Doug Aitken Quotes

Because I went to Chouinard, which then became CalArts, I became a multi-discipline artist - it wasn't just about painting, it was about media and performance.

I'm really interested in the form, putting one piece up against another and finding something corroborative in another voice. I've done a lot of that.

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.

I learned to not separate writing, shooting, and editing, it's all sort of one big mess of creative output.

Opera should be a place for art forms to meet. I've worked a lot with Peter Gabriel; his music isn't operatic, but he creates big, popular gatherings to which architecture, dance, and music are all invited.

I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.

I like to think of myself as a combination of Sid Vicious and Virgil Thompson

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

My boyfriend's a musician, and I think when he's on stage is the only time he's not worrying. And so that's the reason he keeps doing it is because it gives him that sort of experience of weightlessness that I only get out of being sort of, deep into writing something or really lost in a moment on set, like it's available to me in these select moments through my work.

The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.

I make no distinction between poetry and painting.

As much as the needs of fact, the needs of the spirit and the senses, must be satisfied. Architecture is as much a part of the realm of art as it is of technology; the fusion of thinking and feeling.

I try when I'm writing to fill my head and my ears with all sorts of stuff and then let it settle and filter through. At a certain point it seems like fruitless activity because you're taking a lot of time and not seeming to get anything. And then, slowly, you realize you've actually digested elements and that your thinking is being freed up and the way you build up compositions is changed as a result of what you've been listening to.

I dream of a collaboration that will become so complete that, often, the poet will think as musician and the musician as poet, so that the work resulting from this union will not be the random conclusion of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of the same thought.

I don't freestyle, but when I'm writing and thinking, sometimes things pop up - that's basically a freestyle.

In order to have that incredible groove that makes you dream you have to think not of the groove, but of the dream.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

I think it's basically quite different from dreams. If only cinema was that easy. Because dreams, all you have to do is fall asleep, and you can have fantastic vision. I know Baudelaire and people like that enhance their dreams with opium or something. But films are very constructed - they're like architecture. They're pieced together, glued together. To me, it's a craft. It's like making a tapestry.

Any art that you are playing based on effort, loses something. I think that most of the time it should be something that happens, and you are inspired, and you just feel and follow your instincts. The best chiseled sculptures happen when the sculptor looks at the stone and says "I saw this sculpture in the stone, and I had to get it out." It's not contrived.

People say we're similar with Lady Gaga, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music's reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She's not progressive, but she's a good mimic.

When I perform, I lose myself. I'm in total control of that stage. I don't think about anything. I know what I want to do from the moment I step out there and I love every minute of it.

Art is about people. I think the discussion about whether architecture is art or not is lamebrain.

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.