(mellow music) (crowd chattering) - [Voiceover] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauding) - Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name's Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director, and today, we present artist and tender provocateur, Nayland Blake.

I wanna thank our series partners, the UM Arts Initiative, Detroit Public Television, WNET's ALL ARTS and Michigan Public, and Gender Euphoria.

Yes, Nayland is here also as part of Gender Euphoria, which you'll remember, we started the top of the season with Frank, and the beginning of Gender Euphoria, a semester long explosion of queer artists and art making, exploring how to make art and find queer joy in a state of emergency.

Tomorrow, you can join Nayland for a Gender Discard Party.

That'll be at 4:30 pm at the Stamps Gallery.

The thing you have to do for a Gender Discard Party is you bring an item that represents an aspect of your gender that you're done with.

You tell your story, discard the item and celebrate, and you might find something to take home.

Okay, folks, most important thing I have to say today is fall is evaporating.

Note, that this is the last in-person event of the fall season.

I don't know what happened.

Where did the time go?

I swear I thought it was the beginning of September two weeks ago.

But yes, indeed.

So, all of you enjoy.

I hope you have family and friends to spend time with next Thursday on Thanksgiving.

And then on the following Thursday, we're not here, but we do have a very special program that will be released online.

This is our final presentation of the fall season.

This was filmed in London's West End at a cabaret club, this is performances and interviews with Ty Jeffries and Miss Hope Springs.

It's wonderful so don't miss that.

That will be released online, on Thursday, December 5th at our regular time, and be available for viewing on-demand thereafter.

And I will see all of you then back here in the new year, January 16th, 2025 is when we will reconvene back in this theatrical space with Rashaad Newsome.

We are working on all kinds of fun print materials and all that to be available soon.

So, you can check out the Penny Stamp Series socials and the website.

Hopefully, in the next couple weeks, that new winter program will be up online.

Until then, I hope you've all enjoyed the fall and look forward to winter in the new year.

Reminder to silence your cell phones.

We will be having a Q and A today.

You'll notice there are microphones at the ends of the aisles.

So when Nayland is ready to invite you to questions, please do move up to the microphones for that.

And now to introduce our guest, please welcome the progenitor of Gender Euphoria and infamous performance maven, Professor Holly Hughes.

(audience cheering and applauding) - Whoa!

Hey!

Thank you for that welcome, Chrisstina.

And this is indeed the last little series of events in Gender Euphoria.

And I wanna thank, I wanna make sure that I shout out to the people that funded this, and my partners on this semester-long adventure, the Arts Initiative, the Stamps Gallery, the Institute for Humanities Gallery, and of course, the Speaker Series.

And thanks to the teams led by Amanda Krugliak, Srimoyee Mitra, and Chrisstina Hamilton.

And to my fabulous and extraordinary team of project managers, Leah Crosby and Laura Mackie.

Thank you.

And it's not just a series of events, it's a class, ARTDES 438, Gender Euphoria.

Gender Euphoria in the house.

Can I hear you?

Yeah!

(audience cheering) Such an extraordinary group of students who had been part of this journey since the beginning.

A couple of weeks ago, we helped put on a queer haunted house in the Stamps Gallery.

Over 300 people came.

And we're having a show in the Street Gallery.

So stop by and see the fabulous work that the class has made.

When I started planning this series, I knew that I wanted to like close it out with the Gender Discard Party.

It's a simple but poignant kind of performance.

Nayland describes it as kind of a clothing swap meets show and tell.

And it invites you to shed something that represents something you wanna get rid of related to your gender identity, tell a little story about it, but then you're also invited to take something.

Maybe something that someone else has discarded is useful for you, and you can make it your own.

And like much of Nayland's work, the title is playful, but it's also critical.

It's a small-scale subversion of the increasingly popular gender reveal parties.

You know, often very expensive, large-scale celebrations of the gender binary.

And, you know, there's a lot of blue or pink, but never both, never any other colors.

