Sculptors From The United States

"I work in waves because I'm impatient. It has to be done. I take liberties."

"It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks.. .So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks.. .And I did those charts, big palettes.. .two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task."

"When I work I work very fast, but preparing the work can take any length."

"In painting it is the forming of the image."

"Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957]."

"For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)."

"I think of myself as a Romantic Symbolist."

"To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release.By crisis by no means limited to a morbid state, but could just as easily be an ecstatic impulse."

"I show things in flux."

"To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it's amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that's another training in a sense. So there's a certain mannerism that comes in both of them [three], and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don't have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I'm sure it has great feeling when they're doing it, but it's more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it's a complex thing. I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don’t think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush.. .I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It's like a state."

"I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements."

"It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking.. .I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down."

"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’. [...]"

"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."

"Question: Do you make preliminary sketches? I've made so many mobiles that I pretty well know what I want to do, at least where the smaller ones are concerned. But when I'm seeking a new form, then I draw and make little models out of sheet metal. Actually the one at Idlewild [Airport (in the International Arrival Building)] is forty-five feet long and was made from a model only seventeen inches long. For the very big ones I don't have machinery large enough, so I go to a shop and become the workman's helper."

"Question, Léger once called you a realist. How do you feel about this? Yes, I think I am a realist. Because I make what I see. It's only the problem of seeing it. If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space - then you can make it, and tout de suite you're a realist. The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it."

"Question: How did the mobiles start? The mobiles started when I went to see [[w:Piet Mondrian|Mondrian [in Paris, 1930]. I was impressed by several colored rectangles he had on the wall. Shortly after that I made some mobiles."

"What I like best is the acoustic ceiling in Caracas, in the auditorium of the university [Central University of Venezuela]. It's made from great panels of plywood - some thirty feet long - more or less horizontal and tilted to reflect sound. I also like the work I did for UNESCO in Paris and the mobile called 'Little Blue under Red' that belongs to the Fogg. That one develops hypocycloidal and epicycloidal curves. The main problem there was to keep all the parts light enough to work."

"Question: Which has influenced you more, nature or modern machinery? I haven't really touched machinery except for a few elementary mechanisms like levers and balances. You see nature and then you try to emulate it. But, of course, when I met Mondrian [Paris, 1930] I went home and tried to paint [for a while]. The basis of everything for me is the universe. The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them. My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement. Even my triangles are spheres, but they are spheres of a different shape."

"Question: How do you get that subtle balance in your work? You put a disk here and then you put another disk that is a triangle at the other end and then you balance them on your finger and keep on adding. I don't use rectangles - they stop. You can use them; I have at times, but only when I want to block, to constipate movement."

"His need for fantasy broke the connection; he started to "play" with his materials: wood, plaster, iron wire, especially iron wire...a time both picturesque and witty.."

"Question: Is it true that Marcel Duchamp invented the name “mobile” for your work? Duchamp named the mobiles and Arp the stabiles. Arp said, "What did you call those things you exhibited last year? Stabiles?""

"My entrance into the field of abstract art came about as the result of a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930. I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of color he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature. I told him I would like to make them [Mondrian's flat painting] oscillate, he objected. I went home and tried to paint abstractly - but in two weeks I was back again among plastic materials."

"I think that at that time and practically ever since, the underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from."

"What I mean is that the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form."

"I started [in Paris, 1920's, making toys] right away, using wire as my main material as well as working with others like string, leather, fabric and wood. Wood combined with wire (with which I could make the heads, tails and feet of animals as well as articulating parts) was almost always my medium of choice. One friend of mine suggested that I should make bodies entirely of wire, and that is how I started to make what I called 'Wire Sculpture'. In Montparnasse, I became known as the 'King of Wire'."

"I fled, a fortunate fugitive, / Lying with the work of one alive / The day and the night unfurled in the presence / of mobile wings - algae - leaves. / Greetings forger of gigantic dragonflies / Diviner of mercury your fountain revealed / A water heavy as tears. But a carousel of little crimson moons thrills me / It brings to mind a translucent circus / It is a leaf traversed by the sun. / One green day you saw a red bird / in pursuit of a yellow bird; you [Calder] know that we are bound to nature / that we belong to the earth."

"Since the design of the movement is paramount, shape, for me, should have no significance of itself; it merely makes movement evident. Therefore, the simplest, most customary, most unobtrusive forms suffice."

"While aesthetics generated by movement can be traced back to ancient wind chimes, the beginning of kinetic art is associated with avant-garde experimentation of the early twentieth century. The generally acknowledged starting point is Naum Gabo’s 1920 publication of the realist manifesto and his exhibition of Virtual Kinetic Volume in the same year. Kinetic art explicitly introduced the temporal dimension into art, and movement was incorporated into works hung and framed as conventional paintings, freestanding sculpture both in and outside the gallery, machine works, and installations at a range of scales. With Alexander Calder’s exhibition of mobiles in Paris and New York in 1932, the genre received heightened exposure. He dominated the pre-war period with a series of developments on the mobile theme, while the most prolific period for kinetic art was during the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to the continuing popularity of Calder, prominent artists include Schoeffer, , Len Lye and George Rickey."

"As for what l'm making now, perhaps it's art; but if it isn't, at least it's something else equally interesting to me!"

