I want to start with a question. Where does an artwork begin? Now sometimes that question is absurd. It can seem deceptively simple, as it was when I asked the question with this piece, "Portable Planetarium," that I made in 2010. I asked the question: "What would it look like to build a planetarium of one's own?" I know you all ask that every morning, but I asked myself that question. And as an artist, I was thinking about our effort, our desire, our continual longing that we've had over the years to make meaning of the world around us through materials. And for me, to try and find the kind of wonder, but also a kind of futility that lies in that very fragile pursuit, is part of my art work.
我想用一個問題來開場。 藝術作品從哪裡開始? 有時,這個問題顯得很荒謬。 它看似簡單, 我配合我 2010 年的 作品「可攜式天文館」 提出問出這個問題時就是如此。 我問: 「建自己的天文館會是什麼樣子?」 我知道你們每天早上都這麼問, 但,我問我自己這個問題。 身為藝術家, 我想的是我們的努力、慾望, 多年來我們持續不斷的渴求, 希望透過素材 將意義賦予我們周遭的世界。 我不止試圖找到那種驚奇, 而這種徒勞無益的脆弱追求, 兩者皆出現在我藝術的作品中。
So I bring together the materials I find around me, I gather them to try and create experiences, immersive experiences that occupy rooms, that occupy walls, landscapes, buildings. But ultimately, I want them to occupy memory. And after I've made a work, I find that there's usually one memory of that work that burns in my head. And this is the memory for me -- it was this sudden kind of surprising experience of being immersed inside that work of art. And it stayed with me and kind of reoccurred in my work about 10 years later.
因此我結合周遭找到的素材, 嘗試創造體驗, 佔據房間的種沉浸式體驗, 佔據牆壁、地景、建築物, 我希望最終它們會佔據記憶。 完成作品之後, 我發現通常在腦中會有一種 關於那件作品的記憶在燃燒著。 這是給我的記憶—— 這種記憶是一種突然的驚異體驗, 感覺沉浸到了藝術作品中。 這種記憶揮之不去, 且還會再次出現在 我十年之後的作品中。
But I want to go back to my graduate school studio. I think it's interesting, sometimes, when you start a body of work, you need to just completely wipe the plate clean, take everything away. And this may not look like wiping the plate clean, but for me, it was. Because I had studied painting for about 10 years, and when I went to graduate school, I realized that I had developed skill, but I didn't have a subject. It was like an athletic skill, because I could paint the figure quickly, but I didn't know why. I could paint it well, but it didn't have content. And so I decided to put all the paints aside for a while, and to ask this question, which was: "Why and how do objects acquire value for us?" How does a shirt that I know thousands of people wear, a shirt like this one, how does it somehow feel like it's mine?
但我想先回頭談談 我讀研究所時的工作室。 我覺得很有趣的是, 有時要開始創作就得全盤拭淨, 拋開一切。 這看起來可能不像全盤拭淨, 但對我來說的確是。 因為我學畫大約十年, 當我進入研究所時, 我發現我雖然已經 發展出了技能,卻沒有主題。 這就像是一種運動技能, 因為我可以非常快速地畫完人像, 但不知道為什麼, 我可以畫得很好,卻沒有內容。 於是我決定把所有的畫作 暫且擺到一旁, 先問: 「為什麼和如何 物品對我們有價值?」 我知道有數千人穿的上衣, 像這樣的上衣, 我怎麼會覺得它感覺像是我的?
So I started with that experiment, I decided, by collecting materials that had a certain quality to them. They were mass-produced, easily accessible, completely designed for the purpose of their use, not for their aesthetic. So things like toothpicks, thumbtacks, pieces of toilet paper, to see if in the way that I put my energy, my hand, my time into them, that the behavior could actually create a kind of value in the work itself. One of the other ideas is, I wanted the work to become live. So I wanted to take it off of the pedestal, not have a frame around it, have the experience not be that you came to something and told you that it was important, but that you discover that it was in your own time.
