The circumstances are: a show at 420 West Broadway, 'center' of the New York art world -- at least that part of the art world that's in the news, as we know it. This is Soho at the end of the 70's: now the galleries have been there since the beginning of the decade (now they need -- to keep themselves going -- not attention but establishment, not headlines but sales. . . )

The given space is: an L-shaped corridor that makes, frames, an enclosed room, the main room of the gallery -- the corridor is almost a non-room, a fluid space starting at the entrance elevator and including windows that look out onto the street, onto West Broadway.

My method of construction is: close, further, the enclosed room -- open, further, the already 'open' corridor.

The entrance to the enclosed room is walled off, and the outside of the room is painted black: the room becomes an object within the overall space -- an object loaded with the memory that there's a room inside. Alongside the room, running through the corridor, is a wooden plank forty feet long and two feet wide, a plank that changes function: it starts by settling into the room as a table, eight stools on either side -- but it doesn't stop there, it continues toward the window, extends out the window and becomes a diving board.

The gallery, then, is used as a meeting place. Hanging down above the plank -- at the point where table turns into diving board -- is a set of speakers: a clock ticks, my voice calls the meeting to order: one sentence keeps coming back, 'Now that we know we failed... ‘: this is a meeting at the edge: this is like a game of musical chairs, not everybody has a place here. There's something off to the side, there are 'skeletons' in the closet: from inside the black room come muffled voices, the sounds of a crowd -- this is something we can fall back on, this is something that keeps nagging at us. When the crowd dies out, one voice stands alone, at the table: each of us has a different answer. By this time the clock is ticking again: the meeting begins one more time: 'Now that we're back where we started...'