Despite the wish to allow for interventions, it was evident that something resembling limits would have to be defined - otherwise the work would have ceased to exist after a few days. In our talk we agreed that the work should also be made available to later visitors in the same initial conditions, which meant that we had to take action whenever dealing with someone who was bent on destroying things. What kind of experiences have you gained with your works in the course of time? Are limits imposed on actions now easier to define?
The exhibition space as such implies a certain behavior.
So why should there be additional regulations?
Everybody should react in the way that he or she sees
fit. If you consider that neither Waterpoint nor The Web nor Solaris physically exist today, it becomes clear
that every work and the exhibition as a whole are born
out of this interactive triangle – the artist, the curator
(possibly assisted by a team), and the public. This
enables both the visitors and you as a curator to interfere.
So yes, I define the limits of action within thistriangle, but I don't regulate the dev elopment. Polystyrene disintegrates into tiny pellets. This property is crucial for Waierpoinl. In the show on display at Kunsthaus Baselland the polystyrene wall generously cuts off a corner of the room, defining a close off space. I have familiarized you with my idea to make sure that every visitor encounters the same situation,
at anv given point in time. If I had told you that my intention was to conquer invisible space, your team, in presenting the work, would have presumably acted differently. Having said this, I need to confess that I wanted this work to put something into practice that was not feasible. At the beginning there is a motivator, a catalyst - the wall, standing very still. There are a few carved-out niches in the otherwise pristine polystyrene- wall in which transparent plastic cups have been placed, filled with polystyrene pellets from the wall. The plastic cups come from a water dispenser that is positioned at the side of the space, i.e. it's not sure if they are part of the exhibition or an amenity provided courtesy of Kunsthaus Baselland. What
manifests itself as an encouragement is, in fact, an obsessive nightmare: to make the entire wall crumble so that it forms minute spheres and to fill these into plastic cups. Demanding that visitors act accordingly means to tempt them to indulge in an obsession. But the chances of things proceeding as originally planned are slim. The first visitor who interferes with the setting reinterprets the wish by, for example, drilling a hole into the wall to find out what is behind it. I soon realized that people wanted the wall to fulfill different
kinds of their wishes.
