 So good evening and and welcome to the annual lecture hosted by the the program in critical curatorial and conceptual practices in architecture As co-directors of the CCCP program Makusura myself are very very pleased to be Welcoming Martin Beck to speak tonight Martin is an artist based here in New York whose work is long stood as a as a paradigm of the type of critical nuance and Conceptual and historical rigor that we hope the CCCP program might foster within architecture So moreover it's worked that for a long time and I'll speak to some other ways It does this has engaged directly with or even drawn from fields of architecture and design notably including the history of exhibition design a obsession that Martin Mark and I all share and His work often takes exhibition design as a sort of format We might say or mode of practice that might be subject to systematic modes of scrutiny and artistic refunctioning Additionally, some of his artworks have taken the form of architectural interventions recently such as remodel of 2011 with Ken sailor, which was a redesign of the the Goethe Institute's gallery at 30 low at 38 ledlow level 38 a wall of 2012 at artist space books and torques So I wouldn't be so Imprudent as to claim Martin for our side of the fence so to speak I do want to underscore the importance of this architectural trajectory Throughout his work actually both in exhibition ecoratosis, but also in content and we see it in in early exhibitions like outdoor systems Indoor distribution with julie alt of 2000 which engaged with super graphics and megastructures and the work of figures like Akizum and super studio and Akigran or exhibit Sorry an exhibit viewed played populated of 2003 But we find figures like Rainer Bannum and Chels Jenks as key protagonists or another exhibition The details are not the details of 2007 which took George Nelson's strut tube system as a key archive of mid-century Exhibition practice through to panel to nothing better than a touch of ecology and Catastrophe to unite the social classes which was installed among other venues here at the Arthur Ross Gallery in 2009 and which drew on Rainer Bannum's involvement in the aspen design conference And I could go on and on to bring us up to current work And I've often said that that seeing or Reading Martin's work is sort of like finding a wormhole or something onto a parallel universe In art a sort of position from which somebody like myself can look back at my own discipline from a sort of parallax view and Will heighten intensity that for me remains continuously Fascinating and enormously constructive But I did want to say that the crucial here is not only the figures like architecture design and exhibition Making have remained Important archives from Martin or sort of sites at play within his work But but equally important is that we pay attention to the incredible Precision with which he selects and reactivates and transposes and translates aspects of that visual material into his work So architecture and design we find always don't come into play merely as stylistic or even semiotic tropes Let alone as functional ones But as harboring methodological Problematics as vehicles of research into a medium or a practice sort of vehicles that reveal Something of the works of its functioning of these materials functioning within institutional frameworks and cultures more broadly But also always that insist on a type of profound internal heterogeneity within the material itself even prior to Being redirected into his work and and it's this in some senses that brings me to Martin's presentation tonight As advertised Martin's talk is presented on the occasion of a two-year exhibition project at the Carpenter Center for the visual arts at Harvard University entitled program a Work that manifest or an exhibition that manifest as a series of episodes across time a series of of Interventions installations events and display and I'm sure many of you in the room know that the the Carpenter Center is a Building designed by look of Buzier in the early 1960s Not that this is the subject of Martin's work So as the poster notes the poster for G sub and I quoted here Program focused on the institutions Modes formats and sites of communication with its various constituencies and drew upon the exhibition histories Academic pursuits and institutional development of the Carpenter Center during its founding period in the 1960s but Somewhat of a spoiler alert here I might say Departing from the poster Martin will not actually speak about the project Rather instead of instead of describing the work as such He's going to offer us an element of it Presenting a script or performance that constituted one of the final Elements or episodes generated in this context. You know, so you'll see a sort of version of an artist's talk and I want to recall just very briefly a rather nice piece of this story, which I think Allegorizes at once the proximity of Martin's work to but also its manifest distance from something like design as he explains in an interview related to the project the initial invitation from the director James Voorhees was to and I quote To re-envision as an artist the foyer area of the cert gallery in order to accommodate a coffee bar So instead of playing the role of artist as designer here Martin headed instead into their institutional archives to come up with a very different kind of project and In turn of what he's named the the platform which emerged from this collaboration Institution building which now takes the form of an expanded residency envisaged as a critical mode of curating and so we'll come back to that after Martin's presentation to to Open up what exactly that project was about in a slightly different register But finally before I hand it over to Martin I wanted to announce that in May of this year Martin will be having a major retrospective of his work at Moomoc in Vienna Entitled rumors and murmurs, which I hope that many of you will have an occasion to view on which I personally am very excited To see over the summer. Okay, so please join me in welcoming Martin Thank you Felicity an organized system of instructions Rudolph Arnheim Professor of the psychology of art at Harvard's Carpenter Center from 1968 to 1974 Begins his seminal book visual thinking with these words Without information on what is going on in time and space the brain cannot work However, if the purely sensory reflections of the things and events of the outer world Occupied the mind in the raw state the information would be of little help The endless spectacle of every new particulars might stimulate but would not instruct us Nothing we can learn about an individual thing is of use unless we find generality in the particular Evidently then the mind in order to cope with the world must fulfill two functions It must gather information and it must process it The two functions are neatly separate in theory, but are they in practice? Do they divide the sequence of the process into mutally exclusive domains as Do the functions of the woodcutter the lumberyard and the cabinet maker or those of the silkworm the weaver and the tailor? Such a sensible division of labor would make the working of the mind easy to understand Or so it seems Arnheim Continues to state his objective to show that the collaboration of perceiving and thinking in cognition Would be incomprehensible if such a division existed the artist the institution the audience The invitation the presentation and the resulting communication Studio and kitchen table Exhibition space and lecture hall the forms of interacting and the formats it creates April 14 2016 Carpenter Center for the visual arts Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts an artist talk episode 9 of program a Program is defined as an organized system of instructions Something organized has been put together in an orderly functional structured hole in a coherent form a System is a group of interacting interrelated or interdependent elements forming a complex hole Instructions compose a functionally related group of elements They can be a direction to be obeyed an order or detailed directions on procedure March 3rd 2014 I am writing to say hello and to ask if you would be interested in beginning a conversation about about participating in an exhibition in spring 2015 that would take the form of your Envisioning and designing the spatial environment for a coffee bar at the carpenter Center on The third floor of the carpenter Center is a defunct cafe space That was introduced into the architecture during a renovation in the early 2000s the space adjacent to a gallery Visible through walls of glass and situated beautifully at the