 Hi, everyone. We're going to start now. We're really happy to have Amy Siegel today in the AAD arguments lecture series. Amy is going to be presented by Jonah Rowan, that is one of the AAD instructors for arguments, and Oscar Ornorsson is going to be also joining the panel afterwards and moderating with Jonah the debate. We're very excited to have Amy here, Amy Sohn in a very critical way, also through a very particular aesthetic calibration, the way architectural objects expand through scales, through financial networks, through political constructions, and the way that they could build up their criticality by moving and displacing through these endeavors and milliers. I think that her work is now in the center also of transdisciplinary connections, is connecting art with architecture, with political discussions in a way that is becoming very effective, and also attracting and producing and prompting new forms of debate. So Jonah. I want to begin by reading a lengthy quotation from feminist literary scholar Diane Elam on the term Mies an Abim. She defines it as, quote, a structure of infinite deferral, a representation in which the relation of part to whole is inverted. The whole image is itself represented in part of the image. Thus the Quaker Oatsman here appears on the Quaker Oats box holding a small box which depicts the Quaker Oatsman holding a box with a Quaker Oatsman and so on ad infinitum. The Mies an Abim thus opens a spiral of infinite regression in representation. Representation can never come to an end since greater accuracy and detail only allows us to see even more Quaker Oats boxes. This is rather odd since we are accustomed to think of accuracy and detail as helping us to grasp an image fully rather than forcing us to recognize the impossibility of grasping it, end quote. Elam makes use of that recursivity to argue that such forms of objectification of women in particular in her case, displace the viewing subject, producing a flickering oscillation between subject and object. One could refer to innumerable theorizations and depictions of these phenomena from Jacques Derrida's extensive writings on the topic on which Elam comments, to Michel Foucault's analysis of the Velasquez painting Las Meninas here, and from Giotto's frescoes to the Lando Lake's Butter logo. I chose to begin with Elam's description, however, for two reasons. First, because her exemplar is a consumer product, Quaker Oats, and second, because her use of it is to, she uses it as a means to theorize value. Elam's main concern in articulating Mies on Abim is to unseat the dominance of the male and night-add white subject by suggesting that the device opens up space for different subject positions to inhabit. She writes, again quoting her, part of the value of the Mies on Abim is the way in which it upsets the assumed relationship between subject and object. In the scene of representation, the subject is thus faced with its inability to know what it knows, to see what it sees. In this sense, the subject becomes the subject of a representation that exceeds it, end quote. This is one way of conceiving of this rhetorical figure as an emancipatory hopeful one. We're living in a time, however, when our president, who is aggressively white and male, watches news television programs that speak directly to him, which he uses as confirmation for policies that those same programs report on, and his subordinates participate in those programs to recursively nudge the executive to act according to his whims. That's to say that, like any technology, reflexivity can be inclusive and liberating, or it can foreclose and exclude. It can affect insularity as much as accessibility. Amy Siegel's work operates with an acute understanding of those possibilities and risks. Quarry, the movie screened for us, provides a visual path of the supply chain of stone from point of extraction to refinement to installation in presumably high-end apartment buildings. By showing us sites of production and exchange, the quarry or the auction house, trans-oceanic shipment, often insular processes in themselves, she exposes the mechanisms by which objects attain value. That description showing us doesn't quite get at the effectuality of this work, since the phrase allows us to remain viewers while she exposes. As critiques, Siegel's works prompt us to reckon with our own contributions to commodity culture, in which the pronoun us must include makers and users, laborers and consumers alike. In other words, we can neither allow ourselves to be insulated from, nor hold others accountable for, the injustices that result from our systems of resource extraction, value assignation, and wealth distribution. By displacing the collective us, Siegel's work makes clear that regardless of our subject positions, at either end of the spectrum, between passive spectatorship or active engagement, we remain complicit in reinforcing the presumed values that the camera bestows on its objects. But that's not all. In a different context, Siegel has written that she was preoccupied at one point with, quote, switching roles, the exchange of voyeur and viewed, framer and object, end quote. And I put this up. This is a lecture of hers that I watched on YouTube, but I thought this was fantastic on the top right. How to insert image into another image using and whatever. So image into image. Yeah. Sorry to attribute that to you. Okay. Not only are we complicit in value production, the exchange itself is reciprocal. Our valuation of objects objectifies us as well. Misana Bim is not simply a device here, but an inversion. If we take the prompt to inhabit a different subject position that exceeds simply hearing our own predilections repeated back to us, we have an opportunity to question the value systems that not only accord and assess exchange values, but which also allow us to be an us, necessarily exclusive of and objectify them. We can look to Siegel's description of a theme in her work of again quoting her agitating boundaries between observer and observed theorist and practitioner as an incitement to forego the comfort of privileged objectivity. So briefly to the practice of architecture. Architects make drawings of buildings, direct teams of other professionals and workers and produce spatial arrangements that others will inhabit. To conflate any of the architect's instruments or techniques with camera or cinematography would be reductive and probably presumptuous. But in the setting of an architecture school, I'll suggest that we can interpret Amy Siegel's work to pose the following questions. How do architects ascribe value to their work and others? By what criteria and in what ways do those criteria reflect back on our own values and valuing systems? And perhaps most salient, how can we self consciously evaluate the materials and objects that we assume to be valuable in order to reflect a larger constituency of contributors to any given work? These are just some of the questions I anticipate that today's presentation will help us to reflect upon and reflect back upon us. So please help me in welcoming Amy Siegel. Well, thank you all for being here, although I know you're required to be here. And thank Andres for the invitation and Jonah for the really thoughtful introduction, which is very unusual. And yes, thank you for not just reading my bio and putting us all to sleep. So I'm going to speak about a couple different works and focus then focus in in the middle on quarry, which you all saw. And then some more recent works that came out of quarry. And oftentimes, in my work, I do work on things somewhat simultaneously. And I'm interested in that kind of nine non hierarchical methodology, where there's an openness to things being connected and generative of multiple works that are going to have within them baked within them some latent or overt connections, because of being worked on simultaneously and also accepting that one. And perhaps an artwork is finished only when I know that there's another work that I'm going to reinvest qualities or ideas into that didn't go into the work or multiple works happening in the moment. I often describe my work as performing or enacting the behaviors of the system that it describes. And a project that or a work, an artwork that perhaps most acutely represents that is a multi element artwork. And again, this is also indicative of my work that there's sometimes multiple components to them. And they're exhibited simultaneously, though they can unfold chronologically at times in their production. And these multiple units, it's importantly they behave together. So though I'm often working with film, monta there's a montage or an editing within the work. But there's also a montage or juxtaposition happening between the components and between the whole body of work. And I think that's important to hang on to and especially in this talk. So this this is an installation image. I don't know how well you can see it with all the light on the projection. Can we bring it down a little bit? Is it right here? So this is an installation view of a work called Provenance. And this is its exhibition, a view of its exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And the what you have is a freestanding wall and a large scale projection of a 40 minute film that follows the furniture that Pierre Genere and Le Corbusier designed for Chandigarh in India. And so I'm not going to go too far into this. But Chandigarh was a city made out of rural farmland. And it was devised or deemed necessary when Lahore, which was the capital of the Punjab went to Pakistan in the partition of India and Pakistan. And so Punjab needed a new capital and paradoxically, as some countries do in the first moments of independence from colonial rule, they look toward a Western European architect to create that vision of a new progressive city. So not to go too far into that. The most important thing is that they designed the whole city along with another team of art, a whole team