所以,我開始實驗, 我決定收集本身 具有某種特性的素材, 找量產、容易取得的東西, 完全以功能來設計, 不考量美感。 比如牙籤、圖釘、 廁所衛生紙, 我嘗試投入能量、手工和時間, 看這樣的行為是否能為 作品本身創造出價值。 我還有另一個想法, 希望作品能活過來。 我想要讓作品脫離展示底座, 周圍沒有框架, 體驗並不是因為你告訴自己 眼前這個事物很重要, 而是照你自己的步調去發現。
So this is like a very, very old idea in sculpture, which is: How do we breathe life into inanimate materials? And so, I would go to a space like this, where there was a wall, and use the paint itself, pull the paint out off the wall, the wall paint into space to create a sculpture. Because I was also interested in this idea that these terms, "sculpture," "painting," "installation" -- none of these mattered in the way we actually see the world. So I wanted to blur those boundaries, both between mediums that artists talk about, but also blur the experience of being in life and being in art, so that when you are in your everyday, or when you are in one of my works, and you saw, you recognized the everyday, you could then move that experience into your own life, and perhaps see the art in everyday life.
這就像雕塑中極為古老的想法, 即:我們要如何把生命 帶入到無生命的素材中? 所以,我會到這樣的空間中, 那裡有一面牆, 我會用顏料本身 把顏料從牆中拉出, 把牆上的顏料拉入空間, 創造雕塑。 因為,我也很喜歡這個想法, 「雕塑」、「繪畫」、 「裝置」這些詞彙—— 就我們看世界的方式而言, 這些詞彙是沒意義的。 所以,我想要模糊那些界線, 不僅模糊藝術家常說的 媒材之間的界線, 也模糊身處生活和身處藝術中 兩者之間的經驗, 所以,當你在你的日常中時, 或者當你在我的一件作品中時, 你會看見、認出那些日常, 接著你就可以把那樣的體驗 搬到你自己的生活中, 也許就能在日常生活中看見藝術。
I was in graduate school in the '90s, and my studio just became more and more filled with images, as did my life. And this confusion of images and objects was really part of the way I was trying to make sense of materials. And also, I was interested in how this might change the way that we actually experience time. If we're experiencing time through materials, what happens when images and objects become confused in space? So I started by doing some of these experiments with images. And if you look back to the 1880s, that's when the first photographs started turning into film. And they were done through studies of animals, the movement of animals. So horses in the United States, birds in France. They were these studies of movement that then slowly, like zoetropes, became film.
我在 1990 年代讀研究所, 我的工作室漸漸堆滿了影像, 我的人生亦是如此。 分不出影像和物品的這種混淆, 其實就是我試圖讓素材 具有意義的一種方式。 此外,我也很好奇這會如何 改變我們實際上對時間的體驗。 如果我們透過素材來體驗時間, 當影像和物品在空間中 混淆在一起時,會怎麼樣? 所以,我開始用影像做實驗。 如果回頭看 1880 年代, 那時照片開始轉變成為影片。 測試的方式是研究動物, 動物的動作, 用美國的馬、法國的鳥。 因為有這些動作的研究, 就像活動畫片玩具, 慢慢變成了影片。
So I decided, I will take an animal and I'm going to play with that idea of how the image is not static for us anymore, it's moving. It's moving in space. And so I chose as my character the cheetah, because she is the fastest land-dwelling creature on earth. And she holds that record, and I want to use her record to actually make it kind of a measuring stick for time. And so this is what she looked like in the sculpture as she moved through space. This kind of broken framing of the image in space, because I had put up notepad paper and had it actually project on it. Then I did this experiment where you have kind of a race, with these new tools and video that I could play with. So the falcon moves out in front, the cheetah, she comes in second, and the rhino is trying to catch up behind.
