gupta Wiggers, the head curator of the Contemporary Crafts Museum. The discussion was held in the Commons at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which in itself startled me — it seemed an unlikely venue for the old Contemporary Crafts Museum. While the CCM has recently moved downtown to the heart of Portland’s art scene and has had some staff shake-ups and financial troubles, they were traditionally a quiet force for High Craft in Portland. Whereas, the College of Art (PNCA) has a highly contemporary, conceptually-based, post-modern orientation.

All the panelists have had wide exposure in exhibits and reviews and writing about their respective areas and seem clear about their own artistic journeys.

Josh Faught, according to his instructor at Chicago Anne Wilson, knows his craft (fibers — weaving, crochet, knitting)  inside and out, and is currently working in sculptural mode:

Josh Faught, Untitled, 2008 crocheted hemp and garden trellis

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, the youngest panel member, also does sculptural work.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins Convivium, 2008, table, linen, paper maché and ceramic, 52.75 x 56.75 x 53.75 inches

Nan Curtis is an installation artist (she did 52 “street signs” along 12th Ave, two blocks away from my house, signs which were posted on telephone poles, like rock band flyers, but having official government looking typeface and material). She has installed complete versions of her home (“Homebody,” Manuel Izquierdo gallery, 1998), and many other conceptual installations of that sort.

Nan Curtis, Role Model #1: She has always served him well 2005
digital photograph on gator board 22.25″ x 29.75″

Anne Wilson too works in installation mode, although her imagery seems less rough to me:

Anne Wilson, Topologies*, 2002

Namita Wiggers continues to make her imprint on the Contemporary Crafts Museum (she oversaw its transition to its highly visible downtown location) and has become a force on the Portland Art Scene. She writes and interviews extensively, is a regular participant in the national crafts scene, and brings exhibits of the highest quality to the CCM.

So, what did this diverse group of artists, three who have roots in traditional fine crafts, have to say about craft and art.

Anne Wilson was perhaps the most interesting interlocutor: she said that “sloppy” was really a sound bite, irresistible once uttered aloud. “Sloppy” indicates intentionality, which she didn’t think was the case with the art she was describing. She would favor terms like “informal” “casual” or “raw” rather than “sloppy” to describe contemporary art that has some base in traditional crafts. Most interestingly, she observed that artists now seem to “take on” crafting only when they need it.

Traditionally, a craftsperson would spend years polishing her craft, working at the highest level until she was so good she could let it go; she would have behind her all the knowledge needed to return to “fineness” if the art required it. To some extent Josh Faught fits that mold. He self-identified as a Fibers Major at Chicago, while his fellow students in fibers always made clear they were “Fibers-and-…” “…and performance,” “…and installation,” “…and assemblage,” “…and collage.” But at some point Faught let go of the fine work of Fiber Craft and turned to rawer work.

Another example of the fine craftsperson turning to raw work after years of exquisitely fine craft is Peter Voulkos.

Peter Voulkos died in 2002 but a look at his biography shows a continuing movement through the highest worlds of craft, then into the fine art world. His craft won him honors over and over again. And his art gained him access to the most formidable museums of high art.

That model, learning the craft inside and out and then letting yourself go, however, has changed to “learning on need” which means that you might teach yourself how to sew a straight seam but can put off learning to sew curves (not to mention French seams).  And you might marry stretch/polyester to silk, which violates a lot of traditional sewing standards, for a number of reasons.

Beyond the Need to Know response of current students were a couple of other aspects of “sloppy craft.” One was the recycling of materials — trash art, one might call it. It’s everywhere these days, at least in Portland, and no one bats an eye at exhibits with “wedding dresses” made from plastic bags picked up on the streets. The other aspect of this kind of casual crafting is that it appears most often in assemblages and collage. Assemblages and collage have clear ancestors, dating back to Picasso, through Rauschenberg and arte povera and  are seen and made by thousands of people who may not even think of themselves as artists.

