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Theaster Gatesand Hesse McGrawin conversationTheaster Gates: I am spending more timetalking about space than anything else.Hesse McGraw: What else is there?TG: Ideology, objects, music, clichés. But spacefeels best.HM: Much of your work has been aboutcreating space for those other things to cometogether in orchestrated ways, in places wherethat coming together might be unexpected.The spaces create torrents of surprise.TG: The part that feels weird, though, is thatthere’s all of this examining and critique aroundwhat’s best for an artist to think about. What’smost efficient? What pays the most money?What is the ultimate ambition?How did we get so essential about everything?Artists no longer have the ability to justdo the things that [they] want to do or love todo. The idea of space, because I can’t imagine itfully, because it escapes me, because it’s too big… it feels like it’s the right size.HM: A larger issue that you’re confronting,or that the expanding scope of your practice isconfronting, is actually a limiting perspectiveabout who artists are and what artists mightdo and what artists have access to. From criticaland curatorial perspectives, it is easier when,in a sense, we know what we’re going to get,but also, in a sense, when an artist’s work isidentifiable, when the work is legible in asuccinct and clear way.TG: But that’s part of the problem.HM: That is the problem. It’s a problem in relationshipto other disciplines, even. The kind offluidity that, let’s say, Rem Koolhaas has, or otherdesign practitioners, or that even a filmmakermight have, is amazing. Those individuals are atthe helm of a large team, realizing many differentkinds of projects in many different kinds ofplaces. We are resistant to artist-polymaths.Why doesn’t that latitude extend to contemporaryartists?TG: Because artists have museums and architectshave the world. Because artists [make] dotson houses, like the Heidelberg Project, whileplanners rezone an area. That is, the form thatwe, as artists, get to play with, the form that wefeel power over, the form that we’ve been givenlegal, governmental, or cultural agency over, differs.If the only form that we think we have theright to respond to is narrowly contested gesturalform, then the world has succeeded atkeeping the smartest motherfuckers busy twiddlingtheir thumbs, navel-gazing, making gesturaleffects while more conventional thinkersare doing the other, more critical, more lucrativework that really needs creative, imaginative peopleto lead.It’s true that, historically, breakthroughs haveoccurred in museum spaces and in galleryspaces. But it’s also true that some of the greatestcontributions that have been made by artistshave been made outside of [art] spaces.HM: I think too often we have been content tounderstand artists’ activities as presaging a biggerthing that will happen at a later time⎯thethings that Gordon Matta-Clark or Chris Burden