所以我決定要用動物 試試那想法: 影像不再靜止,是會動的, 會在空間中動。 我選擇的角色是獵豹, 因為牠是地球上最快的陸地動物。 牠是記錄保持者, 而我想要用牠的記錄, 來真正做出一種時間測量棒。 在雕塑中,牠穿越空間時 看起來就是這個樣子。 我把空間中的影像 用破碎的框框拼起來, 我得把筆記本的紙弄上去, 真正投影在上頭。 接著,我做了這個實驗, 讓你可以參與賽跑, 運用這些新工具和影片就可以玩。 獵鷹在前面飛, 獵豹位居第二, 犀牛則在後面追趕。
Then another one of the experiments, I was thinking about how, if we try and remember one thing that happened to us when we were, let's say, 10 years old. It's very hard to remember even what happened in that year. And for me, I can think of maybe one, maybe two, and that one moment has expanded in my mind to fill that entire year. So we don't experience time in minutes and seconds. So this is a still of the video that I took, printed out on a piece of paper, the paper is torn and then the video is projected on top of it. And I wanted to play with this idea of how, in this kind of complete immersion of images that's enveloped us, how one image can actually grow and can haunt us.
還有另一項實驗, 我在想 如果我們試圖憶起 曾經發生在我們身上的一件事, 比如我們十歲時的事。 很難記得那個年紀發生的事情。 我大概只能想起一兩件事, 而那個時刻就在我腦中展開, 填滿了那一整年。 所以,我們並不是以分、 秒的形式來經歷時間的。 我對著影片拍下這張照片, 再將它印在一張紙上, 這張紙被撕破,接著 再把影片投影在上頭。 我想要玩這個點子, 想看看全面沉浸在 這種包圍我們的影像中, 一張影像如何能夠增長, 讓我們難以忘懷。
So I had all of these -- these are three out of, like, 100 experiments I was trying with images for over about a decade, and never showing them, and I thought, OK, how do I bring this out of the studio, into a public space, but retain this kind of energy of experimentation that you see when you go into a laboratory, you see when you go into a studio, and I had this show coming up and I just said, alright, I'm going to put my desk right in the middle of the room. So I brought my desk and I put it in the room, and it actually worked in this kind of very surprising way to me, in that it was this kind of flickering, because of the video screens, from afar. And it had all of the projectors on it, so the projectors were creating the space around it, but you were drawn towards the flickering like a flame. And then you were enveloped in the piece at the scale that we're all very familiar with, which is the scale of being in front of a desk or a sink or a table, and you are immersed, then, back into this scale, this one-to-one scale of the body in relation to the image. But on this surface, you had these projections on paper being blown in the wind, so there was this confusion of what was an image and what was an object.
我做了一大堆—— 上述只是其中三種,出自 我在十多年間用影像做的 大約百種實驗, 但我從來沒有展示它們。 我心想,好, 如果把它們帶出工作室, 帶入公共空間, 但仍然要保留這種實驗的能量, 也就是當你進入實驗室、 進入工作室時會看到的那種能量, 且我有一場展演在即,我就想, 好,我要把桌子放在房間的正中央。 於是我把我的桌子帶去, 放到房間中, 結果產生的效果讓我感到很驚奇, 因為遠處有影片螢幕閃爍。 而所有的投影機都擺在它上頭, 所以投影機在它周圍創造出空間, 但你會被像火焰一樣的閃爍吸引。 接著你會被這件作品包圍, 它的規模是你非常熟悉的, 就是在書桌、水槽前, 或餐桌前的空間, 接著,你會重新 沉浸到這個規模當中, 身體和影像的比例是一比一。 但,在這表面上, 這些在紙上的投影會被飛吹動, 因此,會造成混淆, 分不出什麼是影像,什麼是物體。
So this is what the work looked like when it went into a larger room, and it wasn't until I made this piece that I realized that I'd effectively made the interior of a planetarium, without even realizing that. And I remembered, as a child, loving going to the planetarium. And back then, the planetarium, there was always not only these amazing images on the ceiling, but you could see the projector itself whizzing and burring, and this amazing camera in the middle of the room. And it was that, along with seeing the audience around you looking up, because there was an audience in the round at that time, and seeing them, and experiencing, being part of an audience. So this is an image from the web that I downloaded of people who took images of themselves in the work. And I like this image because you see how the figures get mixed with the work. So you have the shadow of a visitor against the projection, and you also see the projections across a person's shirt. So there were these self-portraits made in the work itself, and then posted, and it felt like a kind of cyclical image-making process. And a kind of an end to that.
