Democracy Doesn't Need More Debate—It Needs Better Dialogue

When an Artwork Becomes a Conversation

I keep thinking about the first time I really began to understand why the triptych form interested me. I was looking at a triptych at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and what stayed with me wasn't simply the fact that it was divided into three panels. It was the relationship between the panels, the spaces between them, and the way the missing or damaged parts of the imagery invited me to construct something that wasn't actually there. I was looking at an artwork, but I was also participating in it. My own perception was completing something that the artist had left incomplete.

That experience eventually became one of the starting points for Triptych Dialogue. I began wondering whether a similar thing happens whenever we encounter another person. We see someone, hear what they say, and almost immediately begin filling in the parts we don't know. We make assumptions about their intentions, their politics, their background, their intelligence, even their character. Much of what we think we understand about another person may actually be something we have supplied ourselves.

This seems particularly obvious to me when the subject is politics.

We often think of political conversation as an exchange of ideas in which two people present their positions and attempt to convince one another. There is nothing inherently wrong with disagreement, and democracy would be impossible without it. But I have become increasingly interested in what happens before disagreement becomes an argument. What happens in that brief space when we encounter another person's point of view and haven't yet decided what we think about the person expressing it?

That space is where I began looking for the artwork.

The Problem With Always Having an Answer

I have spent a lot of time around political conversations, both through Triptych Dialogue and simply by being a person living through a particularly contentious period. What I have noticed is how quickly a conversation can become a contest. Someone says something, and before they have finished, the other person is already preparing a response. We may appear to be listening, but internally we are assembling evidence, remembering something we read, anticipating the next claim, or deciding how to defend our own position.

I recognize this tendency in myself.

That is one reason I became interested in active listening, although I am not sure I would describe myself as particularly good at it. For me, listening has become less about learning a technique and more about noticing what happens when I resist the urge to immediately categorize what I am hearing.

A stranger says something I disagree with. Can I remain curious for another thirty seconds?

Can I hear the thought before deciding what kind of person would have that thought?

Can I allow myself to discover that I may have misunderstood?

These questions became much more interesting to me than the possibility of winning an argument.

Triptych Dialogue grew out of that curiosity. I began asking strangers three questions about American politics. The questions were intentionally consistent, so that the variable would not be the question but the person answering it. I wanted to hear how different people described the political system, how they felt about its current condition, and what they themselves would say to complete the sentence, "Politics in the United States..."

The answers were often very different.

That was the point.

The Stranger Is Not a Political Position

One of the things that surprised me during the project was how quickly the person in front of me became more complicated than whatever political category I might have assigned to them.

It is easy to encounter someone through a label. We are surrounded by labels, particularly online. A person becomes conservative or liberal, left or right, pro-this or anti-that. Social media is remarkably efficient at turning complicated human beings into recognizable categories, because categories are easier to process than ambiguity.

But standing in front of someone is different.

You see their face. You hear their voice. You notice pauses. You notice uncertainty. Sometimes someone begins an answer confidently and then changes direction halfway through it. Sometimes they say something that doesn't fit neatly into the political position you expected. Sometimes they contradict themselves.

I find those moments particularly interesting.

They remind me that a person is not a position.

This may sound obvious, but I don't think our political culture always behaves as though it is true.

When I was making the recordings for Triptych Dialogue, I wasn't trying to determine whether someone was right or wrong. I was interested in what happened when I gave them enough space to explain what they thought. The conversation itself became part of the artwork.

That changed the way I thought about what an artwork could be.

What Can Art Do That Argument Cannot?

If I make a painting, I control most of what happens. I decide what goes onto the surface and what remains off it. I can alter it, destroy part of it, add something unexpected, or decide that it is finished.

Triptych Dialogue works differently because another person is part of the material.

I can ask the question, but I can't determine the answer.

I can create the structure, but I can't control what happens inside it.

That uncertainty is important to me. It is one of the reasons I think of Triptych Dialogue as an art experiment rather than simply a project about politics. I am interested in what happens when an artwork becomes a situation in which something can occur that the artist did not entirely anticipate.

The Word-Titles developed from this idea. After answering the three questions, each participant was asked to give me one word that summed up their response. That word became part of the work. I wasn't selecting a word that I thought represented them. They were selecting it themselves.

Sometimes the word seemed obvious.

Sometimes it didn't.

Sometimes I wondered why they had chosen it.

But that was exactly what made it interesting.

The artwork wasn't there to explain their choice. It was there to preserve it.

In that sense, the participant was not simply contributing content to an artwork. They were helping to determine what the artwork would become.

