46 quotes found
"Pollock.. ..left us [c. 1958] at the point where we must be preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street [New York].. ..Objects of every sorts are materials for the new art, paints, chairs, food, electric and neon-lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists.. ..All will become materials for this new concrete art."
"Around late 1961 to 1962, right around there, somewhat unevenly and sort of spottily, I began to do pieces that were based upon a short text of actions that only involved a handful of friends or students at some specific site — a site that was not marked as an art site, a ravine somewhere, or a roadway, or somebody's apartment, or the telephone, that is, the places of everyday life, not designated as sites of art. And the work itself, the action, the kind of participation, was as remote from anything artistic as the site was.. ..I chose the word Happening from its normal language usage somewhat earlier for that philosophical reason, but I didn't categorize that as lifelike until much later. But in fact, looking back, that's exactly what Happening meant."
"Well, you know, a lot of work nowadays [c. 1991] tends to be illustrative of theory already written, and some of it tends to be quite consciously didactic, as if the determination is to teach somebody something. And letting that go for the moment, as far as its value is concerned, it's exactly the opposite of what I seem to find most useful, and that is to leave things open and not determine anything except the very clear form. The form is always very simple and clear. What is experienced is uncertain and unforeseeable, which is why I do it, and its point is never clear to me, even after I've done it. So that's a very, very different way of looking at the nature of our responsibility in the world."
"[something like] a badly constructed or repaired motor, or like that wonderful event of Tinguely's, where he made a huge contraption in the backyard of the Museum of Modern Art called 'Homage to New York', which was a machine that destroyed itself in various humorous ways. It's that breakdown system along with slippages that you can't predict I find most interesting, not because I want to make a point about society as being a broken down system or that all life is entropic — I don't, but rather that its process is unforeseeable."
"Most humans, it seems, still put up fences around their acts and thoughts – even when these are piles of shit – for they have no other way of delimiting them. Contrast Paleolithic cave paintings, in which animals and magical markings are overlayed with no differentiation or sense of framing. But when some of us have worked in natural settings, say in a meadow, woods, or mountain range, our cultural training has been so deeply ingrained that we have simply carried a mental rectangle with us to drop around whatever we were doing. This made us feel at home. (Even aerial navigation is plotted geometrically, thus giving the air a 'shape')."
"It's not what artists touch that counts most. It's what they don't touch."
"You can't teach colour from Cézanne, you can only teach it from something like this bubble-gum wrapper."
"The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible."
"A walk down 14th street is more amazing than any masterpiece of art."
"The problem with artlike art, or even doses of artlike art that still linger in lifelike art, is that it overemphasizes the discourse within art."
"SHELLEY JACKSON: You began as a writer, moved to performance art, then architecture. I’d like to follow the traces of writing through your career, and see whether your late work could be rethought as a radically materialist practice of writing. What made you want to write?"
"When I thought of myself as a writer in the 1960s, I questioned what made me go from the left to the right margin, from one page to another. As I thought of the space I was also thinking about time. Then I thought: ‘Why am I limiting myself to a piece of paper when there’s a world out there?’ I focused on performance in the early 1970s because the common language of the time was ‘finding oneself.’ In a time like that, what else could I do but turn in on myself and then go from me to you? Photography, film, and video were sidesteps–spaces in front of you–whereas I was more interested in the space where you were in the middle. Now I’m involved with peopled spaces–that’s design and architecture."
"Vito Acconci’s extraordinary career—poetry, art, architecture: a sort of triathlon of the arts—began in the Bronx, where as an aspiring author of seven years he wrote stories about cowboys and athletes. At his Catholic college, he published sexy stuff about priests and nuns that got the school magazine banned for three issues running. He went on to write fiction in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But when he came back to New York in the early ’60s, something changed, and he began writing poems. Highly conceptual constructions, they did not tell stories, express feelings, or evoke a fictional world. They were not representational. Maybe you could call them presentational: this is a word, this is a sentence, you are reading."
"All my work is informed by personal experience. It is the seed to which I apply a transcendent dialogue. The idea for my first bubble machine was rooted in a complex combination of many memories. During the Second World War I was in my sister’s arms when I saw a young Filipino guerrilla shot by a Japanese soldier. The young guerrilla ran into our garden. The sight of him lying there dying, red blood bubbles foaming from his mouth, made a strong impression on me. Flying over the Grand Canyon on my first trip to America, visiting a soap factory at the bottom of Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseilles, a visit to a brewery in Edinburgh in Scotland: these left deep impressions as well. My mother cooking “guinataan”, a Philippine dessert made of coconut milk and tropical fruit, and the movement of clouds over Manila Bay near where I was born, inspired me to create a work of art that would express and embody the motion of clouds."
