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Speed Bumps Ahead

#santa monica mountains #los angeles #35mm

Today in Jakarta.

ALEXIS SMITH [b. 1949]

In the first ten years of my work, I was largely concerned with the nuts and bolts of the relationship between words and images. And with fate and destiny, which makes sense because a young person is thinking about what life will have in store. Then in the work you make when you’re between thirty and forty, you start to see this visitation of expectation and disappointment. I think that as you get older there are certain things that you expected to happen that don’t, and things you didn’t expect to happen that do.

[…]

… I’ve been very careful, over the years, to leave myself the freedom to do the things that interest and amuse me. It’s been my theory that you can’t do art for a long time if it isn’t interesting and if it isn’t fun. I think that’s a very selfish thing, but the things that I have been interested in — the ironic things that I have noticed about myself and everybody else, the books I’ve read, the song lyrics I’ve heard, the images I’ve seen and the personal connections I’ve made with all those things — have all been in step with my work. I only do things that interest me: if it interests me, I’ll do it for free. If it doesn’t, I won’t do it at all. I think that my work is clean in the sense that I maintain the freedom to do what I want and not do what I don’t want. And otherwise I’m so perverse that, believe me, I would not have persevered if I hadn’t maintained that freedom for myself.