Zak Kitnick with Gedi Sibony

Zak Kitnick: I wanted to ask you if I could interview you for Idiom magazine in anticipation of your show.

Gedi Sibony: In this case is anticipation without a subject? Is it commonly used in this form? I cant even figure out how to fix this. The anticipation part makes me nervous.

ZK: Ah I meant in anticipation only in how it corresponds time-wise with the show. That the timing of the show and the timing of the interview might in some way be related.

GS: They are both happening now.

ZK: Oh yeah. I guess I didn’t realize that. Now I do. They are. That kind of reminds me of a conversation I overheard a couple years ago at your show and something somebody said to me the other day. In the first case this person was talking about how your work had ‘fundamentally changed the way they looked at the world,’ and in the second case a person jokingly suggested that something on the street was ‘a Sibony.’ But despite the difference in context and tone, it seemed to me like both were saying the same thing, that by stopping for a moment, simply by equating this thing with a name, they had somehow questioned and complicated this object in the world, seen a potential in this thing. So I wanted to ask about the process by which something found becomes something else. I don’t think this has as much to do with the readymade as much as an idea of production elsewhere. I don’t get the impression it happens quickly but wonder about the role of time.

GS: at the moment for me the issue is separating. how they come in? all ways. how many lengths of time it takes? all lengths. i mean they share those lengths with the lengths we experience as we live. For the making of a show I have to do it with the truest that I have, which means afterwards leaving me without them. The ledge, the impossible thought or feeling is that it cannot take place again in such a direct and deep and pure way.

ZK: It almost seems like doing it once should be enough, to say something once and really mean it? The challenge is to say it again without repeating ones self? What about improvement? Do things always get better? Is the process of making work guided by an optimism?

GS: Yeah, I think the process is where you get to try things and in doing so see how they make you feel, and this reciprocal growth builds and shifts through the phases of life. For me it’s become less about saying something and more about sharing the experiments. I’m after a certain set of things, of elements, and I sense a tie between experience and efficiency.

ZK: It feels so sustainable. And so few things feel sustainable. To me this seems like a real quality. “All ways. All lengths.” Nothing is overbuilt. But it also feels so vulnerable to change. How does the experiment remain an experiment? Is there a hypothesis?

GS: What would be an example of a hypothesis?

ZK: I don’t know. I just know that experiments often have one. But in the days that elapsed between the last question and your answer, I started thinking, ‘Oh, maybe that’s how they remain experiments. They leave questions unanswered.’ During that time I was also looking at a work of yours called, Ultimately Even This Will Disappear which seems to speak to those ideas of vulnerability and change, thinking about the order in which things will ‘go’ and why. It’s a separate issue, but I’m always surprised how at once the work feels so generous and so frugal. Is that fair?

GS: A pleasant surprise is more than fair. I just had this chess game where I pushed this pawn into what I thought would be an uncomfortable position for my opponent. 15 moves later I inadvertently used it to pin his queen. But somehow he brilliantly wiggled out of it. I like to make sacrifices to gain position, so in this way have to keep a forward momentum. The pieces were thinning and it seemed a symmetry was not emerging to keep my moves effective. Being down pieces you have to balance that deficit by establishing multiple effective roles for all that remain. The unknown is when they will all stack up, and if it will be in time. When it does happen, it happens off-center, somewhere I didn’t even think to look, and I find it and wow, all that other stuff going on I was focused on had this purpose ascertained after the fact and suddenly gains import as a lead up. So what is the thing that disappears? We are shooting for something, a precise carrier for the way things are, as we sense they are but can’t really say so we act it out. But of course that will not matter so soon. Because it is the thing itself that gains prominence. Ask our brother Australopithicus who had his heart broken two hundred million years ago and went alone the waters edge under the blazing night sky and asked what is this fucking life?

the truest that I have: Interview with Gedi Sibony

Share on Tumblr