To begin

In preparation for these lectures, I made a list of projects, drawings, films, installations and performances I could use as the spine of these talks—each lecture having a project, to be used both as a reference to what I was talking about, and also as raw material with which to think. Thinking in cardboard, or breath, or ink, or charcoal, or gesture. I wrote down all the projects I’ve done over the last ten years.

But then the list expanded from a list of specific films and installations and theatre productions to a larger list of all the things I had drawn in my forty-seven years in the studio.

I have drawn:

AN ACACIA TREE,

A PAPINO,

TWO LOVERS,

A PINSTRIPED SUIT,

A MAN IN A PINSTRIPED SUIT,

A COFFEE-POT,

ANOTHER COFFEE-POT,

THIRTY-EIGHT RHINOCERI.

A list many pages long.

A self-portrait in the third person

One can make a self-portrait out of these objects, these drawings, everything that emerges in pencil or charcoal; or rather one can’t escape these being a self-portrait of the…