"...And, that every moment is really magic or divine, because that's the only moment you ever really live in. And so with Kaprow's happenings; I remember one that took place at Stony Brook on Long Island which I was in, and it concluded one night with a huge bonfire, an incredible bonfire with hundreds of students around and everybody singing, in this wild garbage dump, and people began to make sculptures out of garbage cans and trash cans and stuff like that- it was just an amazing moment. And I remember one student said to Allan: "This is incred ible, but no one will ever know about it; there's no way. it can be reported, we can't put it in a museum, a photograph won't do it, and it's going to go away, and disappear." And Allan said: "Yes, but it will always be in your mind." There's some kind of link in all that body of ideas, and it has an effect in the way you think about art, because art has traditionally, in the last several hundred years, been identified with permanenece; and the more I began to think about it, the more I realized that I was living in a society which was dedicated to the past and to the future, and not to the present. and the art produced in it tended to re-enforce that notion. And when I actually began making art, and I think I've described the origins, it was all together there; how it ended didn't make any difference. All that counted was a heightned kind of experience."
Douglas Davis as interviewed by Jud Yalkut in:
Jud Yalkut. "ELECTRONIC ZEN: The Alternate Video Generation" (1984)
http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Artists10/Yalkut,Jud/ElectronicZen.rtf
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that's a great quote, i especially love the section about "the past AND future, but not the present", thanks for posting this!
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