2006. I am offered an artist research affiliateship at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Within weeks, I am also invited to research the collection at the Skissernas Museum.
In his seminar, “The Nature of Creativity,” MIT aesthetician Irving Singer offers Arthur Koestler’s term “bissociation,” the yoking together of two different matrices, as one way of understanding creativity.
CAVS was founded in 1967 by Hungarian-born artist and educator Gryorgy Kepes to create collaborations between artists and scientists. His idea was for art to promote a connectedness between isolated communities, modeling a working process that would reveal as it engaged the diverse, complex, interwoven social ecologies of the world. CAVS is a community of studio-based resident and visiting artists. (http://cavs.mit.edu)
The Skissernas Museum, founded in 1934 by artist and Lund University art historian and theorist Ragnar Josephson, has two missions:
1) to illuminate the creative process of the artist
2) to archive public art
The Museum collects only preparatory works. There are more than 25,000 sketches and models in the Permanent Collection. (http://www.adk.lu.se/)
Before beginning my CAVS appointment in 2007, I have many conversations with Larissa Harris (CAVS associate director), Joe Zane (CAVS production manager), and Elisabet Haglund (Skissernas Museum director) about what drew me to the Skissernas Museum, namely, the provisional status of works in the Collection and the Museum’s focus on creativity and the idea of public art.
I first visited the Museum in May 2006. The galleries are hung salon style, floor to ceiling. Small- and large-scale models in some rooms crowd the floor. Viewing is hyper-dynamic. There is so much work, often in many versions and stages—a vivid contrast to the highly scripted, tightly curatorially navigated collections of conventional museums. The cultural tourism of the global economy, hawking destination museums, canonical collections, and must-see masterworks, exacerbates this top-down, mono-vocal discourse. The galleries of the Skissernas, however, are like a convergence of multiple artists’ studios where artists are mid-conversation with not only viewers and other works in the halls, but most especially with themselves. Visiting in July 2007, Larissa called the viewing “hard work.” To crib a line from UK physicist David Bohm in his book, On Creativity, viewing at the Skissernas is like “making a path by walking.”
As an artist with a language-based practice, I am intrigued by the idea that the Skissernas sketches and models are invitational, one side of a call-and-response dialogue that now, across time and culture, I can return.

In his book Art and Ventriloquism: Critical Voices in Art, Theory, and Culture, David Goldblatt connects “the life of artworks with the idea of conversation,” proposing that “something like conversation takes place between artist and artwork, spectator and artwork.”

Picking up conversations initiated by the artists, I ask, “where do I echo, where do I challenge, how do I meaningfully compound or extend, translate or revise the musing, notational ‘speech acts’ of their working images and objects?”
I am also intrigued by the boundary trafficking/transgression my intervention with artists’ private studies for public work potentially proposes—a distillation of anxieties of the public and private in our 21st-century, “privacy-is-dead-deal-with-it” world as well as a practical inquiry into the sanctity of originals in the age of the copy.
To consider the privileged position of the original entails, in the digital age, proprietary concerns of ownership and implicates complicated questions about authorship. From the CAVS berth in the science and technology think tank that is MIT, it becomes apparent that, peering into, anticipating, and in many ways shaping the future, many of us ask the same question from the different stations and using the particular dialects of our fields: how do we experience our humanity?
Mulling an artwork’s provenance from the vantage of a working drawing raises issues addressed in the modern era from Duchamp’s ready-mades to Manzoni’s deflated balloon, “The Artist’s Breath,” and in contemporary art from pop to appropriation to sampling and the remix.

In her Art in America article on the work of Conceptual artist Elaine Sturtevant, Nancy Princenthal explicates Sturtevant’s approach to art as “a kind of musical score that can be played over and over, each time with new feeling.” Sturtevant says, “My work is the immediacy of an apparent content being denied.”
Gertrude Stein addresses this in her 1935 essay, “What are Masterpieces”: “Nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by the radios cinemas newspapers biographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one.”

