Untitled (Floor 3)

‘The public reaction is often surprising. People kept talking about the floor getting dirty, but it wasn’t really about that at all. The first time I covered a gallery with insulation board, I knew that people would walk on it and ruin the floor, but I was stunned that they would write or draw on the walls. At Paula’s opening, though, people didn’t get close to the painting. They stood at the edge of the big space and kept a distance as if out of respect. Also, lots of people couldn’t remember what the gallery floor had been like before. It reminded me of some shows of Michael Asher, another big influence on my work, where sometimes you don’t even notice that he’s done anything. The strong response to the show makes me think you need to be representational in order to affect the greater public, but I never try to come up with some diabolical strategy to capture the public’s attention. Sometimes it just happens. I guess I go for absolutes’

(R. Stingel, quoted in C.S. Rabinowitz, ‘1000 Words: Rudolf Stingel’, in Artforum, May 2005, pp. 220-221).