Something big and broad happened in the Olympic Sculpture Park on Valentine's Day, at the park's first-ever public program. Artist-architect-furniture-maker Roy McMakin, artist Jeffry Mitchell, and musician Suzzy Roche sang, prayed, and told stories inspired by McMakin's park sculpture, Love & Loss, and McMakin described and explained the sculpture's form. The mixed format of Love & Loss's coming-out event acknowledged that the sculpture publicly invokes things too private to be expressed in an art lecture, or even maybe to be declared literally.
It reminds me of an essay by Mignon Nixon in this winter's edition of October that reworks the history of 20th-century art in terms of Os and Xs. "O is for originary orifice, the eye-mouth-anus of the infantile blob in Louise Bourgeois's Amoeba (1963–65)," Nixon writes. "X, meanwhile, is for the multiple, for extra and excess."
O is the bed, X is the factory. O is love, X is the family.
On a tip from the influential critic Rosalind Krauss, Nixon notes that the dividing line between O and X, popularly epitomized by Duchamp's industrial readymade and the id-dity of Brancusi's sensual forms, is not so solid after all. In truth, both artists—and plenty of others, despite their dualistic categorization—meld "the primal and the multiple, the corporeal drive and the production system."
Of Love & Loss, the performance, was an X-and-O-rama.
McMakin's ordered, cerebral, and utility-focused sculptures seem X, whereas Mitchell's baroque, childlike work (not in the park, but pictured at lower left) is as O as bodily excretions. But just as Love & Loss reveals McMakin's O side, Mitchell's work can be X-y. His drippy flowers and sweet hearts and animals are like a standardized font, an efficient system he applies across mediums. Meanwhile, the uniform surfaces of many of his objects, seeming minimalistic, reenact manic desire, in finishes of frosting white, semen cream, and Krugerrand gold.
"I made a vase to commemorate my friendship and love that I have with Roy," Mitchell announced toward the end of the performance. The two artists have known each other for more than a decade and come across as creative siblings—siblings being, as Nixon points out, parts of a generational series that makes them both aware of their connections to one another and of their limited place in time.
They tell the story of how once, Mitchell made a sculpture for McMakin, and when he handed it to him, the sculpture spontaneously exploded between them. (True story, they insist.)
This time around, as Mitchell hands the commemorative vase to McMakin, their hands let it slip. It falls to the ground in a rehearsed crash that is still deeply upsetting. Siblings represent "the minimal distance between people," says psychoanalytic theorist Juliet Mitchell. So much can happen to objects passing across that short distance. 
