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| I keep trying to make up different dumb names and lyrics for imagined old country tunes. Here’s one: ‘There Ain’t No Queen in my King Sized Bed’ Another: ‘He’s Actin’ Single, I’m Drinking Doubles’ I think most people’s lives have a lot in common with East Enders, Neighbours, and Douglas Sirk films! Peret used to say, ‘Tragedy is my unwanted best friend!’ Very true in my case. Hope is such a torturer I think. ‘Easy Come, Easy Go’ would be a great autobiography title, huh? With lots of funny sex stories in it. The older I get the less I need aesthetics. Casting off shit is one of the most glorious things in life I think. I need less and less. I’m into Zen – I like what I know of it because by detachment you can really create the highest kind of engagement. As well as a lot of other stuff. I love ‘empty places’, cos your mind has to fill them up. Deserts make you confront yourself and your psyche. I’m a firm believer that things are meant to happen – not by divine force, but, well, Francis Bacon said he believed in a deeply organised chaos, and I agree with that. Chance is a lovely thing. I do hafta say the notion of pride is alien to me. Maybe it’s all that Zen stuff. I think people should just exist, be, and that should be enough. But if it’s fun – it works I guess. I love things that seem to be not happening, but scratch the surface and there’s a universe inside. Meat in the grocery store looks so f***ed up, sinister and disgusting. All my life I’ve been the master of vague things. Loved Daleks since I was little. Have no idea why. Maybe it’s because they’re short and have irritating voices! I LOVE Edwardian men’s clothes. Have always found them dead sexy. Do you often have times where something is so beautiful that it overwhelms you? Seeing is the most wonderful drug. Art is the most wonderful drug of all. John Cage said that the concern of any artist in any field is to try and make everything beautiful. That anyone can make shit ugly, but it takes a gifted and profound artist to make it beautiful too. I agree. Art is so beautiful when it seems like magic. I like things that can mean anything you want it to mean – it just depends what you bring to it. I look at it like this – I pile meaning on top of meaning so that I can free myself from all of them – that way people can start at zero. My own work is hard to describe, I guess. People call me conceptual, but I never usually call myself that as it scares off too many. Maybe I should start calling it the ‘C’ word, or something. Before the movie tainted the Titanic, I was obsessed with it for several years, and applied for a grant to stage Gavin Bryar’s piece – ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’ – on the beach here [in Seattle], with musicians spread out and amplified, and lights underwater, other stuff. I was turned down. Bureaucrats lack vision! I saw it as a kind of Zen space for contemplation. The one-man show I’d love to do – called ‘Sinatra, After Hours’. Premise is that the show starts when The Chairman finishes a show. He sits alone in his dressing room, lets loose and starts to say all the things you know he said in private. Like – ‘Sammy. Sammy. Ok, so the bastard’s a nigger, but a JEW too?!?! I always told him he should have his f***in’ head examined.’ Process- I think it’s the most important part of making art. I like hiding things and associations into work. Extremes I love, too. Making very simple and complex concepts simultaneously. Motion is important. In my own stuff, Reihardt is always with me. I love obscuring. Things you need to look at to see the detail – to see that it’s not just a blur or blurs. My preference is for blurred images, especially those of the human form – and especially people I know. And that’s still mostly the case. If I can work fast – it seems to be much less of a problem. Especially if it’s art, I can write it all out immediately. Or my photoshop images – I love those because I can race and beat myself, and be satisfied and understand what I did. I started wondering why I tend to not like looking at images of people I know and places I’ve been. And I discovered that I love looking at all of them, but blurred. It’s much more real to me than a photo. The psychic impression that exists in my brain is like, EXACTLY like, the blurred versions I’ve made. Feels weird to talk about it because I wonder if people can connect with what I’ve said. |
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