My Paintings Are Wiser Than

Photography Has Almost No Reality; It Is Almost A Hundred Per Cent Picture. And Painting Always Has Reality: You Can Touch The Paint; It Has Presence; But It Always Yields A Picture - No Matter Whether Good Or Bad. That's All The Theory. It's No Good. I Once Took Some Small Photographs And Then Smeared Them With Paint. That Partly Resolved The Problem, And It's Really Good - Better Than Anything I Could Ever Say On The Subject.

If I Don't Know What's Coming - That Is, If I Have No Hard-and-fast Image, As I Have With A Photographic Original - Then Arbitrary Choice And Chance Play An Important Part.

Perhaps The Choice Is A Negative One, In That I Was Trying To Avoid Everything That Touched On Well-known Issues - Or Any Issues At All, Whether Painterly, Social Or Aesthetic. I Tried To Find Nothing Too Explicit, Hence All The Banal Subjects; And Then, Again, I Tried To Avoid Letting The Banal Turn Into My Issue And My Trademark. So It's All Evasive Action, In A Way.

What Attracted Me About My Mirrors Was The Idea Of Having Nothing Manipulated In Them. A Piece Of Bought Mirror. Just Hung There, Without Any Addition, To Operate Immediately And Directly. Even At The Risk Of Being Boring. Mere Demonstration. The Mirrors, And Even More The Panes Of Glass, Were Also Certainly Directed Against Duchamp, Against His Large Glass.

In Truth, Factual Information - Names Or Dates - Have Never Interested Me Much. Those Things Are Like An Alien Language That Can Interfere With The Language Of The Painting, Or Even Prevent Its Emergence.