A Quote by Francis Alys
Can that make any sense - a Belgian artist living in Mexico and working in Afghanistan?
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Working a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you. I dropped out of college at 21 and my illustration hadn't yet taken off. It is more than working in a store. It is a hard way to make a living but you earn more than in a similarly unskilled job.
I recently wrote a piece on comics in architecture - I was talking about the three kinds of comics I pay attention to: the Franco-Belgian, the Japanese manga, and the American comics. I started thinking about the relationship between Japanese manga and Japanese architecture, or Franco-Belgian bande dessinée versus Franco-Belgian architecture, it began to make sense; there are parallels to the modes of operations and the cultures they belong to. If I didn't force myself to write, I would have no forum to clarify these thoughts. Writing is really helpful.
It is the experience of those who have tried it, that working from a sense of duty, working for the work's sake, working as a service, instead of for a living, or to make money, or in order to hoard up wealth, brings blessings into the life.
Songwriting is like working on a jigsaw puzzle, and it doesn't make any sense until you find that last piece. It has to make sense or it doesn't work.
Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you.
The way we always want to compromise between everything, I think that's really Belgian. I think I'm really Belgian for that, because I never make choices. That's my problem, actually.
I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.
That's easy to answer: I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.
You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico; that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.
It's hard to make a living in any of the arts. When most people think of artists, they think of the stars and the celebrities. But that's such a tiny minority of the elites who are able to make those millions of dollars. The reality is that it's very hard for the rest to make a living as an artist. So, you really have to persevere and understand that achieving the sort of success where you're making the big money is like winning the lottery.
Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.
The beauty standards had nothing to do with me in Mexico. It was such a bizarre, dire time for my hair. I was living in a small town where there was not any semblance of an African community. I'd have to take the bus to Mexico City to find a woman who could braid my hair. That was two and a half hours away.
The first thing that any good artist has to develop is a sense of independence from the artworld. What really destroys a young artist is insecurity, the fear that everything could be taken away at any moment.
I'm very Belgian, and I will die Belgian. I just have my house in the north of France because I began my career in Paris, even though I don't live there anymore.
The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy , the motion and the other inner forces ... the modern artist is working with space and time , and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.
I respect the government of Mexico. I respect the people of Mexico. I love the people of Mexico. I have many people from Mexico working for me. They're phenomenal people.
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