Re-Contextualization Quotes

You could go so wrong with a 'Planet of the Apes' reboot; you could make it melodramatic, you could make it campy, you could fall into so many traps with it.

Any scene in Shakespeare can be vulgarised almost out of recognition with the wish to have a modern concept.

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

My personal feeling about reboots is - I'm very against it. I feel bad for the pop culture of this generation because I feel like they're getting a lot of retread... a lot of digested and vomited stuff from our teens and 20s and all of that.

An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

The truth is that we're not remaking Sam Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs,' we're making 'Straw Dogs.' We're taking this story, and we're putting our own spin on it. The mere fact that I have James Marsden in it is an indication that it's a very different film than the one that had Dustin Hoffman in it.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

Oh see, first off you gotta realize - everything for me is a reconstruction or deconstruction. I would actually say deconstruction. Mission: Impossible would be the exception. That would be a reconstruction- deconstruction.

I think plays deserve other interpretations. They should live on, and other people should should take their hand at them. I'm very supportive of that.

To have a sense of contemporary ownership of Shakespeare is the most important thing to his work.

It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way.

I'm so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn't belong.

As soon as you've written it, you're thinking about how it can move into different mediums.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

I've always liked the idea of taking old dramatic ideas and devices and making them feel relevant or contemporary or whatever.

Being a sculptor who uses found objects, all the objects I use in my work have been designed by other people. So I'm tweaking them in some way by squashing them or throwing them off cliffs! Then I formalise my damage by suspending them or arranging them in some kind of way. So I'm using other people's design in a way, so I'm an 'un-maker.'

Still, we view that old material very much like we view the new material so if this gives us a chance to go out and promote it then, yes we will go out and do that.

In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.

My work since the late '80s specifically questioned what was presented as the 'natural' order of things in the history of post-war-N.Y. painting.