of architects, and they designed everything. So the city plan, the government buildings, the university, the temple, the residences, the street lamps, and the sewer covers. And they designed the furniture. And they made thousands of pieces of furniture. So maybe they had 100 designs. And then each of those 100 designs was produced many times over. And then those furniture, those pieces of furniture I found were in auction houses around the world, appearing about maybe 10 years ago, they started to appear for exorbitant sums of money, let's say compared to perhaps what this chair was. So this this work follows the furniture, like a provenance document. A provenance document is a piece of paper, literally that can be many pages long, that accompanies any object or artwork deemed of cultural value. And it's the history of its ownership. So it starts with the current owner, and then moves backward in time through all the previous owners. And you can imagine there are some rather problematic provenances in the world with whole gaps and blacked out moments. So this film follows that kind of or performs that idea of the provenance, right, the idea of moving backward to an origin. So it starts in the homes of collectors around the world, who have this is the Hamptons, or I should say around the Western world, who feature the furniture in their high end environments, and then goes to the photography of the furniture for the auction houses. And this is Paris, Antwerp, London, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, a yacht in the Mediterranean. And then backwards to the auction exhibitions, the auctions themselves, that's a starting price for the furniture, not an ending bid. And then you see the restoration of the furniture. So back to it's the European dealers who brought it from India and are restoring it. And then back finally to India where you see the pieces in situ in Chandigarh, as they are used or not used. Making this work, though, when I embarked upon the project, it as I started to film in the collectors homes, I was perhaps surprised, but also not surprised at the same time to find that these people also collected contemporary art. And I would be near very familiar works. And it got me really thinking about how close the design market and the art market are, and therefore how close I am, and therefore how complicit or involved I am in that economic circuit itself. And I decided pretty soon thereafter, as I'm always interested in kind of creating these very layered works, that I would auction Provenance, my film, at Christie's in London. I arranged for it to be auctioned in the postwar and contemporary sale. And I would film the auction of my work, and that would become the second element of the piece, and they would always be exhibited together. So there's a second video called Lot 248 that's shown on the other side of that wall, in which the work that is auctioned or the protagonist of that work is the work that you see on the on the first wall that you encounter. There's a third element, which is a kind of a loose site embedding of the auction catalog page for Provenance. My works are additioned. They're additioned in a quite limited fashion. So there's usually five works. And then there's two artist prints, or APs, which I hang on to in the tradition of printmaking. So I held back the first in the edition of Provenance. And by the time I showed it in a gallery, Simon Preston that I work with in New York. And by the time that show closed, the Christie's auction for the piece was two weeks later, the entire edition, except for the one that I held back had sold out. So there was a bidding frenzy. It happened at Christie's for the work. So I had no way of predicting this. And I have no control over this. And I'm interested in that kind of opening oneself up to the market and sort of letting it letting it do its animalistic weird thing. But but in fact, the artwork was sold at Christie's for a number that was very close to meaning six figure numbers of the furniture themselves that they that the furniture goes for. So that's, I think, a good kind of acute example of how the work kind of re embeds itself in the system, and then underlining and calls questions to the system in which it's depicting, it becomes participatory, but not participatory in a kind of maybe friendly way, but participatory in a in a in a more critical way, let's say. Another project that I thought I'd talk about a little bit and show you a clip from is this was made a year after provenance, is the architects and the storefront for architecture in New York invited me to do a work. I think they were representing us the US in the in the Venice architecture by Daniel that year, Office US or Office us, as they say. And they asked me to make a work and they asked me to make the work in April. And I think we all know that the biennial opens in June. So I said no, but I'll make something for the final week. So and then we did an exhibition, I think more importantly of the work at storefront here in New York, but this film, you probably all of you who saw quarry, noticed that there was a tendency to have these long parallel moving tracking shots in the piece. And that's somewhat of a signature of my work. And we can talk about why a little later on. But the architects is was filmed in 14 architecture studios in New York. And it's all parallel tracking shots. There's maybe three tripod shots at the beginning. So I don't usually do this. But because you guys are kind of like, it's like a busman's holiday here. So I'll say this is Seldorf. I don't usually name the offices, you know, but this is DSNR. This is Bob Stern's office, which don't laugh. It was fun. They're great. That was this is an installation view of the work. But the images are from KPF from a building that they're building currently that's on the palm in Dubai on the outer rim of the palm in Dubai. That's again, an installation view. And that's models from Bob Stern's office, so Robert Stern's office. And I'll show you guys a little, little clip from that. Okay, so for those of you in the field, this was probably a kind of primal scene for you to watch again, those of you who have practiced in the field. And for others, this is what you have to look forward to. I think of this as a as a factory film. And I made it a year before quarry. And I say that because it was inspired by the I went around and visited. Oh, I don't know, maybe, maybe 16 or 17 offices in New York, of architecture firms. And I was really fascinated by the trope of the long desks, which is something I kind of associate with 1980s Wall Street. But the kind of recapitulation of that, it fit both the architecture of storefront, which is this kind of long, you know, elongated structure. I know you've all been to storefront, you're very engaged and involved with it because it's a great New York institution. But also because it reiterated in a way formally the tracking shot, the sort of parallel tracking shot, that so much kind of consumes my work. So I'm going to go on to quarry, which you all saw. So I love calling these things movies, which I never do, but I understand that they are, but they're not there are works in the sense that my works don't. I've only made two theatrical films, and I've made something like 22 movie video, you know, moving image installations and all kinds of other works and other mediums. So the context is important because just as the work looks at a socio economic context, so is the context of its exhibition brings with it all kinds of meanings. So whether the choice of whether to engage to make a work that shows in the cinema or shows in an art museum or gallery is also to choose what to engage with in my part, its history, its exhibition tropes, and to be able to play with that to some degree. But I think the vast majority of my work really situates itself in in art and the history of art and its practice. quarry, this is an installation image. So quarry, which you saw is usually installed as a large floating screen. And this is in South London Gallery in Peckham, which has this great historic kind of roof and building. Here's another view. This is at the house tricker turn of Elts in Berlin. And that was the institution that commissioned the work originally. So quarry, as you know, starts it has a kind of dual structure, right? It starts in the furthest underground point of the largest underground marble quarry in the world. But then again, most marble quarries are not underground, right? They're mountainside. So it's quite unusual. It's also quite unusual because the quarry itself has its factory inside it underground, and does all the cutting in the millwork there on site. There's a very particular place. And often when I'm there, I see architects coming through and visiting, because it's such a spectacular new unique place. But I don't think you'd get to see this far down. I mean, this is going quite far underground about a mile underground. And the furthest point underground is the lake upon which the piece starts. And the piece is accompanied by this kind of quite dramatic spectral or orchestral score. And then that same score is repeated almost exactly in the second half of the piece. So whereas the first half takes you through the quarry and its productions and its cutting and you know, close ups on the marble and its raw and honed form, the second half of the piece takes you into seeming luxury apartments designed by star architects and moves you through the deployment of the marble in those spaces and things as quotidian as back splashes and bathtubs and flooring and and you know, wall covering and and and so forth. But then as you continue through the piece, it's revealed that in fact, these are themselves not real apartments. They are model apartments. They are apartments that are built residences that are partially built inside office buildings. And those office buildings often have two windows, two sets of windows. The one of the silver set back in