Category: Uncategorized
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Josef Strau
Carried by self esteem and arrogance I quickly found new and very different and most distinguished ways of children painting. As it was announced that there will be a great city wide competition and that one will be chosen from my school, my paintings were chosen as the truly best by our innocent teacher, who…
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Rebecca Warren
[. . .] On Varnishing Day, Turner would often go to the exhibition rooms at the Royal Academy in London and significantly rework his paintings after they had been hung on the walls. It can be during this first public outing that you have a sudden realization that what you thought was done is not.…
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Marilyn Minter
I was intrigued by Mike Kelley’s work. I saw his show of stuffed animal sculptures and stuffed animal paintings. He would decoupage bureau drawers with eyes and mouths. I thought, “Wow! If a woman artist made this work, nobody would pay any attention to it.” It was really mining a teenage or adolescent girl’s bedroom.…
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Cecily Brown
I love the room of medieval sculpture as a total environment. The atmosphere feels completely outside of time. Not that it feels old-fashioned, but it’s a world unto itself. When I make a painting, I’ve always liked the fact that I know what my limitations are. I mean, there’s something very reassuring but also exciting…
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Jeff Koons
[Versailles is] very much a place for show—and my works want to show themselves. They’re extroverted. The spaces and the major salons at Versailles are about public interactions. But there are surprising, wonderful parts. Whenever the king or queen would move, their environment would change with them. So if the king walked through the gardens,…
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John Cage
Well the first time I saw [Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés], he had made an experiment of taking it from 14th Street where he made it. Do you know the story of his two studios? He had two studios. One was the one he was working in and the other was the one where he had…
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Walter de Maria
I have been thinking about an art yard I would like to build. It would be sort of a big hole in the ground. Actually it wouldn’t be a hole to begin with. That would have to be dug. The digging of the hole would be part of the art. Luxurious stands would be made…
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Marcel Dzama
MoMA did a Dada exhibition a couple of years ago that I really loved. I ended up visiting it whenever I was in Midtown, even just to stop in to watch the films. I identified more with that work than anything I’d seen in a long time, so I realized I needed to go to…
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Bobby G
On the evening of Jack Smith’s performance as Sinbad Glick in Exotic Landlordism of the World, the house was packed. Jack, his cast, and considerable entourage were upstairs readying themselves for the show. It began with the most exotic music piped down from upstairs: antique Persian love songs, North African dance music, Hollywood B-movie music…
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Constance DeJong
I started to perform it before it was finished. I’m not sure I told The Kitchen that. But I knew I was going to finish it. So anyway, that double bill you mentioned, which was the first time The Kitchen had a literature event, I performed the first three volumes. At that time, and still…
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Mike Iveson
They made me smoke a cigarette in a gopher mask. They made me play the slut in Sartre’s play No Exit, and I had to wear the same skirt and vinyl boots they were wearing. They made me do a duet with Pooky, a.k.a. Richard Move, where I wore a mask beneath another mask. Pooky…
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David Brooks
This project, satirically titled Preserved Forest, entailed the indoor construction of an earthen hill upon which were planted numerous nursery-grown trees to approximate a forest cross section of the Amazon. Once the forest was assembled, twelve cubic yards (twenty-five tons) of cement was dumped over the trees, entombing the entire indoor forest in concrete. As…
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Zoe Leonard
I took pictures in the natural history museum in Venice. There were rooms stacked with animal heads. There were no labels or information—just the walls covered, floor to ceiling, with trophies—mounted heads and animal pelts and stuffed animals on the floor. It was creepy and disgusting. It says so much about the people who assembled…
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Marina Rosenfeld and Tristan Shepherd
TS: […] Doesn’t this sort of echo the work you did when you produced P.A. at the Park Avenue Armory? The distribution of sounds in that work happened more through a mechanical dispersal–by means of loudspeakers–than through choreographed bodies. But there was a gorgeous way that voices and textures seemed to emerge out of the…
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Mel Bochner
“Primary Structures” is a misnomer for an important exhibition at the Jewish Museum (29 April – 12 June). A qualifying addition to the title is “Sculpture by Younger British and American Sculptors.” This subtitle reveals most strikingly the extent of misunderstanding about the new art. The best work in this exhibition is not sculpture. In…
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Kerry James Marshall
…A lot of it started to circulate around the idea of post-Blackness out of the Freestyle show that Thelma Golden curated at the Studio Museum in Harlem. When you read the reviews of those shows, you have writers like Peter Schjeldahl saying “Yeah, yeah, this post-Black thing is hip because man, we are tired of…
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Ann Messner and Rebecca Howland