crest of Corbusier's concrete ramp is Approximately a thousand square feet with a large terrace overlooking part of Harvard Yard The space has extraordinary potential to become a vibrant social site an important extension of the exhibition programming It is a perfect location for a coffee bar The initial plan is for this designed space to exist for at least two years before another artist is Invited to reimagine the space a defined site a defined role a defined time frame A defined way to perceive and to act based on how the work I have done has been perceived To design a space as an artist a functional environment To provide a function as an artist To take on a role by crossing into an adjacent field of practice Can one operate as a designer without being one? Do I want to operate as a designer in between here? There not here not there one and the other both but not disciplines and to be disciplined crossing over crossing into Trying to learn as much as I can Coffee comes from some of the most remote places in the world and there are a number of key environmental preconditions that allow for the creation of incredible coffees Altitude journal temperature range adequate sun exposure Good rainfall and healthy soil are all critical factors that make great coffee possible Despite being somewhat puzzled by the idea of designing a coffee bar I accepted the invitation out of curiosity to where it might lead Two months later. I spend time at the carpenter center in Conversation I learn about details and desires for a new beginning Different possibilities emerge with more specifics and less of a frame The coffee bar slips into the background the institution as a whole becomes a possibility Time is a possibility Uncertainty is welcome Rethinking the invitation a larger terrain Recently when combing through a collection of work resources, I have been assembling for a while I read in a 1970s book on new forms of communication The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly and fully is That clear speaking is generally obsolete thinking Clear statement is like an art object. It is the afterlife of the process which called it into being The process itself is a significant step and especially at the beginning is often incomplete and Uncertain I'm thinking about my own process in relation to clarity About the crossings attempted the blurring that might have happened Thinking about a rule that I made for myself a long time ago In order to engage with and draw from various bodies of knowledge and practices Every crossing into a different field has to be accompanied by an exchange If I take something I have to give something back an Ethics that defines the seriousness of the engagement. I wonder about the relationship between process and objects And I am aware that most meaningful exchanges are not about objects During the first visit to the carpenter center. I was shown through the building Highlights and idiosyncrasies of the Le Corbusier architecture were pointed out to me as were its various spatial functions. I Took in the sites of activities Some curricular some social some administrative some relating to exhibitions some public some private a Building in which aesthetics and function are meant to come together in a culture producing machine The carpenter center for the visual arts a belated modernist institution Representing the persistence of the modern dream in the exhibition staff's office and mountain of boxes sitting on the floor The 21 boxes contained the archive of the institution from its inception to now packed up in folders binders and boxes documents photographs and artifacts Concept and position papers discussion notes memos letters lists events exhibitions celebrations ideas research curricula communication pragmatics documentation materialized time and institutions past contained and ordered May 22 2014 Thinking about how to start the process. I thought to include you in my anything But formalized and maybe rambling stages of development and make our correspondence an initial site for engagement So as I collect and work through notes and thoughts for myself Some of it might appear off topic incoherent cluttered But bear myth bear with me take what is useful ignore the rest I See this as an experiment for myself a thinking out aloud Figuring out a way of working that acknowledges details of a process that is full of Uncertainty and meandering rather than one that returns to tried ways of doing things. I Will be sending You things over time some Britain some images some other Some personal some research some casual observation Sometimes lots sometimes very little sometimes nothing a Collection of materials and fragments that are company and enable the project What follows? tests and trials Conversations requests proposals discussions assumptions and impressions do's and don'ts Rehearsals and returns another beginning the introduction to Charles H. Kepner and Benjamin B. Trego's 1965 book the rational manager a systematic approach to problem-solving and decision-making describes how the authors developed their consulting method First they reviewed the literature on problem-solving and decision-making Looking for techniques and concepts or principles that might explain the difference between good and poor decision-making They found bits and pieces but precious little that they considered useful Then they examined the internal workings of an organization from policy level to accounting procedures Looking at its complete operation But those details did not help in finding concepts that could be used in solving problems Sitting in Trego's garage They spent hour after hour trying first one idea or technique and then another But nothing worked out to their satisfaction Then one day they completely reversed their attack and decided to start with a prompt with a problem of a company and Work backward through the process of solving it dissecting the thought process involved at each step in order to begin to reverse the attack and Work backward step by step starting where something else ended to see and to think to learn to collect to visualize the lasting and the ephemeral To act by making visible when in 1851 John Adams Whipple first attempted to capture a photographic image of the moon through the new Harvard Telescope He noted that one of the obstacles to getting a clear image was the Boston Cambridge atmosphere with its sea breezes the hot and cold air commingling When the moon was viewed through the telescope, it had the same appearance as Objects when seen through the heated air from a chimney in a constant tremor pressure heated air refractions Decisions always lead to a change of course Two of the main concepts of problem analysis One is that every problem is a deviation from some standard or expected performance And the other is that a change of some kind is always the cause of a problem the situation I Learn that a change is wanted by the institution's new director If change is brought about by problems as Kepner and Trego argue My task then as the invited artist is to cause a problem The initial invitation requested an exhibition participation as the artist who not only acts as a designer But as an artist who changes a component of the institution who as designers do solves a problem But in order to affect change in order to not solve a problem But to cause it a different mode of engagement is needed One has to construct an artist role that departs from the familiar crossover script of the artist as designer a Role that challenges the institution by inscribing a new character into a tried and true narrative a Role that potentially ruptures the cohesion of the artist institution audience comfort zone And rattles whatever the planned exhibition was supposed to become What would it mean to explode the exhibition itself? to scatter it through space and time to Reduce its presence to a ghostly character of being there and not at the same time a different image a new character a new plotline The tension between clarity and tremor After spending a few initial days with the 21 boxes I wrote down the following observation about the early decades of the carpenter centers archive The composition of the archive of the CCVA reflects a similar inconsistency as its exhibition and lecture program Where as the exhibitions of the first five years are ambitious in scope and visuality an Institutional exhaustion seems to take root after 1970 Similarly the archive files from the early years are not only comprehensive Their composition also points to larger ambitions the archive boxes of that period Document the tremendous research effort that went into the development of the early exhibitions and the keeping of Every