“I’ve been very interested in the last year or so in the phenomenon of disgust as an aesthetic concept. It’s interesting that the concepts of disgust and monstrosity have a strange role in a text like Aristotle’s Poetics and in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. There is a line drawn between the sublime, which is almost too much, and the monstrous which is absolutely too much, and we have to protect ourselves against the absolutely too much because if that intervenes in the aesthetic arena it will lead to disgust. And I guess at this point, the beginning of February 2012, I’m very interested in reclaiming or rethinking that extremity of affect, of disgust, in relation to monstrosity, which, of course, is a way of thinking about the entire history of the avant-garde over the last 100 years. There’s a quotation from Bacon where he’s asked about the violence of what he does and he says well I don’t think it is violent, or if it is violent it’s about thinking through a greater violence which is the violence of the screens in which we find ourselves surrounded, and it seems to me we find ourselves screened and secluded in informational cells and part of the function of art is to try and break through that. I mean Nauman says a work of art is like a blow to the back of the neck, I’d like to see a bit more of that. What that might mean? I’m not sure, but to go back to some of that physical and intellectual extremity which seems to have been lost.”