“By the time I use something autobiographical, it’s not about me and my life. I see it as material, stuff I can work with and make into forms. Here are some analogies that might be corny. I look at a lot of visual work. I see how artists take what might be considered junk or banal images, but which have deep relevance to them. They use material that’s freighted for them and transform it. Painters use color differently, each color has meanings to them, aesthetic and personal associations. The important thing is, those meanings exist not only for them. Artists use material aware of its importance beyond them.”

(Source: electronicbookreview.com)

“I also became aware at that time that I had no taste for putting myself on show, or for occupying even a trace of the symbolic position of an author. I told myself that I would be a long-term performer, in the sense that presence is my goal, but my concern is to authorize rather than to be an author.

[…]

I consider my images and objects as tools, articles of use:practical above all else. The point of departure of my work consists in images that have found a support in photography. I am not saying that I do photography, but that I make images, in the same way as I make objects, not sculptures, because sculptures are only a typology of objects. What are the conditions of the work? My criteria are that it should be complete in itself, separate, and that it should bring with it, in such a way as to be plainly visible, all the conditions under which it was produced. But also that it should have a direct link with what it has been separated from, which is to say, the world. This separation I speak of is not pathological, but liberating. It is in being as impersonal as possible that I try to keep looking at the world. To separate oneself is first and foremost to elude the temptation of realism, of moralizing. My wall images play on representation, while my objects play on presence. To go into the sense of impression or expression doesn’t interest me; rather, it is the tension between the two that matters to me. A work is an affirmation and, at the same time, a negation. It is a battlefield.

[…]

I do not attempt to control the discourse and analysis of my work; on the contrary I try to surrender all control…I never use the word “project” concerning my work; it is always simply a matter of practice. Becoming aware of your own practice is retrospective. There is no art, and no theory, that comes before practice. It is only when you become aware of your practice that you can begin putting something into form. When the first phase of the practice is of the order of feeling, allowing a return into the area of perception, it is then that a conceptual space arises through the act of forming. The act of forming is of the order of technique. […] The form of a work has no stake in the game other than to make experience possible; it is a kind of rhetoric that helps to communicate thought. That’s why what is common interests me far more than what is singular. I share something with the other, and that shared something is my playing field.

Thought, to my mind, is an act that forces one out of oneself, not an imposition of personal singularity. This means that I must take into account even what I reject. It is by starting from the center, not the periphery, that one can gain an overall view of what goes on in the world. Photography is an instrument of frontally.”

Jean-Luc Moulene

(Source: kaleidoscope-press.com)

“A good exhibition is never the last word on its subject. Instead it should be an intelligently conceived and scrupulously realized interpretation of the works selected, one which acknowledges by its organization and installation that even the material on view—not to mention the things that might have been included, but were not—may be seen from a variety of perspectives, and that this will sooner or later happen to the benefit of other possible understandings of the art in question. In short, good exhibitions have a definite, but not definitive, point of view that invites serious analysis and critique.”

-Storr, “Show and Tell”

“By art, to put it at its minimum, I mean any intentionally created existent that, following processes of searching and self-reflecting and including consideration of previous and other imaginable art, embodies its being and establishes its relationships with its anticipated viewers, primarily through visual means. To exhibit is—again following such processes—to bring a selection of such existents (along, perhaps, with other relevant kinds), or newly created works of art, into a shared space…with the aim of demonstrating, primarily through the experiential accumulation of visual connections, a particular constellation of meaning that cannot be made known by any other means.  

Of course, such meaning may be parsed in terms other than strictly exhibitionary: art critical, art historical; literary, philosophical, cultural; personal or idiosyncratic; ideological or programmatic—the list is quite long. But exhibitionary meaning is quite specific because it is established and experienced in the space of an exhibition, actual or virtual (virtual includes memory). The parsings, therefore, are translations from curatorial into other expository and interpretive languages.”

-Terry Smith, “What is Contemporary Curatorial Thought?”

“analysis seeks order by dissection, by tracing the elements. Analysis changes our understanding of things, and one way of achieving this is by comparison…common things or elements give new frameworks for comparison, but it is my contention that the reversal also applies: new frameworks, such as artwork, allow common things or elements to gain new meaning in relationship to each other.”

“to create something new is to kill all earlier darlings which delivered satisfactory results. It is more than forgetting or getting over those earlier results, they really have to be totally torn down.
[…]
To create from ideas is quite evident, but an idea is in fact a prison, a superficial prison. To have an idea is already too articulated, it’s working with something which is already known. If you want to go deeper, lower, more profoundly into the unknown it’s better to be empty, blank, without any idea. Inventions happen in unknown areas or soil. So get rid of ideas, look into the gaping maw of emptiness, where some despair resigns. Then it’s going to become interesting, desperation with concentration is the sate of being in which an idea-less invention can happen.”

“The work of art is not the end product of the artist’s thinking, or just for a moment at best; it is an intermediate stage, a temporary halting of a never-ending thought process. As soon as the artist has allowed the work as object out into the world, he takes leave of it. His activity with regard to this specific work now belongs to the past, and at this point the beholder, the public, becomes involved in the work. The beholder picks up the train of thought as it is embodied in the work of art.”

Lawrence Weiner: “as I see it, it’s an imposition to impose my personal life on the art that attempts to present something to people that is not just about me…it’s about the world they live in, perhaps, but it’s not about themselves, their own personal, everyday lives, which is what i try to take out of my art”

“he felt that the museum was presenting itself as a bulwark of professional expertise and hence as an untouchable authority that was not essentially interested in a dialogue with visitors. There was, it felt, ‘a one-way traffic in communication’ that hindered ‘the formation of independent opinions on the part of the public’… As opposed to the ‘canonisation of a final situation’…he advocated a presentation of the material that would stimulate visitors to take on the role of researcher themselves.”

“to problematize the ‘creative’ activity and the relevance of ‘meaning’, and thus to develop images that are a solution for the problematised object/subject relationship in visual art and, in general, the recognition of the ‘Identity’.”

Lyrical inconsistency of space