What the Room Was Doing
An encounter with Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Chicago, 2003
For much of 2003 I was living between two cities. I was teaching at Parsons in New York on Mondays and Fridays, and at the University of Chicago on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Every Monday evening I would leave Parsons at six, take a cab to LaGuardia, land at O’Hare around eleven, and ride a bus and then a train to an apartment a friend had found for me on the North Side. Every Thursday afternoon I would reverse the trip. I did this for months and somehow never missed a class at either institution.
It was the kind of schedule that dissolves the boundary between places. You stop fully arriving anywhere. Each city becomes a condition you pass through rather than a location you inhabit. My apartment in Chicago was not quite an apartment — a loft on North Damon Street, still under renovation, not legally habitable, offered by a friend who told me that if anyone asked, I should say I was doing an artist residency in the space. “Some kind of durational installation,” he suggested. I slept on a vintage daybed in the middle of what would have been the living room, surrounded by building materials for other projects. The space was rough, provisional, between categories — not quite a home, not quite a construction site, not quite legal. I was at the beginning of my academic career, and everything felt like this: porous, unsettled, the edges of things not yet hardened into form.
During the spring quarter break I was on campus early, organizing supplies in the building where I taught — a structure everyone called the Art Barn, on the southwest corner of the campus. I was teaching two classes for non-majors — the University of Chicago had no formal studio art major at the time. The first was a drawing course designed not around technique but around attention: drawing as a way of learning to look, exercises that allowed students unfamiliar with the practice to let it open their eyes to the world around them. The second was a course called Robotic Arts, based on the work of the physicist Mark Tilden, whose BEAM robotics demonstrated that complex lifelike behavior — walking, obstacle avoidance, adaptive movement — could emerge from simple analog circuits without any programming at all. No code, no instructions, no predetermined outcomes: just coupled oscillators producing movement that appeared alive.
The two classes seemed unrelated. But I was teaching both through the same question: how does meaning appear rather than get recognized? In drawing, the students were learning to see what was in front of them before interpretation arrived. In robotics, they were watching behavior emerge from circuits that had no model of the behavior they were producing. Both practices — one ancient, one contemporary — were oriented toward the same threshold: the moment when something shows itself that was not predicted, not planned, and not contained in the method that made it possible.
I had been reading John Berger’s Ways of Seeing with the drawing students, and on the #5 bus that carried me to campus each day I would pass the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which was hosting a large-scale symposium on Berger’s work that spring. His ideas were in the air — the cultural mediation of perception, the difference between looking and seeing, the way institutions shape what we notice and what we ignore. I was swimming in these questions when I walked over to the Renaissance Society (founded in 1915 by University of Chicago faculty, it is one of the oldest and most prestigious galleries dedicated to Contemporary Art in the US) to see what they were showing. The gallery was mostly empty. Someone was preparing the space for an installation.
I called the office and spoke to a curator named Hamza Walker. He invited me over and told me about the next exhibition — a large-scale installation by the Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx, her first American museum show. I asked what the work would be. He said he wasn’t entirely sure, but was excited to see it unfold. Tuerlinckx was arriving the next day.
Two days later Hamza called the Art Barn and asked me to call him back. When I did, he asked if I spoke French — he had noticed my last name. I said it was my first language, though I was rusty. “Would you like to meet Joëlle?”
She had arrived with almost nothing. The gallery was at least a thousand square feet, she had about a week to install, and the materials she brought could have fit in a suitcase. I could sense the staff at the Renaissance Society oscillating between excitement and concern.
That afternoon I walked the campus with her, and then drove while she filmed from the passenger seat — documenting buildings, corridors, the shapes of light on floors, the way classrooms looked when they were empty. She had a habit of extending her arm and raising her thumb — the gesture of early cinematographers gauging distance and scale, the body’s most primitive instrument for measuring what’s in front of it. She filmed herself performing this gesture repeatedly as we moved through the institutional spaces, her thumb silhouetted against hazy, light-filled ambiences where the boundary between interior and exterior, between natural light and fluorescent, was already dissolving. These images — the thumb, the haze, the ambiguous light — would later appear in the archive she assembled as part of the installation: not an archive of what she found, but an archive of the act of looking itself. She spoke about time. Not clock time — institutional time. The rhythm of a university: classes beginning and ending, rooms filling and emptying, the building cycling through functions the way a body cycles through breath. She wanted to use this rhythm as the structure of her installation.
I was reading David Bohm and Francisco Varela at the time — Bohm’s argument that Western languages fragment the world into static objects, Varela’s idea that cognition is not a representation of a pre-given world but a bringing-forth through embodied action. I tried to discuss this with her in my deteriorating French. The ideas contributed to the atmosphere of our time together without generating a specific conversation. Joëlle was looking, actively, and the words — hers, mine, the French we shared imperfectly — were more poetic than discursive, contributing to her attention rather than directing it. She loved to stop and look. She would pause in a doorway and study how the light fell on a linoleum floor as if it were the most important thing happening on campus.
At one point she mentioned Duchamp — specifically Les étants donnés, his final work. The reference was to the concept of the “given” — the pre-existing conditions of a place, the things that are already there before the artist arrives. She was using her camera’s viewfinder as a way to locate and engage what is given, but her investigation felt kinetic to me — a process of unfoldment rather than a fixed gaze through a peephole. I was familiar with both of Duchamp’s late works, having visited them many times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and as she spoke I found myself thinking not of Étant donnés but of The Large Glass — the unfinished, cracked, transparent work that seemed closer to what she was actually doing: holding multiple elements in suspension without resolving them.
