[sweet, lilting piano]
The Met was a great babysitter. Growing up,
we would come to The Met almost every weekend.
Mom would drop us off in the grand hall,
and then she would go take art lessons,
so I was in charge of my brother and sister.
We were in and amongst the crowds, looking at what we wanted to look at,
going from gallery to gallery until mom finished.
One day, my mom and sister were looking at a particular gallery.
In a chair very far behind one of those velvet ropes they saw a piece of popcorn.
They both wondered,
"How could that piece of popcorn get there unless someone was sitting in
that chair after hours, and perhaps,
maybe even living in the Museum after hours?"
So that crept into my mom's mind to start to formulate a story.
She went by her initials, E.L. Konigsburg,
because in the sixties, if you were female,
it was going to be more difficult to be published.
So she started writing "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler."
It's a story of Claudia and Jamie,
two children who run away from home because of all the injustices
(having to do chores and things like that).
And so they decide to live in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jamie was a mixture of both me and my brother, in terms of personality.
Claudia was almost all my sister.
At the time, we were all in elementary school, and we would come home for lunch.
Mom would write in the morning,
and then she would read to us what she had written that day.
Basically, if we'd laugh, she kept it, if we didn't laugh; she rewrote it.
This is the scene in the book just after Claudia and Jamie hid in the bathrooms
and they came out,
and they're trying to figure out where they're going to spend the night.
"They wandered back to the rooms of the fine French and English furniture.
It was here Claudia knew for sure that she had chosen
the most elegant place in the world to hide.
She wanted to sit on the lounge chair that had been made for Marie Antoinette,
or at least sit at her writing table.
But the signs everywhere said not to step on the platform.
She would have to wait until after lights out to be Marie Antoinette.
At last, she found a bed to be considered perfectly wonderful,
and she told Jamie that they would spend the night there."
My mom loved words and she really
liked the Japanese expression "yohaku."
It means the unpainted part of a painting.
It's why a comb is useful: it's not the prongs,
it's the holes between the prongs. It's why a cup is useful:
it's what it can contain. Sometimes it's called negative space.
It started in the Museum, where she would describe the unsaid part,
the unpainted part, the part that the reader could fill in,
the spaces that were left untold.
The fact that this place could be a home
opens up that adventure.
She's writing about a young girl coming of age.
Coming to this museum as a child in charge of my brother and sister
was the start of the transformation of my own becoming an adult.
"From the Mixed-Up Files and Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" won the Newbery in 1968.
And once that happened, the fan mail greatly increased.
And Mom could see how the book was affecting many children's lives.
As time went on,
when the children were reading to their own children,
she really appreciated that the story, as she said,
"had legs," and could go on and be important for many, many generations.
[fan whir, mysterious music]
I feel like somewhere inside me, I am a nomad.
Even though this is my home right now,
I feel like I'm never going to be able to really make it mine.
All I can have and possess is my body and the things my body touches.
And that's my home, essentially.
In 2017, the Museum invited me to come do a performance at The Met.
I knew that the proposal would have to be something immersive
that I would have to live through.
And that resulted in a nine-day-long performance work,
living inside the Museum and occupying the Museum,
becoming part of the museum.
The Met houses objects from thousands of years,
so how do I place myself in that context?
There was this giant institution, this temple, this Mecca of art,
and I was a pilgrim.
While that felt enormous, it also felt empowering.
I have to embrace the institution that one carries within, as well.
My experiences that I've seen and lived through have been archived in this body.
On my research trip, I was not just looking at objects.
I was also looking at people and how people navigated through the Museum.
What were the spaces that they magnetized to?
As soon as people enter the Temple of Dendur they go from,
"I have to see everything in the Museum" to "I have to stop."
They're in awe of this incredible feat,
which is to have transported this building and placed in this museum.
While I was going to bring my private life into the Museum,
I was very aware that I was going to create,
within a public space, this little voyeuristic crack.
In a public space, it's probably impolite to stare, right? But in this context,
I set up that staring.
I wanted to disturb that flow of the Museum.
I wanted people to stop in their tracks and take a look.
It was going to be a tricky one to find a place for me to sleep,
because there are very strict conditions that the Museum has.
So my wife, Madhavi, said, "Why can't you spend the night on stage?"
There was something quite madly odd about looking at empty
seats and rolling out my bed and performing, in a sense,
the act of sleeping for no one.
Or performing for the ghosts, because don't forget,
the auditorium is right next to the Egyptian section.
I knew that I couldn't be in a more secure situation,
because I was being guarded like all other objects in The Met,
but the slightest sound would wake me up.
I would feel the presence of something or someone other than me.
It was obviously my imagination of the Museum
and the curse, perhaps, of collection.
I felt the weight of that when I was on my own with
absolutely no one in the Museum with me.
After about five or six days of being in that space,
the hum of the Museum and the smell of the Museum really got into my
nose and into my ears.
And it did come to a point where I was feeling closed in and boxed in.
And that's where the Museum said, "Hey, listen,
we've managed to open up the terrace for you,
if you'd like to go upstairs for some air."
It was probably the most magical encounter that I've
had with the outdoors,
because I never thought that it would be so difficult,
living inside all the time.
Placing yourself in these positions that are uncomfortable and
vulnerable allow for a certain kind of transformation.
Towards the end of the piece I was dissolving myself
into my work, becoming more and more distant from the audience.
I had become way more of an object than I had thought that I would become.
Everything in the Museum is rigid, framed,
preserved, stored, locked, vaulted, insured.
And the irony is that the artist is the complete diametric
opposite of that: alive, free, human, thinking, changing.
I was not going to be the object that passively sat behind a glass vitrine.
I was going to be the object that looked back at the audience.