Sculptors

"I am concerned with the figure.. .Equilibrium, unity."

"I dream of a sculpture in which landscape, architecture and city are one. It might be a city like Marseille, a city steaming with heat which suddenly transmogrifies. I becomes an immense piece of sculpture, a gigantic figure, made up of white blocks and segmented by flat, horizontal terraces, arranged in a bare and motionless landscape. (circa 1969)"

"The search continues for the absolute model-form which shall do justice to every dimension without loss of inner force."

"Stone is the only true material for the sculptor. All others, tin, iron bars, tin cans and coiled springs are merely poor substitutes"

"The hardness and immobility of material gave me more satisfaction tan true-to-life representations."

"My desire to work is not stimulated by the classical proportions of Greek architecture, but by functional silos and hangars.. .The confusion of places, cluttered with art and culture chokes my inspiration. What stimulates and interests me is the natural noise of a busy city, and the practical lay-out of a harbor or factory which has come into being without consideration of any aesthetic principles."

"Every magnitude, every dimension, requires a new configuration."

"Culture can flourish only under the protection of a society with aristocratic characteristics."

"We like to think that we’re forming our tomorrows, that we’re making pictures that don’t exist in reality, that maybe tomorrow will be a little bit more like our pictures than it would otherwise."

"We want our Art to bring out the from inside the Liberal and conversely to bring out the Liberal from inside the Bigot."

"If a performance artist started going on about England and our culture like that-in fact that's happened to Gilbert and George, they are about the only ones I know that have done anything of this sort. It seems to me that both yourself and other artists can talk about flags and America and all this… you can play with these ideas, you may not believe in it, that you can play such a close game with them without anyone being offended."

"THE SINGING SCULPTURE brought Gilbert & George their first taste of fame in 1969. The piece consists of the artists performing a 1930s music hall song called "Underneath the Arches". Gilbert & George would stand on a table and sing along to a record of the old song, wearing tweed suits, with their faces painted bronze, and using a glove and a plastic walking stick as props. The song’s lyrics tell about the life of a tramp in London whose home is outdoors underneath the arches of a bridge. Gilbert & George first performed the piece under a bridge in London, and were soon invited to perform it in many European cities where it was always received as a sensation."

"SM: Let’s start with a trivial question: why Gilbert and George and not George and Gilbert?"

"SM: You’ve always put yourselves in the center of your work and there’s a strong performance element in your practice. Has it changed throughout the years?"

"People used to refer to our art as "gay art"—though they never said the "gay art of Leonardo or Michelangelo." Much of our content used to be taboo and isn't considered that anymore, not just in the obvious ways of sexuality or bodies. The art world has moved to the point that Gilbert & George isn't on the radical edge anymore."

"But we don't want to think. It's exhausting enough without that. We didn't think when we did the Ginkgo Pictures, at all. Afterwards we found out all this stuff about them."

"George: We say that how we are that day made us do that picture and we have to respect that. If you have another thought, that's another picture; it would be another one."

"Really creative thinking does not occur with regard to problems."

"To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought."

"We don't want to know what we are doing. It's much better not to know. You have to express yourselves, once you've finished a group of works you have to start all over again. It's extraordinary stuff - what an artist has to do. You finish a big group of works, then the next day you have to begin again. Forty years we've been doing that."

"THE LAWS OF SCULPTORS"

"We think of our art as just pictures, not as photographs. We are using photography, not being photographers."

"If you are submerged in normal life, then your view will be normal. So we have to keep separate from normal life in order to be able to say something that is not known. People come to art for something that they don’t understand, that’s not in their life already."

"It is important to us to publish our art in books and catalogues, so as many people as possible are able to see it, but we also want them to see the real pieces. We like it very much when the pictures take over. When they’re bigger than the viewer. You go to a museum to look at a picture, but we like it when the picture looks at you."

"A clergyman once said to us, "Jealousy is a bad thing. But I must confess that I am sometimes jealous of the artist because the artist is closer to creation.""

"Art is Life, Life is Art."

"Events are weapons for politicization of art."

"I declare peace the greatest work of art."

"The boundaries between the reflection and that which is reflected no longer exist: "art is life, life is art" said Wolf Vostell. Men's physical action, the handling of things is already considered to be art. What happens, the "happening", is already art if only one wants it to be and one affirms it. If art is life, life is art, the work of art no longer needs an envelope or frame. Art steps out of its frame, melts immediately into the life stream and only the subjective will of the individual tries to suggest or arrange that anything pertaining to this life stream becomes art, if one fixes it simply and one detaches it from its customary connections and relations."

"George: One man naked is a male study; more than one, well... that's quite serious - two men naked are more naked than one."

