[1940 – 2017] American performance, video and installation artist
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...people talking about a famous artwork have often seen only photographs of it. So some of us started asking, “Where does the art reside? In that unique object, or in the photographs?"
[My early performance work] started by being the activity of a person, any person, like any other—but once that person became photographed it became a specialized person, the object of a personality cult.
My first pieces, in an art context, were ways to get myself off the page and into real space. These photographic pieces were ways to, literally, throw myself into my environment. They were photographs not of an activity, but through an activity; the activity (once I planted a camera in the instrument of that activity—once I, simply, held a camera in my hands) could produce a picture.
Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.
[Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it...)
