sculptors-from-new-york-city

"Life is Military [in the words of the Roman statesman Seneca]. Life is victory, life is defeat. Life is struggle."

"LURVE embraces an 'Ode to individuality' that celebrates creative pioneers such as Christopher Ross."

"There was no contemporary circle that would support me in these ideas."

"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."

"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]."

"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."

"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."

"Shiva dances, creating the world and destroying it, his large rhythms conjure up vast aeons of time, and his movements have a relentless magical power of incantation. Our European allegories are banal and pointless by comparison with these profound works, devoid of the trappings of symbolism, concentrating on the essential, the essentially plastic."

"To accuse me of making sensations is the easiest way of attacking me, and in reality leaves the question of sculpture untouched."

"A sculptor is supposed to be a dull dog anyway, so why should he not break out in colour sometimes, and in my case I'd as soon be hanged for a sheep as a lamb."