Artists From The United States

"Merging a rich visual sensibility with an almost scientific engagement with taxonomy and ecological systems, Frank Gillette is a video pioneer whose multi-channel installations and tapes focus on empirical observations of natural phenomena. An early theorist of video's formal and aesthetic parameters, in 1969 he was a founding member and president of the influential video collective Raindance. With influences ranging from cybernetics to painting, Gillette was an innovator of the multi-channel installation form, experimenting with image feedback, time-delay and closed-circuit systems. His seminal installation Wipe Cycle (1969), produced in collaboration with Ira Schneider, was included in the landmark 1969 exhibition TV As A Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York."

"The antithesis of 10th St. Howard was, at first, like a pariah uptown. He was very midwestern and his gallery had wall-to-wall carpeting."

"There have always been two aspects to my work: formal innovation and strong content. That goes for Steve’s tape pieces as well. To make a work together, we had to be engaged by the subject matter, and we shared an interest in technology as it has advanced. Looking back at the Hindenburg and , and forward in “Dolly” to new technologies, was a way of rethinking and understanding the soup in which we swim. We call this a theater of ideas, but its success as a work depends on the strength of the video and the music."

"In an effort to put different video artworks into separate categories, authors have come up with various solutions. Already in 1976 Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot observed three basic approaches to the video image: video in which the artist/performer is subject; video in which the environment is subject; and video in which the abstract synthesized image is subject."

"Ira Schneider was a pioneer of video in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his work with video installation and single-channel tapes, he explored the manipulation of time, interactivity and simultaneity as formal and conceptual devices. A participant in the landmark exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969, he created several important early multi-channel video installations, including Manhattan is an Island and, with Frank Gillette..."

"Howard Wise is one of the people who is responsible for the idea of an alternative television."

"I was attracted to video art because it allowed me to combine a strong sense of content with formal innovation. The field was wide open and allowed for a great deal of experimentation for creating new forms."

"The most important thing was the notion of information presentation and the notion of the integration of the audience into the information. One sees oneself exiting form the elevator. If one stands there for 8 seconds, one sees oneself entering the gallery from the elevator again. Now at the same time one is apt to be seeing oneself standing there watching Wipe Cycle. You can watch yourself live watching yourself 8 seconds ago, watching yourself 16 seconds ago, eventually feeling free enough to interact with this matrix realizing one's own potential as an actor."

"Eventually, I'd like one monitor at the North Pole, one at the South, and two at the equator, big monitors switching images back and forth."

"Germany at that time was synonymous with the Holocaust to me and as a Jew it was necessary to face that."

"Ira Schneider's 1974/2006 Manhattan is an Island was one example (of the surprises)... On 23 monitors mounted on unusually tall pedestals of varying heights, suggesting skyscrapers and evoking Manhattan, Schneider presented black-and-white video footage of people moving about he city, capturing the ceaseless intensity of life on the sidewalks and streets."

"Howard Wise is one of the people who is responsible for the idea of an alternative television."

"The shape and direction of video art's accelerated growth, since virtual nonexistence in the mid-'60s up to the present, has been influenced primarily by the priorities of major funders-the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others . It has matured without the bevy of individual collectors who support more established forms such as painting and sculpture. Within video's media arts centers and funding organizations, there are many advocates, administrators, and curators who provide an infrastructure which enables artists to produce and distribute work, often doing so with little publicity or recognition. In this realm, Howard Wise stands out as an individual benefactor who preceded and has supplemented private foundations and public monies. He has been a central figure in the visibility, production, and acceptance of video art. For almost 20 years, he has been one of the few patrons of video art."

"Howard was very important because he went against the mainstream in his gallery."

"My father resigned during the Depression, so I had that responsibility at an early age. Like any other business, the Depression had hurt us a lot and we had a lot of labor unrest among the 300-400 employees. I decided that I had better take a good look at the situation, and I got in touch with a labor consultant . He suggested that since we were a relatively small business we could keep an intimate relationship with the employees, so I did that. We had 10-year and 25-year clubs, and when it came my turn to get the gold insignia, or whatever it was, for my 25 years with the company I realized, "My God, 25 years," and I decided to quit."

"Ever since Marshall McLuhan has become a household name, people have become aware of the tremendous force, both actual and potential ; that TV is having and will have on their lives."

"I thought I would combine my artistic experience with my business experience and start a gallery in Cleveland because there really was no gallery of any stature there. I felt that Cleveland was artistically avery closed and ingrown community. The only real modern work that was shown was local work . My objective in opening a gallery in Cleveland was to bring the art from various centers in Europe and America."

"Howard Wise, [was] an art patron and a former dealer who gave important early support to the technology in art movement in the United States... In 1964 his Howard Wise Gallery in Manhattan presented On the Move, the first survey in the United States of contemporary kinetic art. The gallery's exhibition Lights in Orbit three years later was the first comprehensive survey in this country of kinetic light art. Mr. Wise also organized the first exhibition of the budding video art movement, TV as a Creative Medium, in 1969, and two years later he founded , a nonprofit organization that distributes artists' videotapes and provides editing and post-production facilities for independent videomakers."

