Wall space has always been a hierarchical space. It’s a sacred territory. It
seems to belong to the seamless painting. If you’re a painter, you paint from
one side of the canvas to the other, and right now ’70s magazine illustration is
the vogue.
There’s a history of experimental collage and stuff that’s been glossed over
and lost because of people’s notions of craft. If you’re a photographer, it’s
like Rauschenberg never happened. You just do huge, gorgeous, seamless
photographs, and that’s your craft. It’s a very strange moment. Of course I like
to muck it up. It’s just so antithetical to the recent history that I’ve
experienced.
I’m really interested in what I call a “shadow history of art.” I’ve written
a timeline that’s on my Web
site that’s an alternative moving-image history. It begins with the first
camera obscura and it ends with somebody injecting glowing jellyfish genes into
monkeys. It came out of a feeling that there was no art history written for a
video artist or a performance artist or an installation artist. It’s just not
there.
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