Watch this. Have you ever surrendered to a piece of architecture? How would you do it? Here’s a test. Enter an unfamiliar building, suspending your judgment about its design, occupants, current or past uses. Silence that anxious feeling that you’ve got only so much time to spend here, only so much patience before your next appointment. Walk with a crowd, wear dark colors, keep your sunglasses on. Notice the lighting, the mix of the natural and artificial. Notice how the walls meet the floors. Do this and let the structure speak to you. Let the building guide you through it.

It gets tricky. Just as a bee builds the cells as it fills them with honey, you’ll want to do two things at once. There will be lists, concierges, doormen, security desks, electronic locks, surveillance cameras, and the oftentimes invisible but intractable presence of the law—all of these things standing between you and experience. And experience is certainly one way to get to know a thing.

Unlike the endless seasonal march of new fictions, journals, films, fashions, and theories, architecture’s tenacity, if and when built, is to often remain precisely where it is. That is, of course, until it begins to pose a serious threat or profit motivation to someone. It’s funny when these two things begin to resemble one another.

It’s much easier, say, to surrender to a piece of music. That’s a more private experience. Listening discreetly at work on your computer, headphones on, it’s easy to play back and concentrate. Start with a popular song and let the melodies move you, let yourself respond to the emotional cues and colors. If you listen enough to the same thing, again and again, the texture starts to change. Like a growing hum in an otherwise quiet room, certain details increase in stature while others recede. Under its spell, however superficial your newfound familiarity, you could well be somehow changed.

Listen to your body. That’s the wisdom I’ve culled from all of you wonderful athletes. Everyone does their own thing, whatever your ritual before sitting down to get creative with someone else’s life. And that’s beautiful: at work, as in the home. These days, people talk about screen time as if it were some metaphysical state. But we have skins and pores that respond to images before our minds have the chance. Some might try to name this thing you’re playing with here. They’ll call it affect, or bullshit, or worse. But I think it’s more helpful to think of it as suspicion. Share it with others, and it can guide you to articulating emotionally, to feeling. If you work at it, you’ll be able to tease it out from all kinds of historical scraps and bits of culture. How the world is full of them! Which doesn’t mean, by the way, that the power of these vessels isn’t changing as the years go by. On the contrary, the world of facts is quite different. Just as a thing’s use over time can never be fully anticipated by its author, neither can its relationship to the past be so easily fixed. That’s why when we listen to the music of last year, it’s never quite last year we’re hearing. This might be because last year can only ever animate us in the present.

New York City, February 2011

Bosko Blagojevic (b. 1983) lives in New York City. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.