Undelivered speech:
I've tried and tried but I see no way to arrive at a sculpture. To go from the world of ideas and fragments of information to an object is a translation that I'm not convinced needs to happen. Do we need to critique the merits of an object? Can we have a conversation with no centerpiece?

I've had richer experiences reading books than looking at art first-hand. I've thought of sculptures—100 shape-shifting sculptures a minutes—and then been done with them. To bring sculptures into the light and not let them play out is a betrayal of the existence of objects—the necessity of which is debatable in and of itself.

Models acknowledge their beauty in a way that artists keep refusing through production. Sculptural production is increasingly antiquated. The artist of today needs to be a kind of model. To offer themselves. To privilege their process, their presence and their existence over their works. Refraction between object, artist, and audience creates and amplifies ego. The artist as art is beyond ego. Sometimes it drains me. I wish I could think by making and present you with my turds. It seems divine to have your progress visible, marked with milestones, verifiable by yourself and others. To live and work in your head means having to prove yourself to others. There is nothing to point to except one's own nebulousness. But the challenge increases the reward of the work. On days where I wake up too exhausted to converse, can my work still exist? Should it? The answer to both, I think, is not really. But does it exist without you, the viewer? Unlike a sculpture, the answer is a resounding yes.

Photographers steal from models, who expend their energy and focus on sharpening what is beautiful about themselves. I want to be proud of a stream of thought, or a few hours spent on the Internet like a model is proud of a look they gave. I have something to offer. I'm available in response, but want to widen the circles. Why have I come to feel like a model with the dual responsibility to make something from myself rather than just be? Not talking about surface-level appearances here. If I wanted to appear as an artist I would make art—which we could probably still talk about—but it would be a gross feeling attempt at fitting in.

A pendulum swings until it reaches stasis. Physical production is decreasingly human territory. Let robots reap the fields, sew my clothes, and fold my laundry. Industry and production, even in the sacred and personal realm of art, are the new domesticity. Artists freed from production are like women freed from the kitchen. What can we do beyond cook meals, which we have been doing with various degrees of placidity and growing discomfort for years?

There are lots of things I want to try but the first is to be. Not just to be, it is hard. I am a humanist but a futurist too. Let's not go back to plowing the fields for some romantic notion of finding ourselves. That sounds like giving up, or crushing the flowers to stop the spring. Deport artists who want to labor like farmhands to the farms. To start, try untwisting the way we have come to talk about ourselves.

This conversation is not a sculpture. I do not wish to make a sculpture now or ever. Why halt work at a construction site? Because at its core this place is a breeding ground for ideas. I am not saying that by eliminating sculpture you can or should or will be able to work faster in your head. I do not believe in efficiency, on principle. Working hard doesn't count if you're working on the wrong problems.

I am asking this room to not produce. To each hone in on and cultivate what is beautiful about yourself. I am begging that we waste no more cycles discussing the merits of artifacts because we are sophisticated enough, I should hope, to not require props. If we obliterate the idea of the conversation piece, the conversation can wander into wonderful places.