Jasper Johns
Art is either a complaint or appeasement.Collection: Art
Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ("for myself") but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object."Collection: Art
When you work you learn something about what you are doing and you develop habits and procedures out of what you're doing.Collection: Habit
I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.Collection: Thinking
My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.Collection: Differences
Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.Collection: Want
One's range [of ideas] is limited by one's interests and imagination and by one's passion.Collection: Passion
A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.Collection: Looks
Everybody is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.Collection: Thinking
Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.Collection: Ideas
Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.Collection: Art
I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.Collection: Remove
I would like to have insights into things like government, all those big ideas that you brought up that I simply don't have ideas about. I would like to be able to since so many people discuss them, but I don't want to work at them. I don't think my ambition is that strong in that direction.Collection: Strong
That’s what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.Collection: Civilization
Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks busy to me.Collection: Simplicity
A-not-complete-unit, or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of "thought." It is not "thought" which needs showing.Collection: Ideas
Merce is my favorite artist in any field.Collection: Artist
In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and partly due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.Collection: Gun
Make something, a kind of object, which as it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time. Physical and Metaphysical. Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object?Collection: Fall
Art as a fantasy has been one of my earliest experiences. I suppose a lot of my childhood was a fantasy that involved getting away from things I didn't like. Fortunately it had some relationship to reality so that later I was able to, to some extent, act as I imagined I might.Collection: Art
Every artist feels alone and isolated, Friends are very important in terms of all sorts of definitions of oneself. They tell you what you are and what they are aside from the intellectual aspects.Collection: Artist
Donald Judd spoke of a 'neutral' surface, but what is meant? Neutrality must involve some relationship (to other ways of painting, thinking?) He would have to include these in his work to establish the neutrality of that surface. He also used 'non' or 'not' - expressive - this is an early problem - a negative solution or - expression of new sense - which can help one into - what one has not known. 'Neutral' expresses an intention.Collection: Thinking
Put a lot of paint & a wooden ball or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board. Use this in a painting. - ruler on board.Collection: Boards
Working is very important to me. Probably because as a child I was taught that work was good. I don’t believe it intellectually but I identify with that idea. So it’s probably just like a habit.Collection: Children
There was very little art in my childhood.Collection: Art
I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.Collection: Art
Bend color names which should be made of neon or copper tubing. Place an object on a surface - trace the object - then bend the object - leaving some part of it attached.Collection: Color
I would tend to say that I do what I do as well as possible and that most people don't.Collection: People
It’s almost just a difference of mood as to whether I would describe myself one way or the other. I think I share that experience with most people.Collection: Thinking
Object in/ and space - the first impulse may be to give the object - a position - to place the object. (The object had a position to begin with.) Next - to change the position of the object. - Rauschenberg's early sculptures - A board with some rocks on it. The rocks can be anywhere on the board. - Cage's Japanese rock garden - The rocks can be anywhere (within the garden).Collection: Garden
I would like to have insights into things like government, all those big ideas that you brought up that I simply don’t have ideas about. I would like to be able to since so many people discuss them, but I don’t want to work at them. I don’t think my ambition is that strong in that direction.Collection: Strong