Allen Memorial Art Museum bulletin

              situation now is a reaction against much of the art that I was very involved in during the late 1960s
and again in the '70s. There is a kind of separation at the moment. I think the point at which art skirts
in and out of artifice and illusion is in fact a key issue here. I'll try to talk about it as much as possible.
The kind of entrance that would make one interested in what I refer to as the mechanics of
art-making, a kind of mechanistic, mental, interrogational activity that hopefully would underline
what would come after it, was a product of the belief system generated, by and large, during Conceptual Art. Conceptual Art was a multifold carriage of interests. It was a family of uses. Part of these uses
depended on a continued, almost detective-like curiosity, almost a Sherlock Holmes quality of interrogation, of surgically uprooting, of asking constantly for the motive behind the act. A lot of these
questions were asked because of the suspicion about virtuosity. There was a certain suspicion that you
could become an artist, evolve and develop and you still might never come into contact with the motives behind the act. This could become a problem. I knew it could be a problem as I began to think
about how I was going to survive as an artist, and that survival is a multifaceted stream of connections
that has a lot to do with what you think you could live with, and not only with your virtuosity. So based
on an assessment of what one thinks they could evolve through, comes a hierarchy, an estimation of
what things they think will fight away the nightmares of compromise that may challenge any kind of
evolutionary impulse. So on these journeys to discover a rationale to use to make art, I constantly found
things referring to the process of thinking. It occurred to me that thought was a most mysterious thing
to consider. It seems to me that an inquiry into the anatomy of thought has capabilities of visually
unleashing the very mechanics of the thought process itself. Not what it results in, but what thinking
looks like could become a product of inquiry in an artistic setting. Again, this is a belief system. We
proceed based on inclinations and desires. They aren't necessarily true. There is a true and false
mind-set that's common and parallel in these motives and ambitions. But every time I challenge a work
that was simply a product of virtuosity on my part, a product of being in art school for years and picking
up abilities to execute things in a facile, direct, easily orchestrated, visually seductive manner, I
invariably found them missing the mark. In other words, the virtuosity, the object that was always the
residue of a rather traditional method of execution, always appeared to be compromised. So everything
I'm showing you today is inquiry: wanting to believe that there might be a way to use art in the arena in
which it functions as a kind of surgical scalpel, some kind of interrogative device to cast some light into
these subterranean mental sheds that constitute a direct lineage to motivational substrata, something
underneath the act.
Scan (1979; fig. 1) is a work in Stuttgart, Germany. It uses an electric skeet machine behind
shields. These electric skeets hurl themselves at the same time—there's one on each wall—through
a twelve-foot diameter ring. So it's like this perpetual domestic quarrel, throwing plates back and
forth that collect in the thousands at the end of the day. This work wants to believe that the art idea
can be separated from its armature and literally loaded into a magazine and fired almost like a projectile. It wants to believe that the problem of really exteriorizing the mind may be in the approach to
art, that there is a built-in entropy, so that as you approach the final solidification of the object you are,
in fact, further and further away from the point of origin, when in fact, the approach might be better
afforded, by moving toward that kind of plasma state of origin. Most of these works are pursuing that
belief, that in the ovulation, in the generating of the mental energy that makes art, there is a twilight
zone that exists between the cerebral, spiritual, sensual zone, and the sterilized, cooled-down, rigid,
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