Back in the day, I used to get really upset when people used to say that I didn't really make all my own things - like my art or my videos or whatever. I work really hard on everything, so it used to upset me when people would try to discredit me or say that I wouldn't have what I had without this person or that person.
When you're an artist, you're working, literally, for the sole purpose of art, and when people discredit you, it's probably the most disrespectful thing you can do.
Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
I know writers, and they seem to be the most disgruntled part of the art world.
Basically everything I've done in art, I was in possession of when I was 20 years old. I use a waste retrieval method of working. I'll go back and use something that disgusted me 15 years ago but that I had enough sense to think about. Some artists change dramatically. I see my work more like history being written.
A good face they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World!
I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth.
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
There's really an art form to putting together a set list that flows evenly and that takes you on a ride and doesn't feel disjointed.
I think having a dispassionate eye is a good way of making art. When you don't know the structures of a place, you are unencumbered.
Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.
I'm trying to expand the notion of curating. Exhibitions need not only take place in galleries, need not only involve displaying objects. Art can appear where we expect it least.
'Stimela' is the very first video I directed. I wanted it to be an emotional visual art piece, displaying humans as free, powerful animals. We are all running from something or searching for something; our instincts have been ignored.
I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.
Perhaps... I mean there are people who defend that it as an art. I don't. I like it but it's not an art form as far as I'm concerned, and yet it's a similar thing, once you can't land those jumps, you're disqualified - that precludes it from ever becoming a serious art form.
I think that black people making art, women making art, and certainly black women making art is a disruptive endeavor - and it's one that I enjoy extremely.
Sometimes you come up with an idea when you're going out for a job, and then when you actually get into dissecting the world, you end up changing your approach, just because that's the way art goes sometimes.
Film is an art form. Dissecting and understanding it is a part of our own interest in humanity.