Listening Changes the Shape of the Work

This is where the idea of active listening became connected to the art itself for me.

Listening is usually thought of as something that happens between people. I began to think of it as a creative act. When I genuinely listen to someone, I am allowing information into the work that I did not create myself. I am allowing another person's experience to alter my understanding of what I am making.

That doesn't mean I have to agree with them.

In fact, agreement isn't particularly interesting to me as an artistic objective. If everyone I spoke with said exactly what I expected them to say, there wouldn't be much of an experiment.

The more interesting possibility is that someone says something I hadn't considered.

Or that I discover that I had misunderstood a question.

Or that two people give completely different answers to the same question and both answers make sense within their own experience.

That is where the artwork becomes less predictable.

It also makes me wonder whether our understanding of political polarization is sometimes too focused on the distance between people's opinions and not enough on the mechanisms that make those opinions feel so fixed. How much of what we believe comes from direct experience? How much comes from the people around us? How much comes from the information systems through which we encounter the world?

I think about this especially in relation to social media.

From the Screen Back to the Stranger

Before Triptych Dialogue became a face-to-face project, I spent time exploring what happens when strangers encounter one another through a screen. My Views from the Cave work came partly from that experience. I was interested in Instagram, algorithms, visibility and the strange experience of producing something for an audience I couldn't actually see.

The screen creates a particular kind of distance. We can see someone without really encountering them. We can react to an idea before understanding the person behind it. An algorithm can repeatedly show us things that reinforce what we already believe, while making other perspectives increasingly difficult to encounter.

Plato's Cave has been an obvious reference for me for a long time, but technology has given the old metaphor a strange new relevance. We don't necessarily have to be chained to a wall to live inside a constructed reality. We can carry the cave around with us in our pockets.

That was part of what pushed me toward face-to-face encounters.

I wanted to get away from the screen.

I wanted to see what happened when the person who disagreed with me was no longer an image or a comment but an actual human being standing a few feet away.

That doesn't magically resolve political disagreement. It doesn't make disinformation disappear. It doesn't prevent people from becoming authoritarian or intolerant.

But it changes the conditions of the encounter.

And perhaps conditions matter.

The Public Space Between Us

Eventually, the work moved into public spaces, including National Parks. That was important because I didn't want Triptych Dialogue to exist only within the familiar environment of an art gallery. I was interested in what would happen if people encountered the work without having decided beforehand that they were going to see art.

A person walking through a National Park is not necessarily looking for a conceptual art experiment about political polarization.

That was part of the attraction.

The encounter could be unexpected.

Someone might stop. Someone else might walk past. Someone might read the work and disagree with it. Someone might be curious about the questions. Someone might simply notice another person listening to a stranger.

The artwork could exist in that moment without requiring everyone to interpret it in the same way.

This is one of the things I find most useful about art. It doesn't always have to provide a conclusion. It can create a situation in which we become aware of something that was already happening.

Perhaps the artwork can be the interruption.

Perhaps it can slow us down long enough to notice how quickly we have formed an opinion.

Maybe Democracy Needs a Different Kind of Conversation

I don't think democracy needs less disagreement. I think disagreement is one of the things democracy has to be able to accommodate.

What concerns me is what happens when disagreement becomes the only relationship we have with one another.

When political opponents become enemies, when every disagreement is interpreted as evidence of bad character, and when information is deliberately manipulated to make people distrust one another, the problem is no longer simply that we hold different opinions. The problem becomes the loss of a shared space in which those differences can exist.

I don't know whether art can help restore that space.

I wouldn't want to claim that it can.

But I have become interested in testing the possibility.

Triptych Dialogue is one way of doing that. The questions are simple. The encounters are ordinary. The artwork is constructed through conversations that I cannot completely control.

Maybe that is why I keep returning to the triptych.

Three panels don't necessarily tell one story.

They can show three different views of the same thing.

The relationship between them is where the meaning begins to change.

Perhaps political dialogue works in a similar way. I have my experience. You have yours. Neither of us can see the whole picture. Between us is a space filled with assumptions, memories, fears, information, misinformation and things neither of us knows.

The temptation is to fill that space as quickly as possible.

To argue.

To explain.

To win.

But what if we left some of it empty?

What if uncertainty wasn't something we had to eliminate immediately?

What if the person standing across from us wasn't the other side of an argument, but another panel in an unfinished picture?

I don't know if that would produce better politics.

But I think it might produce a more interesting conversation.

And perhaps, for an artist, that is enough reason to keep experimenting.