This slippage has stayed with me. To this day I sometimes need a moment to orient myself to the correct Duchamp work when discussing one or the other. The two have fused in my memory around the experience of that afternoon — walking a campus with an artist who was looking at everything as if it were already the work, as if the work were simply a way of attending to what was already there.
The exhibition, when it opened, was titled Chicago Studies: Les étants donnés — SPACE THESIS. The Duchamp citation was explicit. Tuerlinckx treated the gallery’s location in Cobb Hall — a building filled with active undergraduate classrooms — as the “given data” for her study. She used materials drawn from the institution itself: rolls of paper towels, highlighted calendars, pink “While You Were Out” message pads, custom furniture on wheels, plywood shelves, overhead projectors. Video and slide projections interacted with the shifting physical layout. Movable walls were repositioned throughout the day by gallery attendants following a detailed schedule, so the exhibition was never the same twice.
The overhead projectors were set up to cast squares of light, and the staff was given careful timings to move them in coordination with the sunlight that tracked slowly across the floors and walls of the gallery throughout the day. Natural light and artificial light were hybridized — you could not always tell which was which, or where the institution’s illumination ended and the artist’s began. The periodic rearrangement of walls and furniture mirrored the multipurpose rhythm of the building itself — classrooms becoming lecture halls becoming seminar rooms becoming empty — spaces that contain thought by setting it apart from the physical world, then releasing it, then containing it again.
Hamza told me that visitors would sometimes approach the gallery’s large glass entry doors, peer inside, and turn away — as if they thought the gallery was closed or the installation wasn’t finished. The work looked, from outside, like a room being prepared for something that hadn’t arrived yet.
I thought of Duchamp’s door in Philadelphia. Étant donnés is behind an old wooden door in a small alcove of the museum. You have to find it, approach it, and look through two small peepholes to see the tableau inside. Visitors often study the exterior of the door and walk away, never realizing there is something to look through. Two works, separated by decades and an ocean, producing the same structural effect: the encounter that almost doesn’t happen because the threshold doesn’t announce itself as a threshold.
But here is where Tuerlinckx’s work departed from Duchamp’s, at least for me. The Duchamp reference in the title felt — and I say this with respect for an artist whose work changed something in me permanently — like a kind of closure. A citation of an institution to lend credibility to an investigation that didn’t need it. Her work was more alive than the frame she placed around it. The installation was an institutional critique, yes, but it was also an institutional critique that relied on another institution — the legacy of Duchamp — for its own legibility. To my young mind, this was the one element that didn’t quite belong. The work itself was doing something Duchamp’s title could name but couldn’t contain.
What the work was doing — what it did to me, and what has remained — was operating at the edge where meaning appears and disappears. Not illustrating that edge. Occupying it.
The details I cannot recall, all these years later: the specific materials, what was written in the books she created, what the data contained on the ad-hoc research tables that reminded me of an archaeological dig. These have faded. But her focus was on ephemerality, and what has persisted is not information about the work but a quality the work disclosed — something I can only call awe, though the word feels too large and too simple.
Not curiosity. Curiosity is a search for understanding — a looking-at, a being-apart-from, where data serves as a border condition that maintains distance. Curiosity accumulates. It gathers information about a thing without ever quite arriving at the thing itself. What Tuerlinckx’s installation produced was the dissolution of that distance — using the very materials of knowledge and documentation to undo the pursuit of knowledge. Using data to dissolve data. Using the furniture of the institution to make the institution transparent.
What remains is awe. What proved ephemeral was everything else.
This was, to me, a profound accomplishment: an artwork that used the instruments of analysis to arrive at something analysis cannot reach. How the work puzzled many of the visitors — some of them among the most accomplished students in the world — was itself part of what it disclosed. The puzzlement was not a failure of the audience. It was the work working. The students were trained to analyze, to accumulate understanding, to convert encounter into knowledge. And here was a space that rewarded none of that — that asked only for attention, and returned something that attention alone could not have predicted.
Here is something I have never fully understood, and perhaps the essay can hold it without explaining it.
The encounter with Tuerlinckx’s work was among the most significant of my life as an artist. I have spoken about it to students for over twenty years. I have described the light, the movable walls, the schedules, the visitors turning away at the glass doors. The experience has remained generative — a reference point, a touchstone, a moment when I understood something about what art could do that I had not understood before.
And yet I have never sought out her subsequent work. Not out of disinterest. Not out of judgment. I have simply never felt the need. The encounter was sufficient.
I don’t think I am monumentalizing it — holding it in place, converting it into a fixed reference. If anything, it has continued to unfold. The thought of it refreshes itself each time I return to it, as if the work’s commitment to ephemerality has imprinted on the memory itself, keeping it alive by keeping it unfinished. The experience was so thoroughly about the appearance of meaning — meaning arriving at the threshold of visibility and withdrawing before it could be captured — that pursuing more of Tuerlinckx’s work feels, somehow, beside the point. Not because the subsequent work wouldn’t be valuable, but because the encounter was never about accumulating an understanding of her practice. It was about being present for something that appeared, briefly, in a room on the South Side of Chicago in the spring of 2003, and that has never quite stopped appearing.
One encounter, genuinely met, turns out to be inexhaustible.
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