Rashid Johnson Quotes

I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.

My number-one hero in terms of interdisciplinary art is Laurie Anderson, but I've always admired anyone who can think way beyond any one medium.

We are probably the only artists in the world who have a 2,000-page book on a work of art that doesn't exist. But in this way, these projects reveal their identity through this whole process. When I'm starting, I only have the slightest idea of how the work of art will exist.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Making art is different for everyone.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

I can bring in all these different components, and I marry these components, and I let them get traversed by the viewer, who reorganizes them.

David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

When I work on a part, one of the things I love to do is to put together a collage of things, stuff I see or stuff that inspires me, images, whatever.

I went to art college. I like to be creative. I use food as my medium at the moment but it could easily be illustrations in the future, or something else.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it's paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the relationships between these different mediums as very fluid. I think you see that nowadays, in this postmodern context, there's much more use of different mediums in contemporary art. For me, if you're a creative person, you can choose to make a painting, you can choose to make a film.

Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.

Being an artist, you soak up imagery, and you put it back out in whatever form you do your own imagery.

My goal is to communicate how powerful the breaking down of artistic barriers can be when grounded in thought, intention, and a true understanding of all the forms that are being experimented with.

Anne Imhof is a powerful artist from Germany making work that is totally interdisciplinary.

I look to a lot of artists who don't focus on one medium, who you can't pigeonhole.

An artiste's input, her ability to create dimensions within the given space is very important.

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

All works of art should begin... at the end.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Robert Gober, for example. He doesn't seem like somebody who is just going to show in a gallery that asks him to show. He's just making his work, and when he's ready, he's going to show it.