SS: Let's talk about their function within the museum.

FW: It exposes them to the museum as a viewing space, as a place where ideas are presented, aestheticized, and consumed. Aesthetic issues aren't in play when an inflatable water tank is being used to fight a fire. These objects need the museum to raise these questions, because when they are out in the world you never really "see" them.

SS: Moving these things into the gallery space is a classic maneuver. It brings them into a "wrong" context that allows them to be perceived aesthetically, as sexy, tactile, wellmade objects. It also provides a little breathing room so one can think about them not only in relation to art-historical categories like "minimal sculpture" and "found object," but also in relation to their actual use. In the gallery, they can raise questions about complex issues of sustainability and design in a way that wouldn't be possible when they are used for disaster response.

FW: Yes. I don't think of this as sculpture. I think of them as part of a conceptual project, as props that elucidate a conceptual framework. I really don't think of these as sculpture, because that gets into a peripheral inquiry about authorship, craft, and uniqueness. Of course the minimalist sculptors in the 1960s opened this door; they had other people make their work and established that the artist's hand and touch did not have to exist in the work, which was already hinted at by numerous other works- Duchamp's art, collage, etc. The minimalists made this really clear. I just walked through the door they opened by appropriating these inflatables into my own work.

SS: To me, what you are doing seems more akin to a readymade: you're recontextualizing something that already exists. These make me think more of Duchamp's Trйbuchet (1917), in which he placed a hat rack on the floor. The simple act of displacement trips you up, traps your attention, and opens up other ways of experiencing this thing.

FW: Yes, but they still relate more to minimalism formally. As an artist, although maybe not so much for a general visitor, these objects are familiar; they evoke the forms of minimal sculpture so they seem familiar and right in the gallery. The minimalists took their language from industry, and I am putting it back. We can skip the stage of making work in an industrial manner and just go get the industrial thing. I did make some aesthetic choices; I paid attention to things like size, shape, and color when I requested these objects. Not just any inflatable would work well in this context. I was playing up their primary-ness, their primary structure-ness. I wanted to include a variety of objects not just for the sake of the taxonomy but also to get the most formal mileage that I could out of each one.

SS: Could you talk about the title of the piece? Primary Plus relates these industrial objects to art, since Primary Structures (1966) was the title of the first museum show of minimalism. But what else did you want to evoke?

FW: I am definitely thinking about them as primary structures. Also their colors aren't primary but they're close, they're crayon colors. They're primal, too.

SS: And by primal you also mean their use in the world, dealing with our basic needs for water and safety?

FW: Yes.

SS: It's interesting to think about another tension or ambiguity, this time between objects that meet a primal need and those that, when presented as art, have a kind of playfulness-here as a side effect of being inflatable.

FW: Yes. When they're inflated they appear cheerful and comic, and depending on how they are laying around the space, they can look very humorous.

SS: Sitting here in your studio, I'm looking at a black, nonpotable water tank. It's partly the angle at which I'm viewing it, but there's a certain menace to it. The ways these are presented will definitely have an impact on the attitudes that people attach to them.

FW: Absolutely. Their position in space is really important, because it establishes not only the formal configuration, but also the mood. Proximity is also significant-the degree to which the public is allowed to walk right up to them and begin to use their bodies consciously or unconsciously to measure what size they truly are.

SS: These configurations will change as the show travels: each venue will have the opportunity to choose from a "menu" of inflatables that you've provided, to create arrangements that suit their spaces.

FW: As I said, I think configuration is important. You need at least two, since they inform each other visually. A configuration might also include stacks of the uninflated folded ones or their carrying cases. When they first arrived, they were each packaged in their own individual carrying case with nylon rope and grommets and plastic ties. They're portable; they stack; they go where they need to go for emergency response.

SS: We've talked about reasons why these forms are visually satisfying and how they can connect back to different moments in art history and to things that are familiar from everyday experience, but the visual connections fall flat unless the objects can trigger reflection about these other networks you mention.

FW: It is hard for me to think about that aspect of my work. Yet people point it out to me, and at moments like this, as I try to unpack something with assistance, I start to see it-many of my works are about systems but are manifest as objects or things. The way material culture operates, the knowledge objects hold, and the cultural roles that they play as embodiments of systems, are not very well understood. It's hard to talk about, but that's really at the heart of my interest in sculpture.