In this moment in his Brooklyn Rail interview with Tom Friedman about his new paintings show, Andrew Paul Woolbright is everyone who’s ever seen 1,000 Hours of Staring (1992-97):
APW/Rail: …I value your work so much, and I value the way you think so much that I inherently trust this new step. It’s just like how I trust that you really stared at that piece of paper for a thousand hours in 1000 Hours of Staring (1992–97).Which, by the way, did you really?
Friedman: Oh yeah. I meditate every day. It was just my meditation for the day.
Rail: So was it a thousand days of an hour each? How did it work itself out in terms of time?
Friedman: I would just mark it down, and this is where I really wish I had the paper that I marked it all down. It was an hour here; an hour and a half there; ten minutes here and there. I remember there was a bug that got stuck in the middle of it—a moth—maybe three quarters of the way through. And so it was just there, and I’m meditating on it, and I think it died on the piece of paper. And so when I wiped it off, it left a little mark. I guess it excreted something. I thought, should I keep that there? I didn’t. I scraped it off. It’s one problem that I have with that piece that no one really knows about.
[a few days later update to confirm a suspicion: the medium “stare on paper” predates MoMA and is part of Friedman’s early deadpan Minimalism. But good for them for going along with it.]
Tom Friedman with Andrew Paul Woolbright [brooklynrail.org]
Tom Friedman, Detritus, 4 Sept – 18 Oct 2025 [lehmannmaupin]