note of this process exhibits a belief that this work has greater historical significance From the mid 1970s on the files offered only scattered information No rules for archiving seem to be in place The same can be said about the CCVA exhibition and lecture program One archive to scenarios a Considering every single note scribbled on a scrap of paper as having historical significance be Considering hardly any note or paper trail as having historical significance Full of details for one period Empty for others How to think of the relationship between an institution and the documents it keeps The volume and form of archival documents their presence and absence as a reflection of focus ambition and self-image to be there and not 25 Beatrix Gasse Vienna Adolf Loos orders all the documents in his office to be destroyed as he leaves Vienna and Settles in Paris in 1922 All Investigations of Loos have been marked by his a removal of the traces all of the writing is in on and around the gaps 8 to 10 square du Dr. Blanche Paris Le Corbusier decides very early on that every trace of his work and of himself should be kept He saves everything correspondence telephone bills laundry bills bank statements postcards legal documents family pictures The immensity of the materials available has generated a series of meager publications How is absence a form of forgetting is? The archive a supposed remedy for this or does the archive actually allow us to forget How is presence a form of remembering is the archive a supposed remedy for this or does the archive only allow us to forget a new beginning During the summer of 2014. I spent extensive time reading and looking at the papers and images in the carpenter center archive I transcribed wrote down notes. I scanned documents took photographs and asked for more information. I Record I duplicate I understand and I don't a Thought maybe the problem to metaphorically use the structure of the archived institution as the project's content to exhibit a form that is abstract at the core a Form that reflects the relationship between the institution its memory and the symbolic sites of its public interfaces About how and where an institution builds and communicates with its constituencies a form without a form The artist talk is a popular format to relay information about an artist's work and To institute a relationship between artist host and audience It is generally expected to see works an artist has done and to hear the artist speak about how artworks came about To get insights to get explanations From an institutional standpoint the artist is asked to mediate between artworks and their public understanding to show and to tell Utilizing existing channels of communication can wipe out a statement There is a widely accepted misconception that media merely serves as neutral packages for the dissemination of raw facts Guests on television shows accept invitations to appear on programs in the hopes their messages will reach new and wider Audiences, but even when they are treated in a friendly manner, they generally come away with a sense of failure Somehow the message transmitted is far removed from the message intended Preparing this lecture. I kept wondering if what is said at an artist talk Only fulfills a supplementary function of the format Speaking about art and explaining its intentions and meanings can certainly produce insights and allow for a deeper understanding But since we've heard that clear speaking is supposedly obsolete thinking and the clear statement is the afterlife of the process Which called an artwork into being I'm thinking about the role such a talk plays in the overall project An artist talk also brings together the physical bodies involved the artist the artwork the institution and the audience a Convergence that is meant to further desire The benefits of being there and the challenges of not being there presence and absence My work at the carpenter center has been mostly ephemeral and has produced very little to nothing in terms of a tangible object trail The official framing of my engagement at the carpenter center has been billed as a residency under the banner of Institution building so I ask myself have I really been there? Have I really resided or who or what has been residing? What has been built? From what I am told and from what I have experienced my engagement has garnered interest and curiosity For which the works focus on the institution itself was certainly a factor But what about the project's ephemerality and my almost clandestine presence or absence? Perception and memory To reside to have one's permanent home in a particular place To be situated to belong by a right to a person or body To be present or inherent in something How does one speak about a body of work like that and how does speaking constitute what that work is about? I've learned a lot about the institution's history its ambitions its protagonists I've witnessed how the institution has been repositioned and Of course, I have developed artistic ambitions for the project myself But what narrative to tell? What story to invent? What script to follow? What directions to create the form and the format of narrating one's work? Narratives easily multiply To reflect on how something came about in the process of engaging with it Edward Sackler founding and longtime director of CCVA introduces his and William Curtis comprehensive 1978 study of the Center's Genesis and architecture as follows An act of artistic creation cannot be reenacted We may make it less mysterious through study, but not less mythical It remains dependent on myth because every creator lives by myth public or private When form Motivated by myth is treated as something autonomous and is imitated in its external manifestation it loses authenticity The result is formalism Meaningless except perhaps as an interesting even beguiling historic phenomenon or symptom But when form is studied with a view to understanding the conditions of its genesis The results of such study concerned with the structure of form and the form-giving process Will be meaningful beyond the limits of the individual case Consequently the documentation of a form-giving process and its results may serve a double purpose On the one hand it may yield clues to the nature of the underlying myth on the other hand It may contribute to a better understanding of the way in which creative work is done Here are those two words creativity and form Creativity the artists imperative form the artists challenge Studying an archive leaves one with knowledge about how certain forms came about But those forms don't lend themselves to be implemented in the present Forms are represented in the archive and those representations live in the archive as ghosts of past activities Obviously the archive itself has a form a form that is not only material Boxes folders papers, but an organizational form That is more difficult to take hold of to describe to visualize That form emerges in the process of engagement over time It is based on relations between what is tangible and what is intangible What is there and what is not? The form of a project and the form of its representation All of us are thinkers however Most of us are surprisingly unconscious of the process of our own thinking When we speak of improving the mind, we are usually referring to the acquisition of information or knowledge Or to the type of thoughts one should have and not of the actual functioning of the mind We spend little time monitoring our own thinking and comparing it with a more sophisticated ideal in his 1974 book Conceptual blockbusting a guide to better ideas The Stanford University engineer and design teacher James L. Adams introduces the phrase thinking form Thinking form is obviously the form thinking has or takes Adams argues that identifying and understanding that form would lead to better ideas to more creativity my computer dictionary defines form as The visible shape or configuration of something a mold frame or block in or on which something is shaped a Particular way in which a thing exists or appears a type or variety of something the customary or correct way of producing a Printed document with blank spaces for information to be inserted The state of an athlete or sports team with regard to their current standard of performance The 1960s lit an early 70s literature on productivity enhancement Speaks obsessively about creativity and in their context specifically about two things The relationship between problems and solutions and secondly group processes Problems are thought of as things to do away with They are what needs to be solved in order to get tangible results as Solutions seem to