Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.
The 'Station to Station' film is a fast-moving journey through the modern creative landscape. It's a kaleidoscope of voices and impressions rather than a standard linear film.
I went to film school at UT Austin. I learned a lot, and that school's good for puking up all your bad movies early and quick. But ultimately, no one can teach you to be an artist.
My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall.
I think Picasso was someone who took art's powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That's something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.
All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.
Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
As a film-maker, it's only natural to feel happy about new possibilities opening up.
I came out of a sort of experimental background, and I didn't ever really expect - or even desire - a career as a feature filmmaker.
I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.
I did go through a phase of reading a lot of poetry and getting heavily into philosophy and ended up writing things that weren't really in a musical format, which I put to some very electronic-based backing.
Film festivals are important, as they often provide an opportunity to look at a film from a fresh perspective.
The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?
When I was 18, the vision was to make music that didn't exist, because everything else was so unsatisfactory.
Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
When I was at the Group for Musical Research, with this idea of discovering electronic music, I quickly realized that that it was a very interesting and exciting approach to music, but I also saw that it was very intellectual and quite dogmatic.
The whole of nature is an endless demonstration of shape and form. It always surprises me when artists try to escape from this.
I'm heavily influenced by European and American cinema, but the further I get in my career, the more I find myself looking back East for inspiration.
You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.
I've always been interested in shaping music in odd ways, with odd riffs and that's been probably something that I've continued on with my studies with improvisation as I'm working with people.
The priority for me is just to make music that people can connect with. I want to make something fresh that people may not understand.
That's the thing about being an artist: you never should settle, really.
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods.