把這件作品放入更大的房間 看起來會是這樣, 一直到我做出這件作品, 我才了解到我實際上 做出了天文館的內部, 卻不自覺。 我記得,我小時候很愛去天文館。 那時,在天文館, 不僅在屋頂上有著 很不可思議的影像, 還可以看到颼颼作響的投影機本身, 在房間中央有一台很棒的攝影機。 當時,可以看到 周圍的觀眾都在向上看, 因為當時有一群觀眾, 看著他們,體驗身為 他們當中的一分子。 我從網路上下載了這張影像, 影像中的人在拍攝 他們置身其中的狀況。 我很喜歡這張影像, 因為你能看見人物和作品 如何混合在一起。 你會看見訪客的影子蓋在投影上, 你也會看到投影 出現在人的衣服上。 所以作品本身就有這些自畫像, 接著再張貼出來, 感覺就像是循環式的影像製作流程, 還類似某種終點。
But it reminded me and brought me back to the planetarium, and that interior, and I started to go back to painting. And thinking about how a painting is actually, for me, about the interior images that we all have. There's so many interior images, and we've become so focused on what's outside our eyes. And how do we store memory in our mind, how certain images emerge out of nowhere or can fall apart over time. And I started to call this series the "Afterimage" series, which was a reference to this idea that if we all close our eyes right now, you can see there's this flickering light that lingers, and when we open it again, it lingers again -- this is happening all the time. And an afterimage is something that a photograph can never replace, you never feel that in a photograph. So it really reminds you of the limits of the camera's lens. So it was this idea of taking the images that were outside of me -- this is my studio -- and then trying to figure out how they were being represented inside me.
它讓我想起天文館, 把我帶回天文館內。 我又回去畫畫。 我想,對我來說,繪畫的重點在於 我們每個人都有的內部影像。 有好多內部影像, 而我們已變成聚焦於 肉眼看得見的外在。 我們要如何在腦中儲存記憶, 某些影像如何從不知何處冒出來, 或者可能會隨時間而瓦解。 我開始把這個系列 稱為「殘像」系列, 這個名稱來自於閉上眼睛時 還能看到閃爍的光線逗留; 再次張開眼睛時, 光線又開始逗留—— 這個現象不斷在發生。 殘像是照片永遠無法取代的, 在照片中無法感受到殘像。 所以它會讓你想起相機鏡頭的限制。 想法是用外在的影像—— 這是我的工作室—— 想辦法在我的內在呈現它們。
So really quickly, I'm just going to whiz through how a process might develop for the next piece. So it might start with a sketch, or an image that's burned in my memory from the 18th century -- it's Piranesi's "Colosseum." Or a model the size of a basketball -- I built this around a basketball, the scale's evidenced by the red cup behind it. And that model can be put into a larger piece as a seed, and that seed can grow into a bigger piece. And that piece can fill a very, very large space. But it can funnel down into a video that's just made from my iPhone, of a puddle outside my studio in a rainy night. So this is an afterimage of the painting made in my memory, and even that painting can fade as memory does.
讓我快速帶大家 看一下作品可能的發展過程。 它可能始於一張素描, 或者我記憶中烙印的一個影像, 來自十八世紀—— 這是皮拉奈奇的《羅馬競技場》。 或是籃球大小的模型—— 我沿著籃球建造, 可用後面的紅色杯子呈現它的比例。 這個模型可被當作種子, 放入更大的作品, 而那種子可以成長成為更大的作品。 那作品可以填滿非常非常大的空間。 但它可以被縮進 我用 iPhone 製作的影片中, 內容是某個下雨的夜晚 我工作室外的一個水坑。 這是我記憶中的畫作留下的殘像, 那畫作也有可能隨著 記憶淡去而跟著淡去。
So this is the scale of a very small image from my sketchbook. You can see how it can explode to a subway station that spans three blocks. And you could see how going into the subway station is like a journey through the pages of a sketchbook, and you can see sort of a diary of work writ across a public space, and you're turning the pages of 20 years of art work as you move through the subway. But even that sketch actually has a different origin, it has an origin in a sculpture that climbs a six-story building, and is scaled to a cat from the year 2002. I remember that because I had two black cats at the time. And this is an image of a work from Japan that you can see the afterimage of in the subway. Or a work in Venice, where you see the image etched in the wall. Or how a sculpture that I did at SFMOMA in 2001, and created this kind of dynamic line, how I stole that to create a dynamic line as you descend down into the subway itself.
