A Quote by Erro
In the exhibition at Galerie Perrotin, they have the Sarajevo painting - I think it's very good to nail down this story of Pol Pot and other people, not all dictators but most of them.
Related Quotes
I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thailand|Thai to help the Khmer Rouge. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him. But China could.
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
I think that people have to have a story. When you tell a story, most people are not good storytellers because they think it's about them. You have to make your story, whatever story it is you're telling, their story. So you have to get good at telling a story so they can identify themselves in your story.
I think that the exchange is very important. Before I did the exhibition in Shanghai, I was a judge for the John Moores Painting Prize and that was very interesting for me, because some of the judges are Chinese and some are British, and we look at the work together. It was fascinating that most of the time we were in complete agreement, but some of the time we were not. People send their works from all over China. For a foreigner, this gave me a very good picture about what is happening in China and its art today.
The bottom line for most people who are normal is their need for other people. Even the greedy ones have this need - as long as they're not sociopathic. They may be very misguided and unhappy and do bad things and so forth, but in general if you look down deep, you find that these people are mainly concerned with other people and what other people think of them.
The first exhibition that I used bright colours in painting the room was at a gallery in Paris, and there were seven rooms in the gallery. It was very nice gallery, not very big rooms, around the courtyard, it was a very French space. So I painted each room in different colour. When people came to the exhibition, I saw they came with a smile. Everybody smiles - this is something I never saw in my work before.
For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements.
Smoking pot makes people talk for long periods of time, for instance, so people who advocate pot won't shut the hell up about it. On the other hand, no one really needs to defend drinking. That's something that frustrates me as a comic: I have to play clubs where selling booze runs the business, so crowds get drunk and yell out a bunch of stupid stuff at me. Pot doesn't cause people to do that. I did a show in Amsterdam a few months ago, and people weren't yelling stuff out at all. They also weren't laughing very much, but I think they were still having a good time.
Pol Pot - he rounded up anybody he thought was intellectual and had them executed. And how he told someone was intellectual or not was whether they wore glasses. If they're that clever, take them off when they see him coming!
When I have an exhibition, I usually arrange it so that if people want to, they can spend two hours there. That way, people who like it don't feel cheated when they go. I want them to walk into the exhibition space and look low and at other levels and angles. The same with emotions. I want them to be emotionally manipulated, to come out feeling something. I want them to laugh, smile, feel sad. Even if they feel angry, that's okay.
What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.
Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything.. ..A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together.. ..but no programme, no instruction in painting.. ..drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting - the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting.
Pol Pot will surrender, be captured or commit suicide.
Politicians are interesting people, most of them are smart and hard-working-I mean, they keep schedules no one else would think of keeping. Some of them live down to the caricature, but most of them are good people and they are charming.
I think it's more interesting to throw people into a story and let them catch up instead of explaining and feeling like you have to slow down for them. I think audiences, for the most part, they don't want to be ahead of you.
I think a good painting or a good work of art does many things it wants, I mean, maybe 15 or 20 or 100. One of the things a painting does is to make the room look better. It improves the wall that it's on. Which is much harder than it looks. And that's a good thing. And if one engages with a painting on that level, that's fine, that's great. After some time, familiarity, the other things that a painting does, the other layers, they just start to make themselves felt.
