Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.
Your work isn’t a high stakes, nail-biting professional challenge. It’s a form of play. Lighten up and have fun with it.
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.
During the ’70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.
I wasn’t really that interested in objects. I was interested in ideas.
The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Minimalism wasn’t a real idea – it ended before it started.
The idea part is simple but the visual perception is complex.
Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
Every generation renews itself in its own way; there’s always a reaction against whatever is standard.
All intervening steps, scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed work models, studies thoughts, conversations, are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product.
The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.
Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends.
Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.
Unless you’re involved with thinking about what you’re doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating.
Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.
Minimal art went nowhere.
An architect doesn’t go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He’s still an artist.
The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns out refrigerators.