Today, our attention is less than the television advertisement. We’re looking at six or seven problems constantly. We’re living in the disturbed societies of cities. I think modern technology is one of the worst things human beings have invented.
The most revolutionary ideas are not sellable, but only mind-changing.
Cancer is an emotional disease.
I’ve been criticized by my generation, artists from the ’70s – and there’s nothing more tragic than artists from the ’70s still doing art from the ’70s – because I blur all these borders between fashion and pop.
From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.
The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.
I don’t think anyone does anything from happiness. Happiness is such a good state, it doesn’t need to be creative. You’re not creative from happiness, you’re just happy. You’re creative when you’re miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.
Woody Allen has a wonderful line: ‘Today I’m a star. What will I be tomorrow? A black hole?’ That’s very important to know – that you have the moment, then you lose the moment. You have to see your chances, you have to take them, and you also have to see when you don’t have chances to take.
I had a very difficult relationship with my mother. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night if I wasn’t sleeping straight and was messing up the sheets. Now when I stay in hotels I sleep so straight they don’t even think I’ve used the bed.
Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It’s so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political – everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn’t, then forget it.
Once you live in New York, you can’t live anywhere else. Living in Paris is like going in slow motion. It’s so bourgeois. I get so bored.
I am plenty lonely in hotel rooms.
I have this exercise that I propose to everybody: Hug a tree and complain for a minimum 15 minutes. Be yourself, and do something that you really feel deeply.
I really don’t like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn’t do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don’t believe in the power of the work itself.
I’m not feminist, by the way. I am just an artist.
I used to have a recurring dream where I was at a party in a country house, surrounded by the same people each evening. Everyone would be singing and dancing and after a while I came to know the people; though, of course, they never really existed.
Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.
Happiness is such a good state, it doesn’t need to be creative. You’re not creative from happiness, you’re just happy. You’re creative when you’re miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.
The big problem of our modern society is that we feel that we are separated from the nature. But it’s just the opposite. We are interrelated and our DNA is the same. And only when human beings understand that, the nature will not be obstacle.
With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.
You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important – in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.
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