Conceptual Artists

"In May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of Artist's Shit. Each was numbered on the lid 001 to 090. Tate's work is number 004. A label on each can, printed in Italian, English, French and German, identified the contents as '"Artist's Shit", contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.' In December 1961 Manzoni wrote in a letter to the artist Ben Vautier: 'I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit, that is really his.' (Letter reprinted in 'Battino and Palazzoli', p. 144)"

"So it is obvious that at first glance there would seem to be a paradox: the more we immerse ourselves in ourselves, the more open we become, since the closer we get to the germ of our totality the closer we are to the germ of totality of all men. We can therefore say that subjective invention is the only means of discovering objective reality, the only means that gives us the possibility of communication between men"

"When I blow up a balloon, I am breathing my soul into an object that becomes eternal. [Manzoni's quote of 1960, referring to his art-work 'Artist's Breath']"

"Why not to set free these forms? Why not trying to uncover the infinite meaning of absolute space, the meaning of pure and absolute light? [Manzoni is referring to the colourless, but still matter-made art paintings, made by Zero artists, around 1950-60]"

"I would like to draw a white line covering the complete Greenwich meridian."

"You [=Yves Klein ] are the 'monochrome bleu' and I am the 'monochrome blanc'; we should start to cooperate together, we two. [Manzoni's remark, during their first meeting]"

"The foundations of the universal value of art are given to us now by psychology. This is the common base that enables us to sink its roots to the origins before man and to discover the primary myths of humanity. The artist must confront these myths and reduce them, by means of amorphous and confused materials, to clear images. Since these are atavistic forces that have their origins in the subconscious, the work of art takes on a magical significance."

"You [Dutch Zero-artist, Henk Peeters] take the North of Europe, I'll take the South. Switzerland will be our neutral zone where we shall have our common exhibition. (Manzoni's reaction when Henk Peeters accused him of plagiary]"

"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..."

"The old art depicted space as uniform and enclosed. The new art perceives space as organic and open. The old art was an object. The new art is a system. The configuration of the movement is more important than the shape of the object. The message of a kinetic and luminic work is the light and movement it produces. It has no other message. It has no meaning besides movement."

"When I met Terry Fox in Berkeley in 1970, we became fast friends. I felt his sensibility had a lot in common with Beuys, whom I’d known for some time, and I helped get them together."

"MAM: Liza Béar, welcome back to Arts Magazine. Avalanche—tell us what it was and what it’s going to be."

"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."

"I have a particular interest in corporations that give themselves a cultural aura and are in other areas suspect. Philip Morris presents itself in New York as the lover of culture while it turns out that if you look behind the scenes, it is also a prime funder of Jesse Helms, someone who is very hostile to the arts."

"I think it is important to distinguish between the traditional notion of patronage and the public relations maneuvers parading as patronage today. Invoking the name of Maecenas, corporations give themselves an aura of altruism. The American term sponsoring more accurately reflects that what we have here is really an exchange of capital: financial capital on the part of the sponsors and symbolic capital on the part of the sponsored. Most business people are quite open about this when they speak to their peers. , for example, says quite bluntly that he spends Cartier's money for purposes that have nothing to do with the love of art."

"In an ever-advancing spiral the public was made to believe that only Hollywood-style extravaganzas were worth seeing and that only they could give an accurate sense of the world of art. The resulting box-office pressure made the museums still more dependent on corporate funding. Then came the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. Many individual donors could no longer contribute at the accustomed rate, and inflation eroded the purchasing power of funds. To compound the financial problems, many governments, facing huge deficits—often due to sizable expansions of military budgets—cut their support for social services as well as their arts funding. Again museums felt they had no choice but to turn to corporation for a bail-out."

"The art world as a whole, and museums in particular, belong to what has aptly been called the "consciousness industry.""

"The artist's business requires his involvement in practically everything. He works in reference, not to a section of the world, but to the whole world."

"It would be bypassing the issue to say that the artist's business is how to work with this and that material and manipulate the findings of perceptual psychology, and that the rest should be left to other professions... The total scope of information he receives everyday is of concern. An artist is an isolated system,... he has to continuously interact with the world around him. Theoretically there are no limits to his involvement."

