Excerpts from “Ian Wilson: From Chalk Circle to Full Circle”
By Ken Lum
Over his four-decade series of oral artworks, Ian Wilson sought to foreground the ephemeral nature of art by following a rigorous practice based on the spoken word. Trained as a painter, Wilson’s Discussions emerged from an exploration of abstraction throughout the 1960s that was guided by an abiding interest in nonobjective representation. From 2011 to 2015, Wilson’s The Pure Awareness of the Absolute / Discussions were presented at Dia Beacon. The small gatherings traced the thinking that led Wilson to explore pronouncements as form, and continued his long-term exploration of consciousness, language, and the formless concept of abstraction. As he has stated in 1994, “Language is the most formless means of expression. Its capacity to describe concepts without physical or visual references carries us into an advanced state of abstraction.”[1]
Wilson passed away in New York City in 2020. On December 9, 2013, Ken Lum delivered a lecture on Wilson at Dia Art Foundation, New York City, as part of Dia’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series. Lum’s contribution below is a tribute to his valuable position on the conceptual.
—Kelly Kivland, Curator, Dia Art Foundation
When I was invited by Dia Art Foundation to write and present on an artist as part of Dia’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series, I knew it had to be Ian Wilson. I liked that no one had presented on him previously as part of the series, unlike those subjects better known such as Hanne Darboven or Donald Judd. I liked the challenge of presenting on an artist who had removed himself from anything to do with the world of art, all for the sake of art. I wrestled with the thought that selecting Wilson would violate what I most admired about his practice—its call for isolation from and its unconcern with the historicizing process of art history. Although I had but a brief exchange of emails and one encounter with Wilson, I felt that I had known him for a long time. As a much younger artist at the start of my career, I ran a little gallery space out of a storefront residence in Vancouver. His Chalk Circle on the Floor of 1968 was included as part of a group exhibition in the gallery that also featured Robert Barry, Daniel Buren, On Kawara, and Lawrence Weiner. I remember vividly reading the instructions for Chalk Circle on the Floor:
Attach a white china chalk pencil to one end of a 3-foot-long thin wire (the actual chalk center of the pencil would be 3/8 of an inch before sharpening). At the other end of the wire attach a nail. After hammering the nail into the floor, draw the circle around the nail, keeping the wire taut. Using the enclosed photo of the density of the white chalk, gradually build up the line until it is 1/2 an inch thick. When the circle is drawn, remove the nail from the floor. From time to time using the above described method, redraw any portions of the circle that have been smudged, keeping the circle as clean and as well defined as possible.
I remember thinking, simple enough. But living with it, I would pass through and around the work multiple times a day. It took up much of the width of my small space. My body quickly developed a dialogue with Chalk Circle on the Floor. It made me conscious of my own being, including the limits of my being. So, when I was offered the opportunity to present on an artist at Dia, it had to be Wilson. I had to thank him in my way for what his work did for me at an important point in my life.
The following two excerpts are from Lum’s Artists on Artists lecture, which was published in its entirety as “Ian Wilson: From Chalk Circle to Full Circle,” in Ken Lum, Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018 (Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2020), pp. 234–45. The complete publication may be read here.
———
What does it mean to make art over a long career that is so resistant to the artistic and even the historical archive? Wilson stopped making object-based art in 1968 and devoted himself entirely to conversation as an art form. Two years later, he gave a telling statement about why he chose language as his art:
I present oral communication as an object . . . all art is information and communication. I’ve chosen to speak rather than sculpt. I’ve freed art from a specific place. It’s now possible for everyone. I’m diametrically opposed to the precious object. My art is not visual, but visualized.[2]
I wrote to Wilson to ask him whether he missed making object-based art and time spent in the studio. I asked him this because it seemed to me there was a gentle and quietly elegiac quality to his early, object-based art that shone through even in the sparse amount of visual documentation I was able to secure from Dia on his work.
