random thoughts and quotes on art...

"Push yourself... break boundaries, barriers, change the medium, the setting, the everything that you are used to and comfortable with." (Tricia VanEck, MCA)

"Transfer your world to the viewer, while keeping your world intact, but also decoding it for the viewer with no clue about your world." (Tricia VanEck, MCA)

If artist is not suffering anymore, does that affect his/her creativity?

Someone said artist suffering and working hard "builds character" for them.

What is the Muse in art? is that inspiration or more or different?

Business of art. Why some make it and some don't? Does it matter or it is really if you have to create that you will create? and that is 'making it'.

Explaining art works... statements... why? b/c it creates longevity? basis? doesn't this fall under the same art vs. artist question.

What is Iranian art? having Iranian elements? talking of Iranian issues? what is an Iranian issue?

"these people took risks and that showed me the value of taking risks- of putting yourself on the line." Zaha Hadid about the AA in London.

from "Beautiful Losers" (Aaron Rose, 2008, USA, 90 min):

"If you are not dispossessed, why make art”
Lawless art, art without rules.
Show work and ask audience to come in my world.
I am exercising a lot of things I didn’t get to say before.
“love is worth it”
I went to art school to dis-art
Role of art is…
Chaos…

The role of rebellion, setting free, de-tabooing in my work?
how about the role of death? Nostalgia? why do I work with old photos?
How about the contrast of old and modern? is that to do with the dualities of tradition and modernity?
why the obsession with boxes?
why the obsession with documentation?

"I used to say I want the audience to say that is Steve’s but now I want them to say it is ‘mine’. It is almost like a duty to tell your story and to preserve your vision." (from Beautiful Losers)

"Art is not to give answers but to ask questions." (forgot who said that, maybe Christian Boltansky)

Qs? the social and political responsibility of art. Art as a subversive tool. Artists' responsibility.

"The artist took risks, it dared to be misunderstood, to be "ugly'" (forgot who, maybe Orozco).

                    *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
"The relationship is only between myself and the painting: that’s what you’re looking at. I have really dismissed the idea of anything else. I’ve dismissed the idea of objectivity. It’s very exhilarating intellectually; it turns my attention to how I can expand my mind through painting and into the painting. I feel in equilibrium with the forces of nature, which are so strong."

"For me the paintings are about awareness and openness. The possibility of awareness is like a ghost, or a constant mourning, something that will never come. I know that my work shows love and sadness and human suffering: mine. In a sense the paintings offer both suffering and companionship to suffering."


"The context of those paintings—they were mainly used in installations—allowed them to be dark, to be for the mind and brain, and allowed them protection in that sense. Objects come as part of a composition. There is tension; the relations between the object, the paint, the surface, all that. The paintings with objects are very clearly concerned with geometry. Math is a way to calculate unknown distances or relations that are inconceivable in other ways. Geometry is an intuitive, sensorial language."


"My paintings are concentration, rather than a search. They’re more of an expansion, and so less aggressive in that way. They are a form of concentration at first, and then they eventually become a painting that has a kind of subject."


"A painting is a way to isolate something. As if it were in its own desert. Even the separation in time that painting affords, returning to it again and again. During that time, my focus changes, and I can allow that into the painting quite easily. I find that tangential relations are possible: changes in awareness and direction that the painting itself brings about in me. This is an open relation, an object relation which is intimate and full of conflict. Closed and open relations are something which I’m aware of in my work in general. Brutalities and softness—not as a look, but as a manner in which something is mutually affecting. Production is aggressive."


(Cathy Wilkes and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson: A Conversation --  http://www.aspenartmuseum.org/archive_wilkes_zuckerman_jacobson_conv.html)


                   *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***