"There can be no doubt that Tsai's phenomena (whether they be works of art in the strict sense, or whether they be fantastic artifices) are extremely important. They show what promises and dangers may be in here in a "play," if it is proposed by a great artist. Because, even if Tsai's phenomena be considered artifices, there can be no doubt that Tsai is a great artist. Not because what he does is pleasant, or because he proposes a play, or because he represents the spirit of our times, but because he reveals to us, through artifice or works of art, the concrete experience of a future full of promise or abysmal danger."

"As far as the sensory experience of the spectator goes, the most outstanding American kinetic artist is unquestionably the Chinese-born Wen-Ying Tsai. His pieces, which are perfect on the technological level, serve the primary purpose of giving a complete visual experience to the spectator, whose sound solicitations provoke a choreographic, chromatic and rhythmic response in the ‘cybernetic sculptures’. [...]"

"Traditional guerrilla activity such as bombings, snipings and kidnappings complete with printed manifestos seem like so many ecologically risky short change feedback devices compared with the real possibilities of portable video, maverick data banks, acid metaprogramming, Cable TV, satellites, cybernetic craft industries, and alternative lifestyles. Yet the guerrilla tradition is highly relevant in the current information environment. Guerrilla warfare is by nature irregular and non-repetitive. Like information theory, it recognizes that redundancy can easily become reactionary and result in entropy and defeat."

"Tsai's Multi-kinetics were dynamically integrated multiple constructions, employing thirty-two kinetic units, each of which contains a configuration of multi-colored gyroscopic forms. With these elements he created an active environmental field that could, apparently, be infinitely extended. Each motorized unit was a self-sufficient entity, and when it was combined with other similar units produced a large-scale kinetic work that joined visual intensity with mechanical power. By controlling the time sequence of each unit in skillful compositions, Tsai used engineering principles to achieve aesthetic ends."

"The arrangement I worked out with Fordham was that I would do my alternate service there as a conscientious objector, working with McLuhan directly during the 1967–1968 academic year and then experimenting with video for 1968–1969. It was terrific. I had an office two doors away from his. McLuhan would stop me in the hall and with great excitement tell me about a book he read the night before on the sense ratio of Russian peasants. Once he invited me into his office to talk about a paper I had written about war. He sat on this couch, spun around, lay on his back, held the paper up, read a bit from it, put it down, and continued to lie on the couch for a good hour, free-associating."

"Paul Ryan, a research assistant with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University, lent Fordham's equipment to Frank Gillette, a painter; filmmaker Ira Schneider met Gillette at a party and later taught a video workshop at Antioch College with Gillette... Completing the variety of work in "TV as a Creative Medium" was Everyman's MobiusStrip, by Paul Ryan (who, along with Gillette, was soon to become the theoretical mover in the video collective Raindance). Working with McLuhan, Ryan was exploring video as a psychological mirror, asocial tool, and a communications device."

"You are sitting in a curtained booth on a stool, a TV aperture hangs before you like a surrealistic picture frame, beyond which the portable video camera sits and observes, as you are prodded ever so gently by calculatedly stimulating questions: "React to the following people : Nixon, your mother, Eldridge Cleaver, Teddy Kennedy, you... for the next ten seconds, do what you want... now let your face be sad..." You watch yourself in full audio-picture recap of your "interview," erasing all but the fewest frames of the previous tape as your tape will be obliterated by the next."

"Edward Ihnatowicz (1926-1988) built one of the world's first computer-controlled robotic sculptures, The Senster, in 1968-70. Rather than concentrate entirely on this groundbreaking and influential piece of work, this paper describes the stages he went through in developing his ideas, as an illustration of how a conventional artist became a cybernetic sculptor."

"I am not really suggesting that we should construct cybernetic cigarette boxes, merely that the situation described contains all the elements which would have to be taken into account in a design of a practical cognitive system. These can be described as:"

"...three artworks created in the mid and late sixties stand as landmarks in the development of robotic art: Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe's Robot K-456 (1964), Tom Shannon's Squat (1966), and Edward Ihnatowicz's The Senster (1969-1970). While these works are very significant in their own right, they acquire a particular meaning when re-considered today, since seen together they also configure a triangle of new aesthetic issues that has continually informed the main directions in robotic art."

"But this logic has also worked to exclude the decorative — the decorative insofar as it functions solely as decoration. It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on "absolute" or "autonomous" art: thus on visual art — including even architecture — that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not. Decoration is asked to be "merely" pleasing, "merely" embellishing, and the "functional" logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such "mereness." This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins..."

