Works of art are like people. Some you don’t feel like spending time with after you’ve met. Others seem interesting, but you’re overscheduled and don’t want to make any more commitments. You can always look them up later, right? Once in a while, you fall madly in love and have a wild affair—until someone else comes along and steals your heart. And sometimes you become friends and the friendship grows and deepens and lasts a lifetime.
The work I like most is always the art I don’t understand—the stuff that sticks in my mind but eludes me in every other way. It nags at me, making sure that when I least expect it, it’ll interrupt my dinner or my sleep with stupid questions, like “Why do I make you uncomfortable? Why can’t you just accept me as I am?”
As with people, I’ve made errors of judgement, mostly because I have a predilection for the margins. I always feel that the margins tell you more than the center of the page ever could.
MARCIA TUCKER, from her “Prologue,” A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World ; edited, and with an afterword by Liza Lou. Berkeley : Univ of California Press, 2008.
My current affair: Brian Kenny & Slava Mogutin | Gay History | 2006 | mixed Media on Canvas