come easier when attempted in groups The literature argues the messy aspects of collective work processes need to be smoothed out and Everyone needs tools for that through the use of various forms of listing and by consciously Questioning and striving for fluency and flexibility of thought It is possible to improve considerably once conceptual performance One of the most powerful techniques of enhancing one's conceptual ability is the postponement of judgment the ego and superego suppress Ideas by judging them to be somehow out of order as they try to work their way up to the conscious level If this judging can be put aside for a while Many more ideas will live until they can be seen To see and not to judge But to select from what emerges to be seen To select to take a choice as a choice from among several To choose to pick to pick out to make one's choice to decide for to elect to single out To opt for to prefer to fix upon to settle upon to put aside to lay aside the 1972 book the Universal Traveler a soft systems guide to creativity problem-solving and the process of reaching goals is A homemade quirky instruction manual with a counter-cultural flair that is set on demystifying the creative process The books authors Don Coburg and Jim Bagnall describe short compact tasks that anyone can pursue Dozens of exercises unfold within the book's overall trajectory Diagramming a big spiral that ends close to where it begins a round trip The Universal Traveler offers Ways to assign value or worth to process ways to decide from among many options Ways for taking action on a decision ways to broaden the field of choice Ways to determine a point of view ways for getting to know the problem ways to get started The spiral and the return To cause a problem the problem of form among the constellations of the night sky Some are a little more than an assortment of dots a bit of of sparkling texture Accidental in character and hard to identify They owe their unity only to the empty space around them Others hold together much better and display a definite shape of their own because their items fit into an order The seven brightest stars of the Urza major are seen as a quadrilateral with a stem attached to one of its corners Here the perceptual relations go much beyond connection by similarity What is seen is indeed a constellation in which each item has a definite and unique role Because of its graspable shape the constellation can also be compared to familiar objects of similar visual structure Such as a dipper a wagon or a plow or an animal with a tail Its relation to neighboring constellations is established by further structural connections since two of its stars point to Polaris And its tail leads to Arcturus the bear watcher Form is emerging as a relationship of parts Depending on which parts one focuses on different forms emerge out of a constellation of elements Le Corbusier's notes and sketches for the design of the carpenter center repeatedly refer to the metaphor of the institution as a breathing apparatus If looked at in planned view one might read the building's ramp and the floor parts alongside it as an image of a windpipe flanked by a pair of lungs For Corbusier lungs have metaphorical significance as a model for the city whose air and traffic circulate freely and whose greenery and open space allow it to breathe The creative person must be able not only to vividly form complete images but also to manipulate them Creativity requires manipulation and recombination of experience An imagination which cannot manipulate experience is limiting to the conceptualize This game is called breathing Let us imagine we have a goldfish in front of us Half the fish swim around Half the fish swim into your mouth Take a deep breath and have the fish go down into your lungs, into your chest Half the fish swim around in there Let out your breath and have the fish swim out into the room again Now breathe in a lot of tiny goldfish Have them swim around in your chest Breathe them all out again At the end of the first working document sent to the director on May 22, 2014 I wrote A term Program Rather than start the engagement with the curatorial request or the physical site The coffee bar, the more than obvious Le Corbusier Start with what makes the invitation possible in the first place The anchors and rituals of the institution as it defines and reveals itself in its own archive Breathe in, breathe out Breathe in, breathe out In his 1962 book The Shape of Time The art historian George Kubler points out That original forms in what he calls prime objects Are notoriously difficult to identify Those objects he speaks about artworks of the past Are often only known through mutant replications Analogous to the experience of dead stars We might know of their existence only indirectly By their perturbations And by the immense detritus of derivative stuff left in their path Kubler uses the term form class Which resembles a broken but much repaired chain Made of string and wire to connect the occasional jewelled links Surviving as physical evidences of the invisible original sequence of prime objects His emphasis is not on the objects themselves But on connectivity, on the string and wire that hold together the objects A 1963 working document titled A Program of Action for the next three years Preliminary draft for purposes of discussion, confidential Lays out ways to deepen the educational experience at the Carpenter Center An integrated program is more than a sum of individual courses Excellent as they may be Integration is brought about by an agreement On the part of all participants in a program To accept certain common goals as giving a general direction to the joint effort And by a willingness to make certain adjustments and modifications In individual courses in recognition of the common goal Genuine integration or coherence of a program Cannot be brought about by administrative action It is a matter of underlying attitude Program is a collection of episodes that began in October 2014 And concluded with an exhibition titled 50 photographs at Harvard In the summer of 2016 Although self-contained and non-sequential The individual episodes connect the institution's sites of public interface The press release, the physical space, the exhibition, the educational mission Student and visitor relations, artist talks, lectures and a collection They focus on the institution's interactions with its various publics And how in the process it constitutes itself As an amalgam of education, presentation and conservation This talk was episode 9 of program In medicine, episodes are distinctive and separate events That are part of a larger series The term episode is especially used to describe the occurrence Of a usually recurrent pathological abnormal condition In television, episodes in a series build and continue a larger narrative Although part of a sequence, they are written and directed in a way That one can enter the narrative at different points Without having seen all the previous episodes Familiarity with the plotlines and characters Certainly allows insights into the nuances of a serious development But it is not a necessity for understanding individual episodes In most television series, the longer the series runs, the more the narratives multiply Not only do stories and characters develop more fully New characters are introduced, unforeseen relationships emerge Plotlines detour, edits clash forwards and backwards Time expands and time contracts Television and medicine, departure, departures and returns Question, what does an evaluation of a trip usually reveal? Answer, measures of achievement, need for improvement Plus the fact that the process never ends That destinations are merely rest stops Looking back over a completed journey is a mellowing experience The good times and the bad tend to fuse together to become a single memory or general impression Such general impressions are merely accented by those most memorable experiences encountered Minor pleasures and acquisitions are as easily forgotten as are some difficulties and sub-problems As we lose sight of the small experiences and begin to remember only the major ports of call We set ourselves up once again to forget the joy and reality of process orientation Where we call our total multi-event experience as but a series of products and destinations Ten episodes, removed and applied 1963, integration of the program, a report of the committee, the photographer and the city Reality is invisible, the limit of a function, a social question, an organized system of instructions Fifty photographs at Harvard Let's begin again As the project is now in the past, questions of form and format