Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp (as well as John Cage) . . . . Each of them avoided easy humanism and navigated a difficult time nonchalantly. They wholly opened themselves up to coincidences (what happened by chance), errors (what should not have happened), portents (what might happen) and silence (what did not happen?), and lovingly treated them with a generous passivity, savoring all the complex flavors hidden in such incidents—their “rich impurity,” so to speak—without ever simplifying it.
Their acceptance of the complex as it is, the humor in their work, and their “way of living through inadvertence”: these are what I always turn to these artists for.
(translated by Kondō Gaku)
Note for “Biennale de Lyon”