"When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that..."

"I chose to paint because the medium as such has a particular meaning. It is almost synonymous with what is popularly viewed as Art - art with a capital A-with all the glory, the piety, and the authority that it commands."

"Starting on a large scale towards the end of the 1960s in the United States and expanding rapidly ever since, corporate funding has spread during the last five years to Britain and the Continent. Ambitious exhibition programs that could not be financed through traditional sources led museums to turn to corporations for support. The larger, more lavishly appointed these shows and their catalogues became, however, the more glamour the audiences began to expect."

"The cybernetic art team >bcd< believes that the cybernetic art environment, initially involved with pattern recognition and artificial intelligence research in art and science, can make an important contribution t intersubjective communication and to the sharing of insight between people. The cybernetic sculpture Instantaneous, which was presented for the first time during the Rome colloquium, illustrates the existence of instantaneous communication on a truly parallel architecture based on 16 Compaq Deskpro 386 computers. It also signifies a true parallel processing mode (as experienced in extrasensory perception) in which 'time sequence', 'before' or 'after' hardly have meaning. The cybernetic sculpture instantaneous is seen as a contribution to a new communication medium between artists working interactively within the same system. This is a step towards intersubjective communication, through the process of reflection between artists and a transcendental Galois field."

"His most famous work, the Today Series (1966–2014), is an accumulation of thousands of "Date Paintings". In these works the date on which the painting was made is meticulously painted in white sans serif text, at the centre of a canvas coated with flat colour, with the month spelled out in the language of the place where it was made (unless the Roman alphabet was not used for the first language, in which case Kawara resorted to Esperanto). The paintings were produced in more than 112 cities worldwide. If a Date Painting was not finished by the end of the day, by midnight, he would destroy it."

"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."

"[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."

"In a certain sense the phrase "I am still alive" can never be sent as it cannot be received by the addressee instantaneously...It is only valid at the very instant that it is being written, and in the very next second it no longer is a certainty. If the addressee receives the telegram a few hours or days later and reads it, he merely knows that the sender was alive at the very instant the telegram was sent. But when he is reading the telegram, he is totally uncertain if the content of the text is still relevant or if it is still valid The difference, the small displacement between sending and receiving, is that particular unseizable glimpse of the presence of the artist. Likewise, it is a sentence of self-reassurance..."I am still alive." The activity of telling oneself and the world "I am still alive.""

"In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form... Wilson’s work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson’s work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened."

"Conceptual artist Ian Wilson (1940 in Durban, South Africa) has been interested in spoken language as an art form since 1968. He describes his own work as ‘oral communication’, and later on as ‘discussion’. At Wilsons own request, his work is never recorded either as film or audio in order to preserve the transient nature of the spoken word."

"... Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines. They're both. This is something usually not acknowledged and there's probably a good reason why: because if this were in one's consciousness, then one would be a bit more immune to brainwashing — assuming brainwashing is the intent."

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

"Avoiding all control, I spread out sheets of white paper or canvas in the nature. For some time they stay in the grass, in the rushes of river, in the meadows or among the rocks. Nature registers its presence, covering the surface of the paper with colors, forms and tracks. This process is controlled by a number of agents; such as space and time, substance and causality. It is governed by nature's intensity. It does not, depend on man's interference. Nature is the greatest and most admirable creator, and unlike logic it doesn't fail. The artist obligation is not to shape - handicraft, but to understand the riddles of reality. In such conception of Art there lies, as in the Universe itself, an immense richness, and a countless variety of forms."

"The Universe is the greatest piece of art"

"What really moves you and not just faked emotion. I don't think it's good when it's like that in art – but unfortunately it often is. That's why I like Bruce Nauman, for example, as a sculptor. With his work, sometimes I have really thought to myself, that's simply beautiful.. .Above all, it is difficult enough to depict something that moves you deep down inside. But that's ultimately what art is all about, and that's also what appeals to people – if an artist can do it."

