On September 11 (the anniversary of) I was in this ashram in Tanglewood Massachusetts, and I'm not even going to tell you what put me there, the fit of despair, the endless crying, the pull in my heart towards going all the way into that blackness, which would be death, or wanting to die ... all I can say is that Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian revolutionary who wrote Red Love (her manifesto of the multiple human relationships of sexuality friendship and love that might be possible in a revolutionary society) had a very brave project and it isn't her fault that it failed. I was exhausted.

     Immediately after arriving I began to feel better, it was a strange and beautiful culture being practiced there. The path to the lake was wide and well worn but enclosed on both sides by all kinds of foliage: chokeberries and I don't know the other names, but yellow and purple and red. I felt extremely protected. Everything was held in place, the lake by the hills, the hills by the white strands of cloud in the sky, and I began to feel whole. The "hole" being filled by the "whole."

     The yoga they practice here at Kripalu is based on presence, acceptance and love. They say that Everything Matters. They call it Intentional Living. You can feel it by the way they smile at the check-in desk and open the door. Or the swathes of white and pink cosmos they've planted up on the hill. Or the utterly rational way they've deployed technology within their 20,000 square foot physical plant towards the greatest efficiency, comfort and pleasure. Money is effortless here, the result of an affirmation. Some of the ones I'm learning to say are, "Money rushes to me because I am a master at multiplying its abundance" AND "A full love surrounds me" AND "Financial success comes easily to me" ... And seeing that there are so many expensive new cars in the ashram parking lot with New Age bumper stickers, maybe it's working--although I must say it's in their total exclusion of relativity (i.e., their banality) that the affirmations begin to lose me ...

     There are hardly any rules here in the ashram except for the absence of cellphones and sexualized clothing. There is even an area designated for smoking, except this area isn't marked or disclosed. You have to declare yourself to the front desk staff as a smoker and then they will tell you, but I didn't do that. I tried to find it myself, unsuccessfully. Still, I was curious how this culture deals with taboos. Because it seemed to me, the Designated Smoking Area on the "east hill" above the ashram would be like the boneyard outside the Marquis de Sade's Chateau ... the back end of the institution, the place where they throw all the used-up dead girls, the place that everyone knows of but nobody wants to go.

     A couple of weeks ago when you were preparing your show for Greene Naftali, I asked you, What does it mean to be Whole? You answered, That's a good question. Because you'd been preparing this show called Whole for nearly four years and you were starting to realize it would never be finished. It was becoming an endeavor as gorgeous and doomed as Red Love, or the San Francisco sculptor Jay DeFeo's enormous white plaster rose that grew like a tapeworm inside her apartment until it threatened to take down the whole building ... or else, even jill johnston's early art writing in Lesbian Nation, which she later recanted, and here I am possibly imitating-

     You said: "There's always an attempt to be whole. Everyone in the universe has spent time trying to become whole through religious means, from sitting in a church to yoga to swimming, and everybody is trying to get more energy and become more whole."

     But you couldn't do it. You'd started to realize that the real project of Whole would be "an endless exposing of parts and not ever reaching a whole," you said that, and then you added, "so I have tried to share that, that human process," but when I asked you if being Whole is like being dead, you complained, "But I haven't even had coffee yet!"

     The show you mounted this month at Greene Naftali was a part of the Whole. We both agreed that showing these parts over time was the only way you could do it. Because in fact, we agreed, it's sort of a quantum tautology to think you can capture the [W]hole without falling into it ... And this gets close to something like madness, a state both of us know. In the videotape you made, called Whole Film 2002, you cut a square hole in the floor of your living room-studio and hoisted a model of the California Federal Bank building down through it on pulleys into the basement ... The CalFed Bank was the building you saw then, looking outside the window, when you were still in the Echo Park house that became the site of this project called Whole. When you moved in, the house was owned by the bank, and then later it wasn't. During the three years you lived there, the place changed hands several times, it kept being bought and sold.

     Except no one knew what to do with it, because Echo Park hadn't gentrified yet and the real estate market was flat. The house was really a shack falling into the ground, there was constant flooding. No one fixed the place up, but the actual land wasn't worth enough yet to bother tearing it down. The lot hadn't reached its maximum value yet.

     I think we were talking, later, about the mystical power of money: the way the US dollar bill is engraved with 27 masonic symbols. The bills change hands many times every day but nobody knows what they mean ... You made a drawing then, called Playful Embellishment, with the Eye of the dollar bill pyramid blinking in front of the CalFed building, all brightened with candles and glitter.

     Anyway, before you moved in, when the bank took it over, a gay man with AIDS was living in the basement apartment downstairs. It was really only a room built over cement. The man had been a stained-glass maker, but when he died nobody came to reclaim his stuff. The bank let you use downstairs for free in exchange for clearing it out, and this stuff became part of the Whole.

     The walls of this room were covered in cheap pine paneling, and the basement became the metaphysical-conceptual lab for the yet-to-be-fully realized Whole. You found it strange to be living on top of this stuff, it was like something was brewing down there beyond your control. But really things were happening outside the house, the buying and selling, the change in the market, as well. There was a Tiki Bar built into the wall, one of those shingle-roofed things that they use to sell poolside drinks. It seemed to be holding the whole place up. As you told me once, the Bar, (which you later rebuilt and called the Mysterious Object Bar,) is the underside of the belly of Whole.

     The bar, as it appears in your installation, contains certain disturbances at the "bottom" of a house that is decaying at its very foundations and has been tied up in lawsuits for years. Is the bar an alchemical center for the production of negative energy? Obviously your work alludes to the social fact of gentrification and its attendant displacement, as they'd say in art criticism, while probing the psychic underside of what we call "real estate"... the troubled lives of actual property occupants, whose troubles are only compounded by official papers and documents.

     In your videotape, the camera hovers around a sign hanging on the pine-paneled wall left behind by the previous tenant. The sign is a riff on the kind of inspirational slogans hung all over the ashram (that say things like YOU ARE PERFECT IN YOUR IMPERFECTION) but his sign said IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HEAD IN ALL THIS CONFUSION YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION ... and I was struck by his use of the word "situation," the way it's a noun and a verb ... as you as a sculptor, i.e., a visual thinker, must have been, because it seems that part of the project of Whole is to willfully resituate things. In Whole Film 2002, the camera holds on a piece of the urban landscape, i.e. the bank, as seen through your living-room window. And then it cuts to the model you've built of the bank, which is small enough to be hoisted down into the hole ... The actual bank itself is full of holes. It has those porthole windows designed to make a large building look like a plane in the hi-tech imagination of the 1950s, when commerce, like god, took off like a jet.

     The landscape seen through the window was blurry and smeared.

     At the ashram this week, I kept thinking about Alice when she fell down through the hole, or Ariadne, how she didn't forget to tie a string to her wrist when she left for the land of the dead. Mexican radio music blasting on the video soundtrack, the frequency of the pirate radio station someone runs near your house, the way that music enters the wires whenever we talk on the phone ... Eleanor Antin quoting Baudelaire in her installation Minetta Lane -A Ghost Story (1994): The city changes faster than the human heart.

     At the ashram they always light candles at the heart of the circle when they gather to meditate. Everyone wept for the 3000 dead on September 11, because these are the dead we can imagine best, they are triggers of grief, and you said, What attempt to move for ward isn't an attempt to become Whole?