"The evolution of Calder's work epitomizes the evolution of plastic art in the present [20th] century...First we have a reduction of volumes to contour lines - a sort of spatial calligraphy in wire.. .Then a growing interest in the bases of plastic organization - texture contrasts, primary colors, simple rhythms. Finally a new fusion of these elements into forms.. .And it is in the ability to effect this fusion that Calder's quality lies.. .Tatlin's and Obmochu's constructions remained architecture and machines. Calder personalizes his 'mobiles' with a lyricism entirely his own - a freshness, gaiety and charm."

"Into the plastic expression of the period he has introduced a new element - that of time. In several of his mobiles he has, as it were, underscored certain suggested compositional rhythms by actual kinetic ones. And here his work offers an interesting parallel with that of the fountain sculptors, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Rome and Florence. Just as out of their playing with water and their free and often fanciful solutions of technical problems, grew what we recognize today as some of the earliest hints of the baroque style in sculpture; so Calder's realizations, vividly vernacular to the present age as they are, offer, at the same time, more probabilities of relationship with the plastic expression of the next, than does the work of any other American sculptor today."

"It was only a step further for Calder to bring back actual movement in place of the suggestions of it [in art]. And the immediacy of this stimulus carried with it a primitive strength of rhythmic evocation that is perhaps Calder's most striking contribution. But a still more personal and perhaps more important one lies in his recognition of another feature of natural movements - their unpredictable character and the aesthetic possibilities of the unexpected.. .Calder in adapting the natural rhythms also recognized the dramatic value of the surprise element."

"Such artists [as Calder] design with 'movement itself' as distinct from a movement which is incidental or accessory...without changing the form. Their movement is as intrinsic as that of a gramophone record or an airplane in flight; without it the object would be something else."

"Calder's constructions are not imitative of nature; I know no less deceptive art than his. Sculpture suggests movement, painting suggests depth or light. A "mobile" does not "suggest" anything: it captures genuine living movements and shapes them. "Mobiles" have no meaning, make you think of nothing but themselves. They are, that is all; they are absolutes. There is more of the unpredictable about them than in any other human creation. No human brain, not even their creator's, could possibly foresee all the complex combinations of which they are capable. A general destiny of movement is sketched for them, and then they are left to work it out for themselves. What they may do at a given moment will be determined by the time of day, the sun, the temperature or the wind.."

"I was talking with Calder one day in his studio when suddenly a "mobile" beside me, which until then had been quiet, became violently agitated. I stepped quickly back; thinking to be out of its reach. But then, when the agitation had ceased and it appeared to have relapsed into quiescence, its long, majestic tail, which until then had not budged, began mournfully to wave, and, sweeping through the air, brushed across my face. These hesitations, resumptions, gropings, clumsiness's, the sudden decisions and above all that swan-like grace make of certain "mobiles" very strange creatures indeed, something midway between matter and life. At moments they seem endowed with an intention; a moment later they appear to have forgotten what they intended to do, and finish by merely swaying inanely.."

"I knew metal working before I knew Calder, and Calder is one of our great men and he is earlier by a few years than any of the rest of us [in American Abstract Expressionism ]. Calder had worked in Paris quite a bit in the early days, though he did go to school here in New York at the Art Students League.. .After my first year in college I had worked on the assembly line in the Studebaker plants up in Indiana.."

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

"Art originating in the countercultural tradition - a tradition which became epoch-making - introduced some new specific values into the cultural fabric, values to which the creative activity of Jacek Tylicki refers closely. Through his art, Tylicki lays a stress upon personal experience bearing witness to artistic truth; he searches on his own account for an authenticity and a fullness of existence in its relation to Nature, to other human beings, as well as to himself; and maintains a critical suspiciousness towards the ethical and political models of Western society."

"Give If You Can - Take If You Have To."

"Make war in art not in reality"

"For a chicken the most beautiful is chicken."

"In the Spring of 1926 I made some toy animals of curtain rods, broom handles, etc., and wire. Later, a few dolls, which I animated.... In the Winter of 1927–1928 I made some more toys for a friend to take home as gifts, and having shown them to De Creeft a Spanish sculptor with a very acute sense of humor, I was urged by him to make some more toys and to expose them at the . I did this and then began to make more elaborate toys, with articulation, in which the movements got more and more realistic, always adhering to the same basic materials. In this way I have developed quite an elaborate circus of which animation is one of the chief characteristics...."

"Art happens all the time, everywhere. All we have to do is to keep our minds open."

"The Universe is the greatest piece of art"

"The admission of approximation is necessary, for one cannot hope to be absolute in his precision. He cannot see, or even conceive of a thing from all possible points of view, simultaneously. While he perfects the front, the side, or rear may be weak; then while he strengthens the other facade he may be weakening that originally the best. There is no end to this. To finish the work he must approximate."

"At that time (last Spring) I did not consider this medium to be of any signal importance in the world of art; merely a very amusing stunt cleverly executed.... However, wishing to return to Paris, I felt it would be quite justifiable to have an exhibition here, where "clever stunts" are highly appreciated, so I came over 3 months ago and set to work, carving wood and twisting wire. These new studies in wire, however, did not remain the simple modest little things I had done in New York. They are still simple, more simple than before; and therein lie the great possibilities which I have only recently come to feel for the wire medium."

"I say nuclei, for to me whatever sphere, or other form, I use in these constructions does not necessarily mean a body of that size, shape or color, but may mean a more minute system of bodies, an atmospheric condition, or even a void. I.E. the idea that one can compose any things of which he can conceive."

"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."