Two exhibits, Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York and From Trash to Spectacle: Materiality in Contemporary Art Production were specifically referenced as examples of what has happened in the national scene  when informal craft became firmly entrenched in the world of art. These kinds of works — ready-mades, gritty street junk, messy — are contrasted to the highly commercial and polished art of say, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog or Takashi Murakami’s Vuitton bags, which are “finely crafted brands” (the phrase used by Kathryn Hixson at the School of the art Institute of Chicago in her discussion of Trash to Spectacle).

Anne Wilson made another comment at the panel discussion that stuck with me: she said that so-called sloppy art required the highest level of attention to detail — everything counted, because the meaning of the art is  so central. No lapses into mumbling or side-trips into irrelevant detail could be allowed to interfere with the meaning of the piece. Her example was of a student working with clay and fabric, who wanted to indicate the spilling out of fluid materials from the hardness of the clay. But the student closed the ends of her fabric spillages with stitching  and that attention to a “craft” detail stopped the sense of things spilling and in some sense stopped the art from succeeding.

One audience member at the panel noted that because we are now mostly knowledge workers, with few workers in the general public who craft anything besides digital artifacts, fine craft may be accessible only to aficionados of specific fine crafts. In my experience, people are piqued by color and image and like to see stitching, but really can’t see or don’t care if the stitches are tiny or big. They are aware only the overall  force of the wall-hung or sculptural material.

In fine craft, attention must be paid to every detail of the crafting — stitches must be buried into the interior of the quilt; wood grains must enhance the flow of the entire piece and be carved and sanded to perfection. That’s the “need” of fine craft, focusing attention on the material itself. But the “need” of contemporary fine art, according to Arthur Danto, philosopher of aesthetics, is to pay full and whole attention to the meaning of the work; every detail must express the meaning of the whole.

I would add another difference between high art and high craft which is that art tends to be individually identified: Anne Wilson is the artist, even though she may work with a large crew. But much of fine craft is community-identified: the Gees Bend quilts, the totems of the Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples; African masks. The craft may be formed by a single individual, but it arises from the standards of a community. Sometimes at the highest level, the two overlap, so we may know Bill Reid’s name as one who sculpts items such as were crafted by Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples. But much of finely crafted work is anonymous, perhaps done communally. And the standards by which it is judged are set by a community of craftpersons, those who know exactly how many stitches there are in that particular inch, just by looking at it.

As Kathryn Hixson comments, trashy and fine art and craft may represent continuums rather than opposites (so I’m in the running with my middling concept of “competent”.) I am fond of Bill Reid’s sculpture, finely crafted of course, which seems to exemplify in its imagery some of the difficulties this kind of discussion is always running in to:

Bill Reid, Raven and the First Men, 1980

Reid’s humans, working to escape the clam shell, may exemplify the struggle to understand as well as produce, and to produce out of understanding, that forms the most singular element of our current state of art.

As a kind of PS, I would venture to say that Jay’s work fits perfectly into the informal craft mode, while Hanneke’s seems to harken back to the traditional crafting of fine art. And I just heard about a class in figure drawing at a local university, which runs for 3 quarters. The first quarter features only the bones of the human figure; measuring and drawing bones is all that students do. The second quarter moves on to muscles (with more measuring); the third allows for some flesh — always measured. The mind boggles, but there are at least 15 students in the class who are opting for this model of traditional high art crafting.

And this just in: in today’s NY Times,  Denis Dutton,a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.” takes on the whole question of permanency in crafting and art.

* And as a further PS, I thought it might be worthwhile to present some official textual presentation that accompanied Anne Wilson’s Topologies exhibit, as a sample of the kind of thinking brought forth by her work in “informal” crafting.

project statement from Anne Wilson’s Topologies

While our society faces a growing fragmentation and specialization that seems at times to alienate us all, we have also started to view our world as a series of integrated, even entangled networks. One way we can begin to understand this contradictory state is as a matrix of field phenomena – repetitive patterns of texture, growth, turbulence, sound, light, etc., within a given system or space.

