biographical installation and living sculpture. (#3)

I had the reception for my installation tonight. Since the last posting on here, I hit a point where it occurred to me that this whole process of trying to take a concept and fill the space was becoming the art itself. And then I compiled all these journal entries, conversations and e-mails and made one really long artist's statement/press release-esque diaristic document that looms outside of an empty gallery. You may read it in full. The following are excerpts of the two last bits of writing in the document, the second of which was added in after the installation had been up for several days:

Sara,

(I'm writing you this e-mail partially knowing that it's giving me more material to include in my text.)

I'm feeling confident in this now. Tod shouldn't be in my project; he was never even in LA; this whole time he might as well have been fiction, a ghost through the phone. It was absurd of me to rewrite reality by bringing him back to LA. This piece would be perfect just to have an empty gallery and all these correspondences and journal entries. It's all about me in the end as an artist trying to make this whole confounding installation that doesn't exist. The audience is left to ponder all these different possibilities that I laid out as they stand in an empty gallery. The vacancy becomes my failure/ Tod's absence (becomes the vacancy). All the audience gets is this long text made out of e-mails and journal entries and conversations. The whole thing functions as an artist’s statement.

All along, this installation has really been a performance piece in which the performance was the conception of the works that you didn't see. There's a big irony that it has become a piece of art about a piece of art that didn't work out about a guy who didn't work out. It's like doing a science experiment, and it turns out the hypothesis was wrong, and then you have to go on about why it was wrong or if you made any errors or anything.

No one is going to read eight pages, but that's always the case. 80% of the time, people don't bother to meet the artist halfway in any scenario. All I ask is that the lights in the gallery be on.

—Stephen van Dyck. (October 29, 2006)


Addendum:

The installation is up. It has resulted in directions I perceive as positive as well as negative. I felt free to discuss Tod—a real person—‘s problems. Some of those who’ve seen/read the installation and have interpreted Tod as a real person are thinking that I have put Tod at risk for the sake of my own interests. Tod has a brain, too, and decided himself what to do with his life. I jumped on the train with him much later in his decision-making, only telling him to do what he thought was right. I personally never thought one way or the other, just to let the will will. The “I” in this entire piece is me, but not all of me. I’m delineating certain aspects of my own will that I only sometimes agree with. The gallery being empty is still bothering me, and I continue to think of how to improve this piece. [...]

Tod contacted me yesterday and has decided he doesn’t want to live [in San Francisco] anymore. If the entire chain of events impacted his decision-making at all, which in some way it must have, I feel that the illogic of this piece did something active in his life as well as mine. Alex Castle (who was the friend who saw Ratty’s dead bloated corpse) and I will be picking up Tod from San Francisco this weekend. He will be staying with Alex for a while [...] .

—Stephen van Dyck. (November 2, 2006)