(Counting down to December 21, 2012)
25 years ago, I was living and working in New York City. While I had been exhibiting, I still felt very much the "outsider"; not a part of any group, trend or movement. Not feeling proper recognition as an artist, I chose to make a simple work that I felt would state my connection to art.
I placed myself, naked, within a sandpainting in the corner of my studio on 42nd Street. Photographed myself crouching in the sand with a rope tied around my waist. In the final work, exhibited in 1990, that rope, when it exited the frame of the photo, was lined up with a section of twine which continued out across the wall. That twine, chosen to duplicate the look of the rope, was then tied around a second photograph, the "Venus of Willendorf".
In this way I was hoping to present myself as tied to the very first example of art; connected to the entire flow of art history. Perhaps naively, I didn't realize until recently that by creating the work I had set off a chain of events as surely as Indiana Jones stepping on just the right cobblestone in that temple.
If you look carefully, the rope is tied around my waist and stops. It doesn't continue through me on into the future of art or, for that matter, the future of the world...
