Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

These pieces are very repetitive, very constant: there are no surprises for the body, and so the brain kind of checks out. That’s when you get into a state of harmony with everything around you: that’s the moment when what I call “liquid knowledge” comes to you. I believe

The mind is such a changeable organism—in the blink of an eye it can go anywhere. And you have to always bring it back. You’re thinking you’re in the present, and then you suddenly realize that you are who knows where—deep in the jungles of the Amazon, perhaps. But it was really important always to come back. Because the central thing was my connec

know it’s not my business,” the fish said, before swimming away, “but can you tell me why you wanted to look like this?” The little girl said, “Beauty is temporary. Ugliness lasts forever.”

Another tenant was Piotr, a Polish artist with the most impossibly funny hair: dead straight and cut like a big mushroom. He moved into the living room—only because it was so cold, he slept in a tent in the middle of the room. On the last Friday of every month, people

OPENING THE DOOR. For three hours, very slowly open a door, neither entering nor exiting. After three hours the door is not a door anymore.

Some of the audience obviously wanted to protect me; others wanted the performance to continue. This being southern Italy, voices were raised; tempers flared. The little man was hustled out of the gallery and the piece continued. In fact, the audience became more and more active, as if in a trance.

I understood. Tito had done great things. In 1948, when Stalin tried to take over the entire Eastern Bloc—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary—Tito kept him from invading Yugoslavia. He had found a way to give the country its own socialist brand of Communism, to stay nonaligned with America or the Soviet Union, to lead his own bloc of nonaligned countri

When it came to art, I only cared about content: what a work meant. The whole point of Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful was to destroy that image of beauty. Because I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspaper. It can be use

When I think back on all that happened between Ulay and me, and Paolo and me, I often wonder what I contributed to each split. And I can’t help believing that the need to be loved and taken care of that my mother never satisfied was a hurt I brought to every man I was ever with—and something that they couldn’t fix.