– Douglas Garofalo, architect

Textiles, in their expandable and accumulative structure, can be seen as metaphors for such a matrix. In this new project, the webs and networks of found black lace are deconstructed to create large horizontal topographies, ‘physical drawings’ that are both complicated and delicate. This work is a constantly unfolding process of close observation, dissection, and recreation. The structural characteristics of lace are understood by unraveling threads; following the impetus to remake, mesh structures are also reconstructed through crochet and netting. The computer affords another means of close observation: lace fragments are scanned, filtered, and printed out as paper images. These computer-mediated digital prints are then re-materialized by hand stitching and are placed in relationship to the found and re-made lace in the topography.

The logic of organization within the project is based on the concept of like kinds. Never exactly repeating, areas of proximity are formed on the basis of the structural and visual characteristics of likeness. There is both unity and formlessness as parts coalesce, separate, and collide.

As a physical material, black lace has diverse cultural implications in relation to sexuality, death, and gender. These aspects of material context are embedded in the work, yet are not the dominant voice. This project references many things simultaneously: relationships between systems of materiality (textile networks) and systems of immateriality (Internet and the web); microscopic, specimen-like images of biology and the internal body; and macro views of urban sprawl – systems of organization of city structures, interdependent and/or parasitic, processes of expansion. No single theme or position is privileged over another.

This project is large in scale, but the specific configuration of installation is flexible, the size determined by the space at each venue as the project travels. The horizontal architectural support is created on site — a white painted wood platform.

exhibition history

Topologies (3-5.02), 2002
Installation, “2002 Biennial Exhibition,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 7 – May 26, 2002
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 18 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (9-12.02), 2002

Installation, “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings,” Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, MassArt, Boston, September 4 – December 7, 2002
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (4-5.03), 2003

Installation, “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings,” University Art Gallery,San Diego State University, April 7 – May 7, 2003
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (1-4.04), 2004

Installation, “Perspectives 140: Anne Wilson,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, January 16 – April 4, 2004
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (11.07 – 2.08), 2007

Installation, “Out of the Ordinary,” Victoria & Albert Museum, London, November 13, 2007 – February 17, 2008
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 20 feet long (overall dimension)

A provocative phrase, that — “sloppy craft” sends craftspeople ballistic — and some collectors, too.

After having spent 6 weeks in the desert, perceiving and painting, mostly plein air, I am now back in Portland reading about desert perception in William L. Fox’s The Void, the Grid, and the Sign.

Fox has spent most of his life in and around a variety of deserts and back-of-nowhere lands, but in The Void he’s primarily concerned with the Great Basin, that large space between the Rockies and the Sierras, where water flows in, but never out, where there is no river coursing to the sea.  He says that outside of Afghanistan, this area contains the most mountain ranges (316) in the world, but there are also 90 basins, places where what little water exists is captured between ranges and sinks or evaporates. The best known of these basins is perhaps Death Valley, although that lies outside Fox’s attention. The place I was painting, the Amargosa Plain, is also just outside his wide-ranging travels. However, much of what he says is apropos of the Amargosa and Death Valley.

Death Valley at the Beatty Cut-off, March, 2009

Fox’s interest is in the intersection of geography (and some geology), cartography, personal experience, human perception (of land voids such as the basin and range) and art. He’s a poet, and the first third of The Void, the Grid, and the Sign revolves around Michael Heizer’s City, the enormous earthwork begun in about 1970 and premised to be finished by about 2010.

Fox’s description, found on his website, of the basin and range area is better than any I could create: “The Great Basin, my home desert, encourages … recursive thoughts. Covering almost all of Nevada and western Utah, it is a deeply repetitive landscape of arid basins and high ranges that betrays the cycles of earth, fire, and water underlying it. The entire region continues to swell, uplifted from underneath and pushing apart Reno and Salt Lake City at opposite ends of the Basin. Nevada alone carries three hundred and sixteen mountain ranges, some of them more than thirteen thousand feet in elevation, all separated from each other by valleys that can run a hundred miles long by twenty wide. The basins and ranges tend roughly north by south, massive wrinkles reflecting how the North American plate overrides the Pacific one. The bones of the land are naked here, and so is the syntax of the poetry.

