The Triptych That Changed Everything

The Apocalypse at the Victoria and Albert

I wasn't looking for Triptych Dialogue when I first encountered the triptych.

I was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, looking at an artwork made around 1380 by Master Bertram of Hamburg. The museum identifies it as Triptych with Scenes from the Apocalypse. It was probably made as an altarpiece, with its subject taken from the biblical Book of Revelation. The arrangement was derived from illuminated manuscripts, and inscriptions from a thirteenth-century North German Apocalypse commentary were used to explain the meaning of the different scenes.

I remember being drawn to the structure of it as much as to the subject.

Three panels, joined together, creating something that couldn't quite be understood by looking at only one of them. Each panel had its own imagery, but the panels were also dependent on one another. My eyes moved from one to the next and then back again.

There was something else that caught me.

Parts of the imagery had disappeared with time.

I have since talked about that moment on several podcasts, and each time I tell the story I realize that I am still trying to understand exactly what happened to me in front of that artwork. I remember looking at the missing imagery and beginning to fill it in myself. I would see what remained and imagine what might have been there.

I was inventing a picture.

And then I began wondering whether I do the same thing with people.

What We Add to What We See

When we encounter another person, we are also looking at something incomplete.

We don't know their history. We don't know what they have experienced. We don't know what they were thinking five minutes before we met them, or what happened to them twenty years ago that might explain something they say now.

Yet we fill in the missing parts almost immediately.

Someone tells us who they voted for and we think we know something about them. We see a bumper sticker, a T-shirt, a flag or a social-media post, and suddenly the person becomes a category. We make assumptions about their intelligence, their values, their motives and sometimes even their character.

I do it too.

That was the uncomfortable part of the realization. I wasn't standing outside the problem observing everyone else. I was participating in it.

The triptych gave me a way to think about that.

There were three panels in front of me, but there were also gaps. I could see what was there. I could see what wasn't there. And my mind immediately wanted to complete the picture.

What if I stopped doing that?

What if, instead of completing the missing parts myself, I asked the person standing in front of me?

The Beginning of Triptych Dialogue

That question became the beginning of Triptych Dialogue.

I didn't leave the Victoria and Albert with a fully developed art project. I didn't have a methodology, a website or hundreds of conversations in mind. I had an idea that came from looking at an old piece of art.

I wanted to talk to strangers.

More specifically, I wanted to talk to strangers about something that people are often told not to talk about with strangers: politics.

The choice of politics was deliberate. Politics is one of those subjects where we can very quickly stop seeing the person and start seeing the position. Once that happens, the conversation can become a contest. We begin preparing our response while the other person is still speaking.

I wondered if art could interrupt that process.

Not by making a political argument.

By changing the conditions in which the conversation happens.

The three questions I eventually developed for Triptych Dialogue are deliberately simple. I ask people how they would describe the political system of the United States, how they feel about the current state of American politics, and then I ask them to finish the sentence: "Politics in the United States . . ."

The questions stay the same.

The people don't.

That became important to me because I wasn't looking for the right answer. I wanted to see what happened when people were given the same artistic structure but allowed to bring their own experiences into it.

When Conversation Becomes the Artwork

This is where Triptych Dialogue became more interesting to me as art.

I had spent many years around artworks, first as an art dealer and gallery owner and also as an artist. I was used to thinking about the artwork as an object: something made by an artist and then placed in front of an audience.

But what if the artwork isn't entirely there yet?

What if the viewer has to participate in making it?

In Triptych Dialogue, I can create the questions, the setting and the structure. I can make objects, images, videos, installations and Word-Titles. But I can't make the other person's answer.

They bring that.

The conversation therefore becomes part of the medium.

That idea has continued to change how I think about art. A painting can ask something of you, but it doesn't answer back. A sculpture can change the way you move through a room, but it doesn't tell you what it has experienced. A conversation is different because the material keeps changing.

The other person changes it.

And so do I.

The Third Space

I think this may be why I keep returning to the three panels.

A triptych is not simply three separate pictures. The relationship between them matters.

The same thing happens in a conversation.

There is you. There is me. And then there is something that exists between us.

I don't completely control that third thing.

Neither do you.

It can become an argument. It can become a misunderstanding. It can become a moment of recognition. Sometimes it becomes something neither person expected.

That third space is where I became interested in making art.

The physical objects of Triptych Dialogue matter to me, but increasingly I think of them as invitations. An installation can attract someone's attention, but the real work may begin when that person asks a question about it. A sculpture can become the reason two strangers start talking. A Word-Title can make someone curious about the person who supplied it.

The object opens the door.

The conversation walks through it.

From Museums to Public Spaces

Eventually I took the work outside museums and galleries.

I began creating installations in public spaces, including First Amendment areas in National Parks. The change in environment was important. I wasn't interested in recreating the museum experience somewhere else. I wanted to see what happened when art appeared in places where people weren't necessarily expecting art.

A person hiking through a National Park isn't necessarily looking for a contemporary art installation. They may be thinking about the landscape, their family, the weather or where they're going next.

Then they encounter something strange.

Maybe two chairs facing each other.

Maybe a sculpture inside a museum case.

Maybe a collection of words.

Maybe me.

That moment of uncertainty can become an opening.

In a recent podcast conversation about the project, I described one installation at the Grand Canyon in which a sculpture sat inside a plexiglass museum case. I wasn't particularly interested in explaining what the sculpture represented. I was more interested in the case around it. To me, the case could become a metaphor for the worldview we carry around with us—the boundary between what we think we can see and everything outside it.

The artwork doesn't have to explain the metaphor.

It can simply make someone curious enough to ask about it.

Listening Changes the Artwork

The longer I have worked on Triptych Dialogue, the less interested I have become in making a distinction between art and conversation.

I don't mean that every conversation is art.

I mean that an artwork can create a situation in which something unpredictable happens between people.

That unpredictability is important to me.

If I already know what the audience is going to do, I'm not sure I am experimenting anymore.

This is also why active listening became so important to the project. If I am simply waiting for my turn to respond, then I am still having a debate. If I am actually listening, the other person has the possibility of changing what I think.

That is a very different proposition.

It also makes the artist vulnerable.

I have to allow the other person to surprise me.

And they do.

Over hundreds of conversations, people have given me answers I expected, answers I didn't expect, answers that contradicted one another and answers that sometimes seemed to contradict themselves. That isn't a problem I need to solve. It is part of what makes the work interesting.

Human beings are complicated material.

The Artist Doesn't Get to Finish the Picture

I sometimes think back to that medieval triptych and wonder about Master Bertram.

He made the work around 1380. He couldn't possibly have known that, centuries later, an artist would stand in front of it and use the missing imagery to think about political conversation.

He didn't get to control that interpretation.

Neither do I.

Once an artwork leaves the artist's hands, other people begin completing it. They bring their own histories to it. They see things I didn't intend. Sometimes they misunderstand it. Sometimes their misunderstanding is more interesting than my intention.

Maybe that is one of the reasons I continue to make art.

I don't want to make a completely finished picture.

I want to make something that leaves enough space for another person to enter.

That is what I think happened to me at the Victoria and Albert. I saw three panels, an ancient story and images that had partly disappeared. I filled in what I couldn't see.

Then I stopped.

And I wondered what might happen if, the next time I encountered something I couldn't see, I asked someone else to show me.

That question became Triptych Dialogue.

And I'm still asking it.