And there are too many to say anything about all of them. And so I'm going to go through some of them fairly rapidly, because I want to give you a sense of the scope of what I think my project as an artist has been. In the beginning, I think I'll say a little bit more about the first set of couplets that come up, because I think it's important to talk about the reasons why things are the way they are. But let me start, since the title of my talk was "As Luck Would Have It," and, of course, as luck would have it, I find myself standing on the stage in the University of Chicago's auditorium trying to make a speech about my work that brought me to this place.
And so the beginning of this talk may seem a little disjointed, but I think this first set of comments is kind of an important way of thinking about how we move through our lives and arrive at places where a reassessment of who we are and what we did seems appropriate. And so I'll just start with this, and I'll go through these things. And at some point I'll start flipping through some of the slides. So the way I'm going to start is this. So time is what I'm going to start with. So time, I'm going to say, is the bane of our existence. At birth we are inaugurated into the regime of time keeping since we have no working concept of the utility of time. But from that moment on, we began to run out of time. But we cannot know how much of it we will have. But still many of us don't make good use of our time until the end of it seems near. Making time doesn't add one minute to the time of a day. Although wasting time, leaves you less of it for completing tasks that must be finished on time, but which all too often are mostly done in the nick of time. So in this year, with a major retrospective of my work finishing its time at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, after being at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and opening here at the MCA in Chicago, this seems to have been my time to shine. So I've just this morning received the third honorary degree of my career from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And now I'm back at the U of C to complete requirements that came with the Rosenberger Medal I received last year at about this time. So the thing is if I did not have art making as an occupation, I probably would have become a professional gambler. Indeed, for anybody who knows me, it would be a gross understatement to say about me that I love winning. But what I love more than winning is I love the game. I love the competition. And winning is all the sweeter when you beat the odds in a game you already know is stacked against you. So what appeals to my sensibility is developing a strategy, testing its efficacy, and measuring the degree to which its implementation succeeds or fails its intended purpose. So it can now be told that I have been gambling for most of my life, just as I have been making pictures for most of my life as well, and that both these interests seem to have merged at the same time and, therefore, have had profound effects, each on the other. My first high stakes play for money was a card game called tunk. Now some people in the audience may know that game. So I learned to play this game at about age 6 or 7. My father had staked the pot with pennies that my brother Wayne and I could win as we played with him. We had nothing to lose, of course, but when Wayne had bench 5 cents, he was done and announced his plan to hit the corner store for some candy.
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AuthorEva Dunlopd Archives
March 2019
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