A Quote by Gavin Bryars

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.
I wanted to create this dialogue between music and visual art and vice versa. No matter what part of the spectrum they fill, whether it's visual, music, or whatever, artists are interested in other art forms. Your brain is already kind of firing in that way.
Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.
Right before I went to Pacifica, I had written and performed a one-woman show and I consider that to be my original art form. Spaulding Grey and Karen Finley and other spoken word artists and performance artists really very much interested me, that art form.
Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form; and the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context - which presupposes, of course, that words are used to convey information about the idea and the context. However, none of this means that pictures function as illustrations of an idea: ultimately, they are the idea. Nor is the verbal formulation of the idea a translation of the visual: it simply bears a certain resemblance to the meaning of the idea. It is an interpretation, literally a reflection.
I think what happened in the last 10 or 15 years in the art market is that all the players - and that includes artists, dealers, art advisors, everyone - basically became dealers. We've had old-school collectors morph into speculators, flipping works. We've seen auction houses buying works directly from artists or from sleazy middlemen. The last step before the crash was the artists themselves supplying the auction houses. Dealing themselves, you know? The art world is as unregulated as any financial market there is.
In the early eighties, there were a lot of artists involved with the music scene. All those young artists, before their careers took off, were into music. Robert Longo used to play some guitar. He had a band for a while. Basquiat had a band. I mean, people were always trying to mix music and art - in fact, I'm guilty of it myself.
I don't know what they had against collabos. I have no idea, but I look back on it and a lot of Jive artists have really never collaborated with each other.
My background is in painting but in school in the sixties, like many artists of that time, I believed that painting was dead. I began to work in collaboration with other artists in the creation of performances and installation works. Soon after, I started making video and photographic works and in the process became fascinated with the media itself. Before long I was setting things up just for the camera. In l970 I got a dog and he turned out to be very interested in video and photography as well.
Performance was a shock to me. The first time I remember feeling I could do it was during the making of my first video, 'Fun for Me.' I couldn't sleep the night before the shoot, I was so frightened. I had to play a ghost and a piece of merchandise in a shop window, and I had no idea whether I was going to be able to pull it off.
Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.
It's weird. I went so far away from music that I had to re-invent music again. I had to come back to music. I had to put music with an agenda down and at least write for my son, write to keep writing, but the idea of having a music career had to go away for a while.
Being a full-time musician back before I had my son, it was sort of too much 'me' all the time. I felt like a bit of a narcissist, always doing just my art - even though I feel like artists are doing a service as well. I needed something a little more literal, instead of writing music and hoping people enjoyed it.
Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions, on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.
From playwrights I had never heard of and performance forms I had never seen to sculpture and painting, I gained immense experience as an actor in National School of Drama (NSD). I discovered what discipline and good taste in the theatre means.
Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.
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