lead back to the archive What is left and how does what is left speak of what there was? What would be the documents that program can leave behind? What objects can be kept? What would be the form and the format of such a repository? Or should any attempt at documentation take a different route, bypass the archive and find yet another format to remember and or to forget? The relevant unknown behaviors are experimentally demonstrable only in retrospect Testing in between but not off or in any one part The synergetic behaviors of a plurality of parts are inherently unpredictable Rehearsals and returns, sequence is a fiction And what follows may have produced what went before Thank you Thanks all for coming out Thanks Martin Clearly an astonishing, interesting and challenging talk Especially because in part it addresses the contractual relation between artist and audience And between institutions and guests which is reenacted here for us But I want to in an attempt to work through that underscore the complex of terms, references, associations From program to archives and their structure to exhibition practices To buildings such as the carpenter center as well as all of the interactions and effects among those components I want to underscore that all of these are questions and issues that as Felicity pointed out It's hard to imagine a more fitting speaker And not only because of the content and all of those components which you so brilliantly manipulate But because of the form of your talk And so clearly I think we all understood that form is at question here And not only because of your talk but because it's the term concept orientation or disciplinary predilection That you are most directed toward in this project and talk And so I want to come back to the relationship between form and institution And you've given us various ways in which you can think about that intersection At one level it feels to me that you are raising the problem of form of the institution for the institution Meaning if you assert yourself as the artist who doesn't solve a problem but causes a problem That problem is form but it's not the problem of artistic form as we might conventionally understand it It's the problem of institutional form And so it seems to me that part of your project is to try to grasp or delineate institutional form And in that you think of you tell us about the form of the archive You speak through various voices which program the institution and those are notions of form And these are clearly not the same form as the coffee bar as a form meaning a problem solving form It's a different type of form And so I guess my first question is to ask you to speak a little bit more about that construction of institutional form And how it is and is not or how it is similar to but dissimilar from the building in which it sits And separate from the exhibition practices in which it participates and takes its distance from And how you think of the delivery of that problem and the reaction to that problem through the institution And whatever that meant at the carpenter center That's a lot of questions Well let's maybe try to find an answer through the form of the institution in relation to the form of the project Because I think there's one aspect where I think the two come together and overlap to a certain degree Where all these 10 episodes each one of them attempted to index one of the sites of how the institution itself tries to speak Tries to address like an outside of the institution So like the press release like one of the episodes was the sort of we produced an exact facsimile of the 1963 original press release That the carpenter center had sent out and just mail that out to the current press contacts Which was like produced some sort of confused bewilderment Of like not knowing if people got an original document or what is happening as such But there was like one of the episodes another one was student relations How does the institution welcome new incoming students Where one of the episodes included like gifting something to all the new incoming students And so between these 10 episodes I try to identify like these They're not even like sites but modalities of speech And none of it is sort of like more or less physical You can't quite make like a place for it or a conventional object type form But what I was interested in like making that I mean index might be even as too strong a word But making that collection was that I thought form is something that emerges Once you put all these different points in relation So form is something that's more in between these sites than rather at a particular site And the same way then the project was structured in this episodic setup That as I mentioned sort of was interested in that sort of double meaning of the term Like a medical condition like an epileptic episode where the institution suddenly does something that is out of character And at the same time you build a narrative around it And so that's where like these two forms come together But it's not a form in the sense of like an object has a form it's not like a shape or so It's form more as like Kubler describes it Like in his sort of chain of detritus that is just like there You can never quite say oh this is the form you're always like close to it But the minute you think you have it it escapes you again I imagine there's a sort of straightforward question about the way in which the discourses on rational management And creativity enter into this picture because it seems in many ways that they are I mean obviously they're operating within your performance of the artist's talk as a modality of speech But they seem to come from outside of the research on this particular institution as such And listening to you I was wondering whether they were symptoms of the what you call the sort of out of timeness Of the you know Bauhaus derived carpenter sense of sort of pedagogy and you know the whole sort of institutional framework That's been sort of thrown forward from the 20s sort of into the 60s right at the moment as you know I've heard you say before That that type of thinking was largely redundant So I'm wondering if they're I mean are these sort of just pieces of discourse from the outside interrupting this Or are they things that remind us in a sort of powerful way of things being in and of their own out of their time Because they have that similar type of almost sort of irritation like quality to them in their technocratic You know I mean you know that you sort of love them for that entering into your discussion and yet they you know What the status of those discourses are and what they're how they're coming in within a sort of reflection on this modality of speech And if they're sort of equivalent traces of something from outside in the exhibition in some of the other episodes I mean they they operate in both of the ways that you describe yeah like on the level of what the project does on an artistic level But also in relation to Harvard at like the time in the 60s yeah on an artistic level of course it's going back to the original invitation It's an invitation as an artist to come there and perform creativity for the institutions yeah to okay Here's a situation like you're the artist do something give us a copy give us like a coffee bar and it's going to be a better coffee bar Than an architect or a designer would you because yeah it's like the artistic surplus as such yeah And I was interested in that relationship yeah I mean also like coming out of like generation of artists where sort of like in the 90s Where everyone was like talking about like doing projects and only doing project projects based on a specific invitation on a specific situation Yeah and then always like being in that role of responding yeah and of course it's this classic creative imperative Yeah that the institution puts on the artist but also that the artist puts on oneself in that situation So that was like one aspect that I was interested in and also just trying to understand like these imperatives But at the same time most of the sources that I used in the talk except for that Stanford one was all research that was done at Harvard In the 60s and early 70s yeah specifically at like the business school whatever it's called yeah like this example the rational manager The rational manager was published by Harvard University Press and it was like research done over many years from like the late 50s on throughout the 1960s Yeah at Harvard to like improve sort of yeah creativity and some was even done at the GSD Were those books also in circulation at the Carpenters Center? I mean maybe not exactly those books but it seems like there's a discourse on