Jill Magid Quotes

I often use official documents or bureaucratic forms within my work. I find their structure and language style leaves a lot of room for poetry and my own interpretation.

In my process, I am constantly moving between writing, performing, and producing art objects. These various practices inform one another. What I love about both art and writing are that they can be receptacles for everything.

I want my books to exist in the literary world, not only in the art world. I am interested in having a dialogue with other writers, and the readers of those writers. Someone who is reading a book of mine might not have visited my exhibitions related to it, but can still have a full, literary experience with that book. This would be a completely different experience from stepping into the show, not having read the book. One form is not illustrative of the other.

The writings are often written in a kind of exhaustion or delirium, I try very hard not to censor myself, to be as honest and vulnerable as possible, as one would in a diary. As a child I used to write my diaries backwards in cursive. No one else could understand them. I think it trained me to be bold and admit feelings that I might feel otherwise scared to write down.

I think the term "artist's novel" for me has referred to writing which supports an art practice or a more specifically a particular artwork or project. The nonfiction novellas and nonfiction novel I have written play a role in my artwork as objects - which I will return to, but I write the books to exist autonomously.

I wish I could write solely from imagination, but then I would not have a story to write. I need to produce the story in the real world, live it out, push it forward, watch it unfold, again and again, until it ends or I end it.

It is a misrepresentation to call my works fiction; the work loses something when categorized this way. I realize that the stories are somewhat unbelievable, but the fact that they do actually unfold in reality and leave evidence, that they play out in the "real" world, is important to the work. I am the protagonist of the story, but I am not in full control of it.

I would categorize my books as literature, and I hope that is how they would be consumed. The books do not rely on the artwork to be understood, but I need my art practice to write them.

I love books, letters and texts visually as objects, and textually, for their content. The same book I write serves a different purpose when included in an exhibition of mine than when read on its own, outside of it.