Experimental Art Quotes

We were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.

'Hedwig' was pretty much all the things I wanted to do that other people said I probably shouldn't do: drag, punk rock, stand-up comedy... You know, combine them all in a thing that's supremely uncommercial from the objective point of view.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

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 hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

That was a piece I did in 1963 with Konrad Lueg in a department store, in the furniture department. It was announced in some papers as an exhibition opening, but the people who came didn't know that it was to be a sort of Happening. I don't think it is quite right that it has become so famous anyhow. It was just a lot of fun, and the word itself, Capitalist Realism, hit just right. But it wasn't such a big deal.

I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.

My fans are like, 'Lab does what he does,' which is really cool. If I came out with a Jack White rock tune tomorrow, people would be like, 'Yeah, cool man,' which is great.

Experiment is actually doing the art. That's the experiment and then you get to experience the experiment.

I think everything's experimental whether you like it or not. I think that people who do generic pop are experimenting with cliches. It's no less than I am experimenting with noise or unknown music - until you say, 'This is my song, or this is my composition' - it's all experimental, whether you like it or not.

When he came to television, there was no way I wasn't going to watch. Of course, he delivered everything that you would expect David Lynch to deliver, and more, and he was doing it in primetime network television. Even as a 14-year old, I wanted someone in the room with me that I could look over and say, 'Can you believe we're watching this?'

I started using film as part of live theatre performance - what used to be called performance art - and I became intrigued by film.

Once you free your mind about a concept of music and harmony being correct, you can do whatever you want.

The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.

Art should never try to be popular.

Punk was such an exciting time because there were no rules. You could go and knock on Sun Ra's door - and he was in the phonebook, under Ra!

I feel so much more comfortable when I'm working on material which makes other people scratch their heads and ask, 'You're going to make a musical out of that?'

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.

The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.

I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

I love truly forward-thinking music, and I'm not even sure I'd describe my work as that, even.