Megan and Murray

When Icarus Fell

Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus, 1558, [source]

From Teaching After the End, A Conversation Between David Levi Strauss and Daniel Joseph Martinez

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Divine Violence, 2007, installation, from the 2008 Whitney Biennial, [source]

Strauss: What do you try to teach, Daniel? Give me a list of five things that you try to teach.

Martinez: I am not sure that the order means anything, but it is interesting to see where things come out. The very first thing on my list is discipline. Next is criticality. And attached to that with a hyphen is curiosity. Third on my list is generosity, and attached to that is responsibility. Number four is agency. Five is autonomy. And there is a sixth: a system of respect.

-quoted in Art Journal, Fall 2005

Chuck Close on Drawing

Chuck Close, Big Self-Portrait, 1967-1968, [source]

"It's the tension between the marks on a flat surface, and then the image built, that interested me. And I was always a dyed-in-the-wool formalist anyway. I think process sets you free, because you know you don't have good days or bad days. You just show up. You don't wait for inspiration."

-- Chuck Close

Vija Celmins on Drawing

Vija Celmins, Gun with Hand #1, 1964, [source]

"I did a lot of drawing of course [as a child]. You know we all did drawing, that’s how it started. You know you’re little, you start drawing. Just keep drawing. It sort of makes a certain kind of life. I guess drawing and reading, I used to read a lot. I made a sort of world. Read a lot, draw a lot, that’s what I used to do."

-- Vija Celmins, interview for Art: 21.

Giorgio de Chirico on Drawing

William Kentridge, Crowd Pleaser, 2005 [source]

"This is the point we have reached. This is the state of confusion, ignorance and overwhelming stupidity in the midst of which the very few painters whose brains are clear and whose eyes are clean are preparing to return to pictorial science following the principles and teachings of our old masters. Their first lesson was drawing; drawing, the divine art, the foundation of every plastic construction, skeleton of every good work, eternal law that every artifice must follow. Drawing, ignored, neglected and deformed... drawing, I say, will return not as a fashion as those who talk of artistic events are accustomed to say, but as an inevitable necessity, as a condition sine qua non of good creation."

- Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), The Return to Craft

John Cage, 1912-1992

"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot."

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason."

"I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry."
John Cage

The Working Artist

"Who has ever had a good idea at a cocktail party?" - Elizabeth Murray
in Art City: Making it in Manhattan

The Grid

"Perhaps it is because of this sense of beginning, a fresh start, a ground zero, that artist after artist has taken up the grid as the medium within which to work, always taking it up as though he were just discovering it, as though the origin he had found by peeling back layer after layer of representation to come at last to this schematized reduction, this graph-paper ground, were his origin, and his finding it an act of originality. Waves of abstract artists "discover" the grid; part of its structure one could say is that in its revelatory character it is always a new, a unique discovery."

-Rosalind Krauss
from "The Originality of the Avant-Garde," 1981

Ann Hamilton, Interviewed

Ann Hamilton is one of my favorite artists. Here she is, interviewed for The Oregonian in this article.

"[Q] Do you feel that fine art has become less important today since the distinction between high and low culture has become ever more ambiguous?

[AH] Do you think there was a time when it was more important? I think for a lot of art there's only ever been a very small audience. I've always felt things have a resonance over time. Look at the whole scale of popular culture and media, and there's so much vying for our attention. That's what you're really asking: What is the thing that art provides? That's a big question."

Additional "Camp"