And there's often, you know, unfortunately, pyrotechnics at these parties that go awry in tragic ways.

People have been tragically killed in revealing these.

There was the pipe bomb that blew up on a soon-to-be grandmother.

A plane that was about to spray pink smoke on the attendees, crashed and killed some of the people in Iowa.

And I keep thinking about they're tragic and they're also metaphorical.

Because in a fraught political landscape the bodies of non-binary and trans people have become a wedge issue, where not just the first group of people to have our basic human need to use the bathroom safely, to be exploited for political gain, but somehow we're also somehow held responsible for the results of the recent election.

And Nayland's work critically engages with a lot of the concepts that undergird that type of ideology.

So, I invite you again to be part of a little celebration of refusal tomorrow.

Nayland Blake has a very storied career, spanning decades creating performances, videos, sculptures, drawings, writings that complicate our notions of cultural, racial, and sexual identity, with intellectual rigor and disarming humor.

Currently, professor of Studio Arts at Bard College.

A very dedicated educator as well.

Their work has been exhibited at many major museums, including The Whitney, where they have been included in multiple biennials and the pivotal exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Walker Art Center, SFMOMA, as well as a solo show at the Tang Teaching Art Museum and Gallery, and a retrospective of their work at Project One, curated by Maura Reilly.

In addition, they have a like, very regular daily writing practice that they share online.

And a collection of their writings is coming out in June 25 from Duke University Press so you'll wanna look for that.

And with no further ado, let's welcome, Nayland Blake.

(audience applauding) - Holly, can I get a hug?

- Oh, yeah, yeah.

A hug.

At least a hug.

- Yeah, yeah.

Holly and I have known each other for probably about little over 30 years, so we are what they call queer elders.

Thank you so much for having me here.

Before we get going, I would like to enlist all of your help.

And the lovely thing about doing this is that you could all be shaking your heads no right now and I wouldn't know 'cause I can't see beyond the stage.

But I would ask you to join with me in doing two things.

First of all, I'd like everybody to close their eyes and to think about all of the people who have stood on this land, all the people who stood on this land while this building was here, before this building was here, before this town was here.

Everybody have a sense of all of those folks?

And then I would like you to join with me and think of a person who you feel should be here tonight with us, but is not for whatever reason.

Got that person?

Okay, thank you.

What we do here tonight, we do for all of those people, to honor them and to include them.

So, thank you for bringing them into this space again and remembering them.

I'm gonna talk you through sort of how tonight will go.

This is a little different for me.

Usually, I format my slide talks a little bit differently from this, but in talking with folks at the Stamps it seemed like actually it was a better idea to rethink that configuration.

It does have some similarities to it.

I, when I do these talks, my tendency is to show you all a lot of stuff, like upfront, and to go a little bit light on the explanation.

So tonight it's a little different.

The talk is really organized around some general ideas that have inflected the work that I make, and then hopefully those ideas will be helpful for you as well.

But it still has sort of the same format of, there's a whole bunch of slides.

We're gonna move through things very, very quickly.

There will be Q and A at the end, so if you have questions about those slides, note them down and you'll be able to ask them at the end.

But as the lead in, when I was asked to do this talk, I was like, okay, well, late November sounds fine.

Like what do I want to sort of talk about?

And then I was like, oh, hey, something's happening in early November.

Well, but however that goes, it's gonna really, it's gonna really inflect what we do here tonight.

So thus the title.

And then to talk about like the subtitle, I think that we're at a really tough time in this country and the world in general.

But the thing that really characterizes it to me is a real fear.

A fear of what might happen next.

And I think that one of the things that's tough about that is that when people encounter fear, they shut down, and they start going like, okay, well let's get rid of all of the unessential stuff, right?

I have to focus on the things that are most important.

The live or die things.

And one of the first things that goes out the window is art and art making and creativity.

We're continually told that those things are frivolities.

