I’m wondering what would it be to do nothing – as if that possibility were the real starting point. And then, starting from this bottom line, I think every idea has to justify itself. With some stress on the fact that it’s easy to do too much. Or on the well known idea that less will probably be more. I’m trying to put a brake on the gratuitousness that flows so easily. And on invention for invention’s sake. The world is full of things after all.
Another way to come at this is something to do with looking and listening. I’m trying to look and listen and understand what’s there. I might ask of the work that it adds nothing to this, or that it adds as little as is needed to make a change or pose a question. Or that, in other words, the work concentrates on processes of echoing, repeating, mirroring what is already there. There’s a certain self-erasure in the work considered or made this way. It’s not about assertion. More about listening. Or, if about asserting, then asserting the right thing, precisely the right thing, for the context. I like the idea that the work doubles, repeats, mirrors, echoes and that in doing so it amplifies or underlines or makes visible what was already there.
In the form of one question: what’s the least (but still effective and articulate) intervention you could make?
In the form of another question: what’s here, what’s at work here and what would make these things visible?