the back is the office building window. The kind of rose gold in front of it is the example that you're seeing of the windows, the steel that will be used for the windows of the building to come. So these are speculative apartments built by developers and the architect in collaboration to let buyers see the materials and finishes and in some sense, in some aspects, the layout of the apartment for a building yet to be built that they hope to buy to buy into. That's the bathroom, that one. And then the piece moves further into the world of the unreal by also transversing the renderings that were made, the kind of architectural renderings that were made to give life or a kind of deathly shadow life as I like to think of renderings to the aspirational world that is being sold by the developers and architects, which themselves often reiterate art historical tropes, fascinating way. So when I made, when I showed Corey, I've actually only shown it in the States, I've shown it in North America before in Canada, but only right now am I showing it in the States. And when I showed it last in London, I created another work for the exhibition, a new work for the exhibition. I didn't feel like I was quite done with marble. And there was something about, there's something about book matched marble that has always intrigued me. So book matched marble being, this is an example of it, but being marble, as you know, that's cut, and then the middle is opened, and the pattern of the veining repeats, but in a mirror form, in a mirror image on either side of the slab. And it creates a kind of a Rorschach, right? So one can read into that image, if you will, whatever you want. And I was kind of fascinated by that. And I was looking for, I was on eBay. And I was looking for like, remaindered marble, like what happens when you cut out a whole countertop, and then you cut the hole for the sink? Where does that piece of marble go? That's the sink. That's or that's no longer the sink. It's the absence of the sink, right? Like, where's that chunk go? And I thought, well, maybe like eBay, there's like remaindered marble, like people sell everything and construction materials on Craigslist and so forth. But instead, I came across this, which is literally this tall. So it's about four or five inches tall. And it was somebody was online in November 2016, right after the election, before the inauguration, US election and inauguration, selling a fragment of marble from the Trump Tower Lobby here in New York. And it was escalating in price. So it was getting up there. And I was kind of fascinated because this is like a tiny little thing, right? And it's from really a kind of, you know, that's a pretty odd building, let's just say. And, you know, it's, I don't know if you guys have been inside, I think you can still walk through the lobby. I mean, you have to go through a metal detector, but it's totally worth a visit because it is just a kind of Baroque vision of 80s Fantasia in there, like interior mall kind of Hyatt like Fantasia. And most of it is surfaced on the walls and the floors in this pink marble, this Brachia Perniche marble, which comes from Northern Italy, and is used often in churches. And Eve, I'm always get this wrong. Ivanka is the ex-wife, right? Yes, and Ivanka is the daughter. Okay. So Ivanka actually selected this marble. It was her wish that this marble be used in the lobby. And then she worked on the design of the lobby and collaboration with the architect firm, Der Skutt, who made the building in I think 83. So this person was auctioning this fragment online and I bought it. And then I the way I made a piece called Dynasty, which is also composed of multiple elements. And what I do is I place the fragment with a little museum glue on a very like specked out particular vitrine that gets built for each exhibition or adapted for each exhibition. And then I created this wall piece behind, which is two separate frame photographs that are always pushed together and exhibited together. And what those photographs are, are, it looks like, of course, marble, it looks like an extremely thin skin of marble, especially when you get close to it. But in fact, these are scans of book matched Brachia Perniche marble that I found. And I ordered from China this marble scanner, which is really great that I guess showrooms use to show like the sample of the actual marble to their clients. Because you know, when you pick out marble, you're not you're picking out the kind of marble, but you're not picking the exact slab unless you go to some extremely precise place or a marble yard, like we freaks would do but you know, like normal people don't do. But you know, some people are picking and they want to see the particular thing. So I, I scanned these slabs and then made these photographic prints in their frames, a kind of Rorschach of our time. And then I also exhibit with it the evidentiary photograph that the eBay seller supplied, meaning a photograph that he sent me that he had also posted online of they had renovated part of the lobby, I think in the early 2000s, and they they took out the pink on the upper left, and they put in this kind of creamy colored thing on the bottom right also marble. So he was sort of providing that as as evidence that this had really happened. And this was in fact, a real fragment, you know, but I don't know if it's real or not. Or if it's really from there. And then on the wall, I usually create a kind of a provenance for the piece. So it indicates each element that's in the room. But it also indicates for the fragment the provenance as the artist purchased December 16 2016, sold by an eBay private collector in Greenwich, Connecticut. It's from the Trump Tower Lobby Atrium New York City, again, started in the present and moving backward. It's a history of ownership. Brett Chia Perniche Marbles, elected by Ivana Trump, designed by Derskut, that's Ivana. 1983, Esseg Mami Cori, Verona, Italy, Northern Italian hillside. So again, you get that kind of history, layered history of ownership, and a kind of social stratification, as it were. So that piece is from 2017. And it is it is being exhibited right now in Houston, along with quarry, and another piece that I filmed in the Freud Museum in London, which I'm not going to talk about. And a show in a solo exhibition of my work at the Blaffer Art Museum, which is called Medium Cool. And for that exhibition, I also made, I also felt the calling of the quarry once again, as it were, because I've done quite a bit now with this marble quarry, or at least had to do with with marble. And when I when I filmed quarry, you guys all probably noticed these massive cutters in there that that use a tremendous amount of water, ecologically questionable amounts of water to soften the marble as the blades cut through it, right. And interestingly, there's just a huge amount of runoff that comes from this process. And you can see some of the runoff, you know, on the floor here in the quarry, and you can see the spatters on the wall. And you can also see that buildup of kind of like mud in the back. And what that is is it's the sediment combined with the water, right? It's the sediment of the marble combined with the water. But when it dries, it becomes marble dust. And marble dust is a prime component of most painting Gesso's. So most paintings that are made on canvas have a primer base. And that's usually whiting or Gesso, both of which are made with marble dust. And I thought it was kind of fascinating that the luxury sort of detritus of one classical medium, which is marble and sculpture, would become the substratta of another, which is painting. And knowing that these splatters and so forth were made by machines, because I had witnessed them and filmed them, I decided to make my own paintings. And all of these works are marble dust, all of which were made by the machines in the quarry. I simply placed the canvases and remove them at a strategic time. So these are the installation images in Texas. And I'll show you so you can get some ideas of scale. The large one is five meters in width. And then these are some of the individual works. So what you see in the back is the raw linen of the canvas in that instance. So I use two different materials for canvas linen, and duvetine black duvetine, which is a theatrical material that only film and theater people really know about, which is just used to block out light. And these kinds of strange formations emerged when when when they dried. Some of them have the rhythmic spray of cutters. And others become almost Rorschach like or look like almost like a scholar's rock, another kind of Rorschach like object, you know, used to from open to multiple interpretations as it were. I like to think of them as is almost like the latent ghost in the machine, but the ghost in the machine of the market, pairing as we have the world of developers and architects luxury material, which is marble with the art world's luxury material and object, which is painting. And this work, which was a kind of unique one. So all these processes were additive. But this work was the one canvas that I bought canvas that was pre primed. So it already had a layer of gesso and therefore marbled us in it. And when I put it in front of the or near one of the cutters, what I expected was that it would layer up intensely. But what happened was the pressure erased it, and revealed the linen beneath. So thanks so much. Let's argue, I guess. Thank you so much. There's much to talk about here. I want to just start off, though, maybe with along the themes that you're you ended with, let's say book matching on some level at least connects visually to questions of reflection, the kind of aspects of the work that you described as sort of performing the systems that that you're that you're with the latent system, right? Okay. So importantly, as we think of psychoanalysis, bringing forward the latent urges, right, or latent motives. Okay, right. And so in the essay that that