"In the 1960s the works of and Tinguely were experiments with different forces, both magnetic and kinetic. My work differed from theirs, for although my kinetic art works used machines, the works themselves moved in random organic ways and avoided the monotonous repetitive movements of most machines. My land art projects and all the rest of my cosmic propulsions were born out of the organic and my relation with the dynamics of nature. When I first exhibited with Liliane Lijn at the Indica Gallery in London in 1967 I called my artworks bio-kinetic sculptures. Some of my artworks in that show are featured in the film I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname by the English director Michael Winner."
"I believe—when somebody gave me a pencil and a sheet of paper—was to create a world for myself, basically. It sort of made everything fall to the wayside. The environment where I was growing up, the poverty—all of that just sort of fell to the wayside, and I was able to create these worlds and enter into it. And I think that sort of isolated me a lot from other kids in the neighborhood, even isolated me while I was going to school. And my earliest recollections of entering school was the times when it was art time, and they had easels and they had paint and they had brushes…"
"It was explaining early on, I think, the process. And I can see that those were like the early stages of what I eventually went into when I was doing the large-scale on-site installation pieces when I paint directly onto the walls. Because I’m actually painting but I’m also engaging the viewer and talking during the course of the time that I’m actually doing the work. So I think the early performance pieces actually influenced me in the direction that I would later take in the larger on-site pieces when I started doing those pieces."
"People like to hold onto life in many ways, but everything is transitory. This is it, right now. Youth doesn’t last forever, beauty doesn’t last forever, so appreciate it for the moment."
"The hardest thing these days is to make something that’s beautiful; it’s easy to make ugly art. I think it takes a lot more talent to make something beautiful. Beauty to me is when you show something to someone that they’ve never seen before. That’s what a great work of art does; it shows you something that you didn’t know existed."
"Few weapons are more political than the body."
"As much as I try to isolate death desires from my life, they have accompanied me since I can remember."
"I was born to be sad. I was born to suffer."
"When I regained consciousness, I was transferred to a psychiatric clinic. I stayed there for twenty-two days. Against previous diagnoses, which identified a bipolar disorder, I was diagnosed with a personality disorder. Again, I was medicated enough to practically not be able to speak. I remember walking through those halls more dead than alive."
"Working with pain and the body to the limit, living with wounds and a mental illness, sleeping awake invaded by night terrors, all this entails a spirit of resistance."
"Life without provocation would be summed up in resignation, skepticism and mental asepsis."
"My mother is as protagonist of my work as myself. My mother, my work and I are something indissoluble."
"I will never forget my mother's words when she told us that before giving birth she tried to abort me up to three times. For me it is the greatest act of love that no one will ever do for me."
"How is it necessary to be born just for the sake of being born? I should never have been born."
"Losing a mother seems to me one of the cruelest acts of nature. I have lost three."
"Each of my works is a regression to the past. This way it becomes tangible. Having the ability to expose and revisit it, allows us an update, reconstruction and critical look."
"I was born on April 1, 1988. Birth certificate 2841329, dated December 2, 1991, proves that I legally did not exist until I was about four years of age."
"Abortion is one of the greatest measures for child protection."
"I have always found the unhappiness of people attractive, because if not, I would not trust them."
"Binarism or God are not concepts to deconstruct, they are concepts to destroy."
"All my extreme movements, all of them, are allied with madness."
"I am not as afraid of anything as myself."
"My life and work feed back to such an extent that creating is living, and living is not possible without creating."
"I fervently believe that art must be a tool with which the artist and the visitor or spectator must be intimate. In some occasions, with the approval of the visitor and in others, without it. It is the artist's responsibility to transform the viewer who visits an exhibition of his in a museum or gallery. It would be a total irresponsibility to allow the visitor to leave the museum, the exhibition or the performative experience in the same way that he has entered."
"I don't currently have any kind of family and I have had to learn to live each of my artistic and vital processes in total solitude."
"Education is very important. Education in the sense that, you have to study whatever it is that you love so that you could do it to your best ability with more knowledge."
"Not all of us are gifted in the academia scene and not all of us are good at doing the main subjects such as science and math, but everyone is gifted one way or another, so if you’re a musician take music classes to increase the knowledge that you have right now and improve the quality of your work. But never stop learning."
"Rehearsals help to cultivate the potential in you and they help you to become a better musician or a better songwriter."
"Patience is important, take time with your craft and don’t be afraid to start over and over again if you are not satisfied with what you’ve written. It’s important to balance the external pressure so you don’t end up rushing yourself."
"I started singing since my consciousness, and I haven’t stopped since, it has always been my way of expressing myself."
"I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better."
"A vision of an Africa that shelters and respects individualism and for Africans, that the world’s opinion of us is redirected."