I’d like to begin by thanking Dianne Brown and Mamikon Yengibarian for the kind invitation to speak at the opening this evening.  It’s a pleasure to be here, and to share some thoughts about this installation.  

There’s a nice irony in holding the opening of the installation “Spider City” today.  As it happens, today is the birthday of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who was born the morning of October 15, 1844.  As it also happens, spiders are a recurring motif and metaphor for Nietzsche, appearing quite often throughout his work.  The spider and
web-spinning appear as a symbol of the activities of philosophy, science, and theology; certain philosophers are unflatteringly called spiders; and the spider even makes unexpected and somewhat incongruous, though poetic, appearances at various points: “And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things - must we not all have been here before?”  

What is interesting is that Nietzsche’s position on the spider is ambiguous; that is, sometimes he portrays the spider as a positive symbol of self-generating creation and construction, and at others more negatively as a cunning predator and parasite.  I don’t think we should see this as Nietzsche contradicting himself, but rather that he has a dual view of the spider: he both admires and fears it.  So the spider is neither positive nor negative, but both.

There’s a similar ambiguity in the spider we see before us here.  On the one hand, it is gigantic, not just many times larger than usual spider size, but larger than human size.  As such, it dwarfs us and the boy on the stool behind.  At the same time, though, the spider does not seem terribly threatening.  Its legs are light lyrical lines, tracing a sweeping curve, ending in curled feet, which do not look so much like spider feet, but complete and mirror the curve of the legs.  If anything, the boy’s legs, missing their feet, look more like spider legs than the spider’s own legs do, as do the similarly shaped legs of the stool.  The spider is not fixed, but suspended; it moves, it can be moved, it dances in a solitary spider-dance.  This spider seems as if it could or should pose a certain danger, yet it does not seem dangerous.  Its form is also ambiguous—a spider form? a human body?—in any case if humanoid, it is androgynous, with the sex remaining ambiguous, and if anything the spider’s back seems to be turned away from the boy, and the boy seems relaxed.  So is the spider in fact not dangerous – or is this merely part of its cunning, luring us to let down our guard?

The tall stool represents a distant perch for the boy, isolating him and creating his separate solitude.  It at once separates him from the spider, raising him out of immediate danger, yet at such a great height poses a danger in itself.  Would the boy in fact be safer on the ground, even given the proximity to the giant spider?  The boy has legs, once again, resembling spider legs more than the actual spider’s, but he does not have clear arms, or if he does, they are tight against his body, virtually invisible.  In this way, the boy resembles a spider, which has no arms, but is all legs.  But while the spider dances, the boy sits immobile.  Is the spider dangerous or not?  Is the boy safe or not?  I think here again we have to answer: Both.  Security and danger co-exist as two facets of the same coin.  The boy on his tall stool is apparently safe from the spider, but at any time he could fall off his stool.  And then be captured by the spider.  Or maybe simply join the spider-dance.

Finally, what of the web?  In the cultural imagination spiders are inseparable from their web.  But here there is no web.  Although fittingly, when we were here the other evening viewing the installation, I spotted a spider—a real one and usual spider size—dropping from the top of the stool, walking along the top rung, and beginning to spin a web on the leg.  Has the giant spider spun a web, or not yet?  Or is it we who will spin webs—organisations, networks, and representations of culture, social relationships, beliefs, and philosophies?  Are we indeed the creators of “Spider City”?

And here we can come back once again to Nietzsche.  While the spider’s web sometimes represents deception and entrapment for Nietzsche, here again there is also a positive image.  He admires the spider’s web: because the web is delicate, and yet despite its fragility is extremely strong, and finally because the spider makes its web not with materials it finds outside itself, but rather that it manufactures from within itself.  Thus, while the bee or ant work with what they can find, the spider is a creative artist who functions as a model for us humans as a “genius of construction”.  Insofar as “man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.”  In the case of “Spider City” we have the synthesis of all of these: shaping delicate ideas with wax, ideas drawn as a web from within the artist.  The resulting web that is spun, the delicate concept made visible and tangible, is the essence of the artwork itself.


Thank you very much.