On the eve of the opening, 8 October, Steve McQueen spoke to the guides at the Guggenheim Bilbao. The installation: 66 76 26. Open until 21 February 2027, El País writes. Two a cappella voices, the same song: Wild Is the Wind. Nina Simone, 1966. David Bowie, 1976. A dark room. A loop of about 11 minutes. He: “It’s an invisible work, but it’s present.” And: a requiem to love, a yearning. ABC, from gallery 105: one speaker, Bowie; seven seconds, the other, Simone. A duet they never sang together. The title: three years, three presents.

McQueen, 57 in El País, London, parents from Grenada and Trinidad. Turner Prize and Oscar, the only person to hold both, in the paper’s account. Hunger, 2008. Shame. 12 Years a Slave. Small Axe. Blitz, 2024. Now: “a couple of movies and some artwork.” All the time. Black, a cap, clear glasses, coffee in the morning, rain. If a question rubs him the wrong way, it shows. That is the interview. It is not a press release.

“The idea is to take Nina’s 1966 recording and Bowie’s 1976 recording and bring them to the present day, to 2026.” Both sing about love. There is a sadness in how they communicate it. Love, he says, implies the possibility of being hurt. Two icons, “almost superhuman,” on desire and vulnerability. ABC quotes him differently, in the same hall: love is the only thing worth living and dying for. And: the attempt to defy gravity. Two quotes, the same room.

The line in the headline: “We live in an environment when people talk about AI, when fear is discussed — because there is a lot of fear going around right now, with the rise of fascism in the West — and what is interesting is the idea of love.” He does not want to sound kitsch. It is his view, in a museum archive room. It is not a statistic. On AI: we program the machines. Duchamp already did this. “It’s almost like reinventing what’s already been invented.”

No image, like Bass, 2024, light and colour. Here: strip the instruments, two stones making fire. The effect, not the mechanics. The comparison with Occupied City, Amsterdam under occupation: he rejects it. “You are a journalist.” He wants the masculine and the feminine, the search, the attempt to communicate. Simone and Bowie, close there. Goldsmiths, 1993, not the Young British Artists. “I’m a perfectionist; it’s not a crime.” Art, poetry. Film, the novel. Everyone has read a book. Not many, a poem.

Until February, what remains is two voices in an empty room. After February, what remains is the sentence about fear. Between them, a man who says he is working, all the time, and a song from 1957 that did not stop in 1976.

Image: GattoCeliaco, Guggenheim Bilbao exterior, 12 August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph is of the museum, not the 66 76 26 installation.

Sources consulted: Steve McQueen, artist: ‘We live in an era dominated by fear; I am interested in love’ — El País; Steve McQueen: ‘It is the attempt to defy gravity that moves me’ — ABC.