In 2005, the Guggenheim Museum hosted a symposium in advance of performance artist Marina Abramovic’s “Seven Easy Pieces”(2006), her re-stagings of seminal 1970s performance works. In one of the panel discussions, Stanford University performance theorist Peggy Phelan stressed her preference that the re-stagings be thought of as “do-overs” or covers (as in pop music). She rejected approaching the work as scripts, arguing that as a “re-do,” the new performance gains in intensity because the echo of the previous artist is heard (seen) within the new version.

Princenthal quotes Harold Rosenberg, “Art is collective ownership from which the individual is authorized to extract as much as he can use.”
The article closes with a long look back: in the sixth of his “Discourses” (1774), Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote, “The varieties of artistic trespass or repercussion (or whatever you call it) are inexhaustible because there is as much unpredictable originality in quoting, imitating, transposing, and echoing, as there is in inventing.”
Doing is a necessary though not sufficient component of creativity.
In a provocative debate on the future of artificial intelligence hosted by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Ray Kurzweil and David Gelernter contest the possibility of machine consciousness (http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/422/).
It interests me that the ability to be creative is a high water mark of consciousness.
A young physicist explaining his work with dark matter tells me, “You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. But you know it’s there. You can tell by how other things react in relation to it.” “We’re in the same field,” I reply.
Composing my intellectual framework for the project, I also begin conversations with two philosophers at MIT: Agustín Rayo, whose speciality is vagueness, and Irving Singer, who, when Agustín introduces us, is just completing a book on Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and beginning his new book, The Nature of Aesthetic Creativity.
Summer 2007
Lund. My first extended stay at the Skissernas Museum researching the collection on view and in the archives of the Museum. In the International Hall, I find a three-panel sketch on plywood, the preparatory study for a sculpture.
The line of the sketch is a minimal cut through sheet plywood, both austere and voluptuous. The forms suggest a nested plover or a stylized ginko leaf. I am reminded of Kyoto streets and the globe-shaped paper lanterns printed with the plover crest, symbol of geisha culture, illuminating night. I think of Myron Stout. Ellsworth Kelly.

The styrofoam model of the sculpture is set in a plexi vitrine on a waist-high, white, columnar plinth.
I think of Arp.
I see this photograph of the artist Marta Pan with her sculpture:
I think of Robert Smithson. Jean Claude and Christo’s “Wrapped Islands.”

