Artists

"Will you please go journeying for your own sake, till I come living a moment of life?"

"Let me not so much be lost in involvements as would make me incapable of recognizing the fragrance of the flower beaming in my own yard."

"May I not so much be lost as would have No time to look at myself Ever."

"I am tipsy after my own feelings themselves have become wine. I forget myself, world and all."

"May I not so much, so much be lost, just To see the hue, grace, glory gone Off the face of my beloved As I’d wake and be conscious."

"I wonder– didn’t the Creator really do injustice? With a power to defeat everyone without any battle, children are busy at play with the most beautiful moments of their life. Once they grow conscious of it, those moments will have gone away never to return to them."

"Once positioned on their(children's) lips, even the scariest of words come out as a melodious lisp."

"Even if they (Children) try to pluck it, the flower submits itself onto their hands. If it happens to prick their heels, the thorn scorns itself all its life."

"Even If they (children) fall during their play, the nature, having come under the spell of their creative sports, doesn’t know when they again start to play so full of jest. Believing that they fall unknowingly the ground, mostly, does not even hurt them."

"If they (children) smash, the flower vase assumes a smile while turning into pieces. For a chance to be spilled by their hands, anything they hold gets spilled itself full of happiness. For a chance to play with them, water forgets about its own colourlessness."

"If I'd ever grown prosperous like Shah Jahan was, I'd not have waited for my beloved's death before I erected a Taj Mahal."

"I'm searching a heart inside me-- a heart that's ebullient by swallowing the entire pain of the creation, a heart jubilant by accepting the entire tears of the world, a heart aglow by merging the entire dark within itself a heart that's smooth, effervescent and clean."

"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."

"Hungarian-born artist Nicolas Schöffer created his first cybernetic sculptures CYSP 0 and CYSP I (the titles of which combined the first two letters of “cybernetic” and “spatio-dynamique”) in 1956."

"In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as , Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer’s role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham’s 1968 Artforum essay “Systems Aesthetics” and his 1970 “Software” exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century."

"Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) formulated his idea of a kinetic art that was not only active and reactive, like the work of his contemporaries, but also autonomous and proactive, in Paris in the 1950s. He developed sculptural concepts he called Spatiodynamism (1948)."

"As was the case with other artists, Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics," published in 1948, was to have great significance for the work of Nicolas Schöffer. On reading it he made his first acquaintance with the science in the making, and he was later to incorporate cybernetic concepts in several of his most interesting works. Schoffer's application of cybernetics — which Wiener defined as "control and communication in the animal and the machine"-postulated that the behaviour of a mobile sculpture would be influenced by the behaviour of the spectator and by the environment in accordance with a fixed pattern and this would in turn influence the spectator."

"A homeostat constantly seeks to establish a balance which is perpetually disrupted, and performs a statistical exploration of all the possible combinations of inputs."

"Aesthetic hygiene is necessary for collective societies, for any social group residing together on a large scale. How? By programming environments that obey rigorous aesthetic criteria. Each time the inhabitant walks around in the city, he must bathe in a climate that creates in him a specific feeling of well-being, invoked by the massive presence of aesthetic products in the environment,"

"Crap is the essence of innovation and technological advancement. ...It’s our human way of becoming … well … generators of more crap that helps us become more modern, productive and communicative human beings."

"Monday could not have arrived on a worse day. It could have been polite and waited until Tuesday or even Wednesday."

"Aesthetics is merely an undiscovered force, expressed by a yet un-devised mathematical equation."

"Meditation takes chaos and begins magically morphing it into nothing."

"All my inner beings become streams of brightly lucent colors. I touch each strand and each thread makes a unique tone."

"A battle line occurs at these critical points in time. The heaven born leader must fight the onslaught with vigor and courage. Yet, no person alone can avenge a malevolent enemy. A grain of sand cannot consider itself a beachfront nor can a single drop of rain claim to be a raging river. However, when all the forces combine in harmony, then rocks crumble into dust, the earth shakes, and mountains move."

"Luck is for the poor. For the rich, money flows to its natural source. ...You know, it’s true what they say. Life is a beach!"

"Today is my last full day at the ocean. ...Perfection is not only for the rich, the supremely talented, the powerful. It is also available to me."

"Summerset’s fine culture was the topping on the cake for his delicately assembled self-esteem. Culture was one of the top ranking rest and relaxation pastimes for the citizens of Summerset. The Summerset Art Gallery, the... Theater Group, ...Museum of Fine Art, and its annual Summerset Independent Film Festival were the heartbeat of the township. It was a joy to live in Summerset’s cultural coated lining of contemporary living. It made one feel a cut above the rest of the mundane world."