“No water runs out of the Great Basin, all of it falling inward either to sink beneath the ground or to evaporate. Forming its western rim is the two-mile-high Sierra Nevada, an escarpment of granite that casts a deep rain shadow over almost the entire Basin. This is the largest, highest, and coldest desert in the contiguous United States. Because the air is so devoid of humidity there is little blurring of ridges thirty and forty miles away, confounding our sense of distance. Because the spectrum of color in the vegetation is so narrow, our expectations of atmospheric perspective, of a shift in color from a warm foreground to cool background, are distorted likewise.

“The ground at our feet and the distant mountains are all that we see. Nowhere is there a familiar tree or building against which we can measure ourselves. The cognitive dissonance is severe. We don’t know where we are. Traditional wisdom about being lost in the wilderness—follow water downstream until you reach civilization—does not often work here. Follow convention and you are likely to end up stranded in the middle of an alkali flat.

“The only way to understand the enormous space of the Great Basin is to invest time in your experience of it. Slowly your eyes will adjust to the extended reach of vision, and your ears become accustomed to hearing only the wind and your heartbeat. You will learn to read your way around, cutting across the grain of the land instead of following it in order to find your bearings.”

Prior to going to Nevada, I had a vague notion of the basin and range country from having traversed it on route 50, perhaps 40 years before, being astonished at its desolation and at the highway, cutting across basin after basin, rising slowly to the top of inclines, where it would slop wildly down steep backsides, to cross the next basin.

This is a view of a small California basin, the Panamint. The photo was taken from a small unnamed range that we had been traversing in the car; it looks back toward the big Panamint Range (the west wall of Death Valley), which is beyond the top of the photo. The photo has been enhanced a bit to show the road we had just traveled, moving from right center, reappearing to go off center left after crossing the saline flats. The photo may give some indication of the kind of territory that Fox describes and that I tried to paint.

Fox is interested in cartography, how people perceive and map land, and more particularly, how they map apparent voids. Americans, starting with Jefferson and taking cues from much earlier civilizations, map in grids, so John Fremont mapped the Great Basin, disregarding its natural formations and placing it with the rest of the grid that the US was forming. (Other cultures, such as the Australian Aborigines, map in very different ways, through stories and spiritual places, and even city slickers in 21st century America will map the distance from here to the nearest Peets Coffee Shop by time ( 25 minutes) rather than gridded space (15 blocks directly north),

Grids can be comforting, but strangely at odds with what one attempts to paint in the desert. Painting without much middle ground, and without much to focus on, can have strange effects on the painter’s psyche.

This is one view of the ghost town, Rhyolite, from a point south of the Red Barn, where I had my studio for those six weeks. The dots here and there in the center of the photo below the hills are what remains of the town. In its heyday, it had gridded streets, the tracks of which still can be found, as well as three railroad lines, and the usual array of post office, banks, a two-story school, saloons, and whorehouses, all placed on a grid. Just southwest of the ghost town is the sculpture area known as the Goldwell Open Air Museum, about which I wrote earlier. And southeast of Rhyolite is Ladd Mountain, now sculpted on its southern flank by a vat leach mine.

When I painted this scene (plein air) the first time, I was flummoxed by its randomness. Even when looking with my own eyes rather than through the flattening and distortion caused by the camera, the scene had no focus, no way to get hold of it. Here’s one discarded attempt at a plein air work of the subject:

It tooka number of weeks before I found the only spot around where the scene could make sense:

Rhyolite and Sculptures Panorama, 18 x 36″, oil on board

Only on a curve in the paved road going to the ghost town (marked by a big asphalt patch on the right side), can you see that the mountains, Ladd on the right, Busch Peak behind, and Sutherland (and Bonanza Hill) to the left formed a 3-sided wall. The town sat within these hills and looked out over the Amargosa Plain (alternatively called the Amargosa Desert), where that “wretched trickle” known as the Amargosa River sinks. [Digression alert: the Amargosa Plain is not legitimately a "playa", because its water does not totally sink in its depression. A slight decline leads the existing water  down to the end of the Funeral Mountains where it finds further slight declines around the end of the mountain and into a further declination that leads it to below sea level to Death Valley].

