Few places have prompted as many conversations about the boundary between the applied and the fine arts as the Fondazione Antonio Ratti. At its center stands Seth Siegelaub, impresario of conceptual art and publisher of Marxist media theory, who turned to collecting textiles – and stopped at the threshold of the machine. Lectures and discussions at the Foundation have returned to this constellation again and again: to textiles, to abstract and conceptual art, and to how they intertwine. One question, however, has remained at the margins, although it bears on both value and the changing status of the object: how artistic production is organized.

This lecture puts production itself at the center. It approaches textiles and conceptual art not side by side, but through the work that brings them into being – from Andean weaving and the Jacquard loom to Frank Stella’s Protractor paintings and Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, executed by others according to his instructions. In doing so, it crosses the threshold at which Siegelaub’s collection stops, and asks what changes there – and what persists.

Following the work rather than the history of forms, the lecture brings the two fields into a different relation – and considers how this alters the way we look at both.