I visited that show three more times while in the city for those four days and once again on a trip back to New York in April. On Monday, April 9, I sent an email to the Marianne Boesky Gallery asking about the possibility of bringing the show in its entirety to Columbus. This conversation with Donald Moffett took place five months later. Your retrospective, The Extravagant Vein, which was curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and initially organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, has just ended its third and last iteration at the Andy Warhol Museum this month. Given this, it strikes me as an interesting time to talk about the body of work that followed the last chapter of the retrospective and that, in part, comprised your solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky last spring— The Radiant Future. In two talks that you gave in conjunction with The Extravagant Vein—at the Tang Museum, the retrospective’s second stop, and at the Warhol Museum— you devoted a significant portion of the discussion and imagery to The Radiant Future. What are your thoughts on The Radiant Future’s relationship to The Extravagant Vein? The Extravagant Vein was a twenty-year survey, and a survey is akin to illegal dredging of the ocean floor—at night. Everything is crudely brought up from the deep—the good, the bad, the ugly. It is all disturbed and picked over and judged to be worthy of inclusion, or not. But unlike dredging, this process is not quick. Its damage is not done in an instant. A survey like this one takes years to organize, produce, and finish. Sometimes artists do not survive this process well. I’m not sure I have. It’s too early to know. But one thing I realized about halfway through the six (!) years that it took to do the survey was that I had to simultaneously continue moving forward in the private space of my studio—which stands in for my
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