we read the question on questionnaire and materialisms, you also begin with the kind of psychoanalytic figure of the two chairs. And you talk about them in a certain way, reflecting each other, you talk about it as an empathic exchange, right? Potentially, right, I think in fact, use that adverb. And I'll just I want to quote from from that essay also on provenance, you say provenance diagrams, the movements, it reveals the script or form and then lot 248 doubles back and performs the script with the work itself as protagonist object. And I thought about that moment, or that passage at a moment in quarry. You show one of these apartments, I don't know whether it's a real one or rendering or what but as it's a rotating pan shot that shows as part of the shot, it shows a reflective polished, maybe stainless steel lamp. And you see the space reflected in the image I showed here. I don't. Did it come up here? Okay, great. Perfect. The one that I said had an art historical reference. Yes, right. Like thinking of 17th century Dutch painting. Yeah, of course. And also, you know, the idea of last Union. Yes, like the scene is somehow the scene of the of the creation or production itself is depicted in the so embedded within it. Perfect. So that's what I want to ask about, which is along these lines of the themes of the construction of revealing of performing of doubling back that the essay and that you you've talked about here. Your overall emphasis on this kind of reflexivity, self awareness. In watching the movie, I found myself as a viewer almost expecting to see the kind of filmic apparatus behind it. So like what, you know, the camera, the crew, the, and so on. If it's a rendering, then clearly that doesn't quite exist or it exists in a different way. But I guess what I'm curious to start off by asking is, where do we begin to see those, you know, the the kind of revealing of of the, you know, we can put it in terms of labor or the the actual humans and agency behind the production of these images. You know, another way of asking that would be why doesn't the camera ever explicitly appear in the way that Velazquez does in Las Maninas as a kind of subject in the painting. You know, why don't you highlight the kind of filmmaking equipment itself? Well, so it's a great question. And for those of you who were born like really recently, which is I'm sure some of you, I just want to give you a small refresher because this is actually rather interesting and important point that the title of that show and of this talk, Medium Cool, was partially inspired by the media theorist, Marshall McLuhan's definition of hot and cool media, which are rather dated ideas, but interesting nonetheless. But more so, there's a film that Haskell Wexler made in the 60s called Medium Cool. And it's a film, it's a fiction film that mixes nonfiction and real footage of the 1968 Democratic protests that's filmed in Chicago. It's a film about a fictional cameraman slash news journalist because back in those days, that was actually the same role, you shot your own material, who is kind of figuring out that in fact, the FBI is reviewing all of his material and using it to prosecute the Black Panthers, et cetera, et cetera, in this kind of like deep state conspiracy against revolution student revolutionary tendencies. It's a fascinating film you should all watch it Haskell Wexler was part of a group of filmmakers, not only as a famous cinematographer of feature Hollywood films, but made his own body of work which delved in the kind of documentary tendency of self reflexivity. So when people speak of cinema verite, they're very importantly, people like to call it like fly on the wall filmmaking. That's I think kind of a crappy definition of cinema verite. I think a better definition would be the impulse may created through light equipment, handheld cameras, you know, the cinematographer slash filmmaker could be hold the camera, hold the mic in the other hand, and, you know, be very close to action. But at the same time, a lot of those filmmakers became very interested in questioning their own role in the production of images. They knew that their presence altered those images. And there they are trying to do this very political work. But what about not just the political production of images, right? But the production of or not just the production of political images, but the political production of images, meaning questioning how images are made, right? And how the the situation or apparatus of the production itself affects the very thing that's unfolding before the camera and being represented. So you won't often see the filmmaker in the mirror, right, as he passed by, or moments where you could catch the crew or they would include the slate, you know, all these are sort of tropes of 60s, 70s, self reflexivity in cinema. There's 60s and 70s tropes, you know, and I think that they, you know, we can go into a long discourse about how they became reiterated through the films of the 80s, which engage with identity politics, and they're being revisited now. But I've always been very interested in reflexivity, but how to create a reflexivity that is not direct and prescriptive or illustrative in that way, but is kind of produced or embedded or somehow produced by the work itself. So it doesn't become a gesture, but it's somehow innate to the piece. It's almost latent, as it were, so that the piece itself becomes self reflexive, right? It performs the behaviors of the system it's describing. It's not showing you those behaviors. And in some of my early pieces, you'll see some, you can see some of those moments of there are inclusions of the camera and things like that. From for example, empathy, which is a feature film I made when I was in my late 20s or DDR DDR, which I made a couple years after that. But then I moved away from that into this kind of wordless space. And I was, I became more interested in objects and materials, and how people are implied through those objects and materials, because I'm looking at not necessarily initially man made materials, but what humans do with those materials, how we fetishize them, for example, how we, you know, compress smooth and push them into service of our ideals, and what that says about our ideals. So I would argue that humans are present at all times in the work, even if they're not on screen, because it's always their products that we're looking at, right, or their labors, the products of their labor. So even the paintings, you know, they're not human made, but they are human made, because they're machine made, and who made machine, you know, so there's the sort of layers of that to trace back. Hello, I'm Oscar. I was going to kind of open up the conversation by interjecting with another question, and maybe I can build up a little bit from, from this question of kind of the fetishization of the object, something like that. So I was struck by the fourth vignette about provenance in the text, in the questionnaire about materialisms. And the vignette opens with the mise-en-a-bime of the owners of the yacht from provenance striking back at you in a way, where the yacht owners have purchased a copy of the film itself, which I understand was only produced in, as you said, five copies. So, and they send off sailing, send it off sailing around the world, along with the Chandigarh furniture. So this is a kind of a one-up- That's my speculation. That's my fantasy. They buy an addition, and I fantasize that it gets exactly, I don't know where they're showing it on many houses. Yeah, sure. But I mean, whether or not it's still part of somehow the piece, or the implication. And this is kind of like a one-upmanship in a way of your own methods from your piece, Law 248, that you refer to in the fifth vignette about the camera as object. So the owners were previously part of the artwork, but by being now contained within the yacht, but now they become partial artists, as if begging you to make a new film about the boat continuing the kind of the mise-en-a-bime of the object in the film, becoming an object in the film. So after this paragraph, however, exactly midway through the text, you throw kind of in doubt. In a way, your whole project, you know, this may be a misreading, but with the following paragraph, where you say, since then I've wondered, and I'm quoting now, since then I've wondered if the movement of the chairs in the film comes to mimic the individuals who collect them, wintering here, summering there, on the move between homes and art fairs, or perhaps it's the inverse and the collectors mimic the movements of their objects imagining themselves as things to be looked at, emulated and photographed, unquote. And this paragraph, it just jumped at me because coming from an artist that's so sophisticated when it comes to talking about the agency of objects, not the least because of how it reinforces a dichotomy between subject and object that your work always seems to break down. And it almost becomes kind of a repeat of the kind of the church chilean cliche of the building shapes us and afterwards we shape our building, first we shape our buildings and thereafter the building shape us. Because in the former version of the chairs mimicking the individuals who collect them, that posits objects as reflections of human activity, and scaling that up the city somehow as symbolic form, reflecting the societies they serve. And this is a humanist version, it posits that whatever humans do, objects follow and whenever humans change, objects do too. And the latter is a post humanist version of collectors mimicking the movements of their objects, of objects instilling behavior in their owners, zapping their agency and muddling causality of Le Corbusier and Genere somehow tinkering with post colonial India, or Indian subjects from through their chairs or better yet from their drawing boards in Paris or wherever. So, but even so your vignette is a perversion of this familiar skirmish between humanism, post