Archie Rand - Part 4 To be an Artist

Simone Weil was one of the greatest theologians. She came up with the proof of St. Mark’s cross in 1941. When a  church official, Perrin, asker her what was next on her agenda, she replied, “in living continually a way of life that is fixed in stone, one ceases to live. My goals now are to take whatever I’ve believed apart. That is where life springs from. The drama between struggling conflicting ideas.”

Pound, who was wrong about everything except for his appetite for culture.

Kline “If I painted what I knew, I’d be bored, therefore I paint what I don’t know.

Kline “Painting is giving, not knowing.”

An artists is like a tube. The artist looks at the world, and the image or perception passes through him and is made on paper or clay or whatever.

There are artists and then there are the fakers. In college, he and his friends got drunk at a party. There was a fake poet loudly pronouncing how drunk he was and all his feelings, etc… anyways, Archie went to pee but the poet go to the toilet first. The poet, after a moment of silence in the bathroom flushed the toilet. It occurred to Archie that the poet had PISSED ON THE SIDE OF THE BOWL. Just like all the prosaic wanna-be-artists in the world afraid of society and making the sounds of peeing. 

When one becomes an artist he begins to see things truly and objectively, and his lifestyle soon changes. Social constructions and precepts became phony and unnecessary after this point, and the artist realizes… art is solitary. Pretty soon, the artist goes home to his significant other, and she says why don’t we go out with the Jones tonight, and he says I don’t want to, and she says “we have to or they’ll be really upset and he’s says who cares why don’t we watch a movie?

Most great artists did a lot of art.

There are three sexes. Men, women and artists.

Painting is what you do before jumping off a cliff.

Three things: art, life, and work. They’re all completely separate.

Art: eat everything.

Pleasing the audience is not what art is all about. Don’t let the critics set your standards.

Your style is your voice.

The sense of loss of control, complete meditation is the joy of drawing -- fuck the academics. 

Playing the system, detachment:

I have 50 suits and 70 ties. It’s my camouflage. To get to Columbia, we all know how to play the game. Rand is a sixties hippie turned radical art teacher. Prior to Columbia he was director of 3 art schools simultaneously.

When I was young, I wanted to dress like an extravagant nowadays after my midlife crisis, I choose to dress like the blues stars like Otis Redding, orange shoes, purple shirt and cowboy hat… my wife hates it. But I wake up early enough in the morning for her to see me in these ridiculous clothes.