Quotes Flashcards
“Femmage: a word invented by us to include all of the above activities [collage, assemblage, decoupage, photomontage] as they were practiced by women using traditional women’s techniques to achieve their art – sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking and the like – activities also engaged by men but assigned in history to women.”
Excerpt from Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro, “Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled – Femmage,” 1977-7
“I don’t make portable objects; I don’t make works that can be relocated or site adjusted. I make works that deal with the environmental components of given places. . . As [the] phrase implies, site-specific sculpture is one conceived and created in relation to the particular conditions of a specific site, and only to those conditions. To remove Tilted Arc, therefore, is to destroy it.”
Richard Serra, Statement from the hearings to remove Titled Arc, 1985
“I don’t think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.”
Richard Serra
“I don’t believe in artworks being things that are fixed.”
El Anatsui
“[I am interested in textile because it is] Always in motion. Anytime you touch something, there is bound to be a change. The idea of a sheet that you can shape and reshape. It can be on the floor, it can be up on the ceiling, it can be up on the wall, all that fluidity is behind the concept.”
El Anatsui, The Nomadic Aesthetic
“The idea of clearcut binaries—African/European, archaic/modern, religion/pornography—I’ve never really believed in that. I’m interested in powerful images that strike chords embedded deep in the reservoirs of our unconscious.”
Wangechi Mutu
“Concepts drive my medium. I draw upon a wide range of Indigenous technologies and global materials when exploring an idea. Adaptation and resistance, lies and exaggeration, dreams, memories and poetic views of daily life – these themes recur in my work, taking form through sound, texture, and image. Inert objects spring back to life; kitsch is reclaimed as cultural renewal; dancers merge ritual and rap. I am most comfortable not knowing what form my next idea will take, a boundless creative path of concept-based motion.”
Nicholas Galanin
“After that, my art became an examination of things that were important to me— things that scared me but that I knew to be true. I started working with female figures. I wanted to break through the exploitative white-male lens that had dominated Native American photography for over a hundred years.”
Cara Romero
“Moving to another country hurts much more than moving to another house, another face, another lover. Immigrants constantly experience in their own flesh the bizarre otherness of absolutely incomprehensible situations, symbols, and languages.”
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
(The Loneliness of the Immigrant)
“At the same time, I came to understand that attitudes of cultural superiority and cultural discrimination are often expressed as historically defined rights of cultural ownership. It was these attitudes that made me a stranger – a kind of violence of not being permitted to belong. But no-one who lives now has ever lived in the past. How can they claim absolute ownership of a history and culture from a time that they have never themselves experienced? I decided to ‘inhabit’ this history as it is preserved and presented in British oil paintings.”
Chan-Hyo Bae
“To some people breaking into property and painting it might seem a little inconsiderate, but in reality, the 30 square centimeters of your brain are trespassed upon every day by teams of marketing experts. Graffiti is a perfectly proportionate response to being sold unattainable goals by a society obsessed withstatusandinfamy. Graffiti is the sight of anunregulated free marketgetting the kind ofart it deserves.”
Banksy
Graffiti art in many instances was on a par with any work in any museum of modern art’. I began pouring over art history books zigzagging through the entire history of man making art, from those wall paintings in pre-historic caves, which are a lot like graffiti to me, to Caravaggio, Duchamp, Dali, Rothko and Johns. Yes, I went in deep!”
Fab 5 Freddy
“One of the most salient features of graffiti is its approximation of branding. At its most basic level, the tag mimics the ideographic compression, repetition, and saturation that we would expect of corporate logos and marketing campaigns.”
Critic Carlo McCormick
“The identity of the public in public art is amorphous, yet strong-willed and divisive. As a result, public art is riddled with controversy which is as perilous as it is vital for today’s pluralistic culture.”
Michael Kelly, Public Art Controversy:
The Serra and Lin Cases.
Chewing gum is the “perfect symbol for the American woman – chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece.”
Hannah Wilke