"My wife says that I should be working for retirement instead of pursuing my sizzled dream of writing. I told her she was right. I should be working instead of goofing off. But, I’m a man. What does she expect?"

"The sequel would catapult me into the New York Times #1 book for 18 months straight. I would not allow my stardom to affect my Zen-Monk demeanor. I would retire into my mansion, become a Zen-Monk master and own three Jeeps."

"The ocean is an intoxicant or more like WD40. It greases the rusty parts of the mind and body and gets them moving like a precision machine."

"I don’t like jumping in the ocean and pretending to be a fish. I don’t surf and I don’t enjoy swimming. ...I don’t enjoy fishing either. I must come from a line of beasts that lived on the beach but not in the ocean."

"I learned how to work on automatic pilot over the years. It takes a lot of practice to keep a wife calm. I’ve actually become a wife-whisperer during my 32 years of marriage."

"The pivotal element is TIME POVERTY."

"I like to commemorate my trips with a localized t-shirt. I re-live my trips throughout the year, saying to myself that I am not trapped in a dungeon of incessant work because I go on vacations and have t-shirts to prove it."

"Reducing the consumption flow by rich people taking all the money is fun (if you’re rich) … at least for a while. ...In ten years, a new consumer class must emerge to continue to the devouring trend of consumption. IF NOT, the top falls from its own weight. The top dogs of global economic market cannot munch their way through product consumption to keep the show going. The result … CRASH!"

"He was soon asleep as the familiar cadence of Bach played in the background. It was no surprise that no one noticed."

"A couple walked past us holding hands. “You guys look so cute playing football in the park.” Little did they know that they just witnessed the biggest Super Bowl loss in the history of National League Football."

"A noted psychologist, who witnessed one of Mary Wellington’s desperate episodes, wrote about her in one of his articles. “Mary X’s behavior is symbolic of a gross narcissism that doesn’t allow anyone in their world except themselves. If there were a cure for this parasitic ailment, it would lead to world peace. Our modern technological society has inadvertently created the Mary X’s of the world, and our civilization suffers as a result. God help us all.”"

"The “have-nots” see agonizing death as an equalizing force. Their pompous attitude is unfair and their only advantage over us. Recently, I’ve come to resent them, to resent karma. ...I understood when Zombie died. I understood when Monica died. What I can’t understand is why I have to die at such a young age. It just doesn’t make sense. The only question I have is … WHY ME?"

"Jason never knew a day without war. They raged since before he was born, and had become a silent backdrop to his everyday life. As long as it stayed in the big cities, he was satisfied to remain deaf, dumb and blind to the destruction."

"Right now, at this very moment, we are at that point in time where the dream dies and reality takes its place. We are the only ones that can appreciate that moment, because we are the only ones who know it. This is a future moment happening right now. Don’t you get it Jason, then is now. In a few minutes, the present reality we are experiencing will be gone; the dream will have ended because it became reality. All of these stratums of reality, the multiplicity of cascading sheets of our world are about to morph, and shift, and sort, all in one small single point in time."

"I trembled at the thought of commenting on The Economist. However, I knew I had to take the leap or I would forever see myself as a sissy failure, a scaredy-cat unable to put his stuff out into the world for a shake and bake session with the big boys."

"Magic gave a final wink and wave as it vanished into the cascading darkness of the dark lonely back road."

"My wife is talking to me this morning without realizing that her words go into my ears and drop directly to my toes. I hear their thud as they land and maybe a small wisp of air as they pass my brain. ...I need her to understand that the alligator in my head is eating the meaning of her words as my toes become crammed with their debris. She will still yell at me, but I have a good excuse now that I have an alligator residing in my head."

"What they [the Cactus Bristle gang] discovered is that people were not influenced by principles, such as the difference between democracy and communism, Judaism versus Islam, or even rich versus poor. They found people did not generally comprehend or like abstract principles. All people wanted was a place they called their own, a good job, and the ability to make life decisions with ample access to television."

"I need to wake out of my stupor and begin work. ...my body stands frozen in a snow packed tundra waiting for rescue. It may take a few days before that happens, since my mind is on vacation in Alberta right now."

"Human nature is very myopic about its existence. It very much wants to think their current reality is the absolute reality."

"History is a perfect arm-chair coach, but it lacks human sentiment. It’s like imagining living through the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It can’t be done. Essentially history is an emotional iceberg when it comes to human tragedy. We look upon the events of history as folklore, stories of human rights and wrongs, of character and cracks. History is always a good story, but its tragedies or success never hit our current-event nerve."