communications and problem solving Which one would not locate so far away from the Carpenters Center at that time So it also feels like you find that strange moment of convergence around questions of problem and form and how they're articulated And that's a curious Harvard economy between the business school and the Carpenters Center That's worth thinking through I suppose but I keep coming back to this because you know we're asking students to do this right And the thing through what an institution is how do you see it? What are the signs? What is the archive of an institution? What are its programs? What are its modes of performance? And the one tack you took through this question was around the difference I think you're speaking of the archive between its tangible and intangible effects and there's something about the institution being haunted by By text like this, by voices, by earlier programs, by early exhibitions and there's something about the after effect of that haunting that I think is interesting But I keep trying to understand what that reading of the institution is in relation to the format of your talk if that's the right term And I'm thinking about the strange eerie glow of colors and the kind of managerial vocabulary or creative vocabulary that's on the screen And so it's like we don't know whether to locate you as a speaker, this as the piece, you speaking through the creativity of those words And I feel like there's a kind of institutional tension that sparked through that strange relationship It's ambient, it's atmospheric, it's not jarring and yet it's kind of intangibly coloring everything that you're saying And so I'm just wondering if you can speak more about what visual dimension of the piece there was evidence of here If that's the right way of phrasing that The tension that is I think the core of the project, that of always oscillating between being the artist that performs a specific function for the institution To not be the artist who comes in and then delivers the institutional critique as such But integrating into the institution as almost becoming the institution But then at the same time inhabiting these different modalities of speech, of speaking as the institution But also speaking as the creative person and never settle on one position And sort of try to literally create this sort of atmosphere of unsettlement that you describe of where you don't quite know where is one speaking from So I want to just maybe before we open it up to the audience for questions See if we can get you to start to answer the audience left question I mean, so I know that some traces are quite literally left So one of the episodes was removing the cladding from around the gallery that had been inserted You know into the you know to actually create climate control and you know to institutionalize the gallery as a space within the cover to center And that was a piece you know drawing on Michael Asher but that remains yes that that's not doesn't never reverted to its previous And likewise you're working on a publication Yeah, I mean I'm just just wondering how we to think about those remains the sort of literal remains that say the after lives because the episodes You know had a temporality that that you know stretch the the temporal scale of an exhibition to the point of failure to cohere Yeah, intentionally as a as something like an exhibition that would start here and go there and have a series of components But there are traces yes, and I'm wondering if the I mean some of them were decisions after the fact Yeah, like not to resume not to re-clad the gallery but the the publication that that's coming in its wake is I don't know is there sort of re-territorialization of the project and how are you beginning to imagine that it could perform anything like Yeah, some of the machinations of the particular episodes. I mean it'd be almost an impossible challenge for a publication as a device And so I'm wondering if that's I mean how you're imagining that and how you're like the short answer is it can't It can't yeah and I mean with the publication has been in the works for like the last six months and it's entering the design stage now And like the ambition really was to do something like that but the more we sort of worked on that and the more we came up against Like just the constraints of what is a book yeah the more difficult it became yeah this I wouldn't say like it's not going to do it Like at all yeah there there is an element to the project that literally was out of the public view or will be out of the public view until the book comes out Yeah, which is like sort of a set of like over 30 PDF documents that I generated in the course of the two years that the project ran and sent at irregular intervals to the director of the institution And basically just as a something to for me to think through ideas but I wanted like him to be involved and have responses to it and the book will have like a big part of the book will be those documents yeah And there they talk like about preparations for some specific episodes but they also just suddenly this material in there which are going to be quite baffling Because they're literally like sort of you cannot make a connection to the project other than that I was looking at them at that material exactly at the same time when doing certain other things And that like from what I can tell right now is going to be it's quite interesting how it works with the like just photographic and textual documentation of what the book is going to be The artist residency that also remains yeah there's a weird afterlife I mean that is the lasting thing yeah where in order to make that project possible the director of the institution he had to construct a format A more familiar format Which within which he was able to to host me there over time yeah because like whenever I went there it cost money yeah for the train for the hotel and so forth yeah and he needed like he needed a container for that yeah Because that because that's how institutions work yeah it's like budgets have to be allocated to certain things and they have to have a name yeah So he came up with the idea okay it's going to be an artist residency and it's going to be called institution building yeah and although like I mean I went up there over the two years maybe like 10 to 15 times But it was like except for at the beginning it was always like a day or two yeah to go over practicalities because after the first like two one week visits I pretty much had like the whole archive scanned or photographed so I didn't always need to go there like physically to to look at it yeah and I became like this this ghost yeah in the institution that everyone in the institution and around was always talking about yeah my presence and the project there but I was hardly ever there physically yeah and that also became like sort of almost like a light motif for for the whole thing and I really enjoyed that idea of being a ghost in the institution yeah of always like being there like as a spirit but not being there as a physical body yeah and like the physical trace of that episode one yeah that removing removal of metal plating and just sort of smoothing out like the walls it's like except for a little label there's nothing there yeah and that will stay there at least for the foreseeable future it's funny I remember I was heading up to Boston on a regular basis last last year in the middle of this and and I think I said to you oh you know sort of sort of what's up now you know what should I go and see at the carpenter center you know it's part of your project and you said something like well you you can go but you probably won't notice anything we probably won't see anything and so the ephemerality yeah was sort of also met by or the ghostly nurse was also met by this withdrawal almost into invisibility which I think so in a way the the book the what's the book will be the most visible yeah the least I mean ephemerality sense trace of the do we have any questions from can you repeat the question you have the microphone being a historian is to speculate would you agree on that or what's the difference is to speculate between an artist approach as you do and historians approach to the historical material what do you consider to be the difference in it it is to speculate yes because every like history is a fiction at the same time yeah but I think the the practices and the methodologies to generate those fictions they're slightly different I think one has a little more license as an artist yeah to construct fictions yeah because the the forms and formats in which those narratives are told are broader yeah whereas like history is mostly