"FOR MANY YEARS, Bruce Nauman has occupied an unusual position in the art world. Known as a vastly influential pioneer of everything from performance to video to conceptualism to installation, with nearly half a century of international biennials and museum exhibitions behind him, Nauman is the rare artist who seems entirely uninterested in pandering to the demands of his own celebrity—and he's been able to get away with it. In 1979, he moved to New Mexico, and he now spends most of his time on a 700-acre ranch south of Santa Fe, emerging from his cluttered studio only to train, breed and ride horses (and presumably to spend a little time with his wife of 25 years, the painter Susan Rothenberg). Communication with the outside world is conducted via his studio manager and gatekeeper of 29 years, Juliet Myers. And inquiries are often fruitless, as Nauman is known for almost always saying no to retrospectives, interviews or anything else that might "totalize," as he's said to put it, his work and career."

"O: Why did you leave sculpture for pure reflection? I mean thoughts, language and speech."

"I don't work that way. Part of it has to do with an idea of beauty. Sunsets, flowers, landscapes: these kinds of things don't move me to do anything. I just want to leave them alone. My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It’s not that I think I can change that, but it’s such a frustrating part of human history"

"Ascott’s early vision of cybernetic art was founded on the concepts of process, behavior, and system."

"Roy Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contemplation needed to be abolished."

"I am really interested in the different ways that language functions... When language begins to break down a little bit, it becomes exciting and communicates in nearly the simplest way that it can function: you are forced to be aware of the sounds and the poetic parts of words. If you deal only with what is known, you’ll have redundancy; on the other hand, if you deal only with the unknown, you cannot communicate at all. There is always some combination of the two, and it is how they touch each other that makes communication interesting."

"I would be at a gallery opening and someone would ask me: “so what are you doing these days?” I would reply, “I am interested in the word ‘time’.” Later, someone would ask: “But how can time be your art?” And I might have replied, ‘as it is spoken: “time”.’ Another day, someone might have asked, having heard I was using time as my art: “So what are you working with these days?” and I would reply: “time”. I am interested in the idea […] I like the work when it is spoken: “time”.’ And so the work was used over and over again."

"I cannot speak for all, but I have talked to many artists who feel this way - we have lost even our belief that we are the minority that knows. We believed ten years ago, twenty years ago, that we knew the secret. Now we have lost this belief. We are a minority with no power and no belief, no faith. I feel myself, as an artist and as a citizen, just totally obsolete... Okay, it can be done this way or that way or this way, or in splashes or smoothly, but why? What the hell is it about? That's why we wanted to ask people. For us - from our point of view - it's a sincere thing to understand something, to change course. Because the way we live we cannot live anymore. I have never seen artists so desperate as they are now, in this society."

"No, the parallels are between modernism, late modernism, and socialist realism, of course. That's two sides of one coin. Both came of this idea of aristocrats, of people in power, imposing the culture on the people. A totally inhuman art. Modern art, and Pollock is the best example, is totally inhuman. Huge pictures for museums--now we call them museums; in Stalin times they were called palaces, but basically the same thing--which we rarely see and rarely visit. The sheer size of this painting, it's a totally inhuman scale. And there it can be typified..."

"... There's a machine which is called History of Art, which is a structure. And artist fits in this only because he or she is needed for this structure. If for example the History of Art needs some parallel lines, there is an individual who makes parallel lines. And this individual fits into this machine which works by itself; it doesn't care about people or anything else, it just goes by itself."

"There's a crisis of ideas in art, which is felt by many, many people. Not only in art: in social thinking, in politics. That's one of the other things about this poll, one of the attempts to get out of this, by some maybe funny means — humor helps — because we really don't know where to go. and what our next step has to be. Artists now."

"Recognition that art was located in an interactive system rather than residing in a material object... provid[ed] a discipline as central to an art of interactivity as anatomy and perspective had been to the renaissance vision."

"Language is the most formless means of expression. Its capacity to describe concepts without physical or visual references carries us into an advanced state of abstraction."

"A liberal public is interesting to have as an audience. It is for that very reason that corporations make such an effort to ally themselves with cultural institutions."

"When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure."

"The art here does not exist to define conversations or generate dogma, it is here to open up conversations."