AR+D Publishing

Tom: When a work is “done,” we start to see this call and response with people as they’re coming through, and how they’re beginning to author the work in their mind. In a sense, the things that we build physically are not actually the piece. The material and intellectual experience of our work is the piece that people carry away with them.

Jennifer: I’m on the board of the DIA Art Foundation. There’s a new group called the BTA, the Black Trustee Alliance. At our first gathering, Courtney Martin was talking about art institutions and the use of the word “community.” The terms community and audience both have a kind of distancing effect. Courtney has said that she refuses to let people at the Yale Center for British Art use the word community. She prefers “neighbors.” That parsing between community versus neighbors and audience versus publics or just people … We don’t need so much distance. We’re all here in the world experiencing these things together.

Can you tell us a little more about your idea of distributed authorship? How does that model play out in your work currently, and how do you imagine it as your practice moves forward?

Tom: When my dad was in medical school, he went into an exam somewhat panicked. And he had a friend who just said, “Alastair, relax—things will become apparent as we go along.” And that little phrase became a sort of permission, to sometimes work more intuitively, and just trust that you’re onto a good thing. Coming from a sculpture background, I understand that sometimes projects begin to have a life of their own. When they start getting good, they start to speak and ask questions. This prompts a question of the bounds of authorship, and the territories and terrains of authorship. When you’re working in the built environment, you’re also working textually within a number of narratives, some of which are expressed, and some of which are oppressed. When you’re navigating that terrain, do you start to participate in certain fictions or lies, or do you begin to pursue a naked approach to things? We’ve been saying, “What if we’re not the complete authors of our own work? What does that mean?”

Jennifer: We may set some sort of intention, but then it passes through so many other bodies on its way to being a real thing that others can experience. We are authoring the work with the people who make it, with the weather, with other nonhuman species who encounter it. Plus, most of our work has been temporary … it exists in memories, photographs, and videos. Somebody goes to it, they have an experience, they carry that with them, they have the remembrance