written like is it written yeah whereas like as an artist you can do things that are not written yeah in addition to the script that we entered today there are other aspects of it that are not written yeah you know it's interesting also I don't know that doesn't really answer your question but one thing that always strikes me about this project is the incredible economy of the archival traces that you use so we know yeah you went into the archive and Jim sort of talks about you being buried in the archive and you come out with you know one press release or something yeah no no it's interesting that I mean a historian would probably feel an obligation to mobilize more evidence to make a case or something and you manage to sort of leverage evidence in this very different type of way I mean I think like a sort of a telling example of that difference is like in one episode I presented like three documents from the archive yeah which were three pieces of paper that were visited towels yeah and it's just like these sort of yellow line sheets yeah with like lines on there and at first they looked almost like drawings because they were really beautifully done yeah and I found them like in a folder from around 1970 and then sort of looking further like in the years after they always had these visitor towels in there and I started to ask myself the question it's like why in 1970 do they suddenly start archiving visitor tallies yeah did they not make them before and just they were just not there or did they make them and throw them out yeah and I realized like the fact that they thought it's important to archive them reflects like it's almost a shift in the institutional consciousness yeah and I'm pure it's pure speculation yeah like thinking okay they're suddenly either they have a pressure from the outside to show that their exhibitions actually have an audience yeah or they feel their pressure or they pay somebody to sit and take attendance and there's like a shifting of the institutional thinking about what they're doing yeah and like what I did in the episode I presented like those first three sheets as drawings as you would like present drawings yeah and that's sort of like a little element which I think like as a historian one would be hesitant to just show these without anything else yeah and it was like shown with a title it was called like the photographer in the city which was this exhibition organized by the Smithsonian and put together by Charles and Ray Eames yeah and so that's all you got yeah it was like the title of the show and these three like sheets from one weekend in the show money Andrea hi so the material that you pulled from the archive came from no no pattern right it was it was nonlinear can you say that again the material you pulled from the archive was nonlinear it was some might have come before another in relationship to the episodes so some something in the first episode might have come from the 70s whereas something from the second episode might have come from the 60s so there wasn't a sort of chronology to the no there was no chronological correlation between the episodes and the development of the carpenter center right so with that sort of oscillating logic how then would you approach the publication would you represent the episodes chronologically or would you represent it with some other kind of logic that doesn't really fit the archival structure of 60 70s 80s 90s no it's I decided to represent the episodes chronologically as they happened and that became important in so far as like at the beginning of the project when I knew I'm going to do this episodic thing I had no idea how many episodes there were or what would come yeah so some episodes resulted as direct consequences from research done for early episodes for earlier episodes yeah so I wanted to retain that sort of temporal narrative in there I have a question about confusion I guess because there are two moments in which you are describing sort of bafflement either from receiving the press release or from material in the book that might baffle the reader and I found myself sort of like delighted by this idea and wondering why in a sense like what is it about confusion that would be so effective is it that it makes you you know think about the press release more as a format is it that it makes you think about this one in particular or is that it destabilizes the form of the book or of the press release in general so I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit to how you saw bafflement or confusion working I mean this like with the press release and I think with other forms of confusion that might have emerged it's an attempt to disrupt rituals that are sort of tried and true and everyone sort of sits in yeah but it's also something that I've become interested in like a few years ago when I'm teaching in an art school in an art education department yeah and when I first started teaching there like a lot of the thinking that went on there was okay it's like the function of art education is to explain things yeah and I started to realize that it's a very like bizarre way to approach it because it doesn't like allow for any kind of openness yeah and I sort of kept making that case there for sort of misunderstandings and not understanding being like powerful educational tools also and that sort of became something that sort of then like also filtered into how I think about presenting materials yeah where like in some episodes everything was explained yeah so it was like the perfect like perfectly understandable project and then the next one is like what the heck yeah is this yeah and to use these different modes of like presentation and organization of materials and thinking in the overall project to it's almost just as much as I was thinking about indexing the sites the institution speaks in indexing the ways in which you can make things visible yeah sort of like and that's where like Felicity in the introduction mentioned this interest in exhibition history that I have and like display issues that's something that comes from there also yeah to sort of work with sort of as like in the talk there's like one line where it's about clarity and tremor yeah it's sort of like you have both at the same time and that's when it gets interesting yeah at least for me yeah it's like things I don't understand yeah make me want to do something yeah and sometimes it's productive but sometimes it's also it's can also be frustrating and that's the risk you take with that yeah but without the risk like what's what's there to discover yeah the TV analogy is super nice it's like Martin Beck TV in 10 episodes and especially because of the pathos of the figure on TV who has misunderstood his or her relationship to media and thinks this is going to be some moment of transparent communication and so the TV episode is not that it's it's the episode of some misfire or failure of communication or misunderstanding of one's position vis-a-vis media and and so this so the episodes are media 10 media and their TV and it's their misfiring obviously because they're not to say what's their misfiring for the institution but but I'm also wondering if they're misfiring for you are you like one of those figures who has been you know subjected to the inherent misfires and miscommunications of that media or is it something you deploy is it you misfire the communication at the institution and and then I wonder as well if sorry these are more questions again but so fascinating if the 10 episodes are a TV series or whether they're an exhibition because because I think we understand something about causing the problem to the institution I think we understand something about not wanting to design the coffee bar though I think we all want to see the design for the coffee bar but but I'm wondering where the where the exhibition figures in this discussion for you so if the institution we understand is under review in your project is the exhibition format also under review and and what do we think of the let's say the conventional rituals of the exhibition format that requires this type of mismining or disruption yeah I mean that definitely was like a big aspect of it to think of different ways of what an exhibition or how an exhibition can materialize yeah and it in a way came out of a frustration also I had with like doing sort of a few exhibitions in a row that were like based on you have a space you do something for the space and you you do your best and they were all like I thought like good exhibitions and I enjoyed them but there was like something where I wanted like so what else is there yeah it's like where can you like stretch yeah and in that way