Edited for neither truth nor sincerity

Steven: One of your most enigmatic works is The Sound of Ice Melting. Can you tell me what this piece is about?

Paul: Yes, but first I want to tell you what other people have said. I made the piece in spring of 1970 for an exhibition at the Museum of Conceptual Art called Sound Sculpture As. Actually, it was more like a concert. Tom Marioni got up on a ladder and pissed down into a pail. Mel Henderson fired a gun at the projection of a tiger. Arlo Acton passed out crickets to the audience, then drove a metal ball through a pane of glass to end the show.

Steven: Hilarious.

Paul: The simpler folk who were there assumed Ice Melting was a joke because I constructed an elaborate production to amplify an object that made no sound.

Steven: That would be me.

Paul: More soulful people came away with the idea that I was sculpting with silence, which I took as a great compliment because silence is an incredibly rich and mysterious property that goes largely unexplored by artists.

Steven: By critics, too.

Paul: Lots of people, though, didn’t think Ice Melting was about silence at all. In the same way that John Cage’s 4’33 isn’t about silence. It’s about the world of things that happen within the hearing of the audience during the performance. The squeak of the piano stool, the coughs, the turning of the sheet music. Ice Melting is that plus the little details the mics pick up. The hum and feedback from the amplifiers. Everything, in fact, but the sound of ice melting, which doesn’t produce enough sound, even amplified, for the human ear to detect.

Steven: Am I wrong in noting that The Sound of Ice Melting rhymes with the sound of one hand clapping.

Paul: Not at all. Many people said Ice Melting was the visual analogue for a Buddhist koan. They described me as a shaman who creates sensory paradoxes that induce states of meditation which take us to existential spaces beyond conventional meaning.

Steven: That’s a nice compliment.

Paul: They also noted a kind of witchcraft in the way I was able to defamiliarize something as common as the ice cube and exploit its molecular instability for cultural significance.

Steven: You’ve done that kind of thing a fair amount in your career.

Paul: When I used ice to make a lens that starts a fire I I feel like I conjured up a sense wonderment about the material world that you don’t get watching nature shows.

Steven: The relationship of sound, or the lack thereof, to the visual also seems critical in this work.

Paul: The installation looks like a press conference. However, because of the title, the viewer is always trying to translate what they see into what they hear. Except what they hear is silence, so the connection between the senses is short circuited.

Steven: Has anyone ever described a synesthetic encounter with The Sound of Ice Melting?

Paul: One lady came up to me at the Guggenheim when it was shown there as part of The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia and told me the piece gave her vertigo.

Steven: The silence was so existential it disoriented her?

Paul: I think it was the spiral staircase. But you have put your finger on another important reading. People knew I was into Samuel Beckett back then. So they assumed the withholding response from the ice to the pleading attention of the mics had something to do with the existential dread in Waiting for Godot.

Steven: I can see that.

Paul: They also said Ice Melting parodied the media’s amplification of banality, and was an homage to Warhol, that even something as common as ice would have its 15 minutes of fame.

Steven: I can see that too.

Paul: Still other people took away a loss of faith in institutional authority because the official voices that normally hold press conferences are replaced by the inarticulate sounds of geology, the buzzing of the molecular world.

Steven: That seems more relevant than ever.

Paul: For a long time many of the people who talked about the installation had only ever seen a photo of it. This gave the work a mythic quality, like Duchamp’s Fountain, or the moon landing.

Steven: Did that affect what people said?

Paul: You tell me. One critic said the installation captured the metaphysical desire in technology to return us to a prelapsarian state of being with god.

Steven: That’s one I had not thought of.

Paul: These readings are all interesting. And I’m grateful to the audience for producing them. I never dreamed I could engender such poetry and intellectual creativity in people. Their words now envelop the work like a beautiful mist. But they have nothing to do with my intentions.

Steven: Isn’t it a bit egotistical to think that you can know the full scale of your own intentions.

Paul: Ice Melting’s ability to be different things to different people is one of its strengths. However, when you hear what I am about to tell you, I think you will agree that my intentionality is more consequential than the viewership’s.

Steven: Okay, then, let’s hear it.

Paul: In the years before I made Ice Melting I was living in San Francisco and playing pétanque in Golden Gate Park. As you and I know, pétanque is the French version of bocce ball. You play with steel boules, and you throw them backhanded.

Steven: Your devotion to the game is legendary. You made an art work based on it.

Paul: Several. Art and pétanque have a lot in common. Both are totally absurd activities best done when the mind is blank. If you want to succeed, you can’t grip too tightly. You have to relax and let the gods and muses work their magic through you.

Steven: Easier said than done.

Paul: People are always happy when playing pétanque. It’s a target game, and being on target is a primal satisfaction. But it’s the pointlessness of it all that really animates pétanque. Inside that rectangular court is a dream world where nothing matters but the feel of the ball leaving your hands and the clacking sound it makes when it strikes another ball. Your mind rests in a way it can only do when you are sleeping or meditating.

