In 2007 I asked Robert Gober what he planned to do next—he was just about to mount a major mid-career retrospective, the kind of sketch for a tombstone that can paralyze an artist—and he said he intended to let his assistants go and really not to much for the next five years except retrench and reconsider.
I believe we live in a paradise, I really do.
What Al doesn’t understand is that in art you never quite hit what you’re aiming at, but the difference may not be downward.
York simply worked in a slash-and-burn manner, finishing a canvas and sending it away to wipe the slate clean and improve with the next.
When the double bind is this patent—finesse perception so far with what others regard as such terrific results and common air becomes intolerable—the romance of withdrawal curdles quickly. The loner becomes even more alone, in a shell within a shell. Nobody’s counsel counts but one’s own, particularly when the effort is to translate what nobody else has experienced, a private spectrum of being that, the results suggest, stretches from unease to paradisiacal transport to both at once.
art was now an “alibi” to soft-pedal the “slums of the future”.
Never before have distances been so meaningless as nowadays. Increasingly more people fly long distance several times a year. The validity of the concept of distance is being still further eroded.
I was trying to figure out why black people were called spades, as opposed to clubs.
Bliz-aard Ball Sale, his infamous sporadic sales… of variously sized and priced snowballs… that suggested anything white is valuable.
He didn’t leave much behind, and he didn’t intend to.