I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it’s the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
I like suggesting that ‘we are slaves to the objects around us,’ that ‘plenty should be enough,’ or that the ‘buyer should beware,’ within the context of conventional selling space.
I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.
As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy. From the moment of the crash, the pornography of sentiment never let up.
the art world has always been an unrelenting taste machine, but now flavors of the month have morphed into flavors of the minute. Again, all a reflection of a wider cultural condition. I mean, the art world is slow compared with the music and movie businesses.
If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture – not only national culture but global culture.
The different aspects of my activity, whether it’s writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don’t make any separation in terms of those practices.
I’m an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.
I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I’m not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don’t do it. I’m not crazy about categories.
I worked with someone else’s photos; I cropped them in whatever way I wanted and put words on top of them. I knew how to do it with my eyes closed. Why couldn’t that be my art?
