* The following text accompanied Sculpture of a Climbing Wall after CalArts and its insurer denied the artist’s proposal to build a fully functional climbing wall that anyone would be allowed to climb on.

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This is a dangerous object. It is a sculpture of a climbing wall. It is dangerous because if it is used as a climbing wall someone could injure themself. This is a risk both to the institution and to the person interacting with the work.

For CalArts as an institution, if this is a sculpture, it is safe because people do not climb on sculptures. This assumes that the realm of danger and risk is within the physical and that knowledge and ideas do not pose a liability, do not pose risks to our health. Yet at the core of art is the assumption that it has the power to generate change and create understanding—indeed, that ideas are dangerous and can pose risks.

For us as individuals, it is dangerous if this is “just” a sculpture. This work is fundamentally engaged with forms of knowledge related to the body: the knowledge and memories of touch, injury, and intimacy, the unconscious knowledges of movement and physical memory. If we do not have the choice to interact with this work, to climb it, what physical knowledge are we unable to access? Are we continuing to support the idea that knowledge is in the mind and not the hands, not the body?

As an institution, a collective body made up of our plurality, we seem bound to fail, and if so, how do we take the risk?

Repetition takes and holds time and space. Fixation is repetition. Breathe in, breathe out, repeat. Solving a problem requires working through it over and over, yet with the expectation that something will change. This process moves from one letter, symbol, thought, or object to another. It is based on the idea of holding things up to each other to compare them. It seeks to hold the right pieces, in the right way, at the right moment to arrive at... something.

Holding can be an act of preservation or separation. We can be held together or held apart. Holding is based on a physical relationship, the use of our body. So what does it mean to hold today, in a world where our relationships are ever more disembodied, in a time when work, education, or family take us far from those we love? This is not a new condition, we have always travelled, migrated, and immigrated. But as the world has shrunk through interconnection, the corners of the earth far from us seem to hold ever greater pull and possibility. This fluid world of travel brings us in contact with people from places far from those we know and can just as suddenly or forcefully pull us apart. The act of stretching can help sustain our health. Yet we can also be stretched thin and stretched apart. When those we love are scattered far, we become stretched between them. Do we hold our loved ones close through calls and messages? Through objects of memory that we can touch to be reminded of them?

To hold is to care, holding time through calls and messages and holding space through objects. These are acts of holding.