Art Quote by Judith Malina

Performance, for Judith Malina, is never neutral; it is a public claim on attention that carries moral debt. The bluntness of "Look at me" strips theater of its polite pretenses. An actor doesn’t merely inhabit a role; they ask an audience to lend them time, belief, and feeling. Malina’s point is that once you make that demand, you’re already in the realm of ethics. You owe something back, and the only currency worth paying in is "the only truth you know."

That phrasing is doing careful work. She’s not arguing for capital-T Truth or tidy political slogans. She’s insisting on situated truth: the lived, embodied knowledge an artist has earned through fear, desire, shame, class, violence, pleasure. Acting, in her view, is a high-risk form of testimony. Even silence becomes a stance because the stage amplifies it. If you choose not to name what matters, you’re still communicating what you’re willing to smooth over.

The closing line, "There is no such thing as an uncommitted actor", reads like a rebuttal to the comforting myth of "just entertainment". Coming from Malina - co-founder of The Living Theatre, steeped in postwar avant-garde and explicitly political performance - it’s also a critique of institutional theater: the idea that craft can be separated from consequence. You can commit to truth, or you can commit to the status quo. Either way, you’re committed.