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To write is to organize a relationship. –artist, Marcel Broodthaers

All these things are offshoots of words… Words are the most important part, and if they don’t mean a lot, I have a hard time with the rest of it.

— Laurie Anderson, 1983

I begin a painting with a series of mistakes…For me the medium of oil painting resists, more strongly than others, content cut off from external relations. It continually threatens, because of its motility and subtlety, to complicate a work beyond the simplicity inherent in a high order of abstraction. I attribute my increasing devotion to oil, lately as against the constructionalism of collage, to a greater involvement in the human world. A shift in one’s human situation entails a shift in one’s technique and subject-matter.
Robert Motherwell, 1947, statement 

A painter who addresses the public not just in order to present his works, but to reveal some of his ideas on the art of painting, exposes himself to several dangers.

Henri Matisse,
Notes of a Painter (1908)

don’t overly nerd up art in the analytical as the artist inhales a deep sense of lacking and exhales a countering lest the artist may suffocate under the weight of welded words. well, probably not as words then just become another expanse of lacking

“All art is critical. But it does not merely sit back and offer up critical commentary, like some know-it-all talk radio pundit. It actually does something about the shitty state — whatever that is, and I don’t mean only Texas —...
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Why are you conducting this interview?
So that I can find out what is been declassified.

Why is that necessary?
It is a way to keep alert, a kind of sanitation.

Why are you conducting this interview?
So that I can protect myself.

From what?
From people’s imagination.

How can you protect yourself with words?
Words ward off oblivion.

Why are you conducting this interview?
It is a way of realizing guilt.

Why are you conducting this interview?
I want to crystalize the daily situation of talking to myself.

Lucas Samaras (AutoInterview 1971)

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. — Hélène Cixous

Art is not about art. Art is about life…Art will continue, because…it is about the hurt of not being able to express yourself properly, to express your intimate relations, your unconscious, to trust the world enough to express yourself directly in it. It is about trying to be sane in this situation, of being tentatively and temporally sane by expressing yourself. All art comes from terrific failures and terrific needs that we have. It is about the difficulty of being a self because one is neglected. Art is a way of recognizing oneself…Without fear nothing in the world would ever be done. – Louise Bourgeios (p 167, 173…)

One of my favorite collectors collected white stones, each the size of a pebble and each representing a beautiful moment. These stones had a mysterious value to him and to no one else. Some people collect good luck charms like a penny on the street. Eery time they find one they get titallated.

Is the social worker collecting a collection of saved lives? What about the need to collect friends? What about diaries? My diaries are a form of collecting and they have no use to anybody but me. 

The only saving grace of collecting is its transitional value…hopefully there is a transition from the world of the object to the world of ideas.

–Louise Bourgeios, Artforum, 1994, vol 32.

Theories and schools, like microbes and globules, devour each other and by their struggle to ensure the continuing of life. – Marcel Proust

Joan Didion — “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.”

Resistance must always be articulated from within discourse. – Judith Butler