From Richard Nonas’ notebooks, undated

‘Things mean’ is what structural thinking is always about—expeditions into the interior: the invasion of reason into the interior; the search for information (that turning everything into information is what is dubious about anthropology, and much of art too). I’m not looking for clarification (which is just dull), but for something I don’t have words for: a kind of confusion or doubt which excites me the way some women do. Analysis is too violent, too specific, and too slow. I like my violence ambiguous, but quick—weakened by time, but strengthened by the depth of its wounding. (Words, analysis, make their object nothing more than object, but object—ambiguous object—left alone is something more.) As an anthropologist I destroy (or change, which is the same) whatever I touch. What do I do as an artist? What I touch is tainted; what I’ve touched is tainted. I destroy what I don’t know, by understanding it. Is that what art is about? Is art a kind of extended suicide? What we know, we destroy. What we can’t face, we kill. Art is about failure.