這出自我的素描簿的一張小圖, 做成放大版。 各位可以看見它爆展開來 成為一個橫跨三個街區的地鐵站。 各位可以看到,進入這個地鐵站, 就像是踏上一段穿過 素描簿各頁的旅程, 可看見類似工作日誌 跨越了整個公共空間, 通過地鐵就是一頁頁翻閱 二十年的藝術作品。 就連那張素描其實也有不同的源頭, 源頭是攀爬在六層樓建築上的雕塑, 把比例縮到等同 2002 年的一隻貓。 我記得這件事是因為 我當時有兩隻黑貓。 這張影像是在日本的作品, 各位可以看到地鐵的殘像。 這是在威尼斯的作品, 可以看到影像被蝕刻在牆壁上。 這是 2001 年我在舊金山 現代藝術博物館的一件雕塑, 創造出這種動態的線條, 我又用來做成 隨著向下進入地鐵的動態線條。
And this merging of mediums is really interesting to me. So how can you take a line that pulls tension like a sculpture and put it into a print? Or then use line like a drawing in a sculpture to create a dramatic perspective? Or how can a painting mimic the process of printmaking? How can an installation use the camera's lens to frame a landscape? How can a painting on string become a moment in Denmark, in the middle of a trek? And how, on the High Line, can you create a piece that camouflages itself into the nature itself and becomes a habitat for the nature around it?
對於我來說,進入 這樣的表現媒體著實有趣。 例如,如何在畫作中 呈現雕塑綫條的張力? 在雕塑中像畫圖一樣 用線條來創造戲劇性的視角? 如何模仿版畫的過程來畫圖? 如何利用攝像鏡頭做景觀的框架? 弦上的畫在長途跋涉中 如何變爲丹麥的一瞬? 如何在高線公園創作能僞裝大自然, 並成爲自然棲息地的作品?
And I'll just end with two pieces that I'm making now. This is a piece called "Fallen Sky" that's going to be a permanent commission in Hudson Valley, and it's kind of the planetarium finally come down and grounding itself in the earth. And this is a work from 2013 that's going to be reinstalled, have a new life in the reopening of MOMA. And it's a piece that the tool itself is the sculpture. So the pendulum, as it swings, is used as a tool to create the piece. So each of the piles of objects go right up to one centimeter to the tip of that pendulum. So you have this combination of the lull of that beautiful swing, but also the tension that it constantly could destroy the piece itself.
最後我想分享兩件進行中的作品。 這一件叫做《墜落的天空》, 將成爲哈德遜河谷永遠的珍藏, 彷彿是天文館終於降臨人間。 這件 2013 年的作品 將被重新安置在 新開放的現代藝術博物館。 這作品的工具本身就是雕塑, 用這個搖動的風扇當鐘擺, 它就是創作的工具。 所以每一組物體 都堆叠到風扇上端 1公分處, 這樣既能感受到 鐘擺帶來的靜雅之美, 又能感受到時刻都有可能 破壞作品本身的那種緊迫美。
And so, it doesn't really matter where any of these pieces end up, because the real point for me is that they end up in your memory over time, and they generate ideas beyond themselves.
這些作品的最終命運並不重要, 因爲對於我來説,真正有意義的是 它們終將隨著時間 消逝在你的記憶裡, 並且產生超越本身的思考。
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)