(1) How long have you been making installations?
Since 1980.
(2) Why did you choose to make installations and not anything else?
In order to learn more, like speaking in another language...
(3) What do you think of your own works?
I don’t.
(4) What do you think the difference is between your own work and other installations?
I try to make a public setting into a private moment.
(5) What do you think of the relationship of traditional artwork and installation?
Installation is all context. We can look at a ruin of an ancient city and see it as an installation, even though those who built it did not see that concept.
(6) What is the size and material of an installation determined by?
How far can you see? How far can you think? That determines any limitation.
(7) Could you mention the installation you consider to be the largest and the smallest one?
Largest: Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s “RUNNING FENCE” which was a line drawing tracing the contours for miles of California landscape. Smallest: The scenarios built in the eyes of needles found in Los Angeles at the Museum of Jurassic Technology!
(8) Is there any object or idea that cannot be installed?
No, because imagination fills the space where possibility might fall away...
(9) How does environment affect the installation of the work?
There are two kinds of “environmental” effects; first there are the actual elements which can add patina of time or destroy a work (rain, sun, wind...) and then there’s “political environment”; which can look at something like Mount Rushmore’s carved president portraits as landscape “correction” and be a negative concept. However, Richard Long’s lines of stones left in natural settings is politically sympathetic to the environment and is a positive concept.
(10) Do you know any fact that restricts the possibilities of installation?
No.
(11) Do you like making installation for order or at request?
It depends...
(12) What do you think of preserving an installation?
The Spiral Getty was an important earth work by Robert Smithson. It now lies beneath the water of a lake and can only be seen from the air... Things need to have their own lives too.
(13) Can the value of an installation be estimated and how?
Value is all context again; timing. Some installations have the poetic resolve of being temporary and live as memory through documentation. Other installations age over time and change. The value is in the concept and how that is relevant to what the historical, political, or artistic issues are at the time it is made.
(14) How does copyright apply to installations preserved only in documents?
Copyright exists on whatever reflects the concept, even if it is a ghost of it.
(16) Your questions, if there is any, and your answers to them.
Question: “Now...what now?” Answer: “Oh, that’s for you to invent” from Wim Wenders film UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD.