The World That Made Me Curious

The Missing Things

I have always been interested in what is missing.

I don't think I understood that when I started making art.

At the time, I probably would have said I was interested in images. In abstraction. In photography. In things that didn't quite make sense.

But looking back, I think it was the gaps that interested me.

The part of the photograph just outside the frame.

The shape I couldn't quite identify.

The story I knew was there but couldn't see.

The person I thought I understood but didn't.

Maybe curiosity begins there.

With something missing.

A damaged triptych

Years ago, I was walking through the Victoria and Albert Museum in London when I stopped in front of a very old triptych.

It was from the 14th century.

The panels had once contained religious imagery, but some of it had disappeared with time. Paint had worn away. Parts of the story were simply no longer there.

I remember looking at it and doing something very natural.

I filled in the missing pieces.

Not physically, of course.

In my head.

I started imagining what might have been there. What the missing figures might have looked like. What the story might have been.

And then I caught myself.

How did I know?

I didn't.

I was making it up.

That was the interesting part.

The missing image had created an image in my mind.

The absence was doing the work.

I later described this encounter as the beginning of Triptych Dialogue. I have told the story many times since, including in recent conversations about the project. The basic idea remains the same: something I could not see made me curious about what I was seeing.

I began wondering whether people work the same way.

We see a person.

We hear a sentence.

We see a photograph.

We read a post.

And then, almost immediately, we fill in what isn't there.

We make a story.

Sometimes we don't even notice that we are doing it.

When the stranger becomes a category

This seems especially strange to me when we talk about politics.

Someone says something I disagree with.

Almost instantly, I can know who they are.

Or at least I think I know.

Republican.

Democrat.

Liberal.

Conservative.

Left.

Right.

Them.

The word becomes the person.

But what is missing?

Everything I don't know.

The childhood.

The fear.

The experience that shaped the opinion.

The contradiction.

The thing they are embarrassed to say.

The thing they haven't figured out themselves.

The things they might believe tomorrow.

I started becoming interested in that space.

Not because I thought political disagreement was unimportant. Quite the opposite.

I became increasingly concerned about what happens when disagreement turns into something else.

When people stop seeing another person and start seeing a category.

When disagreement becomes contempt.

When information becomes something we use to confirm what we already believe.

When the digital world makes it possible to spend most of our time surrounded by people who think, look, and react like we do.

And when disinformation enters that environment, what exactly are we arguing about anymore?

I don't have a clean answer to that.

I don't think there is one.

But I became curious about what might happen if I stopped arguing and started listening.

The space before I react

This turned out to be harder than I expected.

Someone would say something political that triggered me.

My first reaction was usually immediate.

I wanted to respond.

Correct something.

Push back.

Explain.

Then I began experimenting with something much less dramatic.

Waiting.

Letting the reaction pass.

Taking a breath.

Listening to the person who was actually standing in front of me rather than the person I had constructed in my head.

That distinction became important.

Because sometimes I discovered that I disagreed completely with someone's politics and still understood something about their feelings.

Fear.

Anger.

Frustration.

Hope.

Loss.

Confusion.

Love of country.

A desire for things to be different.

The political conclusion might be completely different.

But the human experience underneath it could be surprisingly familiar.

I started wondering whether that was the place where conversation could begin.

Not agreement.

Not consensus.

Something earlier.

Recognition.

What happens when we listen before we know?

Eventually this curiosity became an experiment.

I began approaching strangers.

I asked the same three questions about American politics.

Not questions designed to trap anyone.

Not questions designed to reveal whether someone was right or wrong.

Just questions.

How would you describe the political system of the United States of America?

Describe your feelings or reactions to the current state of U.S. politics?

And then:

Politics in the United States... (Finish the sentence.)

I didn't know what people were going to say.

That was part of the point.

I wanted to leave some space for the missing pieces.

The answers became conversations.

The conversations became recordings.

The recordings became part of the artwork.

And the people I had approached as strangers slowly became something else.

Not friends, necessarily.

Not people who agreed with me.

Something more temporary.

We were simply two people standing in the same place at the same time.

There is no “them” in that moment.

There is only us.

Art as a way of not knowing

This is probably where my understanding of art began to change.

I had always thought of art as something I made.

Now I was making situations.

Creating a question.

Creating a space.

Putting something into a public place and seeing what happened.

The artwork wasn't completely mine anymore.

A stranger's voice could change it.

A word could change it.

A silence could change it.

Even my own reaction could become part of the experiment.

That is what I like about conceptual art.

It can begin with an idea without knowing where the idea will end.

Sometimes the artwork is the object.

Sometimes it is the encounter.

Sometimes it is the question.

Sometimes it is the space between two people.

And sometimes, perhaps, it is the thing that is missing.

I keep coming back to that old triptych.

Three panels.

Images that have disappeared.

A story interrupted by time.

A viewer standing in front of it, quietly inventing what is no longer visible.

Maybe that is what we do with one another all the time.

We see a fragment and construct the whole.

We hear one sentence and imagine the person.

We see a political label and think we know the human being underneath it.

We fill the empty spaces very quickly.

Perhaps curiosity is simply the decision to stop filling them for a moment.

To leave the space empty.

To look again.

To ask a question.

And then to listen.

I don't know what was actually painted on those missing parts of that old triptych.

I never will.

Maybe that is why it stayed with me.

Because the mystery didn't need to be solved.

It only needed to make me look.

And perhaps that is where all of this began.

Not with an answer.

With something missing.

And the strange desire to find out what might be there.

What are we missing when we look at another person?

And what might happen if, for once, we didn't fill in the empty spaces ourselves?