sort of the idea of like time with something that interested me because it's also with exhibitions you have like your five to eight week run and then it's done yeah and it's sort of it's all there like at the beginning of that and it all disappears after that now one is something that that builds like more gradually yeah that also allows me to experiment while the thing is already underway yeah so that was like the sort of suggestion then to the director like why don't we call this an exhibition yeah but it comes and it goes yeah and sometimes there's nothing there yeah and sometimes there is something there yeah at the same time I was also interested in like thinking of what you actually see in the exhibition as something that's not so much based in the physical presence of things but in the relationship of one presence to another presence and even if they're temporarily not there at the same time yeah and sort of what does it actually accumulate to as a whole yeah and in that way sort of those two parameters were something that I was just trying to experiment with yeah sort of dumb question so coming back to the what's left is there anything you know from this experiment in some exploding the exhibition for one of a better word or stretching it out that that that you'll take forward into another exhibition I mean I you know it's such a specific project within the context of the up into center and it's archive in the invitation I mean is there anything that that can be extracted from this for instance I mean I presume none of these pieces will be in the retrospective or will they I mean is there any way of either is a video documentation of episode nine okay that will be in show that moment but in terms of any other thing that could be extracted now that's just it I mean it is like it was a big sort of I wouldn't say risk but a conscious decision to with quotation marks to shoot myself in the foot as an artist yeah because it's for once it was the project made it extremely difficult for sort of press to understand what it actually is yeah because there was never this is it moment yeah that somebody could actually review it yeah which also resulted in the project like not getting a single write up yeah when it was like happening yeah not even the Harvard Crimson wrote about it yeah and I mean it's like sad on one hand but it also like I took it sort of it exhibits like the challenge that that thing does but it's also sort of the other consequence is for okay I've worked on this for two years and I was like asking at the end what do I have to show for it yeah it's like what do I have like an object trail yeah that can circulate in different ways yeah and of course I don't yeah there'll be a book yeah but that is limited to limited to what it can do yeah but I have to say like weighing the options of okay I could have I don't know developed a sculpture done like a film or do do something yeah that is like there and is left over at the end to me it was just like more interesting yeah it was more of a of a challenge more of a risk yeah and I have to say I've learned more than I think I could have learned by just making like a sort of a distinct work that inhabits sort of sort of material parameters that can circulate after that it can circulate afterwards I didn't really offer a sort of catalogue of the different exhibition practices of that Martin's engaging but just just talking here I realize I should probably point out that you know in addition to exhibitions being you know a medium and a sort of site of research and all these things that you've actually designed exhibitions as a designer like you know I mean as an artist designer so it's not simply using the artist as designer that's the gesture of refusing the coffee bar yeah I mean I mean it's partially that but I would have checked to that characterization because you're right I've designed quite a few exhibitions but there was always like a very clear line between the art practice and the exhibition design practice and the biggest clarity was on the level of economy where as an artist designer you don't get paid what a designer gets paid if you're hired as an exhibition designer you have a completely different I wasn't trying to collapse them I was trying to suggest a type of typology to the point where even the Canadian Centre for Architecture has hired you to design its exhibition as an exhibition designer yeah as an exhibition designer yeah no no it's a good but your qualification I mean I was like sort of years ago I was really interested in that distinction and of course like whatever I learn and know as an artist somehow figures into exhibit designs and the other way around yeah but I was always adamant to say okay there's a clear distinction to that yeah because it's like the moment when I started doing this and the first few years I was doing it with a partner with Julie Alt yeah we got all these invitations from art institutions like inviting us as artists to design like something they had and I said oh yeah we usually pay artists like a fee of like I don't know 500 dollars and since there's two of you you get like 250 each yeah and like the same job exact the same job in design economy is like a professional completely different structure yeah it's hilarious do you have any other any last I mean I don't know actually even though I grew up around Boston I don't know enough to really to say anything about this but just to ask that as an intervention and as to you know to insert a problem to create a problem or to make an intervention or to disrupt as you describe what you're doing is also consistent with the spirit of the Carpenter Center right that the Carpenter Center was always the sort of pressure release valve center of experimentation and and zany projects and hybrid events and happenings and it was like the heart of the experimental community at Harvard that really was not welcome actually anywhere else at Harvard and so it's sort of problematizing but also like completely in the spirit of and consistent with and inspired by that history no is that fair or I think it's a little more complicated yeah where you're you're right on a certain level but at the same time the Carpenter Center is the solution to a problem that Harvard had in the late 1950s yeah which was that they thought okay the visual world is getting increasingly complex and our students don't understand the visual world in a way that they can sort of handle it so they thought we need a program yeah where students can also go and the Carpenter Center is the result of that yeah and as it was set up yeah and as much as it sounds innovative yeah with its look the higher look or was he yeah they established like the sort of visual and environmental studies program they established it after a classic Bauhaus model yeah as if they would start a school in the mid 1920s after some of the Harvard people went to Europe and saw the Bauhaus yeah so it's like it's a totally belated concept yeah but within that framework yeah they do experiments yeah they do like exhibition they do experimental Bauhaus exhibitions yeah and in that way yeah yeah yeah yeah they I mean they wanted Gergy Kepes to be the director for a while but he didn't want to do that so he did like a big exhibition there and that's where they were experimental that's where they were disruptive but like if you take a step back they were actually quite conservative always yeah and what they were doing yeah is there an end point to the archive I'm just wondering maybe you know your experience of that institution was sort of after it had played this function and had somehow been you know liberated from this claim but is there an end point in terms of the archival material that participates in your project I mean is that I mean I focused mostly on the first 10 years okay because that's where the institution was most active yeah and then it starts to fizzle out in the archive and then what's almost like amusing yeah as the 80s come in the only thing that is in the archive are binders of slides of artworks yeah so it's like this classic 1980s medium of documenting artworks yeah 35 millimeter slides yeah binders and binders full like duplicates yeah that they had to send out yeah and there's nothing about like why did they decide to invite that artist or this artist there's nothing about like programming discussions that they have yeah and in that way like the archive keeps telling a story yeah it tells a story about like documenting in the 1980s yeah as opposed to different kinds of documenting yeah okay well thank you again Martin yeah well thank all of you for coming and thank you for having me yeah no no so let's thank Martin