Commissioned to develop a sculpture, the artist instead found herself attempting to define the space around it.
What use is a sculpture without a room, a world? She’d asked her gallerist who reminded her that the municipal client had come with a certain budget. Your job is to make things, the gallerist seemed to misunderstand, when she took as her task something bigger than that.
“Inviting perceptions,” she might say; “convening experiences,” a wall text once claimed, though she’d cringed at that one. Maybe in the end such phrases revealed that indeed her task wasn’t so grand, that plopping something upon a plinth was in fact the grandest part, grander than any motivating “concept” for her and everyone else to say emptier and emptier things about.
Regardless, she’d like to believe sculpture, at least as she practiced it, had learned it, transcended mere quote-unquote material concerns, but you’ve gotta eat, and we have to too, her gallerist seemed to be insinuating, suggesting that art was an issue of not the hand but the mouth. She wouldn’t go hungry.