This is a very sneaky way of maintaining authority, because if something is going to get us to a new place in the society and to a new place with each other, it is going to have to be something that we imagine.

We are going to have to create it.

And if we don't cultivate the habits of creativity, we will never be able to make change.

However you think that change might be.

I jokingly say to my students, you know, artists are the most enormous egotists in the world because they imagine that the universe is flawed and that only they can fix it.

If the universe isn't flawed, there's no reason to make any art.

It's like the universe has exactly everything that it needs.

It doesn't need me to make anything, right?

So if I have the impulse to make something, if I have something that I see that I want to bring into presence, it's because I notice a lack in the universe.

And secondly, if it's not me uniquely who can fix it, then I just support somebody else and they're making up the thing that's gonna fix the universe.

So the fact that we have the impulse, the desire to bring something new into the world indicates how important and how essential creativity and artistic practice is to human thinking.

In fact, it's so important that we create a lot of institutions to try to manage it and make it feel kind of dull and boring and inessential.

So in thinking about my life and my practice as an artist, really, I've been engaged with three questions throughout that time.

Where does art get made?

Where does art get seen?

And where does art get taught?

And this is something that it's like, I've thought about through my entire life.

As a kid, I loved going to museums.

And my parents, you know, where I was growing up in New York, we didn't have a lot of money, but luckily museums were basically free.

They could take me to the Metropolitan Museum and pay a quarter for each one of us and I could see something.

You know, it was cheaper than going to a movie.

So we would do that a lot.

And that just seemed like a magical place to me.

So by the time I got to college and then went on to graduate school, I was really like primed for this idea of like learning about art, making things, and thinking about how art gets displayed.

Right now, this is my final project as a graduate student at California Institute of the Arts, I gave myself my first retrospective.

And it, you know, so I built in these walls myself.

I like, I painted all this stuff, blew up my signature, and it basically was a record of the work that I had done over the past two years.

But I was, you know, in a tongue in cheek way, not waiting for the institution, you know, the greater institutions to give me a retrospective, I would just make my own.

Some furniture I designed during that time.

And then I recreated my studio as part of the retrospective, right?

Sometimes you like go to the museum and they've got like Francis Bacon Studio there, or like, so and so's palette, you know, the magical thing that they had done.

So I just basically hauled all of my stuff up from downstairs in this building and installed it as the replica of my studio.

Here's my soulful artist picture.

So like right from the start, here was this sort of combination of the place where the art gets made, and then the place where it gets displayed In the place where I had been taught art, right?

The other thing I should say is that that ambition to have that kind of a retrospective was seen as kind of like inappropriate at the college at that point, you know.

You weren't supposed to be like angling for those sorts of things.

At least you were supposed to admit it.

So let's take a look.

10 years later, I had been, I'd moved up to San Francisco, I was making a lot of work, I was making a lot of objects, and I started working as a curator at Nonprofit Art Spaces.

And also continued making kind of my own installations.

So I'm gonna show you two things from this year.

One is an installation that I made in New York City called The Philosopher's Suite.

And the way that I made these installations was that I would engage with a particular book, a piece of writing that I found inspirational one way or the other.

And I would come up with all of these different ways to make pieces that arose from that book.

So in this case, the book that I was using was a book by Marquis de Sade called Philosophy in the Bedroom.

You may or may not have read it.

De Sade wrote this sort of philosophical treaties that took the form of a script.

So the book is like a play.

And in the installation, I have all of these different productions of the play.

So you walk into the space, there's a stage that's like for a marionette production of the play.

There's these various marionettes.

There's a little lectern for people reading the play.

There's a hand puppet production.

And then there's these sort of process-oriented sculptures.

So this is a tea set that I made that was out of, made out of burnt copies of the play.

Or here was this brandy-infused with rolled up pages from the play.

And part of the thing that I was asking myself was like, how do we actually take in ideas?

You know, what does it mean to absorb somebody else's thinking?

So what if we actually literally ingest it?