AM: Beginning with when the work was installed there was vandalism where it could have occurred. The sculpture was put to a test. It is a rough area. The work wasn’t guarded. The sculpture that wasn’t strong enough or was easily accessible was taken or destroyed. That was pretty much all during the first week.…
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Jane Dickson
Organizers of each area in the Times Square Show tried to broker peace, but installation was an anarchic Darwinian process. Some artists’ pieces were replaced or overshadowed by other artists’ work. Sometimes the first artist reasserted their place, sometimes not. Unknown SVA students Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring showed up and added art work wherever…
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David Tremlett
There’s a piece at the Tate that was made of cassettes. On each of them is the sound of one county in England. But all you hear is the water or the wind or the rain. That’s it. Sometimes you hear the sound of a bird. In essence, it’s something with no mechanical sounds, ‘it…
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Chris Ofili
You know, when I saw it upstairs I thought, “It’s not that offensive.” — Chris Ofili, in conversation with Massimiliano Gioni, ART IN AMERICA
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Eleanor Antin
I remember the time I stopped an artwork and for me, that’s one of the 8 deadly sins, censoring an artwork. I had asked the students to make a criminal artwork, to do a crime, as it were, but not to hurt themselves or anybody else. One kid brought in a thriving rubber plant and…
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Shimamoto Shozo
I would like to tell you about how some grown-up painters I know have fun. In October of this year, these painters had an exhibition at the Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo. One of them, Murakami [Saburo]̄, thought this up: he blocked the entrance to the exhibition with a huge sheet of paper so that nobody…
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Marcel Duchamp
This is a ready-made dating back from 1916. It is a ball of twine between two plaques of copper, brass. Before I finished it Arensberg put something inside of the ball of twine, and never told me what it was, and I didn’t want to know. It was a sort of secret between us, and…
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Lee Krasner
I became a member of the American Abstract Artists, a group that was formed for the sole purpose of exhibiting, although we did meet to have discussions on art as well. One winter during the period that I was a member, Mondrian and Léger were invited to participate in our exhibitions and they accepted. Mondrian…
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Tony Shafrazi
I went uptown, saw Leo [Castelli], the Jasper Johns show. There are four paintings in that room. I walk into the room, I have a spray can in the pocket of my leather jacket. I look at those paintings. Right away, I have thoughts in my head, and I say: “Truth, Honor, Power, Glory.” These…
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John Currin
I went to the Met one day in 1997, and I was looking at that painting by Velázquez, of the little girl with the butterfly things in her hair. I thought, That’s an odd color on the forehead, and I realized there was an underpainting, with a vermillion glaze over it. You could see the…
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Tino Sehgal
It happens at a table–it’s a work for a couple, and they’ve invited some friends over for dinner. The first course starts, and one of the partners stands up and leaves the table. Then, forty-five seconds later, the other person of the couple also leaves the table… The hosts stay away four or five minutes,…
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John Baldessari
It’s a dramatic gesture, carpeting the whole gallery with clouds, and… covering the ceiling with this freeway pattern. I’m going to have all the guards wearing bowler hats. — John Baldessari on his design for a 2006 exhibition, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, LACMA
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Richard Serra
What they do… is they center you. And when you walk inside, you almost can touch their volume. They compress the space, even though they’re quite large. They make the space almost palpable. — Richard Serra, in conversation with CHARLIE ROSE, 2007
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Maurizio Cattelan
The Guggenheim Museum has a cinematic quality; if you work in that space it unwinds. I would say that my installation is static but the way the visitors see it could be a personal cinematic viewing. I love movies. Yes. Well, more than cinematic, it’s like the sculptures are movies compressed into one still, suggesting…
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Cindy Sherman
I have just vaguely fantasized about being in the exhibit while the public is there. But then what always completely turned me off of it is any particular moment that somebody would suddenly realize it was me — that would just freak me out. — Cindy Sherman, interview with Ira Glass, THIS AMERICAN LIFE
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Robert Smithson
Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. On the slopes of Rozel Point I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids. I opened them…
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David Hockney
When I went to see Pearblossom Highway at the Getty, I was quite amazed. I could see it through two dimly lit photography galleries. I could see it from far away. In fact, it looked like a big painting. Any collage previous to that would not work that way, and they weren’t done that way…
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Rirkrit Tiravanija
We can smell the scent of a steaming pot of jasmine rice with its very distinct combination of water and the perfume of jasmine. It’s enough to make one curious with hunger, and as we make our way through the space we come to the room at the end of the hallway, well lit, with…