Steven: This is true for a lot of sports.

Paul: In the 1960s, almost all the pétanque players in San Francisco were French ex-pats. Chefs and maîtres d’s, importers and exporters, people who knew how to have a good time. Sometimes too good.

Steven: I sense a twist in the tale.

Paul: One Tuesday in the winter of 1968, I was down at the park playing doubles. It was mid afternoon. The sun was out. The wind was down. And most of us were pretty tipsy. As you know in pétanque you have pointers and shooters. I like to be the shooter. And a guy named François, who disappeared shortly after this game, was my pointer. It was his turn. He was in the circle and I was standing behind him. I could tell he was drunk because he kept dropping his boules on the ground.

Steven: They make a very specific thud.

Paul: The next thing I know, I’m on the ground, and a stricken Francois is looking down at me. The ball slipped out of his hand on the backswing and hit me in the head. They told me I twitched for a few seconds, and was out for two or three minutes. As a welt the size of a snow globe blew up on my forehead, I told them I remembered nothing. But I was lying. I knew something had happened. I just didn’t have the words to describe it.

Steven: But you had an image!

Paul: Later that night I was home in bed with an ice pack on my head with Marlene, my wife at the time. I was trying to stay awake as long as possible because everyone kept warning me if I fell asleep I might never wake up.

Steven: That’s an old wives’ tale.

Paul: The pilot episode for the detective show Columbo is on. I find myself in a dark place with a huge spotlight shining down on me from above. I can’t tell if I am indoors or outdoors. But I can sense strange beings all around me in a circle. Up steps a young girl in an old fashioned dress, and she offers me her hand. I take it and we reappear in a small, silver room where I can see a distorted reflection of myself in the paint. Then we go to another room where I feel like I’m being prepped and dressed by invisible hands even though I still have on the gym shorts and tee shirt I wore to bed. Then we go out through a circular hall to another room. This one has a window. And through that window I can see that we are way up in the sky looking down on San Francisco. The window is a magnifying lens that allows me to see what’s going on in close-up detail. It’s like looking at a Pieter Bruegel painting. People are frenetic and oblivious to each other. As we start pulling away from this spectacle, I get the horrible feeling that a cord is being cut, that I am leaving my old life, and that I will never see it again.

Steven: I am confused. Are you awake or asleep?

Paul: The ship silently zooms north by northwest. We pause over my parents’ house in Rock Springs. It’s all changed from the time I lived there, but I can still see the old town, Flaming Gorge, the vastness of the Rockies. We keep heading north, past the Dakotas, over Canada, until we arrive at the North Pole. There isn’t a sign or a polar bear, or even an iceberg. It is all just water reflecting the sun. But a sharp pain in my gut tells me we are there and that something bad is happening. After what feels like a very long time or the blink of an eye we return to San Francisco from the south, coming in over the Bay like the planes do. I get excited because I think, finally, I get to go home. Except San Francisco is all water too. I can just barely make out the tops of the downtown skyscrapers. Then we are under the water and there it is before me, like the lost City of Atlantis. An underwater tomb. As we hover there, I wonder if New York is under water, and if Paris is under water. Then I am back in my bed. It seems like I have been gone for weeks or months, but there is Marlene, snoring away, and Columbo politely accusing a psychiatrist of murder.

Steven: Let me see if I understand this correctly. You are saying Ice Melting was inspired by a prophecy of climate change.

Paul: It speaks to the disruption of the earth’s hydrologic cycle.

Steven: And the idea came to you during an extended bout of airborne clairvoyance in the custody of aliens.

Paul: I only ever saw the little girl, but I believe that is accurate.

Steven: This work’s been shown and written about many times. Why have you never said anything before?

Paul: At first, I didn’t want to be branded a crazy person. I had two young kids when I made the work. I didn’t want to lose my teaching jobs. I needed the money.

Steven: At some point you achieved a level of stature and financial security.

Paul: By then it had receded into memory. I could no longer be sure if it was a dream or if it actually happened. And conceding its reality was too painful. Too horrible. So much of the world I took for granted would have been canceled if it were true.

Steven: Why speak up now?

Paul: Because I can’t take it anymore. It haunts me all the time. Even while I’m playing pétanque. The one place I go to escape my thoughts.

Steven: It sounds like you hit some kind of breaking point.

Paul: The installation has appeared in almost a dozen books on climate change. It found its own reality without my help at all. The secret is out. The evidence is in. Who am I to say it was just a dream now? It must have happened.

Steven: Why do you think the aliens chose you?

Paul: Because everyone else thinks of ice as a thing you use to keep things cold. I turned it into a medium. I gave it a voice.

Steven: Are you happy knowing you will go down in history as a prophet of climate change?

Paul: I would do anything to go back in time before that was true. To enjoy the lightness of being I used to have in my studio when my days were spent trying to forge a language to express the cosmic absurdity of life.