"The spatial forms of TV sets were already used by Fluxus artists such as Wolf Vostell before the birth of video art. In his first TV De-coll/age, created in 1958, Vostell placed six television monitors in a wooden box behind a white canvas, which was slashed open with a knife. Tellingly, he declared the TV set to be "the sculpture of the twentieth century."... Rush concludes that both Vostell and Paik recontextualized the monitor, thus inaugurating a new way of viewing this small screen divorced from the familiar, commercial locus of the home..."

"Edward Ihnatowicz (1926-1988) built one of the world's first computer-controlled robotic sculptures, The Senster, in 1968-70. Rather than concentrate entirely on this groundbreaking and influential piece of work, this paper describes the stages he went through in developing his ideas, as an illustration of how a conventional artist became a cybernetic sculptor."

"I am not really suggesting that we should construct cybernetic cigarette boxes, merely that the situation described contains all the elements which would have to be taken into account in a design of a practical cognitive system. These can be described as:"

"...three artworks created in the mid and late sixties stand as landmarks in the development of robotic art: Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe's Robot K-456 (1964), Tom Shannon's Squat (1966), and Edward Ihnatowicz's The Senster (1969-1970). While these works are very significant in their own right, they acquire a particular meaning when re-considered today, since seen together they also configure a triangle of new aesthetic issues that has continually informed the main directions in robotic art."

"Two small and rather unappealing animals possess patterns of behaviour that have great relevance for the student of intelligent systems. These are the wood louse and the maggot of the common housefly, and it is the difference in their behaviour which is so illuminating. It has to do with the way in which they orient themselves to their environment. Wood lice like moist places and succeed in aggregating there by the simple device of slowing down their otherwise random movements as the humidity increases. The maggot, which, during a certain stage of its development needs to come out of the dark, finds light by a slightly more sophisticated system. It has a single, non-directional light-sensing organ at the forward end of its body and as it moves along it swings this end left and right, allowing the amount of light gathered during each swing to determine the extent of its forward motion. In this way it keeps altering its course until the amounts of light sensed are equal for both sides, by which time it must be heading straight for the light."

"The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems."

"He was best known for his populous, elaborately theatrical “Cafe Deutschland” paintings. Begun in the late 1970s, these were part political cartoon, part history painting, part memoir. They lampooned the paradoxes of West German society by depicting disparate casts of characters in skewed cabaret settings. Their rubbery forms and figures might include the German eagle, Stalin or Hitler, as well as friends and other artists. These were the first works that Mr. Immendorff exhibited in New York in the early 1980s at the Sonnabend Gallery, then in SoHo."

"Jörg Immendorff was one of the most divisive artists in the post-war German art scene, as his paintings could not be approached in a classical, art-loving, aestheticising manner, or classified into art historical categories; moreover his subjects and the solutions in his pictures are unsettling to some people, even today. At the same time, he was one of the most “typical” West German painters of his day, not only because he focused on obviously German (political) matters in his works, but also because he took earlier German painting traditions – the visual world of Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann – and progressed forward with them, enriching them with bold innovations. His characteristic tumultuous, exultantly coloured, constantly moving imagery and compositions were arrived at step by step."

"In perception itself, two distinct processes can be discerned. One is the gathering of the primary, sensory data or simple sensing of such things as light, moisture or pressure, and the other is the structuring of such data into information."

"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."

"I am for a form of art, that sees itself as one of the many means through which human society can be changed."

"Something is beautiful if it is honest. If you do an engaged piece of work, which is sincere, the concept of beauty meets the concept of truth. So no illusive harmony. I try to reach people who strive for truth, for identity. Although these conceptions are incredibly warn out, one must try to find the way back to these simple conceptions."

"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."

"Aber nicht das volle Format trifft den Betrachter, sondern das, was vielleicht ganz leise zu ihm spricht. Das, was einflüsternd zu Ihnen vorstößt, was etwas in Ihnen freilegt an Energien, an die Sie schon gar nicht mehr geglaubt haben"

"Kinetic art was created by artists who pushed the boundaries of traditional, static art forms to introduce visual experiences that would engage the audience and profoundly change the course of modern art."

"In the Pregluton, there were no animals of plastic tubing yet. This initial period was marked by an absence of matter. Life then consisted exclusively of dreaming about life."

"The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds, and few go beyond them."

"My work has threads of ideas from all over the place. I try to crystallise them in something simple and direct that the viewer can then take where they want."

"I like to take man-made objects and push them to the point where they almost lose their reference, so that they become something else, take on other alliances."

"Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to eat. Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storm and water and eventually I want to put those animals out in herds on the beaches so they will live their own lives."