humanism, agency, determinism, people and objects as the agents of history, because we're not talking about chairs in general, but these particular chairs which have been valorized. So the chairs are no longer functional within either of the version you describe. There are neither reflections of their roles as human supports because they have been removed from the context they were designed for, nor do they participate in the formation of subjects through their intervening in their subjects lives, according to Genere and Le Corbusier's expertise. So this is a long question, sorry. So they're a stage removed because after having spent their first 50 years in existence as the chairs of Chandigarh, as simultaneously representations of Chandigarh's ideals in good modern fashion, they now represent a whole other regime of control in which architects' roles are much more fluid. Genere and Le Corbusier have lost all control, allowing for the fact that they ever had it, and the objects have taken control, somehow mobilizing the history of the modern movement and its provenance. So I mean, I guess my question is deceptively simple. Which one is it? Do the chairs mimic the individuals or the individuals the chairs? And if it is neither, as I preempt your answer, what is the agency of the artist architect if the object, both the film and the chair, can be revalued, repackaged and recirculated? Is it possible to design objects that resist circulation, or is it the object's ability to be re-injected that allows for its re-evaluation? I think that there's an assumption at work that there's, in my own thinking, a hierarchy or value or valorization. There is not. Medium cool also applies to my own relationship to that which I'm depicting in the sense that I think of it a little bit more forensically. Right? And I'm not creating a hierarchy but enacting the hierarchy as questions around its structure. Right? So whether you could say is it humanist or post humanist? Is it structural or post structural? I'm not engaging, I'm engaging those as genre, but I'm not engaging one in particular. I'm engaging the questions around them. I don't view it chronologically, and I don't view it in a hierarchical way, where one approach or movement in history or one mode of thinking is privileged above or and beyond another. So it's this flatness that I'm interested in. And you know, some people might even call it affectlessness. I don't think it's affectlessness because I think there's actually, like I think of quarry as my comedy. I know it sounds like unreal, that's not a comedy, but I think it's quite playful at times, especially when you think just to use actual instances from the work rather than my words, which are, you know, speculative and random and associative in the moment. But this thing that I've made which does, you know, pair, for example, this very, very reaching aspirational romantic music, which enacts a whole, you know, 30 person symphony to realize in the moment is paired with a backsplash. It is a backsplash. So I think there's a kind of, you know, tension there that produces a certain playfulness at times as well. So I want to just say that and kind of point that out because we're talking about looking at something forensically. But I also think we're talking about opening up spaces of kind of playful pointing, like pushing and, you know, jabbing at things as well. You know, terror. I mean, the film is terrifying in some ways. But I don't think it would appear as terrifying if you watched it without the soundtrack. It's only when like through the crescendo of the choir that you realize, Oh, my God, this is, you know, and in that way, it almost becomes to me that becomes one of those montage moments. That is not simply a montage between shots, you know, sequence of shots, but a montage between the two halves of the film, where you realize, okay, there was a crescendo here in the first half of the film, and now I'm mapping this onto the other half, and it's creating a kind of like a subjective effect. Yeah, I think you can also think of these works, particularly provenance and the elements that we talked about that constitute the work, as well as quarry and the different, I think of dynasty is connected to quarry. They're different works. And I think of the marble dust paintings as connected to the both of those, but different works, right? But they're all engaging similar interests in very different ways. But I think of all of them is laying a very, very sweet trap almost or setting setting up a situation whereby I can only take it so far. And I've made a couple moves. And if you think of this as like I'm throwing a stone in the pond, and then there's the first layer that comes out, and then there's the second layer, which might be the film of the film that gets auctioned. And then there's the third layer. At a certain point, those layers are not in my control. But I'm very interested in what happens. So my speculation of like, wow, the if they they bought the work, they bought the an addition. So in fact, it could end up in the very place where I filmed. It's like another, you know, it's another circle in the project. So there's a way in which it sets up a situation whereby the works can continue to act in very uncomfortable ways at times, you know, like I might not like that. I might not like what they're doing with it. They might install it in some crazy way. Also, you know, there's all kinds of things that can happen. But those things can be really productive and interesting. And I think it's, you know, important as an artist, architect as a maker, to like, move into them, rather than shy away from them, right? So whatever potentially horrifying things there is, you know, happening right now with these works as they're collected, one has to be open to that as the as a product as another as another product of the work. Maybe it's time to open it up for questioning. I was interested in your discussion of the relationship between material and commodification. So I have a following question, which is, do you think materials provide a provoked spiritual experience that is not necessarily related to commodification? And is it possible to disconnect the two? I don't think it matters what I think. I think it matters the questions that the work asks, you know, in the sense that it's a good question, and you're asking it. And that's great. Like I like that. I like to think about those things too. You know, I felt really puzzled. For example, when I was asked by October to contribute to their rather belated, I think, contribution to the discussion on materialisms and object-orientated ontology, because I didn't really want to have to take a position in relationship to object-orientated ontology because I'm not in the business of positions. I'm in the business of questions. And that may sound sort of, I don't know, it's not to say that one doesn't approach things with extreme rigor. You know, it's just that I think I'm just more invested in the tensions than I am in sort of the romanticization of resolution. I think I'm not really answering your question about material. But it's not that, I think if you, you know, looking at the works, they're like the moment I spoke about with the backsplash and the music. There are other moments in that piece, for example, when it glides over the floor, it glides over a kitchen island that's a marble surface and it's all white and you're kind of lost in it. And then it moves off and it's the floor. Of course, there's a funniness to that, right? Like, we're just looking down and we're looking at the floor and that's the thing we step on and, you know, in some cultures it's like you don't, we're, anyway. But at the same time, the camera work is performing a kind of ballet. And there's, I think there's some interesting kind of poetic associations to be had there. But I'm not, they're not in, they're not ends in and of themselves, right? So the end game isn't the beauty, the poetry. It's like it's all genre to be used. It's all material to be deployed for its sociological context and meaning that we already assigned to it, you see? So there's a kind of equivalency to, like, if materials have a certain socioeconomic meaning that we bring to them when we see them, right? Associations and so forth. So does camera work. So does the deployment of sound. So do all of those tropes that are in the mediums that I'm using as well. So there's a kind of parallel process there, if you see what I mean, through, so it's like I'm like a total format slut, you know, like I'll use 60 millimeter film, I'll use HD, I'll use anything, but I'll only use it if I'm interested in activating within it its cultural connotations, right? And those are, you know, interestingly becoming more and more complicated as the distinctions between the real and the unreal become harder to decipher, but that's also interesting. I'm wondering in terms of the reflexivity, how do you film, like in the architects, without the people being aware of the camera? By asking them not to look at the camera. I know it's really simple and sometimes they, like, can't help themselves and they disobey and then I'm like, you know that we're going to have to start again and that's like hundreds of bucks for me, so please don't do, you know, please don't look at the camera. No, but I also, there can also be, it's like a delicate balance, I think, in production where I really want what I want, but I also want what I don't know yet is going to happen. So there's a sort of a balance between being open to what's happening in the moment that you never would have thought of and sort of like setting up what you have in mind or taking advantage of something you saw when you visited two weeks ago or that sort of thing. But yeah, it's just asking them not to, and then also not bringing anybody too close to the camera because if you have someone really close, it's like really uncomfortable, like you sort of feel their self-consciousness. The artistic vision