Henry Flynt Quotes (22 Quotes)

I converted myself to Marxism through reading. The Cuban revolution had just taken place, and there was a tremendous discussion going on about it.

I'm actually a great fan of lucidity.

I began demonstrating against serious culture. In hindsight, the actual course of events has been very humiliating for me, because no one picked up on the intellectual critique I made.

At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did.

I became very angry about the fact that I'd been talked into going to these Cage concerts when I was in college, that I'd sat and tried to make myself like that stuff and think in those terms. I felt I'd been brainwashed, that it was a kind of damage to my sensibilities. I'm still mad about this.

When somebody says that all statements are false, the obvious problem is that as an assertion it's self-defeating.

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

Rock became an incredible commercial success, people just became bored with serious music, and it was forgotten.

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.

When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.

Around 1967 I began backing away from dogmatic Leninism, not so much because I thought it was false, I just decided there was nothing utopian about it.

Another point I made was that black American music was a new language, and I don't feel this was ever really acknowledged.

The way I devolved, moved out from, this position of strict cognitive nihilism, was with the idea of building a new culture.

The stuff being promoted as serious culture and performed in the Lincoln Centre was absolutely worthless. There was no real emotion in it, the possibility of ingenuous experience had been replaced by an ideology of science and scientism.

I'm trying to assemble materials for a different mode of life.

I began to concentrate on the issues of race and imperialism. As a political statement, the demonstrations were an absolute failure, nobody understood why I was holding them. I was told my activities were creating deep confusion about where I was coming from and why I was angry.

When I came to New York, I began to meet the people who became the most famous artists of our time. I was insecure about my own level of ability, I didn't know whether I could compete with these people and, at the same time. I was wondering what is this anyway?

There were two stages to this affair, at first we were demonstrating against all serious culture. The focus changed tremendously as my interest in politics developed. I was meeting people who were calling my attention to issues of socialism, which I'd never really thought about.

I have a picture of an ideal consciousness.

Basically, I viewed any work of art as an imposition of another person's taste, and saw the individual making this imposition as a kind of dictator.

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.