Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's a bit weird, because I don't really know what people expect or think being political is; I just don't get it. What am I supposed to do as a pop star-stroke-revolutionary? Get up and put my balaclava on, go to the grocery store and then invent some Google viruses, and then go to rob a bank to fund my revolution on YouTube?
The occupation is really terrible on a variety of levels. It's terrible on the "shooting people and torturing people in prison" level. But I think the thing that is very hard to convey is that it's also this bureaucratic grinding-down and daily humiliation that I think would probably be as horrible as the spectacular violence.
The institution of marriage should be re-examined because of its overwhelming claustrophobia. The odds are stacked against spontaneity and effervescence. It's an institution that was brought about for the sake of family and children, but biologically, it's very unnatural. It's masochism and torture the way it's been organized.
You need to know a lot about what's going on, but when it comes to making the work, I take almost an anti-intellectual stance. You've got to be stupid enough, in some ways, to plunge into something that you have no idea what it's about. If you know what you're going to do before you do it, you just end up illustrating an idea.
I think about my art works as paintings, because they refer to the history of painting. I also have to think about them as sculptures, because every part of the process is part of the project. They're sculptures because they play on the idea of what should be hanging in a gallery. In that sense they're also kind of ready-mades.
More people would recognise me in Kingston, but it's rare to go on the road and not get recognised by someone. The problem now is everyone has a camera in their pocket, on their cell phone - at the airport it's difficult to get from point A to point B without taking half an hour because there are so many people taking pictures.
I am almost thanking God that I was never educated, for it seems to me that 999 of those who are so, expensively and laboriously, have lost all before they arrive at my age-& remain like Swift's Stulbruggs-cut and dry for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures:-whereas, I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge.
There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!
You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.
Notre Dame and Sydney - that was nothing. Notre Dame doesn't have a police station; it is not 1,000 or so feet high. It was a public structure, very easy to access. And Sydney Harbour Bridge was half-and-half: a bridge, in the middle of the night. The World Trade Center was the end of the world. Electronic devices, police dogs.
I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see. Because music is so affective and is just as corporeal as it is cerebral, I thought coupling a music performance with machine vision adds up to something that work on an emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual level.
There's a difference between sexy and hyper-sexy. The way I have drawn Vampirella, she's definitely sexy, I designed the costume. But her costume, through the years, has gotten briefer and briefer. She has been hypersexualized, but not by me. I mean, I see drawings in which she's got the 'brokeback pose'. I would never do that.
Follow your heart, and your pleasure in art. Don’t do what you think is going to be making you money, or what you’re parents want you to do, or what that beautiful girl or guy thinks you should be doing. Do what you love. It’s going to lead to where you want to go. Go out there and make the world more beautiful. I know you can.
If I hear dance music, my body starts to move. Whatever the dance music is, I can't help it. With all that, I still felt, well, rock is a little higher art, but it wasn't. Right now, because I have so much experience with dance charts, I started to realize that it's incredible art. This is going to be known one day as high art.
Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again.
The whole world is set up so that for places like Switzerland to exist, that are crime-free and with the best care for everybody, you have to have places like Sudan, or Jamaica. But really, there's enough to share, when you check it. It's not that complicated, really. It's probably less thinking and more feeling that's required.
You just have to work really hard and throw everything into it. ... It's really hard to be an artist, and even if you do work really hard, there's no guarantee about anything. There's no advice you can give someone that things will somehow work out, but you can talk to people about how they can make art a big part of their life.
Detectives are only human; we're not Gods that know everything. When detectives tell their theory, in reality, most are rather anxious. Thinking that there's always possibility that they could have missed something, somewhere... But in return, the excitement you experience when your theory's smack bang correct is twice as great!
Study the great brush drawings of the Chinese and Japanese... When we try to imitate their conventions for perspective, form and texture we lose the content, because those artists were part of an ancient tradition. Our tradition changes rapidly, our schools of thought come to fruition quickly and decay again. We see differently.
I feel like my perception has changed a little because when I was posting stuff online it was an extension of my studio and then it started getting some of the attention. Now it's like, "Oh, this is actually a place where you can make money," but I'm not interested in competing in that space. It seems like too much to deal with.
When the words ‘like a girl’ are used to mean something bad, it is profoundly disempowering. I am proud to partner with Always to shed light on how this simple phrase can have a significant and long-lasting impact on girls and women. I am excited to be a part of the movement to redefine ‘like a girl’ into a positive affirmation.
I think when people struggle with the problem of trying to understand the art world as an idea, they misunderstand it. They think it's a world of visionaries or opportunists. But it also includes people who want to take part in this cultural exercise but don't have the required stuff, they don't have the ideas or the production.
After my performance 'The Artist is Present (2010)' at MoMA in New York, many scientists became interested in why so many people who sat across from me began to cry. I was incredibly moved by this experience also, and was very curious to know what happens in our brains when we spend time not talking, just looking at one another.
But what I attach great importance to is observation of the movement of colors. It is only in this way that I have found the laws of complementary contrast and the simultaneity of those colors that nourish the rhythm of my vision. There I find the representative essence — which does not arise from a system or an a priori theory.
