"In my early twenties I worked as a gallery attendant at Dia:Beacon, where I was tasked with maintaining the precise level of directness permitted in phenomenological encounters between visitors and the Minimalist sculptures on view. A gallerygoer grazing their hand against a plywood box or leaning against a massive hunk of corrugated steel enjoyed too much immediacy, so I would whisper, “Please, don’t touch the art!” while speed- walking toward them, walkie-talkie flapping at my side. The experience of a tourist snapping a selfie in reflective glass shards scattered on the floor was surely much too mediated, so I admonished such offenders: “No pictures! No phones!” Minimalist sculpture aims for a direct but distant relation between an observing body and a taciturn object in real time and physical space. The institution supplied the “real time and physical space.” My job was to maintain it."