He replied:
No, I don’t miss making objects at all. I like the space I live in to be empty. But there are plenty of decisions involved in arranging discussions that have a structure that encourages participation: the subject (of the discussions), the number of people, etc. There are so many different types of discussions that require different approaches. The art system is the same as it was when I started. We were more critical of the establishment then.[3]
“I like the space I live in to be empty.” This line struck me. I live a rather quiet life with my wife and son. We do not have a television. We are not on social media. Nor do we subscribe to Netflix. We play with our little boy a lot. We read to him before he goes to sleep at night. And when there is time, I spend it working on my art. We do not believe in accumulating things and we have made it a habit to relinquish items to our neighborhood thrift store on a regular basis. But the space we live in is not empty. It is full.
———
When I participated in Wilson’s [The Pure Awareness of the Absolute / Discussions (2011–15) at Dia], I arrived about ten minutes early to find a group of people sitting in a circle that was approximate to the size of Wilson’s Chalk Circle on the Floor of 1968. This work now takes on new meaning for me as a spatial marker for a participatory dialogue in the round. It is no longer possible for me to see it exclusively as a reductivist gesture, for there is now always an accompanying image that I have of strangers seated together and opening up to one another through self-reflection.
Prior to the start of the [Discussions session], no one spoke to one another. The ambience was both hallowed and awkward, with some browsing their smartphones and others simply sitting in anticipation of the arrival of the artist. When Wilson did arrive, I found myself sitting to his immediate right. The session began with a series of questions in the manner of a Socratic inquiry:
Could we agree that there is an Absolute?
Can we agree that the Absolute can be experienced?
Can we agree we can be aware of experiencing the Absolute?
And so on.
Again, it is the asking of questions that is important. Wilson’s use of the “we” is significant in that it implicated each one of us in what was being discussed. As people shared their thoughts, I could not help but study Wilson’s visage. He [was] a tall man with the cellophane skin of age. Lodged in his right ear was a hearing aid, which was always in view to me. The session was regularly punctuated by his request to whomever spoke to “speak up” since he had such difficulty hearing what was said. I was moved by his vulnerability and the earnestness of his pleas for people to allow him to hear what they had to say. He genuinely wanted to hear answers to questions that he knows cannot be answered with any certainty.
Toward the end of the Discussion, Wilson surprised me when he recounted a recent trip he made to Berlin. He said that he had always wanted to visit the Neue Nationalgalerie of Mies van der Rohe in Berlin. He said that he was sure that he would encounter the Absolute there because he believed that extreme aesthetic beauty could bring one to an experience of the Absolute. . . . Upon encountering the museum, he felt nothing. But then he said that he noticed a brother and sister at play in the open plaza that envelops Mies’s edifice. The brother was playing on a precarious ledge and soon admonished by his mother for doing so. This caused the young boy to cry. Seeing his tears, his sister embraced him to console him. At that moment, Wilson said, he sensed the Absolute.
———
Vancouver-born artist Ken Lum is professor and chair of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He has taken part in many group exhibitions including Documenta and the Gwangju, Shanghai, São Paulo, Sydney, and Whitney biennials. He co-organized the first international curators’ tour of China in 2000, which included former Dia Art Foundation curator Lynne Cooke. Lum was project manager of the seminal The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York City, in 2002. He has also been involved in a number of important curatorial projects, including Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945 (2004–05), Sharjah Biennial 7: Becoming (2005), and Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (2017). An active writer, Concordia University Press recently published his book Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018. He is also cofounder and founding editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Additionally, Lum has created public art commissions for cities including Leiden, Saint Louis, Toronto, Utrecht, Vancouver, and Vienna.
[1] Ian Wilson, “Conceptual Art” (1994), in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), p. 416.
[2] Ian Wilson, quoted in Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, ed. Donald Karshan (New York: New York Cultural Center, 1970), p. 33.
[3] Ian Wilson, letter to the author, October 28, 2013. Personal collection of Ken Lum.
