Walk Through Walls

"The spectator and the work ⎯ It's all one thing."

"I am tired of changing planes so often. Waiting in the waiting rooms, bus stations, train stations, airports. I am tired of waiting for endless passport controls. Fast shopping in shopping malls. I am tired of more career decisions, museum and gallery openings, endless receptions, standing around with a glass of plain water, pretending that I am interested in conversation. I am tired of my migraine attacks, lonely hotel rooms, room service, long-distance telephone calls, bad TV movies. I am tired of always falling in love with the wrong man. I am tired of being ashamed of my nose being too big, of my ass being too large, ashamed of the war in Yugoslavia. I want to go away, somewhere so far that I am unreachable by fax or telephone. I want to get old, really old so that nothing matters any more. I want to understand and see clearly what is behind all this. I want to not want anymore."

"Chrissie Iles wrote this: ”I walk into the arena of the performance. Marina’s head is bowed. I sit down in front of her. She raises her head. She is like my sister. I smile. She smiles gently. We look into each other’s eyes. She begins to cry. I cry. I think nothing of my life and everything about how the people sitting have affected hers. I want to send her love. I realize she is giving me unconditional love."

The sheer quantity of love, the unconditional love of total strangers, was the most incredible feeling I’ve ever had. I don’t know if this is art, I said to myself. I don’t know what this is, or what art is. I’d always thought of art as something that was expressed through certain tools: painting, sculpture, photography, writing, film, music, architecture. And yes, performance. But this performance went beyond performance. This was life. Could art, should art, be isolated from life? I began to feel more and more strongly that art must be life—it must belong to everybody. I felt, more powerfully than ever, that what I had created had a purpose."

“The mind is such a changeable organism—in the blink of an eye it can go anywhere. And you have to always bring it back. You’re thinking you’re in the present, and then you suddenly realize that you are who knows where—deep in the jungles of the Amazon, perhaps. But it was really important always to come back.”

"What you’re doing is not important. What is really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance is all about state of mind. So in order to get to the right state of mind, you have to be mentally and physically prepared."

"“Failures are very important—they mean a great deal to me. After a big failure, I go into a deep depression and a very dark part of my body, but soon afterward I come back to life again, alive to something else. I always question artists who are successful in whatever they do—I think what that means is that they’re repeating themselves and not taking enough risks.

If you experiment, you have to fail. By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you’ve never been, where failure is very possible. How can you know you’re going to succeed? Having the courage to face the unknown is so important. I love to live in the spaces in between, the places where you leave the comforts of your home and your habits behind and make yourself completely open to chance.

This is why I love the story of Christopher Columbus—Columbus, who was sent by the queen of Spain to discover a different way to go to India, who was given a crew of convicts, because everybody was convinced the earth was flat and you would fall off the edge if you sailed across the Atlantic. And then, on their way out into the unknown, they made one last stop on El Héro, in the Canary Islands, and had dinner—I always imagine this dinner, the night before setting out to God knows where, before taking this unfathomable risk. I imagine Columbus sitting at the table with the convicts, all of them feeling this might be their last supper together.

That must have taken even more courage than going to the moon, in my point of view. You think you might fall off the edge of the earth, and then you discover a new continent.

Then again, there’s always the chance that you really might fall off the edge of the earth."