For this Montage sequence with Tony Cragg, produced on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in Los Angeles, I began from a deliberately neutral position. The filming logic was almost bureaucratic: fixed walls, prescribed paths, repeatable actions. Tony circumambulates one sculpture, then another, then crosses a second room moving left to right and right to left. The camera does not dramatize these movements or search for revelation. It simply registers position, direction, and duration, treating the gallery as a system of coordinates rather than a stage.
This approach borrows from conceptual strategies that privilege description over interpretation. By limiting the shot language and directing the subject through clear, almost administrative instructions, the film resists expressive authorship in favor of structure. Tony’s movement around the sculptures mirrors the viewer’s own habitual behavior in a gallery, pacing, circling, returning, recalibrating. The work unfolds through repetition and minor variation, allowing meaning to surface through accumulation rather than emphasis.
Only after the film was shot did the writing take shape. The script is reverse-engineered from the footage, written in response to what already occurred rather than guiding it. In this sense, the text functions less as narration than as a record, closing the loop between action and description. Like Tony’s repeated movements through the rooms, the film appears to conclude but remains open, a sequence that documents a moment while leaving the larger sculptural conversation ongoing.
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