Luis Camnitzer is an artist and writer. His work ranges from gallery installations to cultural criticism. His work explores systems of power, ideologies of education, and the public value of art through an overtly political model of Conceptualism. Tan Lin is a poet and artist. His work ranges from fiction writing to video, from ‘ambient literature’ to memoir. His work explores the hybridity of cultural experiences through personal, material and technical processes of recall. Together, they discussed the binds between form, content and context that shape the impact of public language.

Each Public Event was an open conversation. So we could start those conversations with some shared understanding of how each speaker has explored the cross-overs between sculpture and poetry in relation to their event's topic, we asked them to suggest a recent project for preparatory watching/reading/listening.

Luis Camnitzer wrote a new, short essay titled, ‘Henry Moore Would Have Understood’. It recalls the impact of a passing comment made by Henry Moore about asymmetry, and the role language came to play in artworks that aim to make something happen in the viewer’s mind. It distances his own conceptual approach from any tradition of ‘the poetic’, instead staking it in the search for the essence of what is poetic beyond any prescribed form such as ‘poetry’.

Read the full essay here.

Tan Lin nominated an experimental video work he made in 2002, titled 11 Minute Painting. The work folds together the aesthetic of a desktop presentation, automated speech and data visualisations with a verbal enquiry into why paintings are mute. It uses time-based media to make a blue painting that speaks in the name of a poem and the form of a slide show.

Watch and listen to the full video here, courtesy of the artist and PennSound, Philadelphia.