Popularity: 4
Vote:   | A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A lot of these angles are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Before Cremaster, my work had more to do with live performance. Those shows, which were probably understood as video installations, had much to do with documenting real-time action. At time I became more interested in telling stories. That was a turning point, rather than a beginning. The Cremaster cycle is in itself a narrative, but not neccessarily a linear one. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I think a lot of the references I make to American traditions - whether it's athletics or a kind of car culture - I think those are things that I've certainly grown up with and understand. It makes those things very available to me to use, and I consider them as kinds of vessels. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think that Vaseline belongs to this family of plastics as a sort of lubricant. One of the interests that the project has is to create a landscape that's both internal and external, and that there's often a need to moisten that landscape and make it internal. The jelly in some way fulfills that. It's sort of the mucous that binds things. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I wanted to see how this sculptural project, which is what it is, could align itself with the cinematic form, and still come out as sculptural. And this was also the first time that I had made single-channel pieces, knowing that they would be seen from the beginning to the end in a way that my other work had not. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I've always thought of the project as a sort of sexually driven digestive system, that it was a consumer and a producer of matter. And it is desire driven, rather than driven by hunger or anything like that. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In the designing of the books, and I like the way that every spread in a book has a gutter, it started to align with sculptural notions deriving from the natal cleft of the body, that line, the residue of initial cell division. From that symmetry, asymmetry can be introduced. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It's a desire in the sense of a kind of sexual desire. If that doesn't answer the question at all it does indicates that these are things I think about - that there is an interest in creating a kind of internal system. So those sorts of biological systems are really useful to look at. Literal systems that exist have their own sets of logic and their own sorts of pressures and conflicts. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Jackass: The Movie is great. I think it's in the tradition of physical comedy, which I'm really interested in. Its relationship to gravity, and how gravity acts on the body. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | NFL films are a real big influence of mine. It's all 35mm material shot on all the NFL teams. It's a fleet of cinematographers that follow the different teams and then I believe that footage is sold to the different teams. Highlight tapes are made and, as a kid, we always had to watch these highlight tapes around lunch time at football camps and stuff. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | There is a slight brutality to Ursula Andress, in the way that she is a proto-athletic sex symbol, whose shoulders are bigger than her hips. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | When he was younger Mailer looked an awful lot like Houdini. But the issue of likeness was not really the point. It had to do with that constellation, and with Mailer's physicality. I think of these characters as physical states rather than as developed narrative characters. Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. |