texts 1977 statement
1977 Statement
Notes
A sculpture made with just a few lines may seem very purist or geometrical at first. My work isn’t either of these things. My lines aren’t distillations or refinements of anything. They are simple facts, issues of my activity that don’t represent anything beyond themselves. My pieces are offered as concrete, literal situations, and not as indications of any other sort or order.
Lately much of my work has been executed in and for a specific place. It’s always been conceived with at least a generalized sort of place in mind, but these pieces are now bound to one site. This doesn’t mean that a piece can’t be redone in a different location, but just that it will be a completely different situation when it is. Of course there are things I’m interested in doing that I don’t have a place for, but because of that they remain necessarily vague and indeterminate.
Most of these larger pieces have a rather limited lifespan—existing for a week or a month and then to a large extent disappearing permanently. It’s not that I place any value on their transience—quite the contrary. It’s just that that’s part of the scale of the whole endeavor.
A consequence of the inclusivity or complexity that I desire is that there is a good deal of decision making for me about my control over a piece—deciding the limits beyond which my specific intentions can no longer have an influence. This might seem vague or incomplete, though of course I don’t find it so, and I’m certainly not interested in any formalized notion of “indeterminacy.” It’s simply a matter of penetration—making the situation as dense and complex as possible without faking anything.
This text was first published in English and Flemish in
Plan & Space, exh. cat. (Gent: Koninklijke Academie, 1977).