I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men. If this work is considered incorrect, all the better, for my attempts aim to undermine that singular pontificating male voice-over which correctly instructs our pleasures and histories or lack of them.
We are individualized aspects of that oversoul, and the individualized soul - yours and mine and everyone else's on the planet - incarnates over and over and over again in a physical body, emotional astral body and mental body. These three bodies are temporary bodies that the soul creates and uses for a given time, long or short.
The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from a whole acquired force, the civilization which precedes us. One cannot do just anything. A talented artist cannot do whatever he pleases. If he only used his gifts, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us.
So when I appear as a kind of shamanistic figure, or allude to it, I do it to stress my belief in other priorities and the need to come up with a completely different plan for working with substances. For instance, in places like universities, where everyone speaks so rationally, it is necessary for a kind of enchanter to appear.
There were some types of sanctions that happen in the public world that made my work acceptable, where someone looks at the paintings and they don't - they may go, "okay," and then look at it in a different sort of way. Instead of just looking at it as some type of wild art, they look at it in a historical perspective or context.
You have, in America, you have gang signs. Well, 5,000 years ago, there was thing called a mudra, which is your sitting position when you do yoga or you're meditating or you're praying or whatever. And there's not a lot of them that are named after gods and goddesses, but the middle-finger is specifically named the Matangi mudra.
If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they're fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave.
You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'
When I was going to school and under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, I believed that if you had a give-and-take rapport with your work that it would be you, and that would be all that was required. It would be honest, and the core of your personality would come out if you responded to position and contrasts in your work.
I think context, location matters a lot. Because location obviously in my situation, it's the space in which the work is going to be exhibited. And since some of the work I do is created onsite, it requires a different type of space, versus the smaller drawings or more subject-oriented work. So that the context becomes important.
My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. It was very - actually, it was a very good study, and got me a job in an ad agency. And they also decided that I had to - to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it.
The 'Women' had to do with the female painted through all ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn't go on. It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light - all this silly talk about line, colour and form - because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of.
At present I am using a good sized bedroom in the 2 bedroom house here as a studio, and it is large enough to step back from my canvases, and has a good north light. It should serve very well until I can afford to have the storeroom half of the back building lined and insulated and a chimney put in. That may be in about two years.
Commonplace people have an answer for everything and nothing ever surprises them. They try to look as though they knew what you were about to say better than you did yourself, and when it is their turn to speak, they repeat with great assurance something that they have heard other people say, as though it were their own invention.
I found that gloss paint suited me entirely, and its qualities still intrigue me. It's viscous and fluid and feels like a pool. It's highly reflective, which means there are layers of looking. You look at the picture, and you look at the surface, then you look at the reflection in the surface behind you, then you look at yourself.
I believe in sensuality. I believe in sex. I believe in the survival of the species. I like aspects of things that are ethereal, but I like the reality of nature and embracing the way nature works, and aspects of interrelationships between male-female, aspects of the body, the way the body has changed over thousands of years . . .
I'm just so grateful for the 10 years that I had in Sri Lanka when it was in the middle of a war and I was getting shot at, because now and again I remember glimpses of those times, and I just go, 'Wow, I'll never, ever see that again in my life. And I'm never gonna feel that, and I'm never gonna feel for a human being like that.'
Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.
I have been struggling with mental illness and emptiness throughout my life. Now I want people to understand my glorious quest for the truth. Working on paintings is a process toward my artistic creation. It is a new spiritual theme of my whole philosophy for pursuing the truth. Each painting represents a process in all of my art.
A number of years ago, when I had an exhibition of my work, the people in charge who came to pick up my manuscripts saw them piled up haphazardly in the garage and were shocked. 'What? They'll grow mold like this!' they said. People who do things properly apparently make a dedicated manuscript room, where they can control humidity.
We need a government, not politics. Because there's too much politics. Of course there should be debate. But there seems to be so much pettiness and not enough good faith. It is civilized to agree to disagree, and this idea is slowly disintegrating. The great statesmen of the past knew this, and I think it helps drive civilization.
I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all, the lone trail is bestI'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.
The mercy of forgiveness is brought from the strength to accept any situation given and faced. Spiritual independence and humbleness toward life makes life like a flowing river of release. What happens will happen anyways, and everybody can make mistakes. The important thing is to learn how to make a better future from the mistake.
Ivy [Wilkes] does exhibit a certain impatience at the beginning of the book [The Dissemblers]. She doesn't want to wait through years of hard work and insignificance to make her mark on the art world. Part of her growth is in realizing - even embracing - that the process of art is more important than the product or the recognition.
The construction of femininity is a construction, yes, but also it can be twisted and turned around in such a way that doesn't necessarily mean it is pointing to the female body or male body in such a binary fashion. The culture is already there and has always been, but not as equal citizens. I think there is more progress to come.
You're wrong! That's not why Kagome was born! Kagome taught me how to smile, how to believe in people! Kagome was the reason I could make friends and rely on those friends! To shed tears for others, to understand true strength and kindness…They’re all things I learned from Kagome! Kagome was born to meet me! And I was born for her!