or the direction that you took with switching the focus from, I guess, humans being protagonists to objects being protagonists, and then we, in our discussion today, started discussing anthropomorphism as in you, as in the objects start to establish their own language, and they start discussing how they start being the movers of in the scene transitions. But if you say it's all genre, and if you say that every part of the process of marble from quarry to marble in 432 Park is essentially whatever the social construct of the material is, whatever we interpreted, whatever the several interpretations of the film that we all have are, did you envision any other storyline that might have been just as effective rather than taking how marble really was made? I know this is a kind of hypothetical question, but the process of marble that we discussed that it is labor-intensive, and personally when I read about your work, I love the fact that there's no humans in it. I love the fact that there's only objects, and they're the drivers. But if there's, upon discussing today, we realized the fact that there is a certain labor that it goes into the production of getting this to be such a finished piece. So did you envision a different kind of a process or a different storyline in your head that could have possibly gotten the point across just, I was wondering? The point of what across? The point of like, I mean the beauty of marble, or like the marble as a material, marble as what 432 Park wanted to probably convey with the with marble, like because they give the example of David, you give the example of the social nature of the marble. We discuss in our trans polarities class, like when you attach the word social to material, you start, you give it a history, you give it something that it has a story, give it some more gravity. So I was just wondering. If I'm understanding your correction, your question correctly, which I don't, I'm not sure I am, but, you know, the production of marble is labor-intensive in part, but part of it is you have men who, they're men who are in the quarry and who, whose fathers worked there, and sometimes their grandfathers worked there, sometimes in tandem, overlapping a few years, and it's gone from heavy manual labor to optimization, right, and that's recent, actually. So in fact, there's a lot of pressing of buttons and standing around, almost to the, and I think that's how I landed on the marble dust paintings as well. Was this question of like, how can I automa, how can I automata, atomize, I guess that's the word? Anyway, my own production, right, because I wasn't going to like write an algorithm and have it edit my film, like, I'm not there for that, but I was kind of interested in, in doing something equivalent to that with the paintings. Not to the degree that it's code, but, you know, to the degree that it's automized, because I, automatized or whatever, because it's, you know, it's sort of like, brings out, like I was saying, this kind of idea of the ghost in the machine. So I guess that, I don't, again, I don't think I'm really answering your question. My basic question was just that, did you envision different storyline because, personally, when we visited, in my undergraduate, we visited a quarry in Rome, and even though, yes, a lot of it is, of course, because of the scale of the material, a lot of it is automized, a lot of it goes through several processes where you're just an observer, you're, but it is labor-intensive also, so I thought, is there a different storyline that you might have approached? Well, there's like a million storyline, if you want to call them storylines, you know, there's a million things to focus on, and a million directions to go with anything, absolutely, but I think one of the important things of being an artist is to immediately try and realize what the most obvious and banal ones are, and to just do away with them, you know, or to engage them in some way, you know, that, that is conscious of, of itself, but, yeah, I mean one, I think one always thinks of other things, but that's, that's somebody else's piece to make, you know, and I'm super happy for them to make it, like I love that kind of stuff, and I love when people say like, oh well so and so made, made, you know, this, this film in a quarry or something like that, and my response is like, yeah, I kind of don't want to watch that right now, but I'm totally, I'm really excited to see it when I'm done, because I don't really want to internalize someone else's process, but, you know, every artist does something so differently, and sometimes we do things a little bit similarly, and that's interesting too, right, so I think again it's like this non hierarchical thing of trying, trying to not, you know, get agitated by that, and to, you know, when you have ideas, I think the, the good ones rise to the top, and the other ones, they kind of settle down, and you, you forget about them, you know, or you'll like have the same idea again, and then you, like you have this idea, and then you look in your book, and you realize like you had that idea already last year, and it's somehow still sitting there, but like it came up in a slightly different way, and you think like, all right God, I'm just, I'm just like the same thing over and over again, aren't I? And I think there's also a pleasure though, in developing a body of work that you start to, at least one that's associative, and builds on its own operations to some degree, that you recognize your interests, and you recognize like there's this kind of really sweet moment where things connect and correspond, and that's like really, really lovely. I mean, it's super pleasurable, like I'm saying all these things like it's cold, it's forensic, but there's like a lot of pleasure in this, so. Yeah, that's good. We had, I would like you to explain what you mentioned before, why are your interests in the panning method of filming, which was an issue that rose in our discussions, like why and which is, we can see in query and in architect man, so. Okay, so don't take this the wrong way everybody, there's no panning in my work, none whatsoever. A pan is when you put a camera on a tripod, and you turn the camera, the camera is moving in a circular or semi-circular fashion, the tripod is not. A tracking shot, or a traveling shot in this instance, is when the whole apparatus is moving parallel to its scene, and not turning and creating a pan, but always maintaining, like if you measured the distance between the lens and the action, it would be fairly consistent throughout, right, or the lens would not shift angle too much. So I point that out only because terminology is actually important, and I love it when reviews write about pans, and I always write into the fact checker at art forum, it's not a pan, and they come back to me like kind of pissed, and I'm like, but why are you fact checking, if you don't want to know this stuff, because you would never do that with painting, you would never, ever, ever mess that up, that formal description. So I think those things are really important, how we describe things. So when I was in graduate school, I read, which I went to a snake pit, I went to the Arn Institute of Chicago, which I wouldn't recommend, but in any case, it was good, it's something to struggle against, but I read a really interesting essay by Brian Henderson called, toward a non bourgeois camera style, and it talked about Goudard's film weekend and Goudard's use of the tracking shot as something that should always, that if you think of moving parallel to an object, a person, a scene, a landscape, is to take it in as such, as an image, but if you track into something, if you move into a person or into an object, you're moving closer to it psychologically, you're getting closer to its meaning, right? Like that's the kind of association we have with the track in, and Brian Henderson was writing that he believed his theory, which I thought was fascinating, is that this would be, that to move in would be psychologically involving, and therefore privilege the loss of critical capability through, you know, the sense of sensuality and emotional involvement and suspension of disbelief, whereas if you retain, if you remain parallel to the action, you are enacting that Brechtian distance that Goudard always wanted, right, that alienation effect, where you're always already aware of the scene, as a scene, as a construct, as a film set, and so forth, and that interested me a lot, and most, it wasn't that I said okay, tracking shot equals Brechtian, equals exactly what I will do for the next 20 years, it was more that I thought, yeah, this is really important to me, it's really frustrating to me that everyone talks about film like, I love the cinematography, and I'm like, what are you talking about, what in specific do you love, like let's break it down, like we all know this language so well, but we can't talk about it, and so it kind of, my interest came out of this desire to really latch on to certain formal gestures in camera work as meaningful, and for me it's less about the, you know, sort of Marxist read of the image, but I am interested in maintaining the image as an act of representation, but I'm also interested in suspensiveness, so I'm interested in the sort of engaging, which may sound really funny, like you're all going to be like, a suspensiveness, your thing was so long, those shots were so long, but there is something that happens with duration, and there's also something that happens when you move along parallel, there's always something that you're anticipating coming into the frame, what's coming next, and that kind of like keeping that investment up in the air is also very, you know, curious to me, and then there are specific works like the architects where the tracking shot becomes indicative of the assembly line, and throws, you know, harkens back to the history of cinema, and workers leaving the factory, and cinema's own relationship