A Quote by Oliver Herring

Perhaps the more "operatic" video pieces were a reaction to my knit sculpture, which kept me isolated for so long in the studio that the videos were a way for me to be social and flamboyant and to change my mind all the time. Because when I did the knit pieces, once I committed myself to a piece, I was locked into an idea, and the only thing that could really move was my mind. The early video pieces were a way for me to express what was going on in my mind.
My friend Phil Morrison directed a lot of my favorite videos back in the mid- to late-90s - all the Yo La Tengo videos that were funny, a Juliana Hatfield video. He was such an influence with me, and I wanted to do a video the way Phil used to do videos. I did that for Phil.
My first pieces, in an art context, were ways to get myself off the page and into real space. These photographic pieces were ways to, literally, throw myself into my environment. They were photographs not of an activity, but through an activity; the activity (once I planted a camera in the instrument of that activity - once I, simply, held a camera in my hands) could produce a picture.
I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
I have to confess that I'm in a constant state of evolution in terms of the way I feel about it. When I was doing early pieces, I wasn't exactly in love with the idea of building the stuff. I could do it because I had the skills, but I really did it because I couldn't find anyone else to build it for me.
I'm not a really good classical guitarist by any means, but what I learned from this is a way of working very slowly on solo pieces and I enjoyed working on these pieces of John's. They were not written for solo guitar but a lot of them were easy to adapt.
I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".
A piece of me is gone," she told me once while we were bra shopping. "I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself.
My grandmother taught me to knit, and as I knit, my mind returns to my childhood.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
The Red Poppy The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me. I have a lord in heaven called the sun, and open for him, showing him the fire of my own heart, fire like his presence. What could such glory be if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human? Did you permit yourselves to open once, who would never open again? Because in truth I am speaking now the way you do. I speak because I am shattered.
During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution - because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way.
Once in a Moscow chess club I saw how two first-category players knocked pieces off the board as they were exchanged, so that the pieces fell onto the floor. It was as if they were playing skittles and not chess!
There is no right way to knit; there is no wrong way to knit. So if anybody kindly tells you that what you are doing is "wrong," don't take umbrage; they mean well. Smile submissively, and listen, keeping your disagreement on an entirely mental level. They may be right, in this particular case, and even if not, they may drop off pieces of information which will come in very handy if you file them away carefully in your brain for future reference.
Tennis is a big puzzle. It's not any more physical or mental; you have to have all the pieces first, and then you have to put all the pieces together. For me, it took me time.
I set up a system for myself where I work on a lot of pieces at once. I'll switch between them and keep working on a piece until it comes together, and then I'll publish it. This way some pieces can take a year if they need to. The trick is to just make sure one is ready every week.
I feel very protective in the first draft, when all the pieces are coming together. I work in a way that is not linear or chronological at all, even with the short story. I will just be writing bits and pieces, and then when I have all the pieces on the table, that for me is when it feels like the real work begins.
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