Walter Benjamin, according to Hannah Arendt who knew him well, was interested only in correspondences between different sorts of phenomena a street scene, speculation on the stock exchange, a poem, a thought the hidden line that holds them together. Benjamin spoke of his “attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality.” He searched for objects that could themselves contain everything else. What fascinated Benjamin, she says, was never an idea, it was always an existent thing. He pointed approvingly at Brecht’s notion of crude thinking. For only crude thinking finds I say the crude being of objects themselves the crude presence, I mean, of those encapsulating objects Benjamin searched for: objects that contain everything else and change everything else the objects I wish now to think of as our only models for sculpture.

My sculptures are, and should actually be, conceptually interchangeable with each other interchangeable not in terms of what they say or what they look like, but rather in what they actually do. For they are all meant to do the same thing; exactly the same thing. They are not meant to call attention to their individuality. They are, for me, all the same. Yet, their interchangeability itself is not what is important either. What they all equally do, what they all equally point at what they all equally replace is what interests and excites me. They hold me by that replacement. (For they do all hold me.) They hold me by the peculiar and stub- bornly consistent strangeness of the very differ- ent places they continue to make and shape.

Crude Thinking: American Art Against European Culture.
Lund, Sweden: Lunds Konsthall, 1995