And then I don't know exactly what the time frame is when we're going to start the Q&A session. Somebody is going to have to give me a cue, because if you don't stop me, I'll keep going. But these are some very early works.
And they simply have to do with the way in which you understand the different functions of different modes of representation or image making or object making or painting making. And I had made it my mission from early on that the only way I was going to be able to get where I wanted to go was to know everything that everybody else who seemed to be interested in art knew. So that in a single individual that I would be capable of having a conversation with anybody, no matter where they started, no matter what they were interested in, no matter what they thought was important, that I would have I would be able to be there and I would be able to have something to say about that too. And so I made sure I could do anything that could be done or anything that had been done within the parameters of what we call this idea of art making. And that meant that when I started school in 1977 at Otis and conceptual art was the dominant mode of operating for artists at the time, I understood what that was about too. But there was still something else that needed to be done, there was some unfinished business that needed to be addressed. And that if I was going to solve the problem that I felt existed within the whole historical construction of art history, that the only way I was going to be able to solve that problem was to resolve that first issue first. And that first issue was a kind of invisibility around the representation of blacks objects in painting. And that once I was able to resolve that, then as long as I knew and understood all of the other modalities then I was free to move on to those other things when I needed to and at will. That because I was doing figurative work I wasn't trapped in figuration. Or if I was doing abstraction, I wasn't trapped in abstraction because I couldn't do figuration effectively. That every one of the things that I did had was done because I took what you could call an instrumental approach to what it meant to be making art, that I made art based on its use value within the historical narrative of art making and the function that it could perform in helping to resolve a certain series of inadequacies. And so where minimalism as a kind of device could be used effectively for a particular idea, I adopted that strategy because it seemed to be the best way to communicate that particular idea. So this is a painting called "Two Invisible Men Naked." [LAUGHTER] So and the way in which that those ideas of invisibility are figured have to do with the way HG Wells wrote the novel The Invisible Man and the way Ralph Ellison writes the novel Invisible Man. And the distinction between those two concepts of invisibility matter. And they have something to do with the structure of the picture that I'm going to make. One is an optical invisibility. The other is psychological invisibility. So it's that way of thinking through the work I'm doing, that's how you do work without being lucky because the work is directed and it's self-conscious and it's instrumental in trying to resolve a problem which is all the idea of making art is organized around in the first place. How do you solve a problem about visibility and about representation? And these are just some examples of other things. So there are always phases in which you do a lot of experimentation. And the only way you can understand how some of these things operate is to do them so that you understand how they work from the inside out, as opposed to from the surface and its appearance
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