First Statement Second Statement Biography Anxiety of Influence, a one act After Sherrie Levine, a one act		Since the door was only half closed, I got a tumbled view of my mother and father on the bed, one on top of the other. Mortified, hurt, horror struck, I had the hateful sensation of having placed myself blindly and completely in unworthy hands. Instinctively and without effort, I divided myself, so to speak, into two persons, one of whom, the real, the genuine one, continued on her own account, while the other, a successful imitation of the first, was delegated to have relations with the world. My for self remains at a distance, impassive, ironical, and watching. *** The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. Similar to those eternal copyists Bouvard and Pechuchet, we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist no longer bears within him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter. *** In the Seventeenth century, Miguel de Cervantes published Don Quixote. In 1962, Jorge Luis Borges published "Peirre Menard, Author of the Quixote," the story of a man who rewrites the ninth and thirty-eight chapters of the Don Quixote. His aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original, he did not want to copy it. His ambition was to propose pages which would coincide with those of Cervantes, to continue being Peirre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experience of Peirre Menard. Like Menard, I allowed myself variants of a formal and psychological nature *** We like to imagine the future as a place where people loved abstraction before they encountered sentimentality *** I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and future, between my history and yours