Conceptual Artists

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Few weapons are more political than the body."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"This is the state that Leckey aspires to attain as an artist: a hyper-sensitized negation of the self, achievable through technology, which would connect him to a space that is profoundly open and potentially infinite. Power ON."

"This is a proposal for a show, in which I imagine a Newly Born Limb, the Ghost of A Flea, and an Endless Note Petrified in Stone. I picture two prosthetic arms, one ancient, one modern, reaching out as far as they can, to grasp all that there is in the world."

"Things that appear as images or pictures, but that somehow impose on me a sense of their actual weight, density and volume, of their physical being in the world. This sensation is then even further enhanced when a picture starts to move; when it comes to life."

"I just...the world just...it's just different. It changes every day."

"I am an autodidact - that's why I use bigger words than I should. It's a classic sign."

"See, we assemble. Samsung, Viking, Gaggenau, and Whirlpool. Here, here. Here, we exist. In the streets. And houses, in cars, and fields. As ever-present as sunshine."

"1. Artists are exploring language to create acces to ways of seeing."

"There appears to be no real relation of artist to art-object: and this notwithstanding the prospect of a clear account of verification; demontsration would still be difficult, and a clear purporting to describe the way something comes about would not ameliorate the situation. There would still be priority problems."

"3. Participating in a dialogue gives the viewer a new significance; rather than listening, he becomes involved in reproducing and inventing part of that dialogue."

"1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."

"32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution."

"Sufficient conditions may be provably consistent without implying anything about the impossibility of vague cases or about tertium non datur. And it is no argument that vague concepts are not under constraint here. Formalizability is not an additional requirement over and above the coherence and extensibility of a set of beliefs."

"Atkinson and Baldwin through the development of a framework investigating the notion of declaring a temporal entity to be an art entity -'The Monday Show'. most of the conversation and writing concerning this idea soon reached a desultory level -it was unnecessary to attempt to provide an adequate analogy to a spatial entity, because it was quickly and clearly equivalent that there wasn't one. What has become clear to the artists since is that this work was a necessary form of development in pointing out the possibilities of a theoretical analysis as a method for (possibly) making art."

"Fundamental to this idea of art (conceptual art) is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction. (note: Without this understanding a 'conceptual' form of presentation is little more than a manufactured stylehood, and such art we have with increasing abundance.)"

"... the first Cubist painting might be said to have attempted to evince some outlines as to what visual art is, whilst, obviously, being held out as a work of visual art. But the difference here is one of what shall be called 'the form of the work'. Initially what conceptual art seems to be doing is questioning the condition that seems to rigidly govern the form of visual art -that visual art remains visual."

"The question of 'recognition' is a crucial one here. There has been a constantly developping series of methods throughout the evolution of the art whereby the artist has attempted to construct various devices to ensure that his intention to count the object as an art object is recognised. This has not always been 'given' within the object itself."

"Cubist paintings were paintings by definition, that is, they are constructed by adhering paint to a surface (two-dimensional by definition) and as such fulfilled the requirements of entry to the category 'painting'. The controversy concerning Cubist paintings, was not primarily about wether or not they were (physically) paintings, but rather wether or not their form (in paint) was viable, Cubist collages were questioned on both levels."

"Epistemologically, it is fallacious to insist that the artist doesn't know that 'a' is an art-object unless he can produce a criterion for art-objectness which will cater for odd, or controversial cases."

"The art-area appears to present propositions which are genealogically untraceable; any attempted systemization would be based on inference. (Inquiry into the sustaining framework of art really needs to be moved from the descriptive to the revisionary stage)."

"..a single uninterrupted and continuous surface from which anything superfluous and all interpretative possibilities are excluded. [referring to his 'Achromes', Manzoni started to make in 1957]"

"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']"

"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."

"I sell an idea, an idea in a can."

"The work of art has its origin in an unconscious impulse that springs from collective substrata of universal values common to all men, from which all men draw their gestures, and from which the artist derives the 'archaic' of organic existence. Every man of his own accord extracts the human element from this base, without realizing it, and in an elementary and immediate way."

"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."

"The key point today is to establish the universal validity of individual mythology.. .The artistic moment is therefore that in which the discovery of pre-conscious universal myths comes about, and in the reduction of these into the form of images. It is clear that if the artist is to be able to bring to light zones of myth that are authentic and virginal he must have both an extreme degree of self-awareness and the gifts of iron precision and logic."

"Where the artist is concerned it is a question of the conscious immersion in himself, through which, once he has got beyond the individual and contingent level, he can probe deep down to reach the living germs of total humanity. Everything that is humanly communicable is derived from this, and it is through the discovery of the psychic substrata that all men have in common that the relationship of author-work-spectator is made possible. In this way the work of art has the totemic value of living myth, without symbolic or descriptive dispersion: it is a primary and direct expression."

"To arrive at such a discovery, fruit of a log and precious education, involves a whole field of precise technique. The artist must immerse himself in his own anxiety, dredging up everything that is alien, imposed or personal in the derogatory sense, in order to arrive at the authentic zone of values."

"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"

"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)"