"Barry was one of the first to see that mass and volume in sculpture were not dependent upon visibility... But also, and perhaps more importantly, that language was a necessary component to communicate the idea in conceptual art."

"Two small and rather unappealing animals possess patterns of behaviour that have great relevance for the student of intelligent systems. These are the wood louse and the maggot of the common housefly, and it is the difference in their behaviour which is so illuminating. It has to do with the way in which they orient themselves to their environment. Wood lice like moist places and succeed in aggregating there by the simple device of slowing down their otherwise random movements as the humidity increases. The maggot, which, during a certain stage of its development needs to come out of the dark, finds light by a slightly more sophisticated system. It has a single, non-directional light-sensing organ at the forward end of its body and as it moves along it swings this end left and right, allowing the amount of light gathered during each swing to determine the extent of its forward motion. In this way it keeps altering its course until the amounts of light sensed are equal for both sides, by which time it must be heading straight for the light."

"A painter should never speak because words are not the means at his command. Words cannot express visually dimension at a glance they can only establish their own relationship in time. However, it is possible for a painter, at certain moments of his development to formulate some of the problems he is facing in the growth of his work. A painting cannot be explained. Words can only stimulate the act of looking. A visual problem is never put a priori as a mathematical problem but is born in the process of painting and evolves in a state of unawareness of the painter."

"Seeking an English equivalent for peinture relative, Glarner settled on the term 'relational painting' towards the end of 1946, which he applied retrospectively to some of his earlier paintings and all his subsequent works. It was a term that suited the kind of abstract painting he pursued, focused on relating geometric shapes and ground through colour in ways which would make shape and ground alternate to produce what he called 'pumping planes'. While acknowledging the influence of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), with whom he was closely associated in New York, Glarner replaced the balancing of horizontality and verticality achieved in Mondrian's painting with interlocking rectangles and wedges that expand out towards the edges of the canvas."

"The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems."

"In perception itself, two distinct processes can be discerned. One is the gathering of the primary, sensory data or simple sensing of such things as light, moisture or pressure, and the other is the structuring of such data into information."

"[Ilya Kabakov] saw Total Installation as a new art form that incorporated all the forms that had come before, including painting, drawing, sculpture, plus the theatrical forms of scene-making, music, and the atmosphere created by the interaction of light and color. If the artist has properly manipulated all these elements, those who enter become "simultaneously both a 'victim' and a viewer, who on the one hand surveys and evaluates the installation, and on the other, follows those associations, recollections which arise in him; he is overcome by the intense atmosphere of the total illusion."

"For me the art world is like a huge river, which began somewhere in the past and keeps flowing towards the future."

"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."

"Fear is the reason for making art. It is a means to freedom."

"Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have been collaborating since 1989, 3 years before their marriage in 1992. Ilya was born in 1933 and spent years working as an artist prior to meeting Emilia, but the couple’s meeting sparked the installation practice that defined their aesthetic trajectory."

"The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."

"Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual’, professional & commercialized culture ... PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, ... promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals ... FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action.""

"Never lend Paik a television. He destroys all televisions."

"If you are really short of $ I could send you some (after my next pay, since I have spent my resent pay 99%). Wait another 5 days, I will send some – don't starve meanwhile. Eat grass mixed with chopped leather belt and boiled old shoes – it's vitamin and protein rich. – That's what the Russian guerillas used to eat."

"The Fluxus movement... developed its 'anti-art', anti-commercial aesthetics under the leadership of George Maciunas. Fluxus staged a series of festivals in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and New York, with avant-garde performances often spilling out into the street. Most of the experimental artists of the period, including Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, took part in Fluxus events. The movement, which still continues, played an important role in the opening up of definitions of what art can be."

"When I started in video I was one of two or three dozen video artists in 1970. And now, to paraphrase Andy Warhol, everyone's a video artist. Video, through your cellphone and camcorder, has become a form of speech, and speech is not James Joyce. It's great, and to be celebrated, but it has to find its own level."

"Jacques Lipchitz and Marc Chagall were among the European artists who settled in New York City during the war. Just before and after he arrived in 1941, Lipchitz gave his works such titles as Flight (1940), The Exile's Path (1941), The Rape of Europa (1941), and Theseus and the Minotaur (1942)."

"I remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he had seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso."

"The period during the First World War was a very exciting time in Paris, with artists, philosophers, and poets continually discussing and arguing about the work with which they were involved. Although I myself am little concerned with abstract theory, I certainly do think of cubism as a form of emancipation essentially different from artistic movements that had preceded it. Thus, impressionism, while it was a revolutionary technique, was still an essentially naturalistic movement concerned with a precise examination of the nature of light and the effect of changing lights on representational scenes and objects. Cubism did add a new dimension to painting and sculpture, a dimension that changed our way of looking at nature and the work of art."

"By the early 1920s I knew that I needed to move beyond the simple cubist vocabulary I had learned and to find a new content, a new personal expression.Abstraction was never enough for me."