Installation Artists

"All my extreme movements, all of them, are allied with madness."

"Binarism or God are not concepts to deconstruct, they are concepts to destroy."

"I have always found the unhappiness of people attractive, because if not, I would not trust them."

"Abortion is one of the greatest measures for child protection."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"My life and work feed back to such an extent that creating is living, and living is not possible without creating."

"I am not as afraid of anything as myself."

"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."

"Life without provocation would be summed up in resignation, skepticism and mental asepsis."

"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."

"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."

"Few weapons are more political than the body."

"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."

"Losing a mother seems to me one of the cruelest acts of nature. I have lost three."

"How is it necessary to be born just for the sake of being born? I should never have been born."

"My mother is as protagonist of my work as myself. My mother, my work and I are something indissoluble."

"I was born to be sad. I was born to suffer."

"As much as I try to isolate death desires from my life, they have accompanied me since I can remember."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"Sotheby's was proud to offer the monumental work by Anish Kapoor, which manifests all the pioneering ingenuity in material and spatial possibilities that characterise the very best output of the world-renowned sculptor."

"Architects have always hoped to find a way to skip that stage between design and finished building."

"Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it’s my role as an artist to bring to expression;it’s not my role to be expressive. I’ve got nothing particular to say, I don’t have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, let’s say, to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions, which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence."

"I think I’ve had three or four moments in my work over the last twenty-five years that have been real discoveries. The pigment pieces felt to me as if they were a discovery about an object and what an object can be; how an object can be and not be. Then, of course, the void pieces. The idea that if I empty out all the content and just make something that is an empty form, I don’t empty out the content at all. The content is there in a way that’s more surprising than if I tried to make a content. So, therefore, the idea that subject matter is somehow not the same as content. Then, in a different sort of way, moving from matte surfaces to shiny surfaces. In terms of the fact that the traditional sublime is the matte surface, deep and absorbing, and that the shiny might be a modern sublime, which is fully reflective, absolutely present, and returns the gaze. This feels like a new way to think about the non-objective object."

"Red is a colour I’ve felt very strongly about. Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it’s one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level. Of course, it is the colour of the interior of our bodies. Red is the centre."

"I am interested in sculpture that manipulates the viewer into a specific relation with both space and time. Time, on two levels; one narratively and cinematically as a matter of the passage through the work, and the other as a literal elongation of the moment. This has to do with form and colour and the propensity of colour to induce reverie. Consequently, I hope, an elongation of time. Space is as complex, the space contained in an objectmust be bigger than the object which contains it. My aim is to separate the object from its object-hood."

"It is precisely in those moments when I don’t know what to do, boredom drives one to try …a host of possibilities… [to] either get somewhere or not get anywhere."

"Jerusalem is all about a very special relationship between the ground and the sky. This work attempts to bring the two together."

"Do you know there’s a wonderful Christian idea in which Thomas stretches his hands out to try to touch Christ’s wound and Christ says ‘Noli me tangere’ (do not touch me). What your eyes see your hands will always try to affirm. Much of dealing with the non-material is about this confusion between the hand and the eye, the ear and the eye, when the thing that you look at is uncertain, your body demands a kind of readjustment, it demands certainty. Something happens to where you are, to space; time changes. Time, I think, becomes slower. The mystical truth of art is time."

"I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects."

"Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies."

"I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form."

"The idea is that the object has a language unto itself."

"There’s something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer."

"It is a conjunction of images I have always loved in his Sonnets to Orpheus and this work is, in a way, a kind of eye which is reflecting images endlessly"

"One of the influences in his design for the tower was the Tower of Babel the sense of building the impossible” that “has something mythic about it. The spaces inside the structure, in between the twisting steel, are “cathedral like”, according to Balmond, while according to Kapoor, the intention is that visitors will engage with the piece as they wind “up and up and in on oneself” on the spiral walkway."

"Germans have a rather healthy respect for the arts and artists, [could] not be more different from the British perspective."

"In Germany, it seems that the intellectual and aesthetic life are to be celebrated and are seen as part of a real and good education, whereas in Britain, traditionally – certainly since the Enlightenment – we've been afraid of anything intellectual, aesthetic, visual."

"In the UK, while the arts are the second biggest sector after banking, they probably form less than one tenth of 1% of government spending. It's completely scuzzy."

"The UK has two things, the arts and education, and both of them it pushes into the corner. It's the hugest, hugest mistake. Why do British ministers meet anyone from the arts other than to cut them? Compared to Germany, Britain has got quite a long way to go there, frankly."

"It's a building with a curious, difficult history that is inexorably linked to the history of Berlin, [he said] That's very potent. You can't make a show here without some reference to all of that. And it certainly makes a show here so much more interesting."

"I've never met Ai Weiwei but he's a colleague, an artist. In a very simple way he is heroically recording human existence. All he's done is to record death by administration, death by corruption, inefficiency. I don't even think he's pointing that sharp a finger, frankly."

"It is more than a month that he's been completely disappeared. It is a true tragedy. Accuse him of something. Give him a lawyer. Let him defend himself …"

"This is a terror of a space, probably much more difficult than the Turbine Hall. It's three times the size, huge horizontally and vertically and above all the light is a killer. It's almost brighter than it is outside."

"It's a shame that I haven't done an exhibition in India till now. But I am working on one in Delhi for January 2005. If things go well, there will be another in Mumbai too."