to industrialization, I mean you can go really far with this, but that's also in quarry, you know, many of the tracking shots are of these machines that move along tracks, like one of them looks like a stationary railroad, you know, this machine that's like chugging along, like a steam engine, and it's like a big wheel, and it's wheels are powering the cutter at the end. So if I can just interject there a little bit, I want to ask, because you're on the subject of mechanistic production, it's something you've brought up in terms of automation as well, I'm curious to ask about the question of aura, and the mechanical reproduction of these, of the things that you made, artworks or movies, however you want to describe them, as objects themselves, and especially objects of value, when you addition them, they become even more valuable as sort of limited edition works. I'm curious how you approach that issue of the original, the artist print, especially within the kind of context of the medium that you're working in, which I don't know whether it's digital or a film, or you said you're sort of, it doesn't matter, but I guess I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about that question, and I think it relates quite a lot, it sort of jigsaws together with the questions of materiality, and when you show a dynasty, the fragment, the tangible fragment, versus the bookmatched marble, and even when you bookmatch things, there's material lost in between because of the curve of the blade, so there's somehow, the thing is supposed to be a reflection of itself, but it's not quite, so there's always this kind of distance of copying reflection, but not something lost in between. Well, I always think of, I always cause a lot of work for myself, I think extra work, because I think of every moment in the life of a work as an opportunity to generate meaning, or generate questions around its existence or context, so it doesn't stop with, so there are like very clever artists who I super admire, who develop these artworks that are almost like they come with pre-designed environments, and you follow the instructions to a tee, and the artist doesn't need to be there, and therefore the works can be, they can be exhibited much more often, whereas I'm like really labor-intensive with the floor plan, and how things fit into the architecture of each individual architecture of each individual space in exhibition, how it works in relationship to the other works in the exhibition, hopefully they're mine, and you know how they all fit together, and that also extends to the exhibition of the work in a gallery versus a museum, when that should happen, and why, as well as the pricing and additioning, or saying a work is a unique, it's one of a kind, it's only original of it, or whether it has, it exists as a multiple, which is what we like to call additions because we don't call them copies, even though of course they are, and of course what you get, so if you bought Quarry, you would get as a collector a little, I think you would still get this, this is what we were doing for a while, a little USB stick in a very nice box, like a very beautiful linen box where the title had been stamped and foil on it, right, so you still felt the preciousness of your object, but in fact what you got was a file, you also get an agreement, you know, you get, you get an agreement that I'll, that my studio will migrate that media to the next platform available should it become, you know, in operable in some degree at your cost, you know, like just for the cost of migrating it. Sorry, not to get hung up on minutiae, but like who makes that USB stick, like, do you replace the casing, like how much is that important? Yeah, I have a friend who makes like really super fancy USB sticks, and I'm sort of less into the stick and more into the box, like that's for my, because, you know, all these things are like, they're not that, you don't, they're not baked into the price, you also have to pay for it, so I'm also thinking like practically, pragmatically, I'd rather put it into the box, but yeah, I haven't, so I haven't really messed with that, also we've moved away a little bit from USB sticks, and that's also the scene where an individual private collector is collecting something, when an institution gets it, they don't usually get a box, because they don't care, you know, what they care about is like, what do we do with this when you die, and like filling out this form that makes you think like so existentially, it's mind boggling, it takes like two days to go through. So, you know, I'm telling you all this stuff, this is all the stuff of an artist's life, in their lifetime, probably lots of artists don't talk about this stuff, but I found all this stuff really fascinating and generative of meaning, and also, you know, potential spaces of messing around with or thinking about, you know, there are artists who make works that are video works, and they say it's a unique, but there's seven versions, so there's seven uniques, and they'll change like one small thing in it, and that's like, it's a way of messing with the system, and I love all those things, because like what else do we do, you know, why else do we do this, but to sort of, you know, really agitate at all these sort of weird authoritarian structures that exist, you know, even though some part they exist for the longevity of the work, and that's a tremendous thing, you know, on some level, like after you've been toiling away in your crappy apartment for years, like wow, it's gonna, it's gonna go on, you know, it's amazing, so I totally got off track here, what was the question? It was about, it was about addition, and assigning value. Getting off track, I think, on a question of originality, exactly where we should be. But you know, there was a debate in the, there was a debate in the 80s and 90s that I think is pretty over, where, you know, when video art kind of came about as such, as we call it video art, which always makes me cringe a little bit, there was this idea that, you know, it was sort of like there were two camps, one camp said, video is a reproducible medium, therefore it should be infinitely reproducible and available as such and distributed as such, and the other camp said, no way, no day, we're not going to become the poets of the art world and never get paid, it's going to become unique objects, we're going to addition it. Yeah, and so there are only two video art distribution distributors left, and the vast majority have gone to the other model, and every so often there comes, and now we're seeing it all over again with Hulu and Netflix and so forth, this idea that you can also stream video works online, and like most artists are just like running in the other direction, you know, but I get an email like every other week, would you like to participate in this online video art distribution platform? You know, so don't email me that question. I was wondering if I could just interject before we move on to the next question, because you said something about agitating the system, didn't you say something like that? And I thought that that kind of reveals maybe, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there is a kind of like a tension in your work then, between kind of agitating the system and then performing the system or participating in the system like you've been saying, and I mean I think that this seems to be very important to a group of architects, and I'm just kind of wondering how you might be able to kind of, because there's always this kind of terror during, because we also teach architectural history courses, and to me as architectural historians, you know, very much what we do is kind of showing, you know, what architecture has done, and there's always this moment when the students just say, Oscar, you know, what have we done? You know, what do we do to kind of, you know, how can we, how can we reduce the kind of the damage that architecture does every day, somehow, you know, so that there is like a kind of like, there is a kind of a, there is a kind of an ask of architects that they don't simply perform the system, that they don't just become like Raphael Benoli, but that they also somehow make things better on the way, on the way, you know, and I'm curious to say, curious to see like how you might, you know, as I told you, I'm not good at resolutions, you know, resolutions, and I, I've heard you, yeah. But I am, I like to speculate, so, I mean there is something, when I think about, you know, I have, when I think about like my proximity to architects and graphic designers, the differences that come up often between us have to do with clients. I don't have clients. This is like a hugely liberating thing, but at the same time, it sort of sucks, because, not only because there's a kind of structuralistness, when you don't have to respond in that way, but also because there's a certain degree of you know, no matter how collectively once one works, there's still this system of the individual artist, right? Whereas I think that in architecture, possibly, and possibly in design, you have opportunities for collaboration and for this kind of non-hariarchical space. I'm not saying it unfolds that way, but I think there's potential there, and it relates to both your colleagues that you're working with, but also with clients, and I'm not talking, I mean, if you can open up that term client to just people, anybody, not just the school that hires you to make its building, but the students and so forth, if you're really kind of open in that way, and that may sound really romantic on some level, but I just don't have that, I don't have that kind of contact often. I mean, sometimes I do, like the guys in the quarry and I hang out, and their thoughts were generative for me in terms of thinking about how to do the project, and we did certain things together that changed the shape of the paintings, for example. But yeah, I mean, I think of those encounters with other