And that's something that's been really consistent within the work is that this relationship to what's inside of our bodies and what's outside of our bodies, what are the boundaries of our bodies.

During the run of the show, I had this reading room set up.

And, you know, my engagement with these texts means that I do a lot of reading around historical stuff that's connected to the text.

So stuff about the French Revolution, stuff about De Sade's life, various philosophical things.

And then I was sort of doing the classroom work of working out ideas, for the exhibition, within the exhibition.

So there was this sort of classroom set up where we had some reading sessions for folks, and then we also had this little walled-off area, which was a little studio again for me here.

So again, this was like this idea of like, usually, when you go to a gallery, all of the work that the artist has done is kind of hidden from you.

And the work of art arrives as a kind of magical thing that you're just supposed to see wholly from, you know, full blown.

And I'm always really interested in like, okay, well, what if we demystify that?

What if we look at what actually goes into creating works of art, which is often something that doesn't look super glamorous.

For me at least, it's a lot of sitting around.

Rarely am I like standing there with like a brush and palette and going like, "Eureka!

", and, you know, wiping away at the canvas.

But I think it's in part that fact that that particular way of working isn't glamorous.

It's the thing that makes it very easy to discount, right?

It's like, well, they don't look like they're really doing anything.

At the same time as having this installation in New York, I co-curated an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum called In A Different Light.

And this was the first exhibition at a major museum to look at the impact of LGBTQ artists and thinkers in the 20th century.

So the show postulated that there were ideas that queer people generated that were very influential within modernism, even past the point of individual queer creators working with them.

So there were artists who weren't necessarily identified as queer, but who were taking up these queer ways of looking at the world.

And so, the exhibition was organized into various groupings.

So for example, this is the sort of drag heading, and all of the works in this section of the exhibition in some way dealt with the thematics of drag.

Just quickly, I can tell you that, that piece of plywood that's leaning against the wall there is a sculpture by an artist named Robert Gober.

And it is a piece of plywood, it's a four by eight sheet of plywood, but it's a four by eight sheet of plywood that had been hand cut down and hand laminated.

So it was kind of this very carefully-made craftsman object that was in drag as a kind of mass-produced object that you would get at the lumberyard.

So with stuff like that, like thinking about how did these ideas of gender and creation inflect different ways of making meaning.

I'm just going to quickly take you through some of the other stuff.

Some pamphlets from the women's music movement of the '70s.

Cool.

So then we're looking at eight years, well, more than eight years, I'm sorry, 18 years.

Is that even?

Yeah, I guess that's right.

Wow.

Gosh.

It is getting past me.

To another sort of installation that picked up a bunch more of these ideas.

And one of the things that I started to really think about in making work was really thinking about the location of where the work was gonna be shown.

So that it wasn't just thinking about the type of space where the work is exhibited, but also what's the history of that space.

So this is a show for Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco called "FREE!LOVE!TOOL!BOX!".

And it is an exhibition that engages with Yerba Buena's history as part of San Francisco's redevelopment scheme.

Those of you who are from the Bay Area, there was a point at which a massive part of the city, south of Market Street, was kind of cleared out and rebuilt and there was a whole, a whole intense like immigrant community that lived there that were all sort of moved out in favor of this convention center that got built.

And also one of the buildings that was displaced was San Francisco's first leather bar, which is a bar called The Tool Box.

So this installation was a way of like talking about that history, but also thinking about what might be possible in that space to bring people together to create new stuff.

So these shelves here were part of that endeavor.

We basically set up different stations within the space.

Some of them actually quite empty.

These shelves were not very empty or were quite empty at the beginning of the show.

And what was going on here was that people, anybody could come here and leave items on the shelves that to them represented the idea of freedom.

So folks who would normally be kind of like bystanders or passive consumers of the show could be creators of the show by bringing stuff here and dropping it off.

We had this runway set up here where we had sort of some stage performance events.

