Why make art?
What do you find by doing it?
What does it get you?
I always wanted an alternative existence,
and by that I mean I wanted to do something
where I could study my own
sentiments and experiences.
And I found that I could do that
in relation to making things
and making art in particular.
And I did it since I was a kid,
and it was a place that I always could go to,
that I could concentrate and
deal with problems
that I thought were of interest to me.
And, if I was clear enough about
what it was that I was probing
and stayed with the premise
of what I was probing,
it was possible that it could also
be clear to someone else.
And it was important that it not be
something that somebody else had done.
I think one of the things art does is it
asks you to perceive what it is
on its own level.
And it can come up and grab you at any time.
It can be reassuring.
It could be exactly the opposite.
It could agitate you.
It could be something you dismiss.
It could be something that engages you.
It could be something you recall.
It could be something that leads to things
that have nothing to do
with what you're looking at.
So, I think, works of art engage, possibly,
an internal memory bank
that isn't linear, and it can make you see
the outside reality in that way, also.
Like, you probably see the world
in ways that you would not have seen it
if those artists had not existed.
And do I think that Cézanne changed
how people saw a landscape in France
in the last century? For sure.
Do I think Warhol changed how we see
contemporary society through painting,
through the media-ization of,
the commodification of objects? For sure.
And you can just go through
the history of art that way,
and immediately you conjure up something that
you, yourself, could not have expressed,
and it fulfills in each of us something we lack.