people, and it's really easy when you're in your 20s and 30s to privilege your own thinking and to be really invested in it, and I think that's fine, because you're kind of figuring out who you are and what you want to do and what you want to contribute. But then, like at some point, it's sort of, you realize it's all relational anyway, and so you should probably privilege those relations or connections, in some sense, and I don't think I'm a great example of that. I'm just saying those are things I think about more and more. My name is Yukon Kim. I greatly appreciate the lecture you gave to us today. Yeah, and beside the film that we saw last Thursday, I have seen another work, Laud 248, and I felt that the two films share a common view, like how human greed can show through furniture and architecture and criticizing materialism caused by capitalism. And my question is, if what I observed through two films was right, and if so, I'm curious to know what makes you uncomfortable when materialism is showing in architecture and furniture design, and why it makes you uncomfortable? By materialism, you mean the importance given to materials and the designation of them as luxury materials? Yes. Yes. I guess it's not so much that I'm uncomfortable, or if I am uncomfortable, I think then, oh, that's a space of possibility if I feel discomfort with it. But I think the notion that if something is deemed luxury or valuable, then I'm interested in how that came to pass and why, because I'm not sure things have innate value. All right, that's a kind of question I carry in my mind when I approach things, is not do they, but like, why do we think they do, right? How does this come about, this kind of construct of value? So, you know, I grew up in my, both my parents worked, and my mother had clothing stores, and I think being around fabrics and material and seeing them, and they also had in the basement, they had a space where there were a couple of women who sewed and who did the pattern making, but there were also fashion lines that they carried that came from elsewhere, so it was a mix. But I think being exposed to the production of those things and then being exposed at the same time to their sales upstairs and to the method, sales methods, kind of like it formed in me these questions around objects and attachments and also like aesthetic pleasure, because it is very, like on some of them there's a lot of pleasure in materiality, and I'm not denying that, I'm really interested in that. So, I think it's kind of giving a space for all those questions to come forward. You were saying that your work is critical and participatory and at the same time there's like this playfulness, so I was wondering, like what do you think of the fact that you're associating yourself or your practice to the corbusier, hymns, is it like fetishizing them or like what do you think of this? Well, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm a woman. Yeah. And so, there's automatically a kind of interesting thing where, I'm sorry, did I let you finish your question? Yeah, that's fine. Okay, good. But I think in that instance there's a kind of, I don't know, if I were a male artist, I mean, kind of haven't, I've kind of wondered about this, but I don't know if I were a male artist whether this would come across, because male artists are very good at referencing canonical male figures in the history of culture as part of their aesthetic genealogy. And I'm sort of not interested in that at all, but I'm interested in the canonical figure, let's say, hymns, the corbusier, et cetera, et cetera, as it's not that I'm trying to take them down or take them off their pedestal, like bravo, their contribution. It's more like I'm interested in activating all the cultural connotations or some of the cultural connotations that they come with, right? So there's also a kind of construct around that, like genre, like I love when people say, oh, she's interested in modernism and failed utopias, and I'm like, I'm not interested in that actually. Like I'm kind of, but not really, like I'm interested in the fact that you think that's what modernism is, and that's what you've come to accept, is like that's the trope of understanding around it. So that's how I tend to think of those things, and actually going back to Jonah's questions about, you know, uniques and copies and works and how artworks enter the world as objects and as reproductions, I'm very, very, very specific in the acquisition agreements of my work, that the works cannot, without my permission, be exhibited in an exhibition about Freud or an exhibition about Le Corbusier, or I don't know, name another one. Yeah, because the danger is then it's like it's sort of like an homage or something like that. And when I made the architects for Storefront, it was very funny because the Storefront had a party where they invited, you know, all the firm, like not the firm, but like the some of the owners of the firm, so whose names are on the firms, and some folks on the board and some folks in the field. And I think there was like this real shock, you know, that it wasn't like a celebration, but it wasn't not a celebration. I mean, I thought it was super interesting in a certain way, but I think that you don't come to me for celebration or homage. I'm not going to do homage. Like it's not my, I could suggest others, you know, but that's not my space of critical interest. Bit going back to what he was saying, and I think you kind of responded some things, but there's a specific question that I want to ask you. So in both query and provenance, you chose to show two highly identified objects or materials in the art, architecture world and the auction real estate world. Collectors love Le Corbusier's chairs and can quickly identify them and the use of marble in our projects gives them exclusiveness or luxury. In the last day case, there has definitely been a growth and influence of the art market defining our economic reality. So I have a series of questions, which are linked. Why did you choose specifically these two objects or materials? How does the relocation of a material change its value? And was this a direct critique to the people who would quickly identify with them and are in a way exploiting them? So the two or three questions? Three questions. Yeah. The first two, why did you choose these two specific materials or objects? And how does the relocation of a material change its value? And then the third question is, is this a direct critique to the people who would quickly identify them and are in a way exploiting them? I think that the relocation is essential because the relocation is an act of montage or an act of collage, in fact. Like if you think of provenance or quarry, it's basically a collage in the sense that you've taken something, the image of it, you've cut it out from its original context and then you've pasted it in a new context. And that's how I always thought of those works is this kind of movement across contexts. And I think that the, as a viewer, beholding the difference between the two contexts, not the one and not the other but the thing that's born between the two, which is the juxtaposition, is the essence, right? The tension that's born. So in provenance, it's the tension between seeing people just using the chairs as chairs and others treating them with incredible rarity. And then sometimes seeing you guys saw that set T on its back, like looking like it was all pulled apart like an operating theater. And at that point, it's almost like tender. Like you almost, you're kind of horrified. Like, wow, that's what's inside that. It's just like crumpled up paper and foam and springs. But on the other hand, you kind of like feel something for it. And that's also interesting. And that anthropomorphizing that we were talking about before or that was brought up before. Of course, it's present in furniture and it's most present in chairs and couches because they mimic the body visually in ways that, you know, other furniture daybeds can do. But like lamps aren't so, well, lamps sometimes do that. But anyway, but at the same time, there's also a way in which these things have been filmed or represented that brings that about. So for example, we have a cinema of close-ups that we live in. So to give close-up to a chair and to film at the height of the chair rather than the human height. So if you're moving by the chair, you're not moving at human height at eye height, you're moving, you know, at seated height. Is to kind of introduce a sympathy, a psychological sympathy like how narrative, dominant narrative film operates. It's to deploy that operation in service of something else. So that's your question about relocation. I just can't keep track. And then the other one was more about... Why did you choose these materials or is this a direct critique to the people who are exploiting these materials? I don't think it's a direct... I mean, I think that asking critical questions is actually a little bit different than... Like, I think for me that's the difference between taking a position, you know, and it's... I think it would be a bit arrogant to take a position. And I'm not so interested in that because it's too limiting. There's all these infinite possibilities of meaning and complication. I don't really want to settle into one thing. As each thing generates something else. I don't know why the chairs or why the marble, really. I mean, in the sense that... You know, there are some things that are just unknown and primal and they just grab you and need you. I don't... I think the things you're really interested in, you know, they have... They come up over and over again, like I was saying, but... Yeah, they kind of choose you. That's about as like object-orientated anthology as I get. So thanks so much for all your thoughtful questions and discussion. I really appreciated it. I didn't think it, you know, be some of my toes this morning, but thank you. All right, thanks everybody.