That banner that's on the back wall was a recreation of a mural that was initially on the interior of the bar, The Tool Box in 1965, I think.

We had a graffiti wall set up by the entranceway.

This was a video, a little video studio room where we had a series of prompts that people could answer and then record short videos in response to the questions.

And then this is a performance from later on in the show.

That's myself and one of my collaborators, Lolita Wolf.

We did this performance with decorative piercing.

And then folks came up from the audience and tied ribbons from the piercings onto the banner at the back of the wall.

And I did a short performance, sort of as a kind of reverse marionette, but as a way of talking about my connection to the history of this location.

In here, we had set up a version of a piece that I've done a number of times, it's a piece called Ruins of a Sensibility.

And on that back wall, you can see a sort of Jackson Pollock-y drip painting.

That painting is sort of my first childhood memory.

I made that painting with my father when I was four years old.

And we made it in the basement of the building we were living in.

And it sort of hung over my parents' couch ever since.

Inside the space, with the painting, is my vinyl record collection.

And basically, what happens here is that during the time that the show is up, there's a DJ booth set up, and speakers that provide the sound for the rest of the installation.

So people can sign up to be DJs using my record collection during the time that the show is up and sort of provide the soundtrack for other people.

So here you see somebody doing that.

And in a way, this brings together, you know, it's sort of thinking about how can you have a kind of autobiography, right, of one's self, one's own artistic thought.

It's both a thing that I made, other things that I collected that became the opportunity for other people to make connections through playing the records.

And then also it was a little nod to the fact that my parents met because my dad was a clerk at a record store and my mom went in and sort of saw him and was smitten with him.

And so that's sort of how they got together.

Next year, another installation, again looking at personal history and place at the International Center of Photography in New York.

At that point, the ICP was a place where I was teaching, running a graduate program.

It was also a museum that had an extensive collection of photography, and it was located at that point on 43rd Street, not far from Times Square.

So this show brings together works from ICP's collection that are organized around queer activism themes, some stuff from my own collection, and then a few of my own added items to the environment.

So you can see some of the stuff that's from ICP's collection and from my collection here.

And most of the exhibition was centered on areas in the museum that you don't normally associate with art being.

So the bathrooms, the cafe, the back service areas.

So here you can see things set up in the cafe, across, back and forth from the bathrooms.

We had a special mug that said, Freak on It, made for the cafe during the time, so that was what all the coffee mugs were.

And then while the show was up, I did another performance.

That was me inhabiting this particular character, Victorya Spectre.

For those of you who have visited Times Square in, you know, the past like dozen years or so, you'll notice there was a real rise in people wearing like Elmo costumes and being, and, you know, dressing up as different characters so that people could take pictures with them.

It was one of the ways that people were actually kind of supporting themselves as kind of a busking thing.

And it was odd to me that they were really like corporate characters.

And I had remembered being around Times Square in my teens when it was really sort of at its seediest, and going out there really trying to connect with people and find partners, and the sort of the danger and the sort of marginality of that space.

And so this character, Victorya Specter, is kind of like the ghost, the hermit that walks around to those spaces.

So I went around to all of the locations where I had connected with people or where there had been like different like adult movie theaters or bookstores throughout the area, none of them were still open, but I sort of was this pilgrim that went around.

And then I handed out this flyer to anybody who wanted to take a picture with me instead of, you know, I would take the picture, but I would give them this flyer as well that would sort of a little thing about helping them to think about, you know, as it says, I hope you find everything you seek here today.

Your dreams are already your own.

Don't let anyone sell them to you.

Because what had really happened in Times Square was this sort of like colonization of people's imaginations by, you know, big companies that are more comfortable with selling you like a sort of sanitized idea of your dream than having you actually make something up on your own.

So, just a quick look at some other performances that I've done over time.

This is a piece called Starting Over.

It is a piece where I'm wearing this bunny suit that you see.

It's been stuffed with beans.

So it is the weight of my partner at the time.

So when I'm wearing the suit, I'm both of our weights.

