how to change the world:
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
(One day in September 1971 I discovered that if I made the slightest mark on a sheet of paper with a pencil, I was irrevocably altering the order of the universe. Any subsequent inventory or documentation of the order of the universe would have to include my mark, and therefore my act called for a new definition of the universal order. That means that changing the universe is a fairly simple thing, it is something that anyone can do, without any university studies. It is more difficult to try to convince the art market that you really did introduce a change, not to mention getting paid for the effort.
Luis Camnitzer, “Chronology”. posted 04.11.2010.)
You haven’t heard about the butterfly-wing theory? When a butter flutters its wings somewhere in China, they affect everything else in the world. That little flutter, what it causes, is connected to absolutely everything else. There is nothing, nothing, no action no matter how small, how insignificant, how invisible, between the blood cells…that does not set the next thing in motion, and that sets the next, and that goes on and on and on…And changes the world.
Jonas Mekas, “Step Across the Border”, 1990.
Three or four hundred yards from the Pyramid, I bent down, I scooped up a handful of sand, I let it silently spill a little further away and said under my breath: I am modifying the Sahara.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Desert”, 1984.
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