"Age Piece - All Is One"
1972
Installation
Venice Biennale
Venice, Italy
1976

In 1972, at the age of thirty, I was thinking over my evolution as an artist, and realized how many specific, concentrated groups of work there were that represented different periods of my art life. I thought that it would be important for me to make a piece to show this evolution, not unlike a personal retrospective. It also seemed important to see and feel this evolution as continuous - one life with changes in it. As a youngster, I had always been impressed by Picasso's different periods - the Blue period, the Rose period, the Saltimbanque period, the Cubist period - and that an artist could do different things and could work in many different styles. I wanted to make a work of art that would show my changes, so I made a sketch in which I slowly isolated my different work periods from the time I began seriously making art at age 8 to that moment - age 30. I decided which was the key work from each period that still existed. I wanted to fit these into a sequence that would be placed along a wall with the ages at which they were completed written over them. The sketch itself was included in the work at age 30, but it included blanks for ages 34 and 40, which would balance the yearly increments at the beginning of the piece and create a perfect symmetry with age 24 in the center. At age 34, I added a wall drawing, a dream (see A15 below) and at age 40 I added one of my chattering men with a motorized mouth and a digital sound system (see A15 below). I think of this "Age Piece", which was conceived in 1972, as my first real installation. The wall was painted grey, which helped to pull all the pieces together into "one work" as well as frame the white conceptual pages (age 26 and 27). I painted the ages directly on the wall. The idea and feeling was the same as most of my later installations: that All Is One, that many disparate parts create the whole, and that everything is connected to everything else.