I just finished reading Singing Sailors, from the gorgeous IDEA BOOKS, full of photos, interviews and quotes of Mark Manders' work. As he is currently my consistent hero, this is pure bliss for me.

He manages to say incredibly pretentious things while sounding like he is both naively sincere and absolutely taking the piss.

This quote reminded me that I shouldn't always be so realistic:

One example of such a image is the night that yearns for space and immediately creeps into your shoe when you take it off in a meadow at night. This type of image seems difficult to translate into a spatial object; that's why it's found its way into my collection of poems. Later, I realized that the night always enters the shoe by the same entrance when you take the shoe off. This has been happening in the same way since the very first shoe was made. But if you glue the shoe completely shut, make a new opening at the toe, and then attach a funnel-like construction to the opening, you've easily created a new entrance for the night-It is disappointing that we seem to observe the world as through a membrane

This one is like a corrolary to my In Theory, Communism Works reminder, suggesting that concept aint jack if you can't experience it:

It's of no importance whatsoever that I first had to fire the sculpture in a kiln, then cast it in bronze, and finally paint it to look like wet clay. I don't want to use my material symbolicly but in a more actual and direct way. I don't want to say: 'This material stands for this or that meaning or for this or that personal interpretation of the meaning of the material' because that creates an annoying and evasive illustrative rebus that requires too big a detour around language. I prefer to use reality and its rich infinite vocabulary. -Room, Constructed to Provide Persistent Absence

And this one I'm just being an opportunist about, because I'm looking for quotes on reality from people I admire.

The entire installation Reduced Rooms with Changing Arrest (Reduced to 88%) should be seen in relation to a normal chair which has not been reduced and which is shown behind a glass display case (p. 47). In this way, this normal chair sets itself apart from reality and the reduced installation. An identical copy of this chair at a reduction of 88% is also part of the installation. By placing the normal 100% chair in the display case, reality is in fact displayed.-Reduced Rooms with Changing Arrest (Reduced to 88%)