He was a choreographer, so he's sort of off-stage teaching me a dance and I'm trying to learn the dance while wearing the suit.

And I sort of do that until I can't really physically do it anymore.

Another animal costume.

This is a performance called Pinky the Elephant.

And it sort of tells the story of this furry suit that a friend lent me who had gotten it from somebody, who had commissioned it.

And I don't know how many, can we hear from, do we have any furries in the audience tonight?

(audience member howling) Maybe that cough is one, okay.

Or you can admit later on to me if you want.

But one of the things that's really interesting to me about furry culture is that it is artisan culture.

It is people making up their own characters and then other people doing things like creating fur suits that are costumes of that particular bespoke character.

And there's something really lovely about an art form that is so personalized and connected.

So I sort of wanted to talk about that, did a lecture about that and then wore the pinky suit.

And then a couple of years later I was in a show called Trigger, and I did this piece called Transitional Object.

This is my persona, Noman.

And during the run of the show, I wore this fur suit.

This is a show that was at The New Museum.

I wore this fur suit and rode the elevator at the museum with this sign here.

And the sign says, pick out a pin, tell your secret to the pin, and stick your pin on Noman.

So by the end of the show, I was wearing all of the accumulated secrets that people had told, and was there as a kind of totemic object character.

This is a couple of images of a piece called Gorge, where I'd sit in front of the audience with a table of food, various foods behind me, and the audience feeds me for an hour.

And I will eat whatever people feed me.

So this is another, another version of that performance that happened in a club in 2020.

And then I figured I would give you a whirlwind tour through my retrospective.

And this is a little bit selfish, I have to say.

So initially, the first leg of this retrospective happened at the ICA LA in fall of 2019.

It was really wonderful to work with them with this gathering up like 30 years of my work.

The show was scheduled to open at the MIT List Center in the spring of 2020.

Remember what happened then?

So we had this weird situation where the work had all been loaned for the exhibition.

It was all there in Boston.

After sitting there for a while, they decided that they would install the show in the hopes that eventually things would open up.

As it turned out, they installed the show and the only people who were able to see the show were MIT List employees, except for the last weekend of the show where they smuggled myself and my mom in.

So I'm showing it to you just to give you an idea that like, there's a lot of work that I've made that is not just these sort of installation pieces, but also because I kind of want more people to see.

It's like, what if you had a retrospective and nobody came?

So yeah, I'm just gonna take you quickly through all this stuff.

There's like, there's tons of explanations that could go on with all of this, but we don't have time.

One thing I will say is that, a thing that I think is really consistent about all of the work that I do is that it is human-scaled.

I'm not interested in making big things big for the sake of bigness.

I'm always interested in the relationship that sculpture has to your body and also using things that you already have an emotional relationship to.

Cool, and then I'm gonna wrap up with three projects that I made for the Whitney Museum for their biennial in 2022.

This is the first, it's called Service Entrance for a Haunted House.

And it is these, this painting that is on the glass doors there, this is the back entrance to the Whitney on the ground floor.

This is what it looks like from the inside looking out.

So you sort of have this like private club entrance that looks the same on either side and the entrance is always on the other side of it.

And what this is, is a recreation of the entrance to a notorious New York City gay sex club called the Mineshaft.

The Mineshaft was located three blocks from where the Whitney currently exists.

And so the Meatpacking District where the Whitney now is and the waterfront there was a very important gay cruising area for much of the '60s, '70s, and early '80s.

So part two of this was a project called Got an Art Problem.

And I was really thinking at this time again about those three questions like where's art made, where is it shown in the museum, and where is it taught?

And I was in '22, I was feeling pretty disillusioned with the art institution in general.

And I thought, well, the part that I do actually believe in is the part of helping people with problems.

So we set up a thing where during the run of the show, I would meet with people who had been brought in through the Whitney's education department.

We reached out to young people and also to older to seniors.

