Luis Gonzalez Quotes

To have a museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to have power. I don't have any interest in being the director of an institution that has power.

If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

You never know who will see your images hanging. And I like that. I think you never really have control over the things that you do.

I think it's impossible to know the destiny of things.

I think my relationship with life has changed - I want to make more complex images than before. Complex in the sense that I try to put in a lot of information, sometimes contradictory information.

I prefer to give a dollar to a thousand people.

I'd prefer to invite the artists simply to work and have fun with Guatemalan artists. To share missions of life. Maybe that is more important than seeing an exhibition.

I want to be a contemporary artist and at the same time a romantic!

Fortunately I don't want to be part of the mainstream. When I see a Kiki Smith work, for example, she's very contemporary, and I feel a lot of emotion in each of her pieces; I think she understands our time, and she makes really interesting art because of that.

In memory of Emily we would like everyone to go out and do random acts of kindness, random acts of love to your friends or your neighbors or your fellow students because there is no way to make sense of this. It's what Emily would have wanted.

Usually the Indian people are outsiders who have to look up at the people who look down.

I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.

I am a postmodern romantic. I try to use their way to photograph, and at the same time, incorporate the problems that I feel in a country like Guatemala.

The Indians are a marginal people in Guatemala just like I am a marginal person in the first world.

Face, to me, is a metaphor of sadness. And I want to share this sadness. I'm not really interested whether it's an Indian face or not - that's not as important for me. But it's still important to establish the relationships in order to bring about a consciousness of our fragility.

When you're somebody who has the pretension to make art, it's completely different from when someone else says I want to make a book of your art. You don't decide the title, you don't decide the size, the order of the photographs . . . so it's completely out of control!

It's very hard to try to be a cultural . . . people who organize cultural things . . . it's very complicated. And more so in a country like Guatemala.