One of my earlierst paintings of the Amargosa Plain didn’t capture the void. It’s not a bad painting, but it isn’t the desert that I was confronted with, even though I was painting plein air. My brain simply couldn’t see the void in front of me:

Amargosa Playa 1, 12 x 16″ , oil on board

I painted that desert straight on at least 3 times and obliquely, a large number of other times. The oblique approach was definitely easier, because the mountains gave a place to go with the brush:

Funeral Mountains, Early Morning, 18 x 24″, oil on board

The middle ground is still lacking, so the mountains, which are perhaps 15 miles away to the west, look much closer, but at least they are there; and there’s a road, a sign, that leads one to know what is being depicted.

Perhaps the most successful painting of the void I’ve managed thus far was very late in my stay in Nevada. It is directly down the Amargosa Plain (desert/playa) in front of the Red Barn. It was painted in late afternoon, when the slight haze that the unseen river causes to rise over the ground surfaces gets played with by the sunlight:

The Amargosa Playa 3, 18 x 34, oil on board

The Plain isn’t fully empty at its southern end. A “pinch” allows the Amargosa to work its way between two mountain ranges before it turns west.  So in some lights (like this one at 3 PM in mid-March) there is some edge to the void of the desert.

I have a canvas painting that presents the perspective in a  different way;  In Aereality Fox describes a variation of this form from an earlier painting The painting was found  on an excavated wall at Catalhoyuk, Anatolia (Turkey): “This ‘volcano painting’ a panoramic view done around 6200 BC, shows the town in planimetric (a plan view, as if seen from straight above) and the then active Hasan Dag volcano, its twin summits sixty miles away reaching 10,672 feet, in elevation (in profile, as if seen from a horizontal view)…. there are no hills nearby Catalhoyuk, and athough the residents apparently climbed up the volcano to obtain obsidian, the town was effectively invisible from that distance… why make this composite image in plan and profile…. this is more than a map, but a highly mediated and thus expressive aerial view of the world.”

It is this “highly mediated and … expressive view” of the Amargosa plain, with a plan (aerial view) as well as a horizontal one from the Red Barn Studio,  which I am still reworking. In other paintings, I managed to capture the grids with telephone poles and desert tracks, and even the signs, with speed limits on metallic boards and billboards. The rocks of the mountains have bold layers of folds and geologic structures and chemicals that made them explicable in paint. But the void is harder. And (therefore?) somewhat more interesting. And I swear, I read Fox’s description of the somewhat older art work after I painted the unfinished but blocked out plab/horizon version I’m now working on. I’m hoping to somehow do other versions of that Amargosa void, working the question of perspectives.

I would also say that Fox himself finds it difficult to discuss the void — mostly he discusses its edges, either by driving, hiking, climbing, or flying above them. Rocks and mountains make stops and points of reference; only artists working on the ocean, or someone like Michael Heizer, can make the void fully expressive.

Incidentally, Fox’s discussion of Heizer’s City, in The Void, the Grid and the Sign, is the best I’ve seen anywhere about this reclusive artist’s work. I’m hoping that when City opens (Dia: Beacon says 2010; right now it’s totally closed to the public) that I can spend some time there. Heizer seems particularly aware of the void he faces; he says City is not “in a place; it is place.” From Fox’s description, I can believe it.

In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

Her “robots” are simple wind-up toys with a sign on a pole. They don’t fit the usual definition of being able to respond to their environment. But their environment—particularly the human environment—can surely respond to them. New Yorkers defied all the unfair stereotypes by helping the tweenbot on its mission to cross Washington Park:

See the web site for a number of still images, and future plans. YouTube already has a video clip of the first art of juxtaposition based on tweenbots. Leslie, maybe your show needs a bot.