I have a certain way of working with scores. I write a score as a parameter of how a particular work gets shown. The score is mostly a simple description like: ‘Fountains, a fountain installed in the exhibition space to cancel sound’. Or sometimes the score can be longer as for Violets 2. All parts of a ventilation system removed from Netwerk Aalst Bar during its 2017 refurbishment are reinstalled within the space of the exhibition and fixed on the floor. Using as much of the material as possible while keeping it all interconnecting. Spare pieces that do not fit this configuration are bracketed together in smaller formations. A welcome sign is installed.
I produced this way of working specifically because I was interested in finding a mode of production that made space for a different kind of work. A different way of working for me, something that was generative. And this comes from something I probably initially conceived of as a problem, I always thought you can make an artwork and you can perfect it in some way yourself. And then the work goes into its context a context that you can't control and it has a different read or it changes or it shifts and this was something I wanted to control. It was the wish to control that seemed like a clear problem to me. I wondered how to embrace the contingency of works instead, to embrace their vulnerability. Rather than thinking how can I fix and control this, how can I maintain its integrity in the way that I have conceived it? I shifted to thinking that the resilience of the work could come from its vulnerability, its total contingency, its complete dependency, trust in a situation.
I was interested in how the score was analogous to music structure and the relationship between composition and musician. You have a piece of music that exists in notation form and then you have the performance of that piece of music. Which one is the work? They are both the work, they're interdependent and that's interesting. It gets the work out of sole authorship, it questions fixed objecthood and identity because the identity of the work is always held in the question of interdependency.
I was curious about how to take some of those questions around the identity of a work and its repetition from performance and moving image. I wondered if there was a way I could circulate sculpture using this operational structure and a score was a way I could do that. I would never show the score, the point is to do the score. And there’s had to be a lot of trust and collaboration through the engine of the score, for it to be performed by the institution or whatever parties that hold it. Working in this way produces something that surprises me. It's not the sole production of me executed by somebody else, it's something that has come together and been generated not only by me but by us, by the institution, by the space, by the history, by the contemporary conditions. All of these contingencies utterly to the fore. This is not unique to the score, it is a condition of art in general. I'm not trying to abnegate authorial responsibility, I'm interested in acknowledging the necessary co-creativity of everything. That everything is made with other people, that we are always holding and being held. I became more interested not in what the concrete physicality of the institution was and criticising that in some sort of site-specific way, but in pursuing a project of understanding how I was instituting, how I worked and that became a different project. One of setting up what a practice would be along those parameters, how do I understand the action and verb of practice not the product and objects of practice? Because I think as well in my own life I've been trying to compartmentalise what I was, as a mother, as an artist, I was fighting hard to separate those parts of myself. But after a while actually letting all of that in became part of the full process, acknowledging those limits recognising and loving those limits even and trying to work with them.
Those limits, those dependencies can be turned around to become a resource for making artwork in another way. In a way that you don't know what it's going to do and I constantly have to decide to maintain this turn. To have a way of working and a politics of working that doesn't just function as an optics, but that structurally embraces the full vulnerability of my production at all junctures.
Edited extracts read by the author from Bosses, Ghislaine Leung, Divided Publishing, London and Brussels, 2023