Other views of Pan’s sculpture:
I show these images to my good friend, Joleigh Parisot, a former pediatric nurse.
Joleigh observes that the interior cavity of the sculpture replicates the shape of the womb.
In 1944, Skissernas Museum founder Ragnar Josephson wrote a book about the creative process, Konstverkets födelse (The Birth of the Work of Art).
I research Marta Pan in the Museum’s Library
and find two publications:
I photocopy images in both books. When I get back to CAVS, I’ll put them up on the studio wall, salon style (my mini-Skissernas).
In one publication, I find this text by Pan:
"I think an object is a point of encounter
Between sun, wind and water
Between space and man.
Everything moves
And meets.
Motion forms for ever renewed connections
And offers unexpected relationships."
I feel a strong affinity for the poetic formal equipoise of Pan’s work—their lyrical balance of medium, site, and form.
“The past is part of the present,” theorist and filmmaker Mieke Bal writes, “embedded in it through memory and desire.” The past is present through “contemporary conversation with it.”
Elisabet Haglund, Skissernas director, brings me to Malmö to see the William Kentridge exhibition at the Kontshall. A lecture Kentridge gave at the Moderna Museet is being screened in the gallery.
Discussing his subject matter of the artist in the studio, the basis for his multi-channel installation, “7 Fragments for Georges Méliès & Journey to the Moon.” Kentridge describes the strange life of the artist, pacing the studio, trying to bring ten or twenty contesting thoughts into one, coherent, workable idea. He suggests that perhaps it’s the walking—left step, right step—helps the artist to synthesize an idea by sloshing the left brain to the right, back and forth with every footfall. If outside viewers were to look in, Kentridge opines, maybe they would understand how necessary and important the shelter of the studio is for the artist in his [her] peculiar practice.
Mulling this on the way back to Lund, having worked long, uninterrupted days in the galleries and archives of the Skissernas, it occurs to me how similar these spaces are in the Museum, and how like the studios I have had and visited.
Fall 2007
Cambridge. I am increasingly compelled by the Pan sculpture on the right, “Sculpture flottante,” a commission from the Kröller-Müller Museum in The Netherlands, where it was installed in the pond of the Sculpture Garden in 1961. It is still on view.
In a conversation with Joe Zane at the Center, we discuss the material composition of the sculpture, fiberglass and plastic resin. Joe notes how toxic these materials are. Sustainability is a big issue at MIT. And it’s part of the conversation I believe Pan would have, with her exquisite sensitivity to site and material, if she were to make the piece today.
In June 2007, Building Futures, a think tank at the Royal Institute of British Architects, held a forum on the future of the built environment called, “Living with Water: Visions of a Flooded Future.” (http://www.buildingfutures.org.uk/pdfs/pdffile_57.pdf)
In July 2007, the English Midlands flood.
Artists work with what’s real. Their take on reality may be eclectic, idiosyncratic, opaque, obscurely personal, but their start point is the real.
Water is coming. Artists take note.
October 1. I attend a lecture, “Space Exploration: Mediating the Void,” by Chris Carr at the Visual Arts Program at MIT. A scientist and engineer, Chris is doing a postdoc at MIT and Harvard about life on Mars. His doctoral work focused on space suit design and astronaut performance. Chris is a generous and engaging speaker. It’s exciting to think about how to keep the body alive and functioning in the extreme environment of outer space. A new puzzle to play with.
Back in my studio, and my perpetual reverie about the “Sculpture flottante,” it occurs to me that Chris is so imaginative about deep space, he’d likely have some interesting thoughts about a sculpture that floats.
Welcoming Chris, I gesture to the triple band of Pan images, taped together frame to frame like film strips and tacked to the studio wall, and briefly step out to make us both a cup of tea. When I return, Chris points out the “Sculpture flottante.” “This one fascinates me.” Me too. “I want to compare it to planetary geology.” Please do. “It makes me think of phantom river beds on Mars.”
We have a wide-ranging conversation, from river beds to emergence to error-free coding to melt channels in Greenland.

I explain that I’m interested in expressing a reciprocity between the artwork and its context.
I’m intrigued by the idea of the floating sculpture being able to generate its own power, which it might then use to actively manifest its presence.
For example, perhaps the skin of the sculpture can breathe? Perhaps its top "hood" can hear? If it can pick up ambient sound, perhaps it can return sound (voice itself) as well? Perhaps this could be structured internally with pipes (like wind blowing over bottle tops) or with strings (like a harp) or be electrically powered with photovoltaics?
Chris suggests the idea of a pendulumlike rudder that might translate the mechanical energy of the water movement into a power that could illuminate the sculpture or make it move. Considering the hoodlike shape at the top, Chris is reminded of the micro-wind technology of a recent MIT grad named Shawn Frayne, who developed a sustainable energy source by adapting aeroelastic flutter, the force that collapsed the Tacoma, Washington, Bridge in 1940.
Perhaps the interior of the hood could have gills to catch the wind to make another power source?
Napkin notes:
November 7. Visiting CAVS artist David Robbins gives a talk on high entertainment. (http://cavs.mit.edu/artists.html?id=264,574). In a follow-up email to me, David clarifies his concept of the binary relationship of the entertainer and the audience: “The difference between art and entertainment is that the entertainer isn't addressing some imaginary constancy the way an artist is by addressing "art." And yet wouldn't there be *some* broader constancy, at a more visceral or (I prefer) vibrational level, that the entertainer taps? After all, the entertainer must have some SENSE of what will "entertain." It's just that what can entertain is so much broader, and so much less codified than what we identify as "art," that it moves beyond code and into some deeper, I daresay physiological mode. What, really, is the human experience of being "entertained"? What is this sensation? That's what I'm interested in. And that's why the entertainer, as a type fascinates me. What is this special knowledge that the best of them have?”
This “vibrational” field deeply interests me.

