Vittorio Santoro
Half-Empty Glass / Half-Full Glass, 2015/2020

The installation consists of two chairs positioned at a chosen distance from one another in the exhibition room and connected by a hemp string. Each chair bears a glass on its sitting surface. Each of the two glasses is filled half-way with water. Close to each chair a caption label is mounted on a nearby wall. Each day while the work is on view one member of the museum crew (a guard, a person from the technical team, the curator, the director, etc.), a collector, or a curator decides if the glass positioned on one of the chairs is “half-full” or “half-empty”, repeating the evaluation also with the other glass. According to this person’s decision the caption labels close to each chair, and positioned on the adjacent wall of the work, will therefore change daily or stay the same the following day. Another label might be positioned nearby but close to the work will exemplify the artist’s daily procedure conceived for this work. This label is not mandatory but it can be decided to be part of the presentation by the person who exhibits the work.

Text by the artist