And I asked them to think about like what their art problem was, to make a drawing of that problem, and then we would sit together and we'd talk back and forth about like, okay, what's the problem?

What's the thing that you need to, you know, what do you feel is causing you difficulty?

At the end of the show or at the end of our session, we'd hang their drawing up in the Whitney and I would give them a drawing that I had made.

And so the idea of this was that like, it was a way of people being able to see their work up in this space in a way that they might never have, you know, necessarily imagined it before.

And also to have a way of connecting around the issues of creativity in a way that wasn't just sort of abstract.

And then the third project, so this is part of the form that people filled out for it.

And then the third part of it was a gender discard party.

And folks have already told you about what those are, but, you know, we see people having a good time getting rid of some stuff and picking some things up.

So to get back to these three questions, you know, where does art get made?

Where does it get seen?

Where does it get taught?

My thing is like, why can't those places all be the same place?

Like why does, you know, who benefits from different types of authority inserting themselves into those transactions and keeping us kind of separate from each other?

And I think the situation that we have now in the art world is like a weird historical anomaly.

When you think about the history of people making things, for most of the human lifespan, they were made in places and they didn't go anywhere.

You know, it's not like somebody shipped off those cave drawings or those petroglyphs.

It's not like, you know, work got made for a temple and then got shipped around.

That only started to happen when you had empires that showed their power by displacing works of art.

So a lot of the history of work of artists are stuff that you would live with, you know, that would be there in your town with you for most of your life and you would have a different relationship to it.

So I think about this as a way of thinking about creativity differently, because I think we live in a time where there is this impulse to publish everything and broadcast everything with very little sense of who's on the other end of that.

And I don't think it serves us ultimately.

I think one of the things that's powerful about art is that it creates intimacy, and it is tough to define, and its meanings change over time.

And that's one of the ways in which it can be helpful for us in this current moment.

I think that people are afraid of stuff that is indefinite.

People are afraid of things that they might think about one way at one point and then think about differently at another point.

They're frightened of stuff that they can't make up their mind about quickly.

We're really worried about not being on the right side of an argument, however that argument might be defined, right?

It's so easy to think about like making a mistake online and then you're like, that mistake is forever everywhere.

Art is the place and is the mode of thinking where our thoughts can evolve.

I think that for me, making art is thinking out loud about objects.

And in all of these things that I've shown you when I've been like, you know, well, this piece is about this text or something like that, I didn't know what I thought about that text before I made all of that work.

It was through the making of that work that I started to understand what those things might mean for me.

It was through enacting those performances that I could start to understand what I thought about different aspects of myself.

So it's not like there was a little piece of identity inside of me that I expressed out.

It was rather, okay, like, what happens if we make this thing physical?

What happens then?

What's the implication there?

And for me to be able to do that and then ask the question, okay, what did I just do?

How does it make me feel?

What does it remind me of?

To me, that's actually what the process of art making is.

But you have to be able to accept the fact that it is indefinite from the start.

And I think giving ourselves the permission, the desire to be indefinite in that way is hugely important.

I started out calling this talk tearing down our walls, and part of the thing about art, like do you have an art problem?

People will often go like, I'm blocked, I can't make anything.

And I asked them to sort of, okay, well, what does your block look like?

Draw a picture of your block.

Nine times out of 10, that phrase, I can't make anything, is the result of there's something big and important that you want to make, and in some way you've decided that it's unacceptable and so you're gonna stop yourself from making it.

Most artists build their own blocks and it is based out of a kind of fear of what the reception of that thing might be or what the implication of that thing might be.

What if I make this thing?

What if I say something and it means that I have to change?

Well, that's the good news.

Change is the only constant.

None of us are old enough here to be done yet.

We're done when we're dead.

Up until that point, there's always a possibility for change.

There's always a possibility for things to be different.

And that potential is so powerful and important for us that it can sometimes scare us.

But that's the thing that we need most of all.

(audience applauding) (crowd chattering)