Where does it end?

My contribution to this show is a site-specific installation I've titled Snow Cave. In keeping with the ideas of the show it is both literally and metaphorically an ephemeral piece: a delicate "shelter" built out of wire, dotted lines and shadows. As with my previous installations this past year, it will exist only for the duration of the show, a particularly short lifespan in this case. In common with previous works too, the piece takes its shape in response to the conditions and constraints of the exhibition space. This space, a classroom in the basement of FCMOCA, has some eccentricities (i.e., the corner I'm using butts up against a kitchen counter)- but I like eccentricities. Encountering awkward arrangements forces problem solving, and this spurs novel approaches in my art making. There's some give-and-take: I'll take the cabinetry hardware off to make the structure more neutral, but I find myself delighting in the way the cast shadows from my piece wrap around the face of the kitchen cabinets.

Although it's always a factor, I think this piece in particular foregrounds the dependence of my work upon found spaces. Of my several installation spaces, it's the least like a conventional exhibit space. I think it raises hitherto neglected questions about where my piece ends and where the architecture of the exhibition space starts. In this instance, I like the boxy shape of the cabinets and the rectangular niche where a window used to be- and I've utilized (or appropriated?) both. If I had to recreate the piece, I would want to recreate those elements.

Where does the work of art end and the rest of the world begin? The curators of Object/ No Object raise the question implicitly by crafting and creatively orchestrating an exhibition that has it's own virtual existence, and which can grow by accruing participation. In a very real sense the exhibition is the work of art, and its borders are yet undefined. Around the time I initially became involved in this project, I was just finishing reading Arthur Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. There's an anecdote the author tells about a bronze cat statue, which I think is terrific (and applicable):

There is at Columbia University's Arden House Conference Center a statue of a cat in bronze. It stands on a floor at the head of a stairway that leads into a common room at a lower level. Presumably it is of some value, or believed to be... inasmuch as the managers have chained it to the railing- to forestall theft, I suppose, as if it were a television set in a squalid motel. Such might be the obvious interpretation. But I am open to the suggestion that it is not a chained sculpture of a cat but a sculpture of a chained cat, one end of which is wittily attached to a piece of reality.... Of course what we take to be a bit of reality can in fact be part of the work, which is now a sculpture of a cat-chained-to-an-iron-railing, though the moment we allow it to be a part of the work, where does or can the work end? It becomes a kind of metaphysical sandpit, swallowing the universe down into itself.