Studio Note

It’s 6:47 am, and I can’t sleep. I have a lot to do today, and my mind is racing. I had my alarm set for 6:30 am, but my ideas woke me up well before that. This residency starts on Monday morning, and there is so much to do still before I walk through those doors. It’s such an unusual project for me: having my studio, for the next nine weeks, be inside an art gallery. (And not just any art gallery either: a really, really prestigious one.)

Despite the fact that the “original” for Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” only ever existed as a photograph in a magazine, it still presented an important (the most important?) idea about the transformative power of art galleries. When you put something into an art gallery, it turns into art. Or at least, that’s always been my feeling on the matter. I’ve never really worked in one or been a part of that gallery staff world. Those people most likely have a very different relationship to the physical space of an art gallery. My relationship to galleries has always been as an artist, and so for me, they turn the things I put in them into art. Or perhaps more accurately: they make that performative artistic gesture a public one, a decree. I the artist, and in front of all public witnesses, have formally decreed that this urinal shall from this moment forth be known as a work of art.

But here’s the thing with this project. What does it mean to have my studio be inside an art gallery? For me it means that my methodology should be on display, that my artistic process itself will be transformed into an art in itself. And really, that is the point of this blog. That’s the point of the Instagram. That’s the point of the Twitter. Across these various 21st century platforms, the point is to create an aesthetics of process: a polished, and cleaned up window into my own methodology.

I am making art in an art gallery, so the making of that art needs to be art also.