38 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."
"Auto-destructive art is conceived as a desperate last-minute subversive political weapon used by artists. It is an attack on the Capitalist system and the production of war materials. It is committed to nuclear disarmament and people's struggle."
"What is the significance of viewer participation in your work? It has to do with kinetic art. Kinetic art has very much to do with the interaction between spectator and art. In the second half of the ’50s, this became a big international movement. When I moved from painting to connections within media, this came through in the first work, which was an exhibition of found cardboard pieces. It was a turning point for me. The world itself, the industrial fabricated world, could stand for the man-made world of art."
"Facing up to the Nazis and the powers of the Nazi state coloured my life as an artist."
"At the beginning I was confronted with a choice: move into art or revolutionary politics,... I took the path of art at the age of 18.... I could see this possibility of using the ideas of social change within art."
"I don't want my image to appear in the mass media, since it would detract from the project."
"Atomic physics, was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century."
"In his 60 years of critiquing waste, commercialization, environmental exploitation, and social injustice, he has employed trash, old newspapers, liquid crystals, and industrial materials, and he has even painted with acid. Since Metzger is known for his work’s philosophical dimension, sometimes penning essays related to his art’s themes."
"It is truly frightening for a young woman artist to separate herself from the patriarchal artistic discourse that she learnt from, that does not support her and that she would like to be part of."
"I rather consider myself as the pursuer of the ideas and artistic movement of Hungarian feminism that started prior to WWI."
"I was a follower of the historical feminist movement in Hungary and of the liberating force of the new dance movement which developed within its artistic context, and which I named “free dance”."
"In my analysis of the art discourse emerging from the cross-section revealing the interlacement of patriarchal power and knowledge, I was greatly influenced by Valéria Dienes’s feminist writings, who could reconcile her thoughts on psychology, philosophy, and semiotics with the choreography of the art of movement – i.e., the mind with the body, and knowledge with feelings."
"I was born immediately after WWII, in 1946. I decided to become an artist at the age of 10, after my father’s death."
"When I arrived at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1970, my intention crystallized."
"By holding on to my independence and autonomy, I decided to make art that I felt authentic, art that was based on the recognition that as a woman, as a woman artist, I feel, see, and think differently."
"I was alone with my intention and could only find precursors in the historical Hungarian feminism that my mother had passed on to me (in the wake of periodicals such as A Nő és a Társadalom [Woman and Society, 1907‒1913] and A Nő [The Woman, 1914‒1917]."
"There was no contemporary circle that would support me in these ideas."
"But there was patriarchal communist political propaganda: “equality,” “emancipation of women” that voiced the political and social rights of women."
"Despite and along with this, censored feminism and the art of new dance, the movement art that pleaded the “divine” body resonated in me when I contrasted the experiences of my “bodily existence” with traditional and patriarchal representation of the woman’s body."
"Orsolya Drozdik (artist Orshi Drozdik) is the first feminist artist in Hungary."
"Individual Mythology was created in the mid-seventies; the series analyses the representation of the female body in general and the illustration of the artist’s body in particular."
"Her work can be found in several major collections such as the Museum Moderner Kunst (Vienna) and the Ludwig Museum Budapest."
"Using her own body for representative methods or simply analyzing herself trough mental work, Drozdik reflects herself in all of her projects."
"Well aware of the irony of her own situation, Orshi Drozdik can’t seem to escape the construction of herself."
"While consistently applying her perspective as a woman, an increased interest in the scientific representation of the body becomes evident in her work."
"She denounces and deconstructs science by showing its role in the creation of gender roles and reveals the construction behind the myth of the female identity and the objectivity of science."
"By overlaying pictures of famous dancers with Drozdik’s own dance moves and projecting images of Hungarian history on her body, she examines herself as an artist, a women and a Hungarian citizen."
"Individual Mythology already displays several characteristics of Drozdik’s way of work."
"Drozdik works primarily in series, which can be developed over decades, complementing or evolving from one another."