Explicating his concept of affectivity in his book, Feeling and Imagination: The Vibrant Flux of Our Imagination, Irving Singer likens “this erotic glue to the force of gravity in the physical world.”

November 14. CAVS artist affiliate Jessica Rylan gives a talk on microelectronics, noise, and chaos. She observes that it often takes many different approaches to address a complex problem. (http://cavs.mit.edu/artists.html?id=264,576)
Winter 2008
Lund. I am back to the Skissernas in December. One of my colleagues at the Museum, Jens Arvidson, gives me a selection of essays from Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations (University of Chicago, 2006).
Another Museum colleague, and Pan admirer, KG Olsson, finds the working drawing of the “Sculpture flottante” in the Museum archive. The paper support is a beautifully aged, rose-tinted vellum.

Cambridge. Artist and CAVS colleague Tad Hirsch visits my studio to talk about the floating sculpture. He shows me work by Dutch artist engineer Theo Jansen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcR7U2tuNoY). We discuss possibilities and process and Tad advises I work with two undergraduates to research, develop, and model the floating sculpture. He recommends looking for architecture undergrads who can offer formal fluency and some materials know-how.
New York. On view in the Lucian Freud exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art are Freud’s homage to Chardin’s “The Young Schoolmistress”: a 1999 oil on canvas “After Chardin (Large)” and the 2000 etching “After Chardin.”
January 7, 2008. The last day of the Seurat drawing exhibition at MoMA. The catalogue includes an essay by artist Bridget Riley in which she explains how copying Seurat’s paintings enabled her to understand Seurat’s thought process.
I post a work-study want ad through the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP):
Floating Sculpture 08
We are looking for two UROPs to research, design, and build a model recreating a 1960s floating sculpture by French artist Marta Pan, currently on view at the Kröller-Müller Museum in The Netherlands. The model will be part of an exhibition at the Skissernas Museum in Lund, Sweden, opening in 2009. We will redesign the sculpture using new materials that update the conversation initiated by the artist in this signature work of kinetic, environmental art. We will work from images and video of the sculpture as well as the artist’s original working drawing. We are looking to eloquently re-present this delicately poised mid-century work in the new century of anticipated and unprecedented climate change and radical environmental shifts. Water is coming, artists and viewers take note.
Prerequisites: parametric modeling ability, model-building skill, and some progressive, environmentally safe, materials knowledge.
February. Katharine Chu, from Materials Science, and Neal Miller, from Brain and Cognition, are on board. In re-conceiving “Sculpture flottante,” we are interested in the possibilities of:
1) making a zero-footprint work of art
2) the sculpture floating—not necessarily on water
3) generating energy
We are going to research aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, sustainable technologies, and climate prediction. We’re also looking at art, artists, and architecture: dada, surrealism, futurism, concrete art, kinetic art, environmental art, land art, site-specific installation, Brancusi, Arp, Duchamp, Corbu, Kahn, Béjart, Smithson, Kapoor, Koons, Eliasson, Jansen.

I meet Daniel Cardoso, architecture PhD student recommended by Larry Sass (http://mit.edu/dcardoso/www/portfolio/index.htm). I’d like to have his input on the design process. During our conversation, Daniel charts the squiggley path of an ant, explaining as he draws how one might be tempted to attribute intelligence to the ant for having navigated such a complicated route. However, if you were to look from the ant’s perspective, you would see that the ant merely traveled a route that